Hear the First Recording of the Human Voice (1860)

in Music | July 12th, 2019

When inven­tor Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar­t­inville sang a nurs­ery rhyme into his phonoau­to­gram in 1860, he had no plans on ever play­ing this record­ing back. A pre­cur­sor to the wax cylin­der, the phonoau­to­gram took inputs for the study of sound waves, but could not be turned into an out­put device. How amaz­ing then, that 150 or so years lat­er, we can hear the voice of Scott in what is now con­sid­ered the first ever record­ing of human sound.

What you will hear in the above video are the var­i­ous stages of recon­struct­ing and reverse engi­neer­ing the voice that sung on that April day in 1860, until, like wip­ing away decades of dirt and soot, the orig­i­nal art is revealed.

Scott had looked to the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy and won­dered if some­thing sim­i­lar could be done with sound waves, focused as he was on improv­ing stenog­ra­phy. And so the phonoau­to­gram took in sound vibra­tions through a diaphragm, which moved a sty­lus against a rotat­ing cylin­der cov­ered in lamp­black. What was left was a wig­gly line in a con­cen­tric cir­cle.

But how to play them back? That was the prob­lem. Scott’s inven­tion nev­er turned a prof­it and he went back to book­selling. The inven­tion and some of the paper cylin­ders went into muse­ums.

In 2008, Amer­i­can audio his­to­ri­ans dis­cov­ered the scrib­bles and turned to the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry and a soft­ware called IRENE. The soft­ware was designed to extract sounds from wax cylin­ders with­out touch­ing the del­i­cate sur­faces, and the first pass revealed what they thought at first was a young woman or child singing “Au Clair de la lune,” the French nurs­ery rhyme (not the Debussy piano work).

How­ev­er, a fur­ther exam­i­na­tion of Scott’s notes revealed that the record­ing was at a much slow­er speed, and it was a man–most prob­a­bly Scott–singing the lul­la­by.

The video shows the stages that brought Scott back to life: Denois­ing a lot of extra­ne­ous sound; stretch­ing the record­ing back to nat­ur­al time; “tun­ing and quantizing”–correcting for imper­fec­tions in the human-turned cylin­der; clean­ing up har­mon­ics; and final­ly adding fur­ther har­mon­ics, reverb and a stereo effect.

The result is less an unrec­og­niz­able ghost sig­nal and more a touch­ing sound of human­i­ty, desir­ing some­how to have their voice live on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

Hear Singers from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Record Their Voic­es on Tra­di­tion­al Wax Cylin­ders

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Thanks to the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

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.

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The New David Bowie Barbie Doll Released to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of “Space Oddity”

in Music, Random | July 12th, 2019

This week Open Cul­ture com­mem­o­rat­ed the 50th anniver­sary of the release of David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” by explor­ing the song’s rela­tion­ship to the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing and Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mat­tel, they han­dled things a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly, releas­ing a new David Bowie Bar­bie Doll. Here’s their spiel:

  • In the defin­i­tive cel­e­bra­tion of two pop cul­ture icons, Bar­bie hon­ors the ulti­mate pop chameleon, Eng­lish singer, song­writer and actor, David Bowie.
  • This col­lectible Bar­bie doll wears the metal­lic Zig­gy Star­dust ‘space suit’ with red and blue stripes, flared shoul­ders and Bowie’s sig­na­ture cher­ry-red plat­form boots.
  • Spe­cial details include bold make­up — fea­tur­ing the famed astral sphere fore­head icon — and a hair­style inspired by Bowie’s fiery-red locks.
  • Spe­cial­ly designed pack­ag­ing makes Bar­bie David Bowie the ulti­mate collector’s item for Bowie and Bar­bie fans alike.
  • Hon­or David Bowie’s extra­or­di­nary tal­ent and unde­ni­able influ­ence with Bar­bie David Bowie doll.

You can pur­chase it online.

Relat­ed Con­tent

David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” and the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing Turn 50 This Month: Cel­e­brate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Hear Demo Record­ings of David Bowie’s “Zig­gy Star­dust,” “Space Odd­i­ty” & “Changes”

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The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online

in Books, History | July 11th, 2019

The his­to­ry of the print­ed word is full of bib­li­o­graph­ic twists and turns, major his­tor­i­cal moments, and the sig­nif­i­cant print­ing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their pub­li­ca­tion. Most of us have only the sketchi­est notion of how mass-pro­duced print­ed books came into being—a few scat­tered dates and names. But every school­child can tell you the first book ever print­ed, and every­one knows the first words of that book: “In the begin­ning….”

The first Guten­berg Bible, print­ed in 1454 by Johannes Guten­berg, intro­duced the world to mov­able type, his­to­ry tells us. It is “uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged as the most impor­tant of all print­ed books,” writes Mar­garet Leslie Davis, author of the recent­ly pub­lished The Lost Guten­berg: The Astound­ing Sto­ry of One Book’s Five-Hun­dred-Year Odyssey. In 1900, Mark Twain expressed the sen­ti­ment in a let­ter “com­ment­ing on the open­ing of the Guten­berg Muse­um,” writes M. Sophia New­man at Lithub. “What the world is to-day,” he declared, “good and bad, it owes to Guten­berg. Every­thing can be traced to this source.”

There is kind of an over­sim­pli­fied truth in the state­ment. The print­ed word (and the print­ed Bible, at that) did, in large part, deter­mine the course of Euro­pean his­to­ry, which, through empire, deter­mined the course of glob­al events after the “Guten­berg rev­o­lu­tion.” But there is anoth­er sto­ry of print entire­ly inde­pen­dent of book his­to­ry in Europe, one that also deter­mined world his­to­ry with the preser­va­tion of Bud­dhist, Chi­nese dynas­tic, and Islam­ic texts. And one that begins “before Johannes Guten­berg was even born,” New­man points out.

The old­est extant text ever print­ed with mov­able type pre­dates Guten­berg him­self (born in 1400) by 23 years, and pre­dates the print­ing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, print­ed in Korea, a col­lec­tion of Bud­dhist teach­ings by Seon mas­ter Bae­gun and print­ed in mov­able type by his stu­dents Seok-chan and Dai­jam in 1377. (Seon is a Kore­an form of Chan or Zen Bud­dhism.) Only the sec­ond vol­ume of the print­ing has sur­vived, and you can see sev­er­al images from it here.

Impres­sive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the hon­or of being the first book print­ed with mov­able type, only the old­est sur­viv­ing exam­ple. The tech­nol­o­gy could go back two cen­turies ear­li­er. Mar­garet Davis nods to this his­to­ry, New­man con­cedes, writ­ing that “mov­able type was an 11th cen­tu­ry Chi­nese inven­tion, refined in Korea in 1230, before meet­ing con­di­tions in Europe that would allow it to flour­ish.” This is more than most pop­u­lar accounts of the print­ed word say on the mat­ter, but it’s still an inac­cu­rate and high­ly cur­so­ry sum­ma­ry of the evi­dence.

New­man her­self says quite a lot more. In essays at Lithub and Tri­cy­cle, she describes how print­ing tech­niques devel­oped in Asia and were tak­en up in Korea in the 1200s by the Goryeo dynasty, who com­mis­sioned a print­er named Choe Yun-ui to recon­struct a wood­block print of the mas­sive col­lec­tion of ancient Bud­dhists texts called the Tip­i­ta­ka after the Mon­gols burned the only Kore­an copy. By cast­ing “indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters in met­al” and arrang­ing them in a frame—the same process Guten­berg used—he was able to com­plete the project by 1250, 200 years before Gutenberg’s press.

This text, how­ev­er, did not sur­vive, nor did the count­less num­ber of oth­ers print­ed when the tech­nol­o­gy spread across the Mon­gol empire on the Silk Road and took root with the Mus­lim Uyghurs. It is pos­si­ble, though “no clear his­tor­i­cal evi­dence” yet sup­ports the con­tention, that mov­able type spread to Europe from Asia along trade routes. “If there was any con­nec­tion,” wrote Joseph Need­ham in Sci­ence and Civ­i­liza­tion in Chi­na, “in the spread of print­ing between Asia and the West, the Uyghurs, who used both block print­ing and mov­able type, had good oppor­tu­ni­ties to play an impor­tant role in this intro­duc­tion.”

With­out sur­viv­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, this ear­ly his­to­ry of print­ing in Asia relies on sec­ondary sources. But “the entire his­to­ry of the print­ing press” in Europe” is like­wise “rid­dled with gaps,” New­man writes. What we do know is that Jikji, a col­lec­tion of Kore­an Zen Bud­dhist teach­ings, is the world’s old­est extant book print­ed with mov­able type. The myth of Johannes Guten­berg as “a lone genius who trans­formed human cul­ture,” as Davis writes, “endures because the sweep of what fol­lowed is so vast that it feels almost myth­ic and needs an ori­gin sto­ry to match.” But this is one inven­tive indi­vid­ual in the his­to­ry of print­ing, not the orig­i­nal, god­like source of mov­able type.

Guten­berg makes sense as a con­ve­nient start­ing point for the growth and world­wide spread of cap­i­tal­ism and Euro­pean Chris­tian­i­ty. His inno­va­tion worked much faster than ear­li­er sys­tems, and oth­ers that devel­oped around the same time, in which frames were pressed by hand against the paper. Flows of new cap­i­tal enabled the rapid spread of his machine across Europe. The achieve­ment of the Guten­berg Bible is not dimin­ished by a fuller his­to­ry. But “what gets left out” of the usu­al sto­ry, as New­man tells us in great detail, “is star­tling­ly rich.”

“Only very recent­ly, most­ly in the last decade” has the long his­to­ry of print­ing in Asia been “acknowl­edged at all” in pop­u­lar cul­ture, though schol­ars in both the East and West have long known it. Korea has regard­ed Jikji “and oth­er ancient vol­umes as nation­al points of pride that rank among the most impor­tant of books.” Yet UNESCO only cer­ti­fied Jikji as the “old­est mov­able met­al type print­ing evi­dence” in 2001. The recog­ni­tion may be late in com­ing, but it mat­ters a great deal, nonethe­less. Learn much more about the his­to­ry, con­tent, and prove­nance of Jikji at this site cre­at­ed by “cyber diplo­mats” in Korea after UNESCO bestowed World Her­itage sta­tus on the book. And see a ful­ly dig­i­tized copy of the book here.

via Lithub

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

See How The Guten­berg Press Worked: Demon­stra­tion Shows the Old­est Func­tion­ing Guten­berg Press in Action

Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Presents the 550-Year-Old Guten­berg Bible in Spec­tac­u­lar, High-Res Detail

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

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The Evolution of the World Map: An Inventive Infographic Shows How Our Picture of the World Changed Over 1,800 Years

in Maps | July 11th, 2019

For about 190 years, human­i­ty has known what the world looks like. Or rather, human­i­ty has known the shape and size of the land mass­es that rise up above the oceans, as well as where those land mass­es stand in rela­tion to one anoth­er. For gen­er­a­tion upon gen­er­a­tion, we’ve all grown up see­ing visu­al depic­tions of this knowl­edge in the form of the stan­dard world map — dis­tort­ed, of course, usu­al­ly by Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion, giv­en the impos­si­bil­i­ty of turn­ing a three-dimen­sion­al globe into a two-dimen­sion­al image with per­fect accu­ra­cy. We can call it to mind (or up on our phones) when­ev­er we need it. But what did the world look like before we knew what it looked like? Thanks to a Red­di­tor who goes by PisseGuri82, we can now take in, at a glance, human­i­ty’s image of the world as it evolved over the past two mil­len­nia.

This Shape of the World info­graph­ic begins in 150 AD with the world map used by Claudius Ptole­my of Alexan­dria, Egypt, “the first to use posi­tions of lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude based on astro­nom­i­cal obser­va­tions.” Not that those obser­va­tions pro­duced any­thing imme­di­ate­ly resem­bling an ances­tor of the map we remem­ber from class­room walls grow­ing up, but it cer­tain­ly must have marked an improve­ment on the guess­work and pure fan­ta­sy used in even ear­li­er times.

World maps from the medieval peri­od, such as the one includ­ed on the dia­gram cre­at­ed by an unknown French monk in 1050, were meant “not to explain the world but the Bible.” Hence its focus on such Bib­li­cal parts of the world as Jerusalem, the Red Sea, and even the Gar­den of Eden.

Just over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a map by Italy’s Muhammed al-Idrisi employed the more objec­tive method of cal­cu­lat­ing dis­tances by what trav­el­ers and mer­chants told him about how long it took them to reach the dis­tant lands they vis­it­ed. Despite its “rec­og­niz­able and detailed Eura­sia and North­ern Africa,” how­ev­er, it still makes for a vague (and, need­less to say, hard­ly com­plete) approx­i­ma­tion of the world. Only in 1529, with the empire-mind­ed Span­ish Crown’s offi­cial and secret “mas­ter map,” updat­ed “by Span­ish explor­ers on pain of death,” do we arrive at a world map that would remind any of us of the ones we use in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Sub­se­quent devel­op­ments came from such advances as the afore­men­tioned Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion, invent­ed in 1569 in the Nether­lands and refined in Eng­land 30 years lat­er, as well as the inven­tion of the marine chronome­ter in 1778. The final map in the chart, an 1832 edi­tion by Ger­many’s Adolf Stiel­er in which “only the unex­plored Polar regions are miss­ing or depict­ed inac­cu­rate­ly,” may look almost exact­ly like the world maps we use today. But the evo­lu­tion cer­tain­ly has­n’t stopped: with the ever more detailed dig­i­tal maps and satel­lite imagery that now fea­ture in our world maps, our abil­i­ty to per­ceive the Earth still improves every day. Our descen­dants 2000 years hence may well place them­selves in a world we would hard­ly rec­og­nize. See the full-size “Shape of the World” info­graph­ic here. Make sure you click on the image once you open the page, and then you can see it in a larg­er for­mat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Maps Reveal the True Size of Coun­tries (and Show How Tra­di­tion­al Maps Dis­tort Our World)

The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Coun­try (and Will Change Your Men­tal Pic­ture of the World)

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans – Not Land – at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Napoleon’s Disastrous Invasion of Russia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visualization: It’s Been Called “the Best Statistical Graphic Ever Drawn”

in Data, Design, History | July 11th, 2019

It’s tempt­ing to asso­ciate data visu­al­iza­tions with Pow­er­Point and online graph­ics, which have enabled an unheard-of capac­i­ty for dis­sem­i­nat­ing full-col­or images. But the form reach­es much fur­ther back in his­to­ry. Fur­ther back, even, than the front pages of USA Today and glossy side­bars of Time and
Newsweek. In 1900, for exam­ple, W.E.B. Du Bois made impres­sive use of sev­er­al full-col­or data visu­al­iza­tions for the First Pan-African Con­fer­ence in Lon­don, with no access what­so­ev­er to desk­top pub­lish­ing soft­ware or a laser print­er.

Almost fifty years before Du Bois turned sta­tis­tics into swirls of col­or and shape, Flo­rence Nightin­gale used her lit­tle-known graph­ic design skills to illus­trate the caus­es of dis­ease in the Crimean War and John Snow (not Jon Snow) illus­trat­ed his rev­o­lu­tion­ary Broad Street Pump cholera the­o­ry with a famous info­graph­ic street map.

Around this same time, anoth­er data visu­al­iza­tion pio­neer, Charles Joseph Minard, pro­duced some of the most high­ly-regard­ed info­graph­ics ever made, includ­ing the 1869 illus­tra­tion above of Napoleon’s march to, and retreat from, Moscow in the War of 1812. View it in a large for­mat here.

Made fifty years after the event, when Minard was 80 years old, the map has been called by the bible of data visu­al­iza­tion studies—Edward Tufte’s The Visu­al Dis­play of Quan­ti­ta­tive Infor­ma­tion—“prob­a­bly the best sta­tis­ti­cal graph­ic ever drawn.” Over at thoughtbot.com, Joanne Cheng sums up the con­text, if you need­ed a his­tor­i­cal refresh­er: “The year is 1812 and Napoleon is doing pret­ty well for him­self. He has most of Europe under his con­trol, except for the UK.”

Angered by Czar Alexander’s refusal to sup­port a UK trade embar­go to weak­en their defens­es, Napoleon “gath­ers a mas­sive army of over 400,000 to attack Rus­sia.” The cam­paign was dis­as­trous: over­con­fi­dent advances on Moscow turned into dev­as­tat­ing win­ter­time retreats dur­ing which the Grande Armée only “nar­row­ly escaped com­plete anni­hi­la­tion.” So, how does Minard’s 1869 Tableau Graphique tell this grand sto­ry of hubris and icy car­nage? And, Cheng asks, “what makes it so good?”

Cheng breaks Minard’s series of jagged lines and shapes down into more con­ven­tion­al XY axis line graphs to show how he coor­di­nat­ed a huge amount of infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the loca­tions (by lon­gi­tude) of dif­fer­ent groups of Napoleon’s troops at dif­fer­ent points in time, their direc­tion, and the pre­cip­i­tous­ly falling tem­per­a­tures in the stages of retreat. He drew from a list of the best his­tor­i­cal sources he could con­sult at the time, turn­ing dense prose into the spare, clean lines that set data sci­en­tists’ hearts a‑flutter.

Minard began his career in a much more rec­og­niz­ably 19-cen­tu­ry design field, build­ing bridges, dams, and canals across Europe for the first few decades of the 1800s. As a civ­il engi­neer “he had the good for­tune to take part in almost all the great ques­tions of pub­lic works which ush­ered in our cen­tu­ry,” not­ed an obit­u­ary pub­lished in Annals of Bridges and Roads the year after Minard’s death in 1870. “And dur­ing the twen­ty years of retire­ment, always au courant of the tech­ni­cal and eco­nom­ic sci­ences, he endeav­ored to pop­u­lar­ize the most salient results.”

He did so by ven­tur­ing out­side the sub­ject of engi­neer­ing, while using the “inno­v­a­tive tech­niques he had invent­ed for the pur­pose of dis­play­ing flows of peo­ple” on paper, writes Michael Sand­berg at DataViz. In order to tell the trag­ic tale” of Napoleon’s crush­ing defeat “in a sin­gle image,” Minard imag­ined the event as a dynam­ic phys­i­cal struc­ture.

Minard’s chart shows six types of infor­ma­tion: geog­ra­phy, time, tem­per­a­ture, the course and direc­tion of the army’s move­ment, and the num­ber of troops remain­ing. The widths of the gold (out­ward) and black (return­ing) paths rep­re­sent the size of the force, one mil­lime­tre to 10,000 men. Geo­graph­i­cal fea­tures and major bat­tles are marked and named, and plum­met­ing tem­per­a­tures on the return jour­ney are shown along the bot­tom.

This was hard­ly Minard’s first info­graph­ic. In fact, he made “scores of oth­er graph­ics and charts,” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic writes, “as well as near­ly 50 maps. He pio­neered sev­er­al impor­tant the­mat­ic map­ping tech­niques and per­fect­ed oth­ers, such as using flow lines on a map.” (See oth­er exam­ples of his work at Nation­al Geographic’s site.) Minard may not be much remem­bered for his infra­struc­ture, but his abil­i­ty, as his obit­u­ar­ist wrote, to turn “the dry and com­pli­cat­ed columns of sta­tis­ti­cal data” into “images math­e­mat­i­cal­ly pro­por­tioned” has made him a leg­end in data sci­ence his­to­ry cir­cles.

Again, view Minard’s visu­al­iza­tion of Napoleon’s failed inva­sion in a large for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flo­rence Nightin­gale Saved Lives by Cre­at­ing Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Visu­al­iza­tions of Sta­tis­tics (1855)

W.E.B. Du Bois Cre­ates Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, Artis­tic Data Visu­al­iza­tions Show­ing the Eco­nom­ic Plight of African-Amer­i­cans (1900)

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

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

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The Restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstaking Process On-Site and Online

in Art | July 10th, 2019

Are col­lectibles mar­kets dri­ven by arbi­trary stan­dards? Of course. Just note the com­par­isons between the art world and world of vin­tage base­ball cards. Don’t see any sig­nif­i­cant sim­i­lar­i­ties? You must not be an econ­o­mist. As Tim Schnei­der points out at Art­net, the two mar­kets may be more alike than not, but they “diverge vio­lent­ly when it comes to the con­cept of restora­tion.” Base­ball cards, no mat­ter how tat­tered, stained, and torn, should nev­er be tam­pered with to improve their con­di­tion one bit. One could say the same of many oth­er “posi­tion­al goods,” to use the prop­er­ly econ­o­mistic term.

But econ­o­mists don’t make cat­e­gories with aes­thet­ic cri­te­ria in mind, and most of us aren’t gallery own­ers, cura­tors, or bil­lion­aire col­lec­tors, but lovers and appre­ci­a­tors of art. Do the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple who vis­it Rembrandt’s mon­u­men­tal­ly famous The Night Watch at the Rijksmu­se­um care about the fluc­tu­a­tions in the paint­ing’s mar­ket val­ue? Like­ly not, espe­cial­ly since a work as trea­sured as the offi­cial­ly-titled Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq has no mar­ket val­ue. “It will nev­er be sold,” writes trav­el writer Kier­an Meeke. The Night Watch is “lit­er­al­ly ‘price­less.’

“Like many oth­er such paint­ings in nation­al col­lec­tions, there is also no rea­son to insure it as it makes more finan­cial sense to spend the pre­mi­ums on improv­ing secu­ri­ty.” Oth­er rea­sons to spend on secu­ri­ty include the three vio­lent attacks the paint­ing has endured at the hands of angry and trou­bled would-be art assas­sins allowed to get too close. This dam­age, rang­ing from severe to mild, and the rav­ages of time, have also neces­si­tat­ed many expen­sive restora­tion efforts, and the lat­est under­tak­ing is the biggest yet, espe­cial­ly since it has been turned into a heav­i­ly-pro­mot­ed live event called “Oper­a­tion Night Watch.”

Last year, we brought you news of this upcom­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to see the painting’s vibrant col­ors emerge from the accu­mu­lat­ed grime; this month, the project began, with an intro­duc­tion on Mon­day by muse­um direc­tor Taco Dib­bets. This is “the largest research and restora­tion project ever for ‘the Night Watch,’” the Rijksmu­se­um reports, “and you can be part of it.” You do not need a tick­et to the Nether­lands, though if you buy one, you’ll also need to buy a tick­et for entry to the muse­um, where the paint­ing will be on full dis­play dur­ing its restora­tion. If, how­ev­er, you decide to watch from home, your seats are free.

The pro­jec­t’s name is only part­ly tongue-in-cheek. “It is like a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion in the plan­ning,” said Dib­bets, and it has required the utmost pre­ci­sion and expert teams of restor­ers, data experts, art his­to­ri­ans, and the pro­fes­sion­als who moved the enor­mous paint­ing into the glass case it will occu­py dur­ing this intense peri­od. The crew of restor­ers will work from dig­i­tal images tak­en with a macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence scan­ner, a tech­nique, says Dib­bets, that allowed them to “make a full body scan” and “dis­cov­er which pig­ments [Rem­brandt] used.”

This restora­tion project will great­ly expand our under­stand­ing of the paint­ing’s cre­ation, and renew our awe for its grandeur. There may be no way to cal­cu­late The Night Watch’s mon­e­tary val­ue, out­side of the unlike­ly event that the Rijksmu­se­um decides to sell, but what restor­ers, his­to­ri­ans, gallery visitors—and mil­lions of art lovers around the world, who only know the paint­ing in reproductions—truly want to know is: what exact­ly did this beloved art­work look like when it was first made, and what might we have been miss­ing in the almost 400 years we’ve been admir­ing it?

We’ll get the chance to see not only the fin­ished prod­uct of the restora­tion, but every painstak­ing step of the process as well. You can mon­i­tor the progress of the restora­tion online, and, fur­ther up, see a time-lapse video of the labor-inten­sive oper­a­tion required to move the mas­sive can­vas.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

300+ Etch­ings by Rem­brandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um

Enter an Online Inter­ac­tive Doc­u­men­tary on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Learn About the Painting’s Many Hid­den Secrets

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

Late Rem­brandts Come to Life: Watch Ani­ma­tions of Paint­ings Now on Dis­play at the Rijksmu­se­um

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

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Arnold Schoenberg, Avant-Garde Composer, Creates a System of Symbols for Notating Tennis Matches

in Music, Sports | July 10th, 2019

This time each sum­mer, as the con­clu­sion of this year’s fort­night-long cham­pi­onship at Wim­ble­don approach­es, even the most pri­vate of the ten­nis enthu­si­asts in all of our cir­cles make them­selves known. Love of that par­tic­u­lar game runs down all walks of life, but seems to exist in par­tic­u­lar­ly high con­cen­tra­tions among cul­tur­al cre­ators: not just writ­ers like Mar­tin Amis, Geoff Dyer, and David Fos­ter Wal­lace, all of whose bod­ies of work con­tain elo­quent thoughts on ten­nis, but com­posers of music as well.

Take Arnold Schoen­berg, who well into his old age con­tin­ued not just to cre­ate the inno­v­a­tive music for which we remem­ber him, but to spend time on the court as well. Though born in Vien­na, Schoen­berg even­tu­al­ly land­ed in the right place to enjoy ten­nis on the reg­u­lar: south­ern Cal­i­for­nia, to which he fled in 1933 after being informed of how inhos­pitable his home­land would soon become to per­sons of Jew­ish her­itage. Few famous com­posers of that time had less in com­mon than Schoen­berg and George Gersh­win, but their shared enjoy­ment of ten­nis made them into fast part­ners.

Accord­ing to Howard Pol­lack­’s life of Gersh­win, fel­low com­pos­er Albert Sendrey left a “reveal­ing account” of one of the week­ly match­es between “the thir­ty-eight-year-old Gersh­win and the six­ty-two-year-old Schoen­berg, con­trast­ing the alter­nate­ly ‘ner­vous’ and ‘non­cha­lant,’ ‘relent­less’ and ‘chival­rous’ Gersh­win, ‘play­ing to an audi­ence,’ with the ‘over­ly eager’ and ‘chop­py’ Schoen­berg who ‘has learned to shut his mind against pub­lic opin­ion.’ ” Any par­al­lels between play­ing style and musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ty are, of course, entire­ly coin­ci­den­tal.

The cere­bral nature of Schoen­berg’s com­po­si­tions may not sug­gest a tem­pera­ment suit­ed for phys­i­cal activ­i­ty of any kind, but even in Aus­tria Schoen­berg had been a keen sports­man. And as a fair few ten­nis-lov­ing writ­ers have explained, the game does pos­sess an intel­lec­tu­al side, and one made more eas­i­ly ana­lyz­able, at least in the­o­ry, by a sys­tem of Schoen­berg’s inven­tion. “Toward the end of his life, Schoen­berg — always fas­ci­nat­ed by rules, analy­sis, and inven­tion — would come up with a form of nota­tion to tran­scribe the ten­nis match­es of his ath­lete son Ronald,” writes Mark Berry in Arnold Schoen­berg. You can see this sys­tem laid out on the sheet above, recent­ly post­ed on Twit­ter by Hen­ry Gough-Coop­er.

The marks look vague­ly sim­i­lar to those of cer­tain dance nota­tion sys­tems, a nat­ur­al enough resem­blance con­sid­er­ing the kind of foot­work ten­nis demands. But ide­al­ly, Schoen­berg’s nota­tion would also have ren­dered a game of ten­nis as com­pre­hen­si­ble as one of chess — anoth­er pur­suit to which Schoen­berg applied his mind. He came up with “an expand­ed four-play­er, ten-square ver­sion of the tra­di­tion­al game,” writes Berry, “involv­ing super­pow­ers and less­er pow­ers all com­pelled to forge alliances, with new pieces such as air­planes, tanks, sub­marines, and so forth.” Schoen­berg’s “coali­tion chess,” as he called it, seems to have caught on no more than his ten­nis nota­tion sys­tem did. But then, the man who pio­neered the twelve-tone tech­nique nev­er did go in for mass accep­tance.

via and Hen­ry Gough-Coop­er on Twit­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arnold Schoen­berg Cre­ates a Hand-Drawn, Paper-Cut “Wheel Chart” to Visu­al­ize His 12-Tone Tech­nique

Vi Hart Uses Her Video Mag­ic to Demys­ti­fy Stravin­sky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Com­po­si­tions

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

Nota­tions: John Cage Pub­lish­es a Book of Graph­ic Musi­cal Scores, Fea­tur­ing Visu­al­iza­tions of Works by Leonard Bern­stein, Igor Stravin­sky, The Bea­t­les & More (1969)

Bob Dylan and George Har­ri­son Play Ten­nis, 1969

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Turn 50 This Month: Celebrate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

in History, Music | July 10th, 2019

One might call the explo­sion of “space rock” in the late 60s anoth­er kind of escapism, a turn from the heav­i­ness on plan­et Earth when the Age of Aquar­ius start­ed to get seri­ous­ly dark. Assas­si­na­tions, riots, ille­gal wars, blunt state repres­sion, coun­ter­cul­ture frag­men­ta­tion, vio­lence every­where, it seemed. Hal­lu­cino­gens played their part in guid­ing the music’s direc­tion, but who could blame bands and fans of bands like the Grate­ful Dead, Pink Floyd, Hawk­wind, or Hen­drix for turn­ing their gaze sky­wards and con­tem­plat­ing the stars?

One might also make the case that so-called “space rock”—psych-rock that direct­ly or indi­rect­ly ref­er­enced out­er space, space trav­el, and sci-fi themes, while sound­ing itself like the music of the spheres on acid—in fact, turned square­ly toward the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-advanced, ambi­tious proxy bat­tle of the entire Cold War. The very earth­ly space race made a fit­ting sub­ject for rock opera—a per­fect stage set for imag­i­na­tive songs about alien­ation, iso­la­tion, and tech­no­log­i­cal inhu­man­i­ty.

All of these themes come togeth­er in a celes­tial har­mo­ny in David Bowie’s 1969 sin­gle, “Space Odd­i­ty,” released on July 11th 1969 and inspired by Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, both cul­tur­al arti­facts that antic­i­pat­ed the dra­ma of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing. The excite­ment Kubrick’s film and Bowie’s song helped gen­er­ate is odd, how­ev­er, con­sid­er­ing that both nar­ra­tives end with their pro­tag­o­nists lost in out­er space for­ev­er.

This didn’t stop the BBC from using “Space Odd­i­ty” to sound­track their Apol­lo cov­er­age, “despite its chill­ing con­clu­sion,” writes Jason Heller, author of Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Explod­ed. The song’s sce­nario “couldn’t have been fur­ther from the typ­i­cal cheer­lead­ing of the astro­nauts that was being con­duct­ed by the media. No one was more sur­prised than Bowie,” who com­ment­ed:

I’m sure they real­ly weren’t lis­ten­ing to the lyrics at all. It wasn’t a pleas­ant thing to jux­ta­pose against a moon land­ing…. Obvi­ous­ly, some BBC offi­cial said, ‘Oh, right then, that space song, Major Tom, blah blah blah, that’ll be great.’ ‘Um, but he gets strand­ed in space, sir.’ Nobody had the heart to tell the pro­duc­er that.

“Of course,” says Bowie, ”I was over­joyed that they did” run with the song. It had been his label’s intent to gar­ner this kind of expo­sure when they rushed the record’s release to “cap­i­tal­ize on the Apol­lo craze.” “Space Odd­i­ty” made it to num­ber five on the UK charts. But if Bowie was mak­ing any com­ment on the moon mis­sion, at first it seems he did so only indi­rect­ly, inspired more by cin­e­ma than cur­rent events. He found 2001 “amaz­ing,” he com­ment­ed, adding, “I was out of my gourd any­way, I was very stoned when I went to see it, sev­er­al times, and it was real­ly a rev­e­la­tion to me.”

The song, he says, came out of that enhanced view­ing expe­ri­ence. Heller writes of sev­er­al more of Bowie’s lit­er­ary sci-fi influ­ences, but not of a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet Bowie, who record­ed the first “Space Odd­i­ty” demo in Jan­u­ary of 1969, did say he want­ed the song “to be the first anthem of the Moon.” The lyrics also “came from a feel­ing of sad­ness,” he said, about the space pro­gram’s direc­tion. “It has been dehu­man­ized,” he said. “Space Odd­i­ty” rep­re­sent­ed a delib­er­ate “anti­dote to space fever,” which is maybe why the song did­n’t catch on in the U.S. until the ‘70s.

This was not a song about plant­i­ng a flag of con­quest. Jour­nal­ist Chris O’Leary remem­bers Bowie mak­ing even more point­ed com­men­tary, con­sid­er­ing “the fate of Major Tom to be the tech­no­crat­ic Amer­i­can mind com­ing face-to-face with the unknown and blank­ing out.” The song her­ald­ed not only a piv­otal sci­en­tif­ic achieve­ment but a cul­tur­al break: “It was prob­a­bly not hyper­bole to assert that the Age of Aquar­ius end­ed when man walked on the Moon,” writes soci­ol­o­gist Philip Ennis. Or as Camille Paglia inter­pret­ed events in Bowie’s song, “we sense that the ‘60s coun­ter­cul­ture has trans­mut­ed into a hope­less­ness about polit­i­cal reform.”

This may seem like a lot of inter­pre­ta­tion to lay on what Bowie him­self called a “song-farce,” but when we’re talk­ing about Bowie’s song­writ­ing, even throw­away lines seem filled with por­tent. And when it comes to that supreme­ly ambiva­lent cou­plet “Plan­et Earth is blue / And there’s noth­ing I can do,” we find our­selves legit­i­mate­ly ask­ing along with Heller, is this “anthem or requiem? Cel­e­bra­tion or decon­struc­tion?” It has been all these things—the “defin­ing song of the Space Age,” sung by astro­nauts them­selves while float­ing in the tin can of the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion, and soon to be broad­cast at the Kennedy Cen­ter in a new video cel­e­brat­ing the 50th anniver­sary of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing.

The video at the NASA event on July 20th will com­mem­o­rate the event with “footage of David Bowie per­form­ing Space Odd­i­ty at his 50th birth­day con­cert at Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1997.” At the top of the post, see a lat­er video for the song (the first film Bowie made, in 1969, would not emerge until 1984); fur­ther up, see an excel­lent live per­for­mance as Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars; and just above, see a young, fresh, bell-bot­tomed, pre-glam Bowie play “Space Odd­i­ty” live on TV in 1969.

As we remem­ber the 50th anniver­sary of the moon land­ing this month, we also cel­e­brate the release of “Space Odd­i­ty” just nine days ear­li­er, the song that first launched Bowie’s career as a space­far­ing rock star. He couldn’t have pre­dict­ed the suc­cess of the Apol­lo 11 mis­sion, but now it seems we can­not prop­er­ly remem­ber it with­out also reflect­ing on his pre­scient pop critique—an attempt, he said, “to relate sci­ence and emo­tion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Astro­naut Chris Had­field Sings David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

How “Space Odd­i­ty” Launched David Bowie to Star­dom: Watch the Orig­i­nal Music Video From 1969

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

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

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