A recent wax cylinder experiment by Metropolitan Opera soprano Susanna Phillips and tenor Piotr Beczala, above, suggests no. This early 20th-century technology is no more due for a comeback than the zoetrope or the steam powered vibrator.
Beczala initiated the project, curious to know how his voice would sound when captured by a Thomas Edison-era device. If it yielded a faithful reproduction, we can assume that the voice modern listeners accept as that of a great such as Enrico Caruso, whose output predated the advent of the electrical recording process, is fairly identical to the one experienced by his live audiences.
The result is not without a certain ghostly appeal, but the facsimile is far from reasonable.
As Beczala toldThe New York Times, the technological limitations undermined his intonation, diction, or performance of the quieter passages of his selection from Verdi’s Luisa Miller. In a field where craft and technique are under constant scrutiny, the existence of such a recording could be a liability, were it not intended as a curiosity from the get go.
Phillips, ear turned to the horn for playback, insisted that she wouldn’t have recognized this recording of “Per Pieta” from Mozart’s Così fan tutte as her own.
Learn more about wax cylinder recording technology and preservation here.
Imagine trying to reconstruct the music of the Beatles 2,500 years from now, if nothing survived but a few fragments of the lyrics. Or the operas of Mozart and Verdi if all we had were pieces of the librettos. In a 2013 BBC article, musician and classics professor at Oxford Armand D’Angour used these comparisons to illustrate the difficulty of reconstructing ancient Greek song, a task to which he has set himself for the past five years.
The comparison is not entirely apt. Scholars have long had clues to help them interpret the ancient songs that served as vehicles for Homeric and Sapphic verse or the later drama of Aeschylus, almost all of which was sung with musical accompaniment. In a recent article at The Conversation, D’Angour points out that many literary texts of antiquity “provide abundant and highly specific details about the notes, scales, effects, and instruments used,” the latter including the lyre and the aulos, “two double-reed pipes played simultaneously by a single performer.”
But these musical instructions have proved elusive; “the terms and notations found in ancient sources—mode, enharmonic, diesis, and so on—are complicated and unfamiliar,” D’Angour writes. Nonetheless, using recreations of ancient instruments, close analysis of poetic meter, and careful interpretation of ancient texts that discuss melody and harmony, he claims to have accurately deciphered the sound of ancient Greek music.
D’Angour has worked to turn the “new revelations about ancient Greek music” that he wrote of five years ago into performances that reconstruct the sound of Euripides and other ancient literary artists. In the video at the top, see a choral and aulos performance of Athanaeus’ “Paean” from 127 BC and Euripides Orestes chorus from 408 BC. D’Angour and his colleagues break in periodically to talk about their methodology.
In the 2017 interview above from the Greek television channel ERT1, D’Angour discusses his research into the music of ancient Greek verse, from epic, to lyric, to tragedy, to comedy, “all of which,” he says, “was sung music, either entirely or partly.” Central to the insights scholars have gained in the past five years are “some very well preserved auloi,” he notes, that “have been reconstructed by expert technicians” and which “provide a faithful guide to the pitch range of ancient music, as well as to the instruments’ own pitches, timbres, and tunings.”
Determining tempo can be tricky, as it can with any music composed before “the invention of mechanical chronometers,” when “tempo was in any case not fixed, and was bound to vary between performances.” Here, he relies on poetic meter, which gives indications through the patterns of long and short syllables. “It remains for me to realize,” D’Angour writes, “in the next few years, the other few dozen ancient scores that exist, many extremely fragmentary, and to stage a complete drama with historically informed music in an ancient theater such as that of Epidaurus.” We’ll be sure to bring you video of that extraordinary event.
“He had admirers but no imitators,” writes Dave Itzkoff in Robin, his new biography of Robin Williams. “No one combined the precise set of talents he had in the same alchemical proportions.” Though Itzkoff’s book has received a great deal of acclaim, many fans may still feel that important elements of Williams’ particular genius remain less than fully understood. Scholars of comedy will surely continue to scrutinize the beloved comic’s persona for decades to come, just as they have over the past four years since his death. The cinema-analyzing video essay series Every Frame a Painting produced one of the first such examinations of Williams’ technique, “Robin Williams — In Motion,” and its insight still holds up today.
“Few actors could express themselves as well through motion,” narrator Tony Zhou says of Williams, “whether that motion was big or small. Even when he was doing the same movement in two different scenes, you could see the subtle variations he brought to the arc of the character.” This goes for Williams’ manic, impression laden performances as well as his low-key, slow-burning ones. “To watch his work,” Zhou says over a montage of entertaining examples, “is to see the subtle thing that an actor can do with his hands, his mouth, his right leg, and his facepalm. Robin Williams’ work is an encyclopedia of ways that an actor can express himself through movement, and he was fortunate to work with filmmakers who used his talents to their fullest.”
Those filmmakers included Barry Levinson (Good Morning Vietnam, Toys, Man of the Year), Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society), Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King), and Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting). Zhou credits them and others with letting Williams “play it straight through” rather than adhering to the more common stop-start shooting method that only permits a few seconds of acting at a time; they gave him “something physical to do,” without which his skill with motion couldn’t come through in the first place; they used “blocking,” meaning the arrangement of the actors in the space of the scene, “to tell their story visually”; they “let him listen,” a little-acknowledged but nonetheless important part of a performance, especially a Williams performance.
Finally, these directors “didn’t let perfection get in the way of inspiration.” While the quality of the individual works in Williams’ impressively large filmography may vary, his performances in them are almost all unfailingly compelling. Even during his lifetime Williams was described as a comic genius, and he showed us that comic geniuses have to take risks. And even though every risk he took might not have paid off, his body of work, taken as a whole, teaches us a lesson: “Be open. This was a man who improvised many of his most iconic moments. Maybe he was on to something.” Or as Williams himself put it on an Inside the Actors Studio interview, “When the stuff really hits you, it’s usually something that happened, and it happened then. That’s what film is about: capturing a moment.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in the all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’”
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
In his post-WWII historical survey, The Story of Maps, Lloyd A. Brown observes that “the very material used in the making of maps, charts and globes contributed to their destruction.” Paper burns, rots, succumbs to water-damage and insects. Maps and globes made from solid silver, brass, copper, and other metals made too-tempting targets for looters and thieves. In this way, maps serve doubly as symbolic indices of what they represent—lands that, in the very act of mapping them, were often despoiled, overrun, and stolen from their inhabitants.
Moreover, in mapping history, it often happened that “if a map were old and obsolete and parchment was scarce, the old ink and rubrication could be scraped off and the skin used over again. This practice, accounting for the loss of many codices as well as valuable maps and charts, at one time became so pernicious” that the Catholic Church issued decrees to forbid it. What better allegory for conquest, the wiping away of civilizations in order to write new names and borders over them?
The old imperial tropes of “blank spaces” on the map and “dark places of the earth” (like “darkest Africa”), used with such effectiveness in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, hide the plain truth, in the words of Conrad’s Marlow:
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.…
Blank spaces represent those areas that had not yet been forcibly brought into the European economy of property, the sine qua non of Enlightenment humanity. “Once discovered by Europeans,” writes historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot—once classified, mapped, and made subject, “the Other finally enters the human world.” For several decades now, postcolonial projects have engaged in the progressive disenchantment of “the idea,” in the recognition of messy relationships between naming, mapping, and power, and the recovery, to the extent possible, of the names, borders, and identities beneath palimpsest histories.
Such projects proliferate outside academia as technology amplifies previously unheard dissenting voices and perspectives and as, to use an old postcolonial phrase, “the empire writes back”—or, in this case, “maps back.” Such is the intent of the online project Native Land, an interactive website that “does the opposite” of centuries of colonial mapping, writes Atlas Obscura, “by stripping out country and state borders in order to highlight the complex patchwork of historic and present-day Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages that stretch across the United States, Canada,” the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and Australia.
Also a mobile app for Apple and Android, the map allows visitors to enter street addresses or ZIP codes in the search bar, “to discover whose traditional territory their home was built on.”
White House officials will discover that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is found on the overlapping traditional territories of the Pamunkey and Piscataway tribes. Tourists will learn that the Statue of Liberty was erected on Lenape land, and aspiring lawyers that Harvard was erected in a place first inhabited by the Wamponoag and Massachusett peoples.
The map was created by Canadian activist and programmer Victor Temprano, founder of the company Mapster, which funds the project. Temprano prefaces the Native Land “About” page with a disclaimer: “This is not an academic or professional survey,” he writes, and is “constantly being refined from user input.” He defines his purpose as “helping people get interested and engaged” by asking questions like “who has the right to define where a particular territory ends, and another begins?”
As neo-colonial projects like oil pipelines once again threaten the survival of Indigenous communities, and indigenous people find themselves and their children caged in prisons for crossing militarized national borders, such questions could not be more relevant. Temprano does not make any claims to definitive historical accuracy and points to other, similar projects that supplement the “blank spaces” in his own online map, such as huge areas of South America being re-mapped on the ground by Amazonian tribes entering field data into smart phones, and Aaron Capella’s Tribal Nations Maps, which offers attractive printed products, perfect for use in classrooms.
Temprano quotes Capella in order to illuminate his work: “This map is in honor of all the Indigenous Nations [of colonial states]. It seeks to encourage people—Native and non-Native—to remember that these were once a vast land of autonomous Native peoples, who called the land by many different names according to their languages and geography. The hope is that it instills pride in the descendants of these People, brings an awareness of Indigenous history and remembers the Nations that fought and continue to fight valiantly to preserve their way of life.”
Visit Native Land here and enter an address in North or South America or Australia to learn about previous or concurrent Native inhabitants, their languages, and the historical treaties signed and broken over the centuries. Clicking on the territory of each Indigenous nation brings up links to other informative sites and allows users to submit corrections to help guide this inclusive project toward greater accuracy.
The site also features a Teacher’s Guide, Blog by Temprano, and a page on the importance of Territory Acknowledgement, a way for us to “insert an awareness of indigenous presence and land rights in everyday life,” and one of many “transformative acts,” as Chelsea Vowel, a Métis woman from the Plains Cree writes, “that to some extent undo Indigenous erasure.”
We’ve previously written about one of Leonard Bernstein’s major works, The Unanswered Question, the staggering six-part lecture that the multi-disciplinary artist gave as part of his duties as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Professor. Over 11 hours, Bernstein attempts to explain the whither and the whence of music history, notably at a time when Classical music had come to a sort of crisis point of atonality and anti-music, but was still pre-Merzbow.
But, as Bernstein said “…the best way to ‘know’ a thing is in the context of another discipline,” and these six lectures bring in all sorts of contexts, especially Chomsky’s linguistic theory, phonology, semantics, and more. And he does it all with frequent trips to the piano to make a point, or bringing in a whole orchestra—which Bernstein kept in his back pocket for times just like this.
Joking aside, this is still a major scholarly work that has plenty inside to debate. That’s pertinent a half a century after the fact, especially when so much music feels like it has stopped advancing, just recycling.
The above clip is just one of the gems to be found among the lectures, something that one viewer found so stunning they recorded it off the television screen and posted to YouTube.
In the clip, Bernstein uses the melody of “Fair Harvard,” also known as “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” by Thomas Moore—recognizable to the young’uns as the fiddle intro to “Come On, Eileen”—as a starting point. He assumes a prehistoric hominid humming the tune, then the younger and/or female members of the tribe singing along an octave apart.
From this moment of musical and human evolution, Bernstein brings in the fifth interval-—only a few million years later-—and then the fourth. Then polyphony is born out of that and…well, we don’t want to spoil everything. Soon Bernstein brings us up to the circle of fifths, compressing them into the 12 tones of the scale, and then 12 keys.
Bernstein can hear the potential for chaos, however, in the possibilities of “chromatic goulash,” and so ends with Bach, the master of “tonal control” who balanced the chromatic (which uses notes outside a key’s scale) with the diatonic (which doesn’t). (It all comes back to Bach, doesn’t it?)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the 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.
On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf took her final walk, into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. She did it with her trusty cane in hand, the very cane you can see laid out alongside other Woolf-related artifacts in the New Yorkervideo above. Its five minutes provide a short introduction to the “weird objects” of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, an archive containing, in the words of the New Yorker’s Gareth Smit, “roughly two thousand linear feet of manuscripts and archival materials” donated in 1940 by the brothers Henry W. and Albert A. Berg, doctors who were also “avid collectors of English and American literature — and of literary paraphernalia.”
The NYPL labels as “realia” such non-paper items as Woolf’s cane as well as “Charlotte Brontë’s writing desk, with a lock of her hair inside; trinkets belonging to Jack Kerouac, including his harmonicas, and a card upon which he wrote ‘blood’ in his own blood; typewriters belonging to S. J. Perelman and Paul Metcalf; Mark Twain’s pen and wire-rimmed glasses; Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings; and the death masks of the poets James Merrill and E. E. Cummings.” We’ve previously featured Nabokov-drawn butterflies here on Open Culture, as well the letter opener seen in the video that Charles Dickens had made from the foot of his beloved cat Bob.
All this may sound on the grim side, but these objects bring their beholders that much closer to the long-passed literary figures who once possessed them. “If you are looking at, say, Jack Kerouac’s lighter or his boots, you’re seeing the man, in a sense,” the NYPL’s director of exhibitions Declan Kiely says in the video. “What you’re trying to get closest to is the creative spirit at work, and I think that’s why these objects are so evocative.” Though visitors to the Berg Collection can only do so by appointment, the library, as Kiely told Smit, “does intend to have an exhibition to present these and other treasures in the Gottesman Hall by 2020.” Something to look forward to for anyone who yearns to approach the creative spirit — and who among us doesn’t?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Frank Zappa’s music and gravitated more toward the bizarre yet bluesy sonic world of his sometime collaborator and lifelong frenemy Captain Beefheart. But I get the appeal of Zappa’s wildly virtuoso catalog and his sardonic, even caustic, personality. The phrase may have devolved into cliché, but it’s still worth saying of Zappa: he was a real original, a truly independent musician who insisted on doing things his way. Most admirably, he had the talent, vision, and strength of will to do so for decades in a business that legendarily chews up and spits out artists with even the toughest of constitutions.
Zappa, notes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its profile, “was rock and roll’s sharpest musical mind and most astute social critic… the most prolific composer of his age,” who “bridged genres—rock, jazz, classical, avant-garde and even novelty music—with masterful ease.” Recording “over sixty albums’ worth of material in his fifty-two years,” he famously discovered, nurtured, and collaborated with some of the most technically proficient and accomplished of players. He was indie before indie, and “confronted the corrupt politics of the ruling class” with ferocious wit and unsparing satire, holding “the banal and decadent lifestyles of his countrymen to unforgiving scrutiny.”
Needless to say, Zappa himself was not prone to banality or decadence. He stood apart from his contemporaries with both his utter hatred of trends and his commitment to sobriety, which meant that he was never less than totally lucid, if never totally clear, in interviews and TV appearances. Unsurprisingly, David Letterman, champion of other fiercely talented musical oddballs like Warren Zevon, was a Zappa fan. Between 1982 and 83, Zappa came on Letterman three times, the first, in August of 82, with his daughter Moon (or “Moon Unit,” who almost ended up with the name “Motorhead,” he says).
The younger Zappa inherited her father’s deadpan. “When I was little,” she says, “I wanted to change my name to Beauty Heart. Or Mary.” But Zappa, the “musical and a sociological phenomenon,” as Letterman calls him, gets to talk about more than his kids’ weird names. In his June, 83 appearance, further up, he promotes his London Symphony Orchestra album. As he explains, the experience of working with cranky classical musicians on a very tight schedule tested his perfectionistic (some might say controlling) temperament. The album gave rise, writes Eduardo Rivadavia at Allmusic, “to his well-documented love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with symphony orchestras thereafter.”
But no matter how well or badly a project went, Zappa always moved right along to the next thing. He was never without an ambitious new album to promote. (In his final Letterman appearance, on Halloween, above, he had a musical, which turned into album, the triple-LP Thing-Fish.) Since he never stopped working for a moment, one set of ideas generating the next—he told Rolling Stone in answer to a question about how he looked back on his many records—“It’s all one album.” See a supercut below of all of Zappa’s 80s visits to the Letterman set, with slightly better video quality than the individual clips above.
Rock Gong. It sounds like a B‑52s song. But a rock gong is not a New Wave surf-rock party groove. It’s not a neo-synthpop act, hip hop group, or indie band (not yet). It’s a prehistoric instrument—as far away in time as one can get from synthesizers and electric guitars. Rock gongs are ancient, maybe as old as humankind. But they’re still groovy, in their way. As they say, the groove is in the player, not the instrument.
Rock gongs, or “lithophones,” if you want to get technical, have been found all over the African continent, in South America, Australia, Azerbaijan, England, Hawaii, Iceland, India, and everywhere else prehistoric people lived. Not the cultural property of any one group, the rock gong came, rather, from a universal human insight into the natural sonic properties of stone. (One theory even speculates that Stonehenge might have been a massive collection of rock gongs.)
Though some scholars have suggested that the term “rock gong” should be reserved for stationary, rather than portable, rocks that were used as instruments, the British Museum seems untroubled by the distinction. In the video above, archaeologist Cornelia Kleinitz explains the principles of rock gongs found in Sudan to modern rock drummer Liam Williamson of the band Cats on the Beach.
You can hear one of those Nubian rock gongs in its natural habitat, before it was moved to the British Museum, in the clip just above. The rock, the narrator tells us, has been “worn smooth by the action of people playing it more than 7,000 years ago. Long before the Romans, long before the Pharaohs.” Early humans would have searched long and hard for rocks that resonated at particular frequencies, for ringing rocks that could be combined into scales for early xylophones or produce a variety of tones like a steel drum.
Despite their antiquity, the study of rock gongs is a rather recent phenomenon, part of the emerging field of archaeoacoustics. “Methodologically,” write the authors of a 2016 paper on the subject, “this field of research is still in its infancy,” and there is much researchers do not know about the uses and varieties of rock gongs around the world. As Kleinitz explains to Williamson in the video at the top, archaeologists are trying to understand the context in which the Nubian gongs at the British Museum would have been played, whether as instruments for rituals, signaling, fun, or all of the above.
As for the techniques involved in rock gong playing, we can only guess, but Williamson does his best to adapt his drum chops to the ancient stone kit. One critical difference between our modern human musical instruments and this ancient kind, Kleinitz notes, is that the latter were integrated into the landscape; their distinctive sound depended not only on the rock itself, but on its interaction with the wild and unpredictable environment around it.
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