Watch an Animated Score for Steve Reich’s Minimalist Piece “Clapping Music“–and Try Your Hardest to Follow Along

Steve Reich’s Clap­ping Music is one of the sim­plest scores of mod­ern clas­si­cal music, and as you might soon find out, one of the most dif­fi­cult to per­form. Writ­ten in 1972 while on a Euro­pean tour and after a night of mediocre fla­men­co, Clap­ping Music is for two play­ers. One claps a steady rhythm (tech­ni­cal­ly an African Bell Rhythm).

A sec­ond per­former claps in uni­son in the same pat­tern for eight bars. At the end of the eighth bar, the sec­ond per­former goes out of sync for one eighth note and after anoth­er eight bars, goes out of sync again. This con­tin­ues until both play­ers are back in uni­son. (The above video explains this tech­nique visu­al­ly).

For Reich it was a sim­pler evo­lu­tion of “phase” com­po­si­tions that he had been cre­at­ing since 1965. The ear­li­er exam­ple was “It’s Gonna Rain,” which used two tape loops of a Pen­te­costal street preacher’s rant going slow­ly out of sync with each oth­er, reveal­ing first an echo and then, as the two loops wind up 180 degrees out of sync, pure apoc­a­lyp­tic cacoph­o­ny.

The sync issues were due to the vagaries of the ana­log machines them­selves, but Reich moved on to recre­at­ing phase music with actu­al instru­ments. In 1967 he com­posed “Piano Phase,” in which a sim­ple melody is played by two musi­cians first in uni­son, and then slow­ly out of sync. Reich fol­lowed up with “Reed Phase” and “Vio­lin Phase,” the lat­ter of which was set to dance by Anne Tere­sa of Keers­maek­er.

Asked about per­form­ing “Clap­ping Music” live, Reich told Clas­sicFM:

It’s a piece that I’m always stand­ing up there doing, and it makes me ner­vous every time because you’re very exposed, as it’s just you and the oth­er guy. If you make one lit­tle hes­i­ta­tion you can find your­self at a place in the piece where you have to fig­ure out where you are to get things right. So it nev­er ceas­es to be a chal­lenge; it’s easy on one lev­el, but it’s chal­leng­ing on anoth­er.

If you’d like to have a go at Clap­ping Music, there is a free app from the Lon­don Sin­foni­et­ta and Touch­press that plays the steady loop while you try to go out of phase. (It tracks and rates your per­for­mance, with the hope you’ll per­fect it.) I haven’t had a chance myself to try it out, but if you have, let us know in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Reich is Call­ing: A Min­i­mal­ist Ring­tone for the iPhone

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

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores to Music by Radio­head, Talk­ing Heads, LCD Soundsys­tem, Photek & Oth­er Elec­tron­ic/­Post-Punk/A­vant-Garde Musi­cians

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paintings:” Now Gathered in One Book and Exhibition for the First Time

Most of us enter Jack Ker­ouac’s world through his 1959 nov­el On the Road. Those of us who explore it more deeply there­after may find much more than we expect­ed to: Ker­ouac’s inner life came out not just in his for­mi­da­ble body of writ­ten work, but in spo­ken-word jazz albums, fan­ta­sy base­ball mate­ri­als, and even paint­ings. Though Ker­ouac has now been gone for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry, it was­n’t until just last year that his works of visu­al art were brought togeth­er: Ker­ouac: Beat Paint­ing did it in book form, and the Museo Maga near Milan put on an exhi­bi­tion of the more than 80 pieces it could find, begin­ning with his first self-por­trait, drawn at the age of nine.

Ker­ouac had an inter­est in por­trai­ture in gen­er­al: the book, the Inde­pen­dent’s David Bar­nett writes, “begins with a series of por­traits of peo­ple Ker­ouac knew or admired. They also high­light Ker­ouac’s com­pli­cat­ed spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: brought up a Catholic, he lat­er embraced Bud­dhism and devel­oped an almost ‘holy fool’ per­sona.” Car­di­nal Gio­van­ni Mon­ti­ni, lat­er to become Pope Paul VI, counts as one par­tic­u­lar­ly notable sub­ject of a Ker­ouac por­trait; anoth­er is Ker­ouac’s fel­low cul­ture-defin­ing writer Tru­man Capote (above), who at the time Ker­ouac paint­ed him had already crit­i­cized On the Road pub­licly, and harsh­ly. San­d­ri­na Ban­dera, a cura­tor of the exhi­bi­tion and edi­tor of Ker­ouac: Beat Paint­ing, ascribes to the Capote por­trait “a dynam­ic, almost vio­lent qual­i­ty.”

The same could per­haps be said of all of Ker­ouac’s cre­ative out­put, and cer­tain­ly of much of his best-known writ­ing. And like many a cre­ator known for his vis­cer­al nature, Ker­ouac made strict rules and built sys­tems to work with­in: his 1959 man­i­festo for paint­ing includes the com­mand­ments “use only one brush” and “stop when you want to ‘improve’… it’s done.” Detrac­tors of Ker­ouac’s work will cer­tain­ly see a con­nec­tion between his visu­al art and his ver­bal art in his self-direct­ed com­mand­ment to “pile it on,” but who could call the “beat paint­ing” of this Beat Gen­er­a­tion fig­ure­head not of an aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al piece with every­thing else that Ban­dera describes, unim­prov­ably, as “that potent enti­ty known as Jack Ker­ouac.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spo­ken-World Albums: A Sub­lime Union of Beat Lit­er­a­ture and 1950s Jazz

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Ker­ouac Was a Secret, Obses­sive Fan of Fan­ta­sy Base­ball

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

The Band Everyone Thought Was The Beatles: Revisit the Klaatu Conspiracy of 1976

In 1976, hun­dreds of diehard Bea­t­les fans became con­vinced that the mys­te­ri­ous album 3:47 EST by the band Klaatu was actu­al­ly a new release from The Bea­t­les in dis­guise, after a DJ in Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island played one of its songs on the radio. Short­ly after­ward, Steve Smith dis­cov­ered the album at the news­pa­per he worked for, Rhode Island’s The Prov­i­dence Jour­nal, lis­tened to it, and became imme­di­ate­ly intrigued.

The album con­tained no pho­tographs, no iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion at all, and the band’s The Day the Earth Stood Still ref­er­ence echoed the cov­er of Ringo Starr’s album Good­night Vien­na. Smith heard Starr’s drum­ming, Harrison’s gui­tars, Lennon and McCartney’s voic­es in the psy­che­del­ic songs. Though he wasn’t a music crit­ic or reporter him­self, he per­suad­ed the paper to pub­lish a fea­ture in which he sug­gest­ed Klaatu could be The Bea­t­les.

The “Klaatu Kon­spir­a­cy” spread. An Aus­tralian fan issued a 34-page book­let on the case. Exec­u­tives at Klaatu’s label, Cap­i­tal Records Cana­da, refused to con­firm or deny, enjoy­ing the pub­lic­i­ty, as Smith recalled in a 1997 inter­view.

More specif­i­cal­ly, “hedg­ing his bets,” writes Ken Raisa­nen for WOAS FM, Smith con­clud­ed that “the mys­tery band could be 1) The Bea­t­les. 2) A cou­ple of the Bea­t­les with oth­er peo­ple. 3) A Bea­t­les-backed band. 4) A com­plete­ly unknown but inge­nious and tal­ent­ed band.” If the Amer­i­can Smith had caught an episode of Kei­th Hampshire’s Music Machine on CBC two years ear­li­er, he would have seen the evi­dence of num­ber four (see the real Klaatu play “Cal­i­for­nia Jam” in 1974, above). But the band oth­er­wise made an effort to obscure their iden­ti­ty.

As Klaatu bassist Jon Woloshuck told Gold­mine mag­a­zine in 2013, one rea­son for the air of mys­tery they cul­ti­vat­ed is that “we were just three guys from Toron­to.” They want­ed the music to speak for itself, and “nobody knew who were any­way.” They were amused by the rumor. “It caught us by sur­prise,” says drum­mer Ter­ry Drap­er, but they “didn’t think much of it at the time…. We were all big Bea­t­les fans, and we were hop­ing they would reunite. At the time, the idea of a reunit­ed Bea­t­les wasn’t all that far-fetched at all.”

These atti­tudes may have been preva­lent, but Klaatu was­n’t delib­er­ate­ly set­ting out to tap into them, they say, but to “do music that was on par” with “late ‘60s pro­gres­sive bands like King Crim­son and The Moody Blues.” They’re clear­ly also chan­nel­ing The Bea­t­les, whether they admit it or not. Still the “rumor did us as much harm as good,” says gui­tarist Dee Long. “It got us noticed, which was great, but also led to a sit­u­a­tion where we could not ever real­ly mea­sure up to expec­ta­tions.” Hear what Bea­t­les fans and Klaatu con­spir­acists heard in 1976 in the song “Sub Rosa Sub­way” above from 3:47 EST, and learn more about the Klaatu con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry in the Poly­phon­ic video at the top.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the “Paul McCart­ney is Dead” Hoax Start­ed at an Amer­i­can Col­lege News­pa­per and Went Viral (1969)

Did Lennon or McCart­ney Write the Bea­t­les 1965 Song “In My Life”? A Math Pro­fes­sor, Using Sta­tis­tics, Solves the Decades-Old Mys­tery

A 17-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bea­t­les Songs: 338 Tracks Let You Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of the Icon­ic Band

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

William Faulkner’s Review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Hemingway.Faulkner

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the two big dogs in the Amer­i­can lit­er­ary scene were William Faulkn­er and Ernest Hem­ing­way. Both were inter­na­tion­al­ly revered, both were mas­ters of the nov­el and the short sto­ry, and both won Nobel Prizes.

Born in Mis­sis­sip­pi, Faulkn­er wrote alle­gor­i­cal his­to­ries of the South in a style that is both ellip­ti­cal and chal­leng­ing. His works were marked by uses of stream-of-con­scious­ness and shift­ing points of view. He also favored titan­i­cal­ly long sen­tences, hold­ing the record for hav­ing, accord­ing to the Guin­ness Book of Records, the longest sen­tence in lit­er­a­ture. Open your copy of Absa­lom! Absa­lom! to chap­ter 6 and you’ll find it. Hem­ing­way, on the oth­er hand, famous­ly sand­blast­ed the florid prose of Vic­to­ri­an-era books into short, terse, decep­tive­ly sim­ple sen­tences. His sto­ries were about root­less, dam­aged, cos­mopoli­tan peo­ple in exot­ic loca­tions like Paris or the Serengeti.

If you type in “Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way” in your favorite search engine, you’ll like­ly stum­ble upon this famous exchange — Faulkn­er on Hem­ing­way: “He has nev­er been known to use a word that might send a read­er to the dic­tio­nary.” Hem­ing­way: “Poor Faulkn­er. Does he real­ly think big emo­tions come from big words?” Zing! Faulkn­er report­ed­ly didn’t mean for the line to come off as an insult but Hem­ing­way took it as one. The inci­dent end­ed up being the most acri­mo­nious in the two authors’ com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship.

While Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way nev­er for­mal­ly met, they were reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dents, and each was keen­ly aware of the other’s tal­ents. And they were com­pet­i­tive with each oth­er, espe­cial­ly Hem­ing­way who was much more inse­cure than you might sur­mise from his macho per­sona. While Hem­ing­way reg­u­lar­ly called Faulkn­er “the best of us all,” mar­veling at his nat­ur­al abil­i­ties, he also ham­mered Faulkn­er for resort­ing to tricks. As he wrote to Har­vey Bre­it, the famed crit­ic for The New York Times, “If you have to write the longest sen­tence in the world to give a book dis­tinc­tion, the next thing you should hire Bill Veek [sic] and use midgets.”

Faulkn­er, on his end, was no less com­pet­i­tive. He once told the New York Her­ald Tri­bune, “I think he’s the best we’ve got.” On the oth­er hand, he bris­tled when an edi­tor men­tioned get­ting Hem­ing­way to write the pref­ace for The Portable Faulkn­er in 1946. “It seems to me in bad taste to ask him to write a pref­ace to my stuff. It’s like ask­ing one race horse in the mid­dle of a race to broad­cast a blurb on anoth­er horse in the same run­ning field.”

When Bre­it asked Faulkn­er to write a review of Hemingway’s 1952 novel­la The Old Man and the Sea, he refused. Yet when a cou­ple months lat­er he got the same request from Wash­ing­ton and Lee University’s lit­er­ary jour­nal, Shenan­doah, Faulkn­er relent­ed, giv­ing guard­ed praise to the nov­el in a one para­graph-long review. You can read it below.

His best. Time may show it to be the best sin­gle piece of any of us, I mean his and my con­tem­po­raries. This time, he dis­cov­ered God, a Cre­ator. Until now, his men and women had made them­selves, shaped them­selves out of their own clay; their vic­to­ries and defeats were at the hands of each oth­er, just to prove to them­selves or one anoth­er how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about some­thing some­where that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that what­ev­er made and loves and pities Hem­ing­way and me kept him from touch­ing it any fur­ther.

And you can also watch below a fas­ci­nat­ing talk by schol­ar Joseph Frus­cione about how Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way com­pet­ed and influ­enced each oth­er. He wrote the recent book, Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way: Biog­ra­phy of a Lit­er­ary Rival­ry .

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in July 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer, 1934

See a Beau­ti­ful­ly Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1999)

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

Buckminster Fuller Rails Against the “Nonsense of Earning a Living”: Why Work Useless Jobs When Technology & Automation Can Let Us Live More Meaningful Lives

We are a haunt­ed species: haunt­ed by the specter of cli­mate change, of eco­nom­ic col­lapse, and of automa­tion mak­ing our lives redun­dant. When Marx used the specter metaphor in his man­i­festo, he was iron­i­cal­ly invok­ing Goth­ic tropes. But Com­mu­nism was not a boogey­man. It was a com­ing real­i­ty, for a time at least. Like­wise, we face very real and sub­stan­tial com­ing real­i­ties. But in far too many instances, they are also man­u­fac­tured, under ide­olo­gies that insist there is no alter­na­tive.

But let’s assume there are oth­er ways to order our pri­or­i­ties, such as valu­ing human life as an end in itself. Per­haps then we could treat the threat of automa­tion as a ghost: insub­stan­tial, imma­te­r­i­al, maybe scary but harm­less. Or treat it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to order our lives the way we want. We could stop invent­ing bull­shit, low-pay­ing, waste­ful jobs that con­tribute to cycles of pover­ty and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. We could slash the num­ber of hours we work and spend time with peo­ple and pur­suits we love.

We have been taught to think of this sce­nario as a fan­ta­sy. Or, as Buck­min­ster Fuller declared in 1970—on the thresh­old of the “Malthu­sian-Dar­win­ian” wave of neolib­er­al thought to come—“We keep invent­ing jobs because of this false idea that every­body has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must jus­ti­fy his right to exist.” In cur­rent par­lance, every per­son must some­how “add val­ue” to share­hold­ers’ port­fo­lios. The share­hold­ers them­selves are under no oblig­a­tion to return the favor.

What about adding val­ue to our own lives? “The true busi­ness of peo­ple,” says Fuller, “should be to go back to school and think about what­ev­er it was they were think­ing about before some­body came along and told them they had to earn a liv­ing.” Against the “spe­cious notion” that every­one should have to make a wage to live–this “non­sense of earn­ing a living”–he takes a more mag­nan­i­mous view: “It is a fact today that one in ten thou­sand of us can make a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of sup­port­ing all the rest,” who then may go on to make mil­lions of small break­throughs of their own.

He may have sound­ed over­con­fi­dent at the time. But fifty years lat­er, we see engi­neers, devel­op­ers, and ana­lysts of all kinds pro­claim­ing the com­ing age of automa­tion in our life­times, with a major­i­ty of jobs to be ful­ly or par­tial­ly auto­mat­ed in 10–15 years. It is a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of dis­pens­ing with huge num­bers of peo­ple, unless its ben­e­fits are wide­ly shared. The cor­po­rate world sticks its head in the sand and issues guide­lines for retrain­ing, a solu­tion that will still leave mass­es unem­ployed. No mat­ter the state of the most recent jobs report, seri­ous loss­es in near­ly every sec­tor, espe­cial­ly man­u­fac­tur­ing and ser­vice work, are unavoid­able.

The jobs we invent have changed since Fuller’s time, become more con­tin­gent and less secure. But the obses­sion with cre­at­ing them, no mat­ter their impact or intent, has only grown, a run­away delu­sion no one can seem to stop. Should we fear automa­tion? Only if we col­lec­tive­ly decide the cur­rent course of action is all there is, that “every­body has to earn a living”—meaning turn a profit—or drop dead. As Con­gress­woman Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez—echoing Fuller—put it recent­ly at SXSW, “we live in a soci­ety where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our prob­lem…. We should not be haunt­ed by the specter of being auto­mat­ed out of work.”

“We should be excit­ed about automa­tion,” she went on, “because what it could poten­tial­ly mean is more time to edu­cate our­selves, more time cre­at­ing art, more time invest­ing in and inves­ti­gat­ing the sci­ences.” How­ev­er that might be achieved, through sub­si­dized health, edu­ca­tion, and basic ser­vices, new New Deal and Civ­il Rights poli­cies, a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income, or some cre­ative syn­the­sis of all of the above, it will not pro­duce a utopia—no polit­i­cal solu­tion is up that task. But con­sid­er­ing the ben­e­fits of sub­si­diz­ing our human­i­ty, and the alter­na­tive of let­ting its val­ue decline, it seems worth a shot to try what econ­o­mist Bill Black calls the “pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy core,” which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, hap­pens to be “cen­trist in terms of the elec­torate’s pref­er­ences.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

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

An Animated Introduction to the Famous Thought Experiment, the “Trolley Problem,” Narrated by Harry Shearer

You don’t have to get too deep into the study of ethics before you run across the trol­ley prob­lem. It comes up so read­i­ly that it hard­ly needs an intro­duc­tion: a run­away train is on course to col­lide with and kill five peo­ple work­ing on the tracks, but you can pull a lever that will switch it to anoth­er sec­tion of track on which stands only one per­son. Do you pull it? Accord­ing to a pure­ly util­i­tar­i­an inter­pre­ta­tion, you should, since one life lost sure­ly beats five lives lost. But faced with the deci­sion, real indi­vid­u­als tend to strug­gle: not pulling the lever feels like let­ting five peo­ple die, but pulling it feels like mur­der­ing one.

What if you could stop the train by push­ing one espe­cial­ly large indi­vid­ual off a bridge into the train’s path, stop­ping it but killing him? Few say, or at least admit, that they would do it. But why not? The Har­ry Shear­er-nar­rat­ed ani­ma­tion above, a part of BBC Radio 4 and The Open Uni­ver­si­ty’s series on the his­to­ry of ideas, con­sid­ers what our respons­es reveal about how we think eth­i­cal­ly.

“What the trol­ley prob­lem exam­ines is whether moral deci­sions are sim­ply about out­comes, or about the man­ner in which you achieve them,” says Shear­er. “Lots of peo­ple say they would switch the points, but they would­n’t push the man off the bridge. Are they sim­ply incon­sis­tent… or are they on to some­thing?

The TED-Ed video just above, writ­ten by edu­ca­tor Eleanor Nelsen, gets deep­er into what they might be on to. “The dilem­ma in its many vari­a­tions reveals that what we think is right or wrong depends on fac­tors oth­er than a log­i­cal weigh­ing of the pros and cons,” says Nelsen. “For exam­ple, men are more like­ly than women to say it’s okay to push the man over the bridge. So are peo­ple who watch a com­e­dy clip before doing the thought exper­i­ment. And in one vir­tu­al real­i­ty study, peo­ple were more will­ing to sac­ri­fice men than women.” The study of “Trol­ley­ol­o­gy,” a sub­ject since Philip­pa Foot first artic­u­lat­ed the prob­lem in 1967, now finds “researchers who study autonomous sys­tems” col­lab­o­rat­ing with philoso­phers “to address the com­plex prob­lem of pro­gram­ming ethics into machines.” Alter­na­tive­ly, of course, they could just put the ques­tion to the near­est two-year-old.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

What Is Free­dom? Watch Four Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Free­dom & Free Will Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

48 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

Watch a 2‑Year-Old Solve Philosophy’s Famous Eth­i­cal “Trol­ley Prob­lem” (It Doesn’t End Well)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

A Stunning Live Concert Film of Queen Performing in Montreal, Digitally Restored to Perfection (1981)

The leg­end of Queen is immor­tal. It needs no fur­ther bur­nish­ing, not even, some might argue, by the most recent Oscar-win­ning biopic. The film may game­ly recre­ate the stage­craft of Britain’s most oper­at­ic export. But once you’ve seen the real thing, what need of a sub­sti­tute? For the mil­lions who loved them before Wayne’s World brought them back to glob­al con­scious­ness, and the mil­lions who came to love them after­ward, the only thing that could be bet­ter than watch­ing live Queen is watch­ing more live Queen.

If you’re one of those mil­lions, you’ll thrill at this con­cert film of Queen live in Mon­tre­al in 1981, “at their near peak,” writes Twist­ed Sifter. The footage you see here has been lov­ing­ly restored from an orig­i­nal release that chopped two dif­fer­ent nights’ per­for­mances togeth­er in a hash the band hat­ed.

The restora­tion, as Bri­an May him­self explained in 2007, is now “much much more true to what actu­al­ly hap­pened at any giv­en moment…. And I do find that once I’m five min­utes into the film, I’m caught up in it as a real live show.” It is, he says, “a great piece of work.”

Direct­ed by Saul Swim­mer, the doc­u­men­tar­i­an who made George Harrison’s Con­cert for Bangladesh, the film was plagued by mis­un­der­stand­ing and hos­til­i­ty, as May describes it. Fred­die Mer­cury hat­ed the expe­ri­ence and the direc­tor. “What you will see,” says the gui­tarist, “is a very edgy, angry band, carv­ing out a per­for­mance in a rather uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tion.” But what per­for­mances they are. “High ener­gy, real, and raw.”

Yet no jus­tice was done to the elec­tric rage they brought to the stage those two nights. The film was shot on very high-qual­i­ty 35mm, then very bad­ly edit­ed with poor attempts at match­ing sound and video from dif­fer­ent per­for­mances. In 1984, an even worse VHS ver­sion titled We Will Rock You appeared, then it went to DVD in 2001. The band protest­ed but could only rem­e­dy the sit­u­a­tion when they bought the rights to the film.

In describ­ing the restora­tion process, May, the irre­press­ible sci­en­tist, gets most excit­ed:

The sur­viv­ing neg­a­tive went to be doc­tored in the USA – by a process using algo­rithms invent­ed by John D Lowry of NASA for res­cu­ing the film from the Apol­lo Moon mis­sions. (Astro­physics gets every­where!)  You know how quick com­put­ers are these days…?  Well, to give you an idea of the huge num­ber-crunch­ing involved, it took 700 Apple Mac G5’s one MONTH to process this film. 

From the orig­i­nal 24-track audio, all the songs, which had been edit­ed, were restored to their full length, and what footage wasn’t cut and dis­card­ed was rejoined “with mod­ern dig­i­tal artistry” into full per­for­mances.

Giv­en that the out­takes had dis­ap­peared, the result “is a doc­u­ment which con­cen­trates on Fred­die,” says May, but no one in the band “is upset” about that. I doubt any Queen fans will be over­ly upset either. See and hear the glo­ri­ous­ly restored film and live audio from Mon­tre­al in 1981 here: a fast ver­sion of “We Will Rock You,” “Some­body to Love,” “Killer Queen,” “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” “Anoth­er One Bites the Dust,” the slow ver­sion of “We Will Rock You,” and “We Are the Cham­pi­ons,” below.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Queen’s Stun­ning Live Aid Per­for­mance: 20 Min­utes Guar­an­teed to Give You Goose Bumps (July 15, 1985)

Watch Marc Mar­tel, Who Sup­plied Vocals for the Award-Win­ning Queen Film, Sing Just Like Fred­die Mer­cury: “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” “We Are The Cham­pi­ons” & More

Scenes from Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Com­pared to Real Life: A 21-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

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

Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Manuscript, the Book of Kells

Last week, we called your atten­tion to the dig­i­ti­za­tion of the Book of Kells, one of the great man­u­scripts from the medieval peri­od. The dig­i­tized man­u­script, we should note, comes accom­pa­nied by anoth­er great resource–a free online course on the Book of Kells. Both dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives are made pos­si­ble by Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin.

The six-week course cov­ers the fol­low­ing top­ics:

  • Where and how the man­u­script was made
  • The social con­text from which the man­u­script emerged, includ­ing ear­ly medieval faith and pol­i­tics
  • The artis­tic con­text of the man­u­script, reflect­ing local and inter­na­tion­al styles
  • The the­ol­o­gy and inter­pre­ta­tions of the text
  • How and why the man­u­script sur­vived
  • The Book of Kells and con­tem­po­rary cul­ture

The course “is for any­one with an inter­est in Ire­land, medieval stud­ies, his­to­ry, art, reli­gion and/or pop­u­lar cul­ture.” Sign up for the free course today.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

80 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.