In 2011, a Stradi­var­ius vio­lin in pris­tine con­di­tion sold for $15.9 mil­lion. And then, in 2014, anoth­er Strad went up for auc­tion with a min­i­mum bid of $45 mil­lion. That auc­tion failed, but it under­scored a trend: The price and pres­tige of Stradi­var­ius vio­lins keep climb­ing, dri­ven by the insa­tiable demand of investors and pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians.

But is a Stradi­var­ius real­ly worth that large sum of mon­ey? As this primer from Vox sug­gests, it depends who you ask. In a high­ly-pub­li­cized blind test, pro­fes­sion­al vio­lin­ists could­n’t tell the dif­fer­ence between mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar Strads and more mod­est­ly-priced mod­ern vio­lins. On the oth­er hand, some elite vio­lin­ists swear by the Stradi­var­ius, claim­ing that the sub­tle supe­ri­or­i­ty of the instru­ment only becomes appar­ent over time, when it’s played over years, not days or months.

That debate will con­tin­ue. And as it does, the Stradi­var­ius will only get older–and, yes, more fetishized as an his­tor­i­cal object that’s con­sid­ered price­less.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

Glenn Bran­ca died on Mon­day at age 69. In trib­utes from august pub­li­ca­tions like The Guardian and The New York Times, the gui­tarist and composer’s name is men­tioned by and along­side min­i­mal­ist lumi­nar­ies like Steve Reich and John Cage. Bran­ca him­self cit­ed com­posers like Olivi­er Mes­si­aen and Györ­gy Ligeti as influ­ences. He belongs in the com­pa­ny of these avant-garde pio­neers, but many who might rec­og­nize their names may not have heard the name Glenn Bran­ca.

Bran­ca worked in a much more anar­chic milieu, name­ly the down­town New York noise rock scene that came to be called No Wave. “My real influ­ence was punk,” he told Pitch­fork in 2016. “I must have lis­tened to the first Pat­ti Smith album 300 times.” In turn, the com­pos­er influ­enced the next gen­er­a­tion of under­ground New York artists, nur­tur­ing the tal­ents of Son­ic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranal­do, who honed their art-rock chops—the drone notes, odd tun­ings, etc.—in the ear­ly ‘80s while play­ing in one of Branca’s noto­ri­ous­ly noisy gui­tar ensem­bles.

Bran­ca released Son­ic Youth’s first two albums on his record label, tutored abra­sive noise pio­neers Swans’ gui­tarist Nor­man West­berg, and inspired essen­tial down­town fig­ures like Lounge Lizards’ John Lurie, who described see­ing the composer’s band The­o­ret­i­cal Girls in 1979 as a life-chang­ing event. Min­i­mal­ist post-rock mas­ter­minds like God­speed You! Black Emper­or owe much to Branca’s inno­va­tions. Giv­en that he occu­pied such a sem­i­nal place at such a key musi­cal moment, giv­ing birth to such sem­i­nal bands, why isn’t Branca’s work bet­ter known?

Per­haps this is because, while he drew from clas­si­cal avant-garde, jazz, and punk rock, he refused to set­tle com­fort­ably into any par­tic­u­lar camp or to clear­ly define the bound­aries of his work. Bran­ca cre­at­ed a tem­plate all his own. Reich described him as “an absolute orig­i­nal,” which made him a very inspi­ra­tional fig­ure, but a dif­fi­cult one to slot into a genre bin.

His treat­ment of rock instru­ments in orches­tral set­tings made for intense, and for some unlis­ten­able, music that thor­ough­ly defied the con­ven­tions of rock and orches­tral music, with ensem­bles of up to 100 elec­tric gui­tars play­ing at once. (John Cage object­ed to Bran­ca’s over­whelm­ing per­for­mances on “polit­i­cal” grounds, say­ing they “resem­bled fas­cism.”)

But while Branca’s music has nev­er had mass appeal, the few who love it, love it pas­sion­ate­ly. Of his clas­sic 1981 album The Ascen­sion (hear the title track at the top), Allmusic’s Bri­an Olewnick writes, “if one choos­es to cat­e­go­rize the music on this record­ing as ‘rock,’ this is sure­ly one of the great­est rock albums ever made.” One hears in The Ascen­sion and Branca’s work in gen­er­al the gen­e­sis of a mus­cu­lar, noisy, orches­tral post-rock sound now famil­iar in, say, the sound­track work of artists like Radiohead’s Jon­ny Green­wood.

Despite his con­tention, as he told the NYT, that “I don’t change,” his work has evolved over time, devel­op­ing new depths and com­plex­i­ty. In the Spo­ti­fy playlist fur­ther up, hear Branca’s devel­op­ment as a com­pos­er in 66 tracks (or 12 hours) of sym­phon­ic exper­i­men­tal noise rock, and in the inter­view just above with the Louisiana Chan­nel, see Bran­ca describe (and demon­strate) his unusu­al gui­tar tech­niques and his breadth of musi­cal influ­ences.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Steve Reich’s Min­i­mal­ist Com­po­si­tions in a 28-Hour Playlist: A Jour­ney Through His Influ­en­tial Record­ings

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

Son­ic Youth Gui­tarist Thurston Moore Teach­es a Poet­ry Work­shop at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty: See His Class Notes (2011)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

As keen observers of Amer­i­can cul­ture and his­to­ry like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Elli­son have writ­ten, there is no Amer­i­can music with­out African-Amer­i­can music. The his­to­ry of the record­ing indus­try bears wit­ness to the fact, with jazz, blues, and rag­time dom­i­nat­ing the ear­ly releas­es that drove the indus­try for­ward. Before these pop­u­lar forms and the age of “race records,” how­ev­er, came the spir­i­tu­als, gospel songs dat­ing back to slav­ery, whose fame spread across the world in the lat­ter half of the 19th cen­tu­ry with groups like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. As Du Bois wrote in 1903, “their songs con­quered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scot­land and Ire­land, Hol­land and Switzer­land… they tell of death and suf­fer­ing and unvoiced long­ing toward a truer world, of misty wan­der­ings and hid­den ways.”

Giv­en the world­wide fas­ci­na­tion with the spir­i­tu­al and the singing groups who spread them across the world, it’s no won­der this was sought-after mate­r­i­al for a nascent indus­try eager for music that appealed to the mass­es. And no spir­i­tu­al has had more mass appeal than “Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot.”

The first record­ing of the song was long thought to have been per­formed in 1909 by a four­some, the Fisk Uni­ver­si­ty Jubilee Quar­tet, “car­ry­ing on the lega­cy,” notes Pub­lic Domain Review, “of the orig­i­nal Fisk Jubilee Singers of the 1870s.” You can hear that record­ing below, made by Vic­tor Stu­dios.

Even before the turn of the cen­tu­ry, writes Toni Ander­son at the Library of Con­gress, “the musi­cal land­scape was pep­pered with over ten com­pa­nies fash­ioned after the orig­i­nal Jubilee Singers, and by the 1890s, many black groups had launched suc­cess­ful for­eign tours.” (Du Bois laments the poor qual­i­ty of many of these imi­ta­tors.) The 1909 record­ing, writes Pub­lic Domain Review, “pop­u­lar­ized the song huge­ly,” or, we might say, even more huge­ly, help­ing to make it a sta­ple in decades to come for artists like Paul Robe­son, Louis Arm­strong, Etta James, John­ny Cash, and Eric Clap­ton (in a 1975 reg­gae take). How­ev­er, it turns out that an even ear­li­er record­ing exists, made by one of those suc­cess­ful trav­el­ing groups, the Stan­dard Quar­tette, in 1894.

Record­ed on a wax cylin­der by Colum­bia Records in Wash­ing­ton, DC while the group made a stop on a spring tour, this “’holy grail’ of ear­ly record­ing his­to­ry,” writes Archeo­phone Records, “push­es back by fif­teen years the first known record­ing of the clas­sic spir­i­tu­al,” but it might have been lost for­ev­er had not a care­ful col­lec­tor pre­served it and Archeophone’s Richard Mar­tin not iden­ti­fied its bad­ly-decayed sounds as “Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot.” The record­ing has been includ­ed on a 102-track com­pi­la­tion, Wax­ing the Gospel: Mass Evan­ge­lism and the Phono­graph, 1890–1900.

First dis­cov­ered on a “large group of dam­aged ear­ly cylinders—moldy, noisy, and thought to have no retriev­able con­tent,” the song has been unearthed from beneath “an ocean of noise.” What Archeophone’s Mea­gan Hen­nessey found is that the ver­sion “is very dif­fer­ent from what peo­ple expect. The cho­rus is famil­iar, but the vers­es are dif­fer­ent. The Stan­dard Quar­tette sing lyrics we asso­ciate with oth­er jubilee songs.” Also, as Mar­tin points out, the song’s arrange­ment is unusu­al: “there are com­plex things going on here with har­mo­ny and rhythm, but you’ve got to lis­ten close­ly through the noise.” (Learn more about the dis­cov­ery and restora­tion in the short video above.)

The song itself may have been writ­ten in the mid-1800s by an enslaved man named Wal­lace Willis, who was tak­en from Mis­sis­sip­pi to Okla­homa by his half-Choctaw own­er dur­ing forced relo­ca­tion in the 1830s, then “rent­ed out” to a school for Native boys. The head­mas­ter heard him sing it, and passed it on to the Jubilee singers. In anoth­er, more dra­mat­ic, account of the song’s com­po­si­tion, it “’burst forth’ from the anguished soul of Sarah Han­nah Shep­pard, the moth­er of Ella Shep­pard of Fisk Jubilee Singer fame,” when Sarah learned she would be sold and sep­a­rat­ed for­ev­er from her daugh­ter.

In his live per­for­mance of the song, above, John­ny Cash gives a pic­turesque ori­gin sto­ry of an anony­mous slave, “sit­ting on his cot­ton sack one day,” and singing about a vision of a char­i­ot. But what­ev­er the song’s true ori­gins, “Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot,” per­haps more than any oth­er pop­u­lar spir­i­tu­al of the 19th cen­tu­ry, has come to rep­re­sent the music, Du Bois wrote, through which “the slave spoke to the world.”

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Walt Whit­man (Maybe) Read­ing the First Four Lines of His Poem, “Amer­i­ca” (1890)

Hear Voic­es from the 19th Cen­tu­ry: Ten­nyson, Glad­stone & Tchaikovsky

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness