In 2019 Le Castor Astral launched A day in the life, a book series directed by Christophe Quillien. Each title evokes a key moment in the great rock saga; beyond the detailed narration of the facts, it traces the day’s consequences, sometimes unexpected, and its influence on rock in general.
The inaugural issue, De rock et de metal: 30 mai 1980, Trust dynamite–Le hard français by Pascal Paillardet (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2019-17626), focuses on the evening in 1980 when the band Trust was recording “Antisocial” for its album Répression. This song became the anthem of the group and the spearhead of French hard rock. Through an account of this recording, the author illuminates the emergence of hard rock in France in the 1980s.
The feature film Kalpana (Imagination) is the only kinetic record of Uday Shankar’s choreographic work. Directed by and starring Shankar himself, it is semi-autobiographical and also stars his wife, Amala Shankar.
The film involved a fair amount of social commentary, and Shankar’s opening statement in it still feels strikingly appropriate:
“I request you all to be very alert while you watch this unusual picture—a Fantasy. Some of the events depicted here will reel off at great speed and if you miss any piece you will really be missing a vital aspect of our country’s life in its Religion, Politics, Education, Society, Art and Culture, Agriculture and Industry.”
“I do not deliberately aim my criticism at any particular group of people or institutions, but if it appears so, it just happens to be so, that is all. It is my duty as an Artist to be fully alive to all conditions of life and thought relating to our country and present it truthfully with all the faults and merits, through the medium of my Art.”
“And I hope that you will be with me in our final purpose to rectify our own shortcomings and become worthy of our cultural heritage and make our motherland once again the greatest in the world.”
This according to “Uday Shankar’s Kalpana” by Sunil Kothari (Sruti 195 [December 2000] 53–57).
Today is Uday Shankar’s 120th birthday! Above and below, excerpts from the film.
Dave Brubeck helped to rekindle jazz’s mainstream popularity in the 1950s and 1960s with recordings like Time out, the first jazz album to sell a million copies, and Take five, the still instantly recognizable hit single that was that album’s centerpiece.
In a long and successful career, Brubeck brought a distinctive mixture of experimentation and accessibility that won over listeners who had been trained to the sonic dimensions of the three-minute pop single. He experimented with time signatures and polytonality and explored musical theater and the oratorio, Baroque compositional devices, and non-Western modes.
Brubeck did not always please the critics, who often described his music as schematic, bombastic, and—a word he particularly disliked—stolid. But his very stubbornness and strangeness—the blockiness of his playing, the oppositional push-and-pull between his piano and Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone—make the Brubeck quartet’s best work still sound original.
This according to “Dave Brubeck 1920–2012: His music gave jazz new pop” by Ben Ratliff (The New York times 6 December A1; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2012-10080).
The volume collects papers from the conference L’Émergence en Musique: Dialogue des Sciences, which was held in Plaisir and Versailles in 2016. This conference explored musical examples of how in certain complex systems radically new properties appear unexpectedly and are characteristic of a higher level of organization; these emergent properties are not found in any individual parts of the system, but occur as an effect of the system as a whole.
Below, a work by Horacio Vaggione, one of the composers who contributed to the book and conference.
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Singing by the pan, a women’s folk tradition known as tepsijanje (“panning”), was documented in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Ottoman period.
Recent research has shown that tepsijanje is still popular, especially with Muslim and Roman Catholic populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a rare example of a nonmusical object—in this case, a cooking pan—functioning as a musical instrument.
This according to “Examples of an interesting practice: Singing along the pan” by Jasmina Talam, an essay included in Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis. II (Münster: Monsenstein und Vannerdat, 2011 251–56; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2011-49486).
The 12 keyboard polonaises of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach were immensely popular during the composer’s lifetime, and they are among his best-known pieces today.
W.F. Bach did not treat the polonaise as a light, unpretentious dance form for dilettantes; rather, he approached the genre with the same compositional refinement and sophistication found in his large forms.
Written during the period when the popular galant style dominated, these pieces display aspects of the older contrapuntal art and a level of complexity that rarely appears in light popular dance genres of the time.
This according to “‘…welche dem größten Concerte gleichen’: The polonaises of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach” by Peter Wollny, an essay included in The keyboard in Baroque Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 169–83; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2003-4580).
The First Committee of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem 1912. Sitting (from right to left): Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Joseph Klausner, David Yellin, and Eliezer Meir Lifshitz; standing: Chaim Aryeh Zuta, Kadish Yehuda Silman, Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, Abraham Jacob Brawer. Photo by Ya’ackov Ben-Dov (Widener Library, Cambridge, public domain)
Upon settling in Jerusalem in 1906, the Latvian cantor Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882–1938) was deeply impressed by the diversity of the Jewish communities in Palestine and embarked on a massive project. Supported by the Academy of Science in Vienna and supplied with a phonograph for his fieldwork, Idelsohn recorded the unique musical and linguistic traditions of these communities. This ethnological work led to the publication of his Gesänge der jemenitischen Juden (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1914), which would become the first installment of his 10-volume Hebräisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz / Thesaurus of oriental Hebrew melodies (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel et al., 1914–32).
In its final form, the thesaurus covers a universe of over 8000 Jewish melodies including the musical traditions of Yemenite, Babylonian, Persian, Bukharan, Oriental Sephardi, Moroccan, German, Eastern European, and Hassidic Jewish communities in Palestine and throughout the Diaspora (as a cantor he had previously served in South Africa and in various cities in Germany). Idelsohn’s goal was to illuminate the “authentic” Hebrew elements in Jewish melodies. He firmly believed that neither geographical change nor outside influences could alter the basic spiritual mold of Jewish culture.
Both the original publication and the reprints of this exhaustive and seminal work are now accessible through RILM’s Index to Printed Music (IPM), the digital finding aid for locating musical works contained in printed collections, sets, and series. Researchers no longer have to cope with the print editions, working page by page through bulky tomes. For example, a search in IPM for Adon olam (Eternal Lord), a piyyut used in the Jewish liturgy since the 15th century, yields 58 renditions sprinkled throughout six of the volumes; these can now be easily located, along with page numbers and further details.
Below, a rendition of Adon olam that comes close to Idelsohn’s transcription no. 59 (Thesaurus. IV: Gesänge der orientalischen Sefardim / Songs of the Oriental Sephardim of 1923).
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While Aaron Copland’s works are widely celebrated for their elegant formal coherence, his compositional method was strikingly nonlinear; in fact, he spoke of himself as an artist who primarily assembled materials.
Rather than writing pieces from start to finish, Copland wrote down fragments of musical ideas when they came to him. When it was time to produce a complete work he would turn to these ideas—he called them his “gold nuggets”—and if one or more of them seemed promising he would write a piano sketch and proceed to work on them further at the keyboard.
This piano phase was so integral to Copland’s creative process that it permeated his compositional style in subtle and complex ways. His habit of turning to the keyboard tended to embarrass him until he learned that Stravinsky did the same.
This according to Copland. I: 1900 through 1942 by Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984, 255; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1984-3448).
Today is Copland’s 120th birthday! Above, the composer in 1962; below, a selection of his “miniature” piano works suggests how he worked with his gold nuggets.
For much of the 18th century there was a clear divide between the music of the upper and lower classes in Austrian society. However, by the late 1790s, a time when Europe’s ruling classes were under threat in the aftermath of the French Revolution, there is evidence to suggest that folk instruments previously associated with the lower classes—including the hurdy-gurdy, zither, tromba marina, and a peasant xylophone known as the Hölzernes Gelächter, (“wooden laughter”, above)—were played in aristocratic settings.
Austrian Composers wrote operas, concertos, and chamber pieces that included parts for folk instruments; some of these works were even dedicated to the Emperor Franz II and the Empress Marie Therese. The setting of these works, compositional practice, and the design of the instruments themselves enabled the music of the lower classes to be adopted by the upper classes, perhaps to evoke a sense of place and national identity during a period of great political change. These practices paved the way for folk music to influence composers later in the 19th century.
This according to “‘Wooden laughter’ in the opera house: The appearance of folk instruments in Bohemian and Austrian high society at the turn of the nineteenth century” by Sam Girling, a paper included in Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis VI (Berlin: Logos-Verlag, 2019 83–100; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2019-12296).
In 2020 the University of California Press launched Resonance: The journal of sound and culture (ISSN 2688-867X), an interdisciplinary, international peer-reviewed journal that features research and writing by scholars and artists working in fields typically considered to be the domain of sound art and sound studies.
These fields may include traditional and new forms of radio, music, performance, installation, sound technologies, immersive realities, and studies-based disciplines such as musicology, philosophy, and cultural studies. The scope extends to other disciplines such as ethnography, cultural geography, ecologies, media archeology, digital humanities, audiology, communications, and architecture.
The journal’s purview investigates the research, theory, and praxis of sound from diverse cultural perspectives in the arts and sciences, and encourages consideration of ethnicity, race, and gender within theoretical and/or artistic frameworks as they relate to sound. The journal also welcomes research and approaches that explore cultural boundaries and expand upon the concept of sound as a living, cultural force whose territories and impacts are still emerging.
Resonance is published quarterly in an online-only format.
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
