by | April 13, 2016 · 6:00 am

Al Green’s “Take me to the river”

Written and recorded by Al Green (guitarist Teenie Hodges gets a co-writing credit), Take me to the river straddles the line between sacred and secular—between sultry soul music and ecstatic gospel release. The sound is R&B with lashings of subtlety; it doesn’t sound like a band playing, it sounds like a lot of instruments humming.

Despite never being released as a single, Take me to the river was covered in turn by several other R&B musicians. Still, it took a band of CBGB-dwelling art school grads to fully realize the song’s potential.

Produced by Brian Eno, the Talking Heads version turns the original production inside out. In the original version, the strings, horns, organ, guitars, and Green’s wild-honey voice blend into a single swinging, winning thing, whereas the Heads/Eno version emphasizes open space and distinct sounds.

This according to “Take me to the river” by Tim De Lisle, an essay included in Lives of the great songs (London: Penguin, 1995 pp. 21–25; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1995-20152).

Today is Green’s 70th birthday! Above, Green in 2010 (photo credit: Kingkingphoto&celebrity-photos.com, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0).

Below, the original recording, followed by the Talking Heads version.

BONUS: Talking Heads in Stop making sense (1984).

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by | April 11, 2016 · 6:00 am

Ginastera and Argentine traditions

 

Three categories of Argentine traditional elements are evident in Alberto Ginastera’s sonata for guitar, op. 47.

Characteristics of the criollo guitar tradition and of the guitar itself play important roles in the construction of the piece. Elements of the andino cantos de caja, the baguala, and the vidala are used in the development of important thematic material as well. Finally, the malambo and other criollo dances generate the rhythms of the energetic closing movement.

This according to Alberto Ginastera’s use of Argentine folk elements in the sonata for guitar, op. 47 by Mark Grover Basinski, a dissertation accepted by the University of Arizona in 1994.

Today is Ginastera’s 100th birthday! Below, Manuel Espinás performs the sonata.

BONUS: The composer with one of his more temperamental critics (click to enlarge).

Ginastera

 

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by | April 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Yip Harburg, the Lemon-Drop Kid

 

Born Isidore Hochberg, the lyricist changed his name to Edgar Yipsel “Yip” Harburg when he married in 1923. In spite of a close childhood friendship—and some collaboration—with the Gershwin brothers, he did not consider making a living with poetry until the stock market crash in 1929 wiped out his profits as an industrial inventor and entrepreneur.

His first hit song was Brother, can you spare a dime?, with music by Jay Gorney. Although radio networks tried to ban the song for being sympathetic to the unemployed, Harburg was not discouraged from political commitment: He wrote one of the first antiwar musicals (Hooray for what!, 1937); the first all-black Hollywood musical for general audiences (Cabin in the sky, 1943); the first musical about feminism (Bloomer girl, 1944); and the first stage song about the emerging civil rights movement (The eagle and me from Bloomer girl). He was also the first to mount a fully integrated Broadway musical (Finian’s rainbow, 1947).

Harburg is best remembered for his collaboration on 111 songs with Harold Arlen, including those for The wizard of Oz.

This according to “The lemon-drop kid” by John Lahr (The New Yorker LXXII/29 [30 September 1996] pp. 68–74).

Today is Harburg’s 120th birthday! Below, Pete Seeger sings Brother, can you spare a dime?

BONUS: The classic Harburg wit.

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by | April 6, 2016 · 6:00 am

Finnish nationalism and neotraditional music

 

Music has played a critical role in the shifting spaces between the Finnish national imagination and the global marketplace.

The ways in which neotraditional musicians think and talk about past and present practices, the role of music in the representation of national identity, and the interactions of Finnish musicians with performers from around the globe illuminate the multilayered processes that have shaped and are shaped by new traditional music in Finland, illuminating the connections between music, place, and identity.

This according to Ilmatar’s inspirations: Nationalism, globalization, and the changing soundscapes of Finnish folk music by Tina K. Ramnarine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Below, JPP—the group serves as one of the book’s case studies.

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by | April 4, 2016 · 6:00 am

Children and music-animal pairs

 

In a study of the development of children’s ability to relate musical forms to extramusical concepts, four- and six-year-old children matched appropriate animal pictures to excerpts from Sergej Prokof’ev’s Petya i volk (Peter and the wolf) significantly better than chance, but identified the wolf and bird more readily than the cat and duck excerpts.

Three-year-olds participating in a simplified version of the task experienced a comparable order of difficulty in matching the various music-animal pairs.

A third experiment replicated the first, but with the less familiar music of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Le carnaval des animaux. Again, performance was above chance, increasing the likelihood that children’s success in the first two experiments was not attributable to previous exposure to the music.

This according to “The development of referential meaning in music” by Sandra E. Trehub and Laurel J. Trainor (Music perception: An interdisciplinary journal  IX/4 [summer 1992] pp. 455–70).

Below, the Saint-Saëns work.

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by | March 31, 2016 · 6:00 am

The roots of Goa trance

DJ Laurent

To understand how a menagerie of Western misfits, searchers, junkies, and fugitives ended up dancing to a mutant strain of proto-techno on a beach on the Arabian sea, you have to go back to the all-night psychedelic rock jams played over massive beachside sound systems during the 1970s.

By the late 1980s electronic music and DJs had taken over the Goa dance scene. With the dust and heat of the coastal setting, vinyl was not a viable option for deejaying. Instead, DJs used cassette tapes played on professional Walkmans, which allowed for pitch manipulation and precise edits (vocals were often cut out of songs and hypnotic trance-like sections extended).

The key player in the early Goa trance scene was DJ Laurent. Playing to a crowd tripping on LSD and charas, he was a master at weaving eclectic musical sources into an organic progression that could last from dusk until dawn; from ominous twilight grooves to blissed-out, sun-kissed climaxes.

This according to “Unveiling the secret: The roots of trance” by Dave Mothersole (Dancecult: Journal of electronic dance music culture IV/1 [2012]). Above and below, DJ Laurent in action.

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by | March 28, 2016 · 6:00 am

Lady Gaga’s “Bad romance”

 

Performances by Lady Gaga, particularly her music video Bad romance, exemplify postmodern America’s preoccupation with spectacle. They expose how the gaze, as a public-driven or self-imposed zone of terror and destruction, inscribes potentialities of renewal, wherein the subject’s authenticity is reasserted through the very process of commodification, or a kind of singeing of the image.

Such crossings constitute what Baudrillard calls “a [postmodern] materialization of aesthetics where…art mime[s] its own disappearance”; they also expose the complex dystopias underpinning America’s bad romance with its own renewal.

This according to “Doing the Lady Gaga dance: Postmodern transaesthetics and the art of spectacle in Don DeLillo’s The body artist” by Pavlina Radia (Canadian review of American studies XLIV/2 [summer 2014] pp. 194–213).

Today is Lady Gaga’s 30th birthday! Below, the video in question.

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by | March 25, 2016 · 6:00 am

Bollettino di studi belliniani

bolletino

Launched in 2015 by the Università di Catania, Bollettino di studi belliniani is the digital journal of the Centro di documentazione per gli Studi Belliniani and the Fondazione Bellini.

The inaugural issue includes studies of the reception of Bellini’s operas in 19th-century London, contextual discussions of aspects of Norma and La sonnambula, and a prospectus for a critical edition of the composer’s correspondence.

Below, Maria Callas sings Casta diva from Norma.

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by | March 23, 2016 · 6:00 am

Bismillah Khan and Varanasi

Bismillah-khan

The renowned Hindustani śahnāī player Bismillah Khan lived in Varanasi for all of his adult life, and never wanted to leave the city even for a day—for example, complicated negotiations were required to persuade him to travel to Eluru to receive a prestigious award.

An American patron once invited him to come and live in California, but he replied that he could not bring himself to leave his beloved house. When the patron offered to build him an identical house and create a similar neighborhood, Khan asked him whether he could also bring the Ganges River!

This according to “The legend that was Bismillah Khan” by Pappu Venugopala Rao (Sruti 264 [September 2006] pp. 20–21).

Today would have been Bismillah Khan’s 100th birthday! Below, a live performance; can anyone help us to date it?

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by | March 21, 2016 · 6:00 am

The challenge of free improvisation

 

Free improvisation, which arose among jazz musicians but now encompasses a broad range of musical interactions, is best understood as a forum for exploring interactive strategies.

The practice emphasizes process, an engendered sense of discovery, dialogical interaction, the sensual aspects of performance, and a participatory aesthetic; its inherent transience and immediacy challenge dominant modes of consumption and sociopolitical and spiritual models of the efficacy of art.

This according to “Negotiating freedom: Values and practices in contemporary improvised music” by David Borgo (Black music research journal XXII/ [fall 2002] pp. 165–188).

Above and below, Ornette Coleman’s group in the early 1960s.

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