Tag Archives: Birthdays

by | May 10, 2016 · 6:00 am

Milton Babbitt’s twelve-tone tango

 

Milton Babbitt’s It takes twelve to tango (1984) has a subdivision series that unfolds in two dimensions: globally in the first beat of the 2/4 meter, and locally in the second beat. Though the eight subdivision series expressed in the second beat mostly proceed at the rate of one subdivision per measure, occasionally a subdivision will be repeated in two consecutive measures.

Attempts to interpret these duplicated subdivisions reveal intersections between the subdivision series and a wide variety of other aspects of the piece, including the pitch-class array, hypermeter, and registral gestures. These non-systematic explanations illuminate the meaning and power of the systematic aspects of Babbitt’s music.

This according to “Duplicated subdivisions in Babbitt’s It takes twelve to tango” by Zachary Bernstein (Music theory online XXVII/2 [July 2011]).

Today would have been Babbitt’s 100th birthday! Below, Edward Neeman does the twelve-tone tango.

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by | April 30, 2016 · 6:00 am

Reverend Gary Davis and Miss Gibson

 

One day Manny Greenhill, Reverend Gary Davis’s sometime manager, received a desperate call from Wurlitzer, one of Boston’s most staid and respected music stores.

A quavering voice explained that an elderly man, a minister of some sort, had seized the most expensive guitar in the store and refused to part with it.

The man had tried out several models, had chosen the top-of-the-line Gibson, and had been there for some time, talking to it, and playing and singing spirituals in a loud voice. No one dared to take it away from him. “He says he has no money, but he gave your name, Mr. Greenhill, as his manager. He is upsetting the other customers. What shall we do?”

Greenhill bought Davis the guitar, and the debt became a longstanding joke: Davis was always going to pay him back for Miss Gibson “on the next check.”

This according to “Remembering Reverend Gary Davis” by Eric von Schmidt and John Kruth (Sing out! LI/4 [winter 2008] pp. 66–75).

Today is Davis’s 120th birthday! Above and below, Davis and Miss Gibson in action.

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by | April 26, 2016 · 6:00 am

Ma Rainey’s “Prove it on me”

ma rainey prove it on me

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s Prove it on me blues affirms her independence from orthodox norms by boldly celebrating her lesbianism.

Rainey’s sexual involvement with women was no secret with both colleagues and audiences. The advertisement for the song (above, click to enlarge) shows her dressed as a man, obviously flirting with two women, while a policeman keeps an eye on her.

The song’s lyrics include:

They said I do it, ain’t nobody caught me / Sure got to prove it on me

Went out last night with a crowd of my friends / They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men

It’s true I wear a collar and tie / Make the wind blow all the while

‘Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me / They sure got to prove it on me

This according to Blues legacies and black feminism: “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis (New York: Pantheon, 1998 p. 39)

Today is Rainey’s 130th birthday! Below, the 1928 recording.

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by | April 22, 2016 · 6:00 am

Yehudi Menuhin, conductor

 

By the late 1960s the legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin was conducting regularly, and by the 1980s he had led most of the world’s great orchestras and had recorded with many of them. In the early 1990s he retired from playing the violin in public and concentrated on conducting.

While Menuhin mostly focused on standard repertory, he could surprise listeners with his adventurousness. For example, as part of his 80th-birthday celebration at the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival he conducted the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in a program of 14 new works composed in his honor. The composers were a strikingly diverse group that included Lukas Foss, Karel Husa, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Somei Satoh, David Del Tredici, Giya Kancheli, and John Tavener.

This according to “Sir Yehudi Menuhin, violinist, conductor, and supporter of charities, is dead at 82” by Allan Kozinn (The New York times CXLVIII/51,460 [13 March 1999] pp. A:1, 12).

Today would have been Menuhin’s 100th birthday! Below, conducting part of Elgar’s cello concerto.

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by | April 17, 2016 · 6:00 am

Whitney Balliett’s jazz metaphors

 

In more than 40 years at The New Yorker, Whitney Balliett encouraged readers to hear jazz through his vividly metaphorical writing.

Writing during the years of jazz’s greatest development and ferment, Balliett used comparatively little technical vocabulary, favoring a sensual rendering. Of the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, he wrote: “His tone at slow tempos still supplicates and enfolds and at fast speeds hums and threatens.” The trumpeter Doc Cheatham’s solos were “a succession of lines, steps, curves, parabolas, angles, and elevations.”

Balliett also used metaphor to great effect in describing appearances. Of Teddy Wilson: “His figure, once thin as a stamp, has thickened, and his hawklike profile has become a series of arcs and spheres.” And of the drummer Big Sid Catlett, who inspired some of his finest writing, he wrote: “Everything was in proportion: the massive shoulders, the long arms and giant, tapering fingers, the cannonball fists, the barn-door chest and the tidy waist, his big feet, and the columnar neck.”

This according to “Whitney Balliett, New Yorker jazz critic, dies at 80” by Ben Ratliff (The New York times 3 February 2007).

Today would have been Balliett’s 90th birthday! Below, Big Sid in action (wait for him trading fours near the end).

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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 | 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 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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