One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the original version was “Honor Thy Error…”).
As a teenager growing up and trying to make art (at that time music and comics) there was no advice more freeing. It was the opposite of what I thought I knew: mistakes were shameful, the sign of an amateur or of the lack of practice. But the more art I made, the more I referenced Eno’s idea, and the more I read and listened, the more I realized it wasn’t just Eno. The Beatles left in an alarm clock meant for the musicians on “A Day in the Life” and the sound of empty booze bottles vibrating on a speaker was left in at the end of “Long Long Long” (along with tons more). The Beastie Boys left in a jumping needle intended for a smooth scratch on “The Sounds of Science.” Radiohead left in Jonny Greenwood’s warm-up chord that became essential to “Creep.” (There’s a whole Reddit thread devoted to these mistakes if you choose to go down the rabbit hole.)
But those examples relate to the recording process of rock music. What about jazz? Surely there’s “wrong” notes when it comes to playing, especially if you’re not the soloist.
In this very short video based around an interview with pianist Herbie Hancock, the master improvisor Miles Davis honored Hancock’s mistake as a hidden intention by playing along with it. It’s both a surprising look into the arcane world of jazz improvisation and a revealing anecdote of Davis, usually known as a difficult collaborator.
“It taught me a very big lesson not only about music,” says Hancock, “but about life.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Can there ever be such a thing as too much Sherlock Holmes? Since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of the character in 1887, he’s never gone out of style; there are often several adaptations of Sherlock Holmes—in film, television, and otherwise—running simultaneously, and I never hear anyone complain about Holmes overload. In fact, Holmes holds the Guinness World Record for the most-portrayed literary character ever, with over 70 actors (but alas, no actresses, yet) playing the brilliant detective in 254 screen adaptations. And that’s not even to mention the thousands of detectives and detective-like characters inspired by Holmes, or his many cameo appearances in other fictional universes.
Comments sections may quibble and snipe, but it seems to me that we’ll never run out of opportunities to make more Sherlock Holmes films, television shows, video games, fully immersive holographic virtual reality simulations…. But there’s one medium that seems to have slowed when it comes to adapting Holmes—and everything else literary: Radio. (Though several podcasts have picked up the slack.) And as much as we love to see the arch looks on Holmes actors’ faces as they astonish and perplex their various Watsons—radio is a medium well suited to the dialogue-driven drama of Conan Doyle’s stories. One classic demonstration of this is a series of Holmes radio plays that ran from 1939 to 1947 and starred for a time perhaps the quintessential screen interpreters of Holmes and Watson, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as it was called, took a lighthearted approach to the characters and, as one reviewer puts it, could feel “quite rushed,” with the actors given little time to rehearse. Although the original series has many merits, in the ‘50s, NBC decided to improve upon it, taking the radio transcriptions of the Conan Doyle stories and re-recording them with new actors. Which actors? In many episodes, two of the finest British stage actors of their generation: Sir John Gielgud as Holmes and Ralph Richardson as Watson. And in one episode, an adaptation of “The Final Problem,” the producers found to play their Professor Moriarty an actor whose voice dominated some of the most popular radio broadcasts of the age: Orson Welles.
You can listen to “The Final Problem” with Gielgud, Richardson, and Welles at the top of the post; hear all of the 1950’s New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes episodes (125 in all) just above, and download them at the Internet Archive. And, further up, hear thirty-two broadcasts of the original New Adventures starring Rathbone and Bruce. Like all commercial media then and now, each episode features its share of… well, commercials. But they also feature some very fine voice acting and excellent music and sound design. Most importantly, they feature the genius of Sherlock Holmes, who will live forever, it seems, in our imaginative media, whatever form it happens to take.
How to classify the singing-songwriting of Rufus Wainwright? Pop? Folk? Surely we’ll have to throw a “neo-” or two in there. And we can’t ignore the importance of all things operatic to the work of this musician who grows more sui generis with every album he puts out — and indeed, with every stage production he puts on. His interest in opera dates back to his youth, and as early as his self-titled 2001 debut we can hear its direct influence in a song like “Barcelona,” whose lyrics borrow from Verdi’s Macbeth. Verdi, of course, was also working with some pretty rich inspirational material himself, and Wainwright has found an occasion to pay more direct tribute to William Shakespeare this April 22nd, on almost the 400th anniversary of that most influential English playwright’s death.
On that date, he’ll release Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, an album that finds him, in the words of NPR’s Stephen Thompson, “tackling the Bard’s work in a grandly sweeping collection of recordings” featuring the talents of “an assortment of singers and actors to perform these 16 tracks, many of which pair rich orchestral pieces with dramatic readings by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fisher, and even William Shatner.” Yes, Wainwright has somehow managed to bring Star Wars and Star Trek together — and in the least likely of all possible contexts, one in which we also hear Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska, Florence of Florence + the Machine, Wainwright’s sister Martha, and a fair bit of German.
Fans of both the ambitious and nearly uncategorizable singer, fans of the (if you believe Harold Bloom) humanity-inventing dramatist, and many in-between will find in Take All My Lovesmany more feats of musical craftsmanship, literary creativity, and sheer cleverness. And they don’t have to wait until the actual anniversary (or in any case the day before) to do it. You can hear “A Woman’s Face Reprise” (based on Sonnet 20, for those playing the Shakespeare-scholarship home game) at the top of the post; “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” (Sonnet 29) below that; and for a limited time, the entire album available to stream free from NPR, which gives everyone a chance to hear what one of our age’s most interesting bards has done in partnership with the Bard himself.
Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Yes, I’m taking about Zero (0), a number that seems so essential to our system of numbers, and yet it hasn’t always enjoyed such a privileged place. Far from it.
In this short animation, Britain’s venerable Royal Institution traces the history of zero, a number that emerged in seventh century India, before making its way to China and Islamic countries, and finally penetrating Western cultures in the 13th century. Only later did it become the cornerstone of calculus and the language of computing.
India, we owe you thanks.
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The names Leo Fender and Les Paul will be forever associated with the explosion of the electric guitar into popular culture. And rightly so. Without engineer Fender and musician and studio wiz Paul’s timeless designs, it’s hard to imagine what the most iconic instruments of decades of popular music would look like.
They just might look like frying pans.
Though Fender and Paul (and the Gibson company) get all the glory, it’s two men named George who should rightly get much of the credit for inventing the electric guitar. The first, naval officer George Breed, has a status vis-à-vis the electric guitar similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s to the helicopter.
In 1890, Breed submitted a patent for a one-of-a-kind design, utilizing the two basic elements that would eventually make their way into Stratocasters and Les Pauls—a magnetic pickup and wire strings. Unfortunately for Breed, his design also included some very impractical circuitry and required battery operation, “resulting in a small but extremely heavy guitar with an unconventional playing technique,” writes the International Repertory of Music Literature, “that produced an exceptionally unusual and unguitarlike, continuously sustained sound.”
Like a Renaissance flying machine, the design went nowhere. That is, until George Beauchamp, a “musician and tinkerer” from Texas, came up with a design for an electric guitar pickup that worked beautifully. The first “Frying Pan Hawaiian” lap steel guitar, whose schematic you can see at the top of the post, “now sits in a case in a museum,” writes Andre Millard in his history of the electric guitar, “looking every inch the historic artifact but not much like a guitar.” Gizmodo quotes guitar historian Richard Smith, who discusses the need in the 20s and 30s for an electric guitar to be heard over the rhythm instruments in jazz and in Beauchamp’s preferred style, Hawaiian music, “where… the guitar was the melody instrument. So the real push to make the guitar electric came from the Hawaiian musicians.”
Beauchamp developed the guitar after he was fired as general manager of the National Instrument Manufacture Company. Needing a new project, he and another National employee, Paul Barth, began experimenting with Breed’s ideas. After building a working pickup, they called on another National employee, writes Rickenbacker.com, “to make a wooden neck and body for it. In several hours, carving with small hand tools, a rasp, and a file, the first fully electric guitar took form.” (An earlier electro-acoustic guitar—the Stromberg Electro—contributed to amplifier technology but its awkward pickup design didn’t catch on.)
Needing capital, manufacturing, and distribution, Beauchamp contracted with toolmaker Adolph Rickenbacker, who mass produced the Frying Pan as “The Rickenbacher A‑22″ under the company name “Electro String.” (The company became Rickenbacker Guitars after its owner sold it in the 50s.) Although the novelty of the instrument and its cost during the Great Depression inhibited sales, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker still produced several versions of the Frying Pan, with cast aluminum bodies rather than wood. (See an early model here.) Soon, the Frying Pan became integrated into live jazz bands (see it at the 3:34 mark above in a 1936 Adoph Zukor short film) and recordings.
How does the Frying Pan sound? Astonishingly good, as you can hear for yourself in the demonstration videos above. Although Rickenbacker and other guitar makers moved on to installing pickups in so-called “Spanish” guitars—hollow-bodied jazz boxes with their familiar f‑holes—the Frying Pan lap steel continues to have a particular mystique in guitar history, and was manufactured and sold into the early 1950s.
The next leap forward in electric guitar design? After the Frying Pan came Les Paul’s first fully solidbody electric: The Log.
Learn More about the invention of the electric guitar in the short Smithsonian video just above.
If you’ve taken any introductory course or even read any introductory books on music, you’ll almost certainly have heard it described as “organized sound.” Fair enough, but then what do you call disorganized sound? Why, noise of course. And all this makes perfect sense until your first encounter with the seemingly paradoxical but robust and ever-expanding tradition of noise music.
“Modern ‘noise music’ finds its roots in early electronic and industrial musics,” says Static Signals, which used to review a lot of the stuff. “Where composers began expanding their vocabulary of sound and instrumentation is where the concept of ‘noise’ begins: what sounds can produce music and which are purely static or noise? For some, music’s outer boundary is defined by western European classical instruments designed hundreds of years ago and the sounds, pitches, rhythms they can (classically) produce. For others, no sound, rhythm, tone, or pitch is off limits; music can be made by anything that can vibrate air.”
The development of electronic musical instruments — and indeed, any kind of sound-manipulating electronic device — came as a great boon to this exploration of the borderlands between organized and disorganized sound. You can hear the effects of that sort of technology and much else besides in An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, a seven-part anthology released by formidable Belgian experimental music label Sub Rosa, all of it available on Spotify (whose software you can download here if you need it). The first two volumes are embedded above; all seven volumes can be streamed via the links below. If you dig the collection, we’d encourage you to purchase your own copy and support Sub Rosa’s project.
To the noise music-uninitiated — and probably even to a few of the initiated — some of the tracks here will sound like music, and some certainly won’t. But most of them fall fascinatingly in-between the two states, ideally expanding the listener’s conception of the sonic territory music can explore. Some musical experiments, just like scientific experiments, point in more fruitful directions than others, but each one sheds a little new light on the musical enterprise itself. And “the noise,” to take the words straight from Sub Rosa themselves, “goes on…”
From the makers ofTitanic: Honor and Glory–a PC video game that lets you sail aboard a fully detailed re-creation of the RMS Titanic–comes an animation that lets you watch the sinking of the Titanic in real time. According to the web site Titanic Facts, the ship sank in two hours and 40 minutes in 1912. And that’s precisely how long things take to unfold in the video above. The animation narrates the events in a fairly straightforward way–nothing like the dramatic scenes painted in James Cameron’s 1997 fictionalized film. But it’s still worth the watch.
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For most of us, making a list of our favorite albums involves no small amount of nostalgia. We remember highlights from high school and college: songs on constant rotation after breakups and during summers of bliss. More so than any other media we consume, music—from classical to the most commercial pop—feels deeply personal.
But there are many other ways to relate to music. Brian Eno’s journey through the world of recorded sound, for example, more resembles that of a 19th century explorer. He gravitates toward the culturally exotic, makes studious observations, and advances hypotheses and theories. In reading through an interview he gave to The Quietus for their “baker’s dozen” series—in which they ask famous artists to name their top 13 albums—one theme emerges in the way Eno talks about music: discovery.
And as Eno reminds us in his commentary on his first pick—a gospel record by Reverend Maceo Woods and The Christian Tabernacle Choir—one precursor to discovery is curiosity, unbounded by prejudice or preconception. It’s an approach that has enabled him to create some of the most consistently interesting records decade after decade (hear 150 Eno tracks here), and to remain relevant long after most of his ’70s peers have disappeared.
Eno first heard, or misheard, the gospel group on U.S. radio. To his ears, the refrain “surrender to His will” sounded like “surrender to the wheel,” a cryptic phrase that provoked all sorts of associations. But even after he learned the real lyric, he was hooked on the group’s sound, and wanted to know more, though he himself is entirely non-religious.
“Why am I so moved by a music based on something that I just don’t believe in?,” Eno asked himself. His response ranges into philosophical territory, then ends on an unexpectedly upbeat note. If it surprises you that one of Eno’s favorite albums is an obscure record by an amateur gospel group, take a look at the rest of his picks. We’d expect the Velvet Underground to appear—given his famous comment about their massive influence—and they do. The rest is a collection of wild cards. See the eclectic list below and stop by The Quietus to read Eno’s thoughtful, candid commentary on each album.
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