In a 1992 journal article “Eruptions: heavy metal appropriations of classical virtuosity,” musicologist Robert Walser explored the link between heavy metal and classical music–the way in which metal guitarists studied classical music and created “a new kind of guitar virtuosity.” Published by Cambridge University Press, Walser’s essay comes to focus on Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption,” the “solo that transformed rock guitar.” He writes: “Released in 1978 on Van Halen’s first album, ‘Eruption’ [see an extended live version below] is one minute and twenty-seven seconds of exuberant and playful virtuosity, a violinist’s precise and showy technique inflected by the vocal rhetoric of the blues and rock ’n’ roll irreverence.” The solo features rhythmic patterns reminiscent of J. S. Bach’s famous ‘Prelude in C major’, while “the harmonic progressions of ‘Eruption’ lead the listener along an aural adventure,” much like you’d find in the music of Vivaldi. None of this was an accident. As a youngster, Eddie Van Halen was raised on a diet of Mozart and Beethoven.
Above, you can watch “Jill,” a member of the Japanese metal band Unlucky Morpheus, perform a violin-driven version of “Eruption.” It’s classical meets metal once again, except this time a classical instrument takes the lead. Enjoy.
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Hollywood film scores have become blandly formulaic, thanks to filmmakers’ over-reliance on the same kinds of “temp music” during the editing process, a practice that can lead to a boilerplate approach at the scoring stage. But the use of temporary music is nothing new. Stanley Kubrick left the temp score for 2001: A Space Odyssey as the film’s official soundtrack, opting for Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra for the iconic opening sequence over the score composed by Alex North.
While composers may now stick too closely to temp music, North strayed too far, Kubrick complained, writing a score “which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to.” Another composer, Wendy Carlos, scored two of Kubrick’s films—The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. In both cases, her original music was mostly cut in favor of classical recordings. Kubrick described his attitude in an interview with Michael Ciment: “Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time?”
Few have argued with the results of Kubrick’s ruthless approach, though Carlos refused to work with him again. Maybe Kubrick’s films would have been equally well-received with different music, who can say? But if the director found North’s score “alien,” consider what he must have thought when he heard Mike Kaplan’s lyrical interpretation of his sci-fi epic, “2001: A Garden of Personal Mirrors.” Weird doesn’t really begin to describe it, and it’s odder still given that Kubrick himself commissioned the song. After rejecting another songwriter’s demo at MGM’s offices, he supposedly turned to Kaplan, then a young publicist, and said, “I hear you write music. Why don’t you write something?”
There’s no indication that Kubrick had “MacArthur Park” in mind as inspiration, but Kaplan chose to “emulate the success of the quirky hit,” writes Vanessa Thorpe at The Guardian. After 52 years, Kaplan’s song has finally been released, “thanks to a small British record label.” Thorpe quotes Observer film critic Mark Kermode, who played the song on his radio show: “Audience reaction was utterly polarized, but I have the suspicion it will become a cult favorite. It is very ear-wormy.” It was supposed to be, anyway, as a single to promote the film to confused audiences.
When Kaplan played the version above with folk singer Naomi Gardner for Kubrick, Thorpe writes, he got a very different response: “Although the great director liked the title, he said he could not imagine it becoming a hit. The two friends never discussed the song again, although they continued to work together closely on A Clockwork Orange.” Kaplan didn’t take the rejection personally, but he’s pleased it has finally emerged for the public to hear. “I know it doesn’t sound like anything else,” he says. It certainly doesn’t sound remotely like any of the music in 2001.
Kubrick may not have cared for “2001: A Garden of Personal Mirrors,” but it does, in its way, capture the spirit of a film Kaplan calls “a metaphysical drama encompassing evolution, reincarnation, the beauty of space, the terror of science and the mystery of mankind,” a film that “required critics and audiences to surrender to its unique rhythms.”
If Werner Herzog has ever stood atop a skateboard, cinema seems not to have recorded it. But when asked by online skateboarding magazine Jenkem to discuss the sport and/or lifestyle, he did so with characteristically little reservation. “I’m not familiar with the scene of skateboarding,” he admits in the video interview above. “At the same time, I had the feeling, yes, that’s kind of my people.” Fans will make the connection between skateboarding videos and the Bavarian filmmaker’s early documentary The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, on champion ski jumper Walter Steiner, even before a clip of it appears.
In fact Herzog himself, as revealed in the autobiographical short Portrait Werner Herzog, only turned filmmaker after shelving his own dreams of ski-jumping. The experience must have taught him viscerally, through those parts of the body that don’t forget, what it means to make countless attempts resulting in countless failures — with a better failure here and there, and at some distant, ecstatic moment, perhaps a success.
Viewed at great enough length, the kind of skateboarder who attempts a trick on video dozens, even hundreds of times, before landing it could well be a character from one of Herzog’s own films, especially his documentaries about men unable to stop putting themselves in harm’s way in the name of their fixations.
“So many failures,” marvels Herzog as he watches one such video. “That’s astonishing.” It certainly “doesn’t do good to his pelvis, nor to his elbows,” Herzog adds, but such is the price of ecstasy. For him, the obscurity of the vast majority of skateboarders only compounds the sacredness of their practice. This as opposed to the David Blaines of the world, whose physical feats “are meant only for his own publicity, and for shining out in the media. Skateboard kids are not out for the media. They do it for the joy of it, and for the fun of it.” If Herzog were to pay cinematic tribute to these kids, surely he would make similar observations though voiceover narration. As for his instinct of how to fill out the rest of the soundtrack, “What comes to mind first and foremost would be Russian Orthodox church choirs.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Major motion pictures need the work of writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, and a slew of other professionals besides. That group also includes researchers, whose role has until recently gone practically uncelebrated outside the industry. In 2015, filmmaker Daniel Raim brought the work of the film researcher to light with Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, about production designer Harold Michelson and his researcher wife Lillian. “In Raim’s documentary, she talks about working on Fiddler on the Roof and the filmmakers needed to know what a Jewish woman’s undergarments looked like in the 1890s,” writes The Hollywood Reporter’s Emily Hilton. How could she find such obscure information?
“Michelson sat on a bench at Fairfax and Beverly near a Jewish deli and spoke to women who were about the right age to have been alive in that era.” One of these women “ran home and grabbed a sewing pattern for her to reference. This research inspired the outfits that Τevye’s daughters wear in the number: knee length bloomers with scalloped edges.”
As yet, this pattern hasn’t appeared in the Michelson Cinema Research Library, now hosted online at the Internet Archive. But it may yet, as the project of digitization and uploading has hardly begun: it was just last year that the nonagenarian Lillian Michelson donated to the Archive her formidable collection of research materials, amassed over her long career.
“After nearly six decades serving filmmakers first at Samuel Goldwyn, then the American Film Institute, Zoetrope Studio, Paramount and DreamWorks,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Mary McNamara, “the library filled 1,594 boxes: tens of thousands of books, photographs, magazines and a panoply of other visual resources. All of this had been sitting for five years in a storage facility, paid for by friends who could not bear to see it all destroyed.” Now that the digital archival process is underway, you can browse the first 1,300 or so entries at the Internet Archive, which allows users to virtually check out the Michelson Cinema Research Library’s books on subjects ranging from theatrical costumes and vintage cinema lobby cards to places like Japan and Paris to less expected topics like the Amazing Kreskin and the externals of the Catholic Church.
But then, a Hollywood researcher must be prepared to learn about anything, and by all accounts Lillian Michelson was perhaps the greatest of them all. In addition to its comprehensiveness, her library became a hangout of choice for a variety of studio professionals and celebrities including Tom Waits. (“I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how he found some time to unwind,” says Raim, “just drinking tea there.”) The Internet Archive describes her collection as consisting of “5,000 books, 30,000 photographs, and more than 1,000,000 clippings, scrapbooks and ephemera,” more of which will come online as time goes by. Eventually the site will contain all the materials from which Michelson drew vital knowledge for filmmakers like Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick. And if her research materials satisfied those three, they’re more than good enough for us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Conspiracy theories are like blockbuster Hollywood movies. Instead of the painful, confusing tedium of historical detail that meets us when we try to understand the world, they offer spectacle, clear dichotomies of good and evil, the promise of redemptive resolution. If only, say, we could rid ourselves of scurrilous figures behind the scenes, we could get back to the garden and make everything great. Or, if only we could change the frequency of standard musical pitch from 440 Hz to 432 Hz, we could throw off the yoke of Nazi mind control, experience pure meditative bliss, open our root chakras, and.… Wait… what?
If this one’s new to you, you’ll find rabbit holes aplenty to fall into online. Retired dentist Leonard Horowitz, for example, has elaborated a theory that has “the Rockefeller Foundation’s military commercialization of music,” then Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, tricking the world into 440 Hz, “effectively persuading Hitler’s supposed enemies in Britain to adopt this allegedly superior standard tuning for the ‘Master Race.’” Meanwhile, on YouTube (and even in scientific journals), notes Thom Dunn at Boing Boing, pseudoscience about the “‘meditative qualities of 432 Hertz” proliferates, “which, of course, relates back to Horowitz’s theory that 440 Hertz is a weapon of Nazi aggression.”
Like most conspiracy theories, “there is a kernel of truth here—that there has been an historical debate between these frequencies for middle ‘A,’ and that 440 Hertz won out largely because of Western industrialization, which coincided with some World Wars.” The history, however, predates the Rockefeller Foundation and the Nazis, extending back at least to 1885, as Alan Cross writes at Global News, when “the Music Commission of the Italian Government declared that all instruments and orchestras should use a tuning fork that vibrated at 440 Hz, which was different from the original standard of 435 Hz and the competing 432 Hz used in France.”
The push for worldwide commercial standardization finally decided the question in the 20th century, not mind control. It was just business, but why do the proponents of 432 Hz believe this is the superior frequency? In the video above, guitar teacher Paul Davids satirizes the reasoning (over the X‑Files theme): something to do with “the natural harmonics found in sacred numbers” and the “psychic poisoning of the mass of humanity.” Davids quickly moves on to discuss the actual history of tuning, from the 15th century onward, when standards ranged from country to country, even city to city, anywhere between 400 and 500 Hz. (Learn more about the history of pitch in the video above.)
Some classical musicians who play Bach, for example, tune to 415 Hz, not because it has magical qualities but because it’s the frequency Bach used, one semitone below today’s standard 440 Hz. But all of this is academic. Should not our ears and chakras be the judge? I stick closely to the criterion, “if it sounds good, it is good,” so I’m open to considering the superiority of 432 Hz. So is Davids, and he demonstrates the difference between the two pitches in some fingerpicked examples of classical and contemporary hits. What do we hear?
Each of us will have a different response to these frequencies, depending on several factors, not least of which is our degree of conditioning to 440 Hz. Musicians and composers, for example, are far more sensitive to changes in pitch and more likely to feel the difference, especially if they try to sing or play along. What does Davids hear? He personally dismisses any notion that 432 Hz tuning will “let a different part of the universe vibrate,” or whatever. For one thing, playing in a different key makes the frequency change largely irrelevant. For another, every musical note resonates at multiple frequencies, never only one.
Logically, the difference between 432 and 440 Hz is arbitrary, even in the most meditative of relaxing 432 Hz videos on YouTube. “It all comes down,” says Davids, “to what you’re playing and how it sounds.” Or as Thelonious Monk put it in his indispensable advice to musicians, “You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?” and “A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.”
“Color is part of a spectrum, so you can’t discover a color,” says Professor Mas Subramanian, a solid-state chemist at Oregon State University. “You can only discover a material that is a particular color”—or, more precisely, a material that reflects light in such a way that we perceive it as a color. Scientific modesty aside, Subramanian actually has been credited with discovering a color—the first inorganic shade of blue in 200 years.
Named “YInMn blue” —and affectionately called “MasBlue” at Oregon State—the pigment’s unwieldy name derives from its chemical makeup of yttrium, indium, and manganese oxides, which together “absorbed red and green wavelengths and reflected blue wavelengths in such a way that it came off looking a very bright blue,” Gabriel Rosenberg notes at NPR. It is a blue, in fact, never before seen, since it is not a naturally occurring pigment, but one literally cooked in a laboratory, and by accident at that.
The discovery, if we can use the word, should justly be credited to Subramanian’s grad student Andrew E. Smith who, during a 2009 attempt to “manufacture new materials that could be used in electronics,” heated the particular mix of chemicals to over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. Smith noticed “it had turned a surprising, bright blue color [and] Subramanian knew immediately it was a big deal.” Why? Because the color blue is a big deal.
In an important sense, color is something humans discovered over long periods of time in which we learned to see the world in shades and hues our ancestors could not perceive. “Some scientists believe that the earliest humans were actually colorblind,” Emma Taggart writes at My Modern Met, “and could only recognize black, white, red, and only later yellow and green.” Blue, that is to say, didn’t exist for early humans. “With no concept of the color blue,” Taggart writes, “they simply had no words to describe it. This is even reflected in ancient literature, such as Homer’s Odyssey,” with its “wine-dark sea.”
Photo via Oregon State University
Sea and sky only begin to assume their current colors some 6,000 years ago when ancient Egyptians began to produce blue pigment. The first known color to be synthetically produced is thus called Egyptian blue, created using “ground limestone mixed with sand and a copper-containing mineral, such as azurite or malachite.” Blue holds a special place in our color lexicography. It is the last color word that develops across cultures and one of the most difficult colors to manufacture. “People have been looking for a good, durable blue color for a couple of centuries,” Subramanian told NPR.
And so, YInMn blue has become a sensation among industrial manufacturers and artists. Patented in 2012 by OSU, it received approval for industrial use in 2017. That same year, Australian paint supplier Derivan released it as an acrylic paint called “Oregon Blue.” It has taken a few more years for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to come around, but they’ve finally approved YlnMn blue for commercial use, “making it available to all,” Isis Davis-Marks writes at Smithsonian. “Now the authenticated pigment is available for sale in paint retailers like Golden in the US.”
Photo via Oregon State University
The new blue solves a number of problems with other blue pigments. It is nontoxic and not prone to fading, since it “reflects heat and absorbs UV radiation.” YInMn blue is “extremely stable, a property long sought in a blue pigment,” says Subramanian. It also fills “a gap in the range of colors,” says art supply manufacturer Georg Kremer, adding, “The pureness of YInBlue is really perfect.”
Since their first, accidental color discovery, “Subramanian and his team have expanded their research and have made a range of new pigments to include almost every color, from bright oranges to shades of purple, turquoise and green,” notes the Oregon State University Department of Chemistry. None have yet had the impact of the new blue. Learn much more about the unique chemical properties of YInMn blue here and see Professor Subramanian discuss its discovery in his TED talk further up.
On the off chance Lin-Manuel Miranda is casting around for source material for his next American history-based blockbuster musical, may we suggest American Cookery by “poor solitary orphan” Amelia Simmons?
First published in 1796, at 47 pages (nearly three of them are dedicated to dressing a turtle), it’s a far quicker read than the fateful Ron Chernow Hamilton biography Miranda impulsively selected for a vacation beach read.
Slender as it is, there’s no shortage of meaty material:
Calves Head dressed Turtle Fashion
Soup of Lamb’s Head and Pluck
Fowl Smothered in Oysters
Tongue Pie
Foot Pie
Modern chefs may find some of the first American cookbook’s methods and measurements take some getting used to.
The book’s full title is an indication of its mysterious author’s ambitions for the new country’s culinary future:
American Cookery, or the art of dressing viands, fish, poultry, and vegetables, and the best modes of making pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, puddings, custards, and preserves, and all kinds of cakes, from the imperial plum to plain cake: Adapted to this country, and all grades of life.
As Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald write in an essay for What It Means to Be an American, a “national conversation hosted by the Smithsonian and Arizona State University,” American Cookery managed to straddle the refined tastes of Federalist elites and the Jeffersonians who believed “rustic simplicity would inoculate their fledgling country against the corrupting influence of the luxury to which Britain had succumbed”:
The recipe for “Queen’s Cake” was pure social aspiration, in the British mode, with its butter whipped to a cream, pound of sugar, pound and a quarter of flour, 10 eggs, glass of wine, half-teacup of delicate-flavored rosewater, and spices. And “Plumb Cake” offered the striving housewife a huge 21-egg showstopper, full of expensive dried and candied fruit, nuts, spices, wine, and cream.
Then—mere pages away—sat johnnycake, federal pan cake, buckwheat cake, and Indian slapjack, made of familiar ingredients like cornmeal, flour, milk, water, and a bit of fat, and prepared “before the fire” or on a hot griddle. They symbolized the plain, but well-run and bountiful, American home. A dialogue on how to balance the sumptuous with the simple in American life had begun.
American Cookery is one of nine 18th-century titles to make the Library of Congress’ list of 100 Books That Shaped America:
This cornerstone in American cookery is the first cookbook of American authorship to be printed in the United States. Numerous recipes adapting traditional dishes by substituting native American ingredients, such as corn, squash and pumpkin, are printed here for the first time. Simmons’ “Pompkin Pudding,” baked in a crust, is the basis for the classic American pumpkin pie. Recipes for cake-like gingerbread are the first known to recommend the use of pearl ash, the forerunner of baking powder.
Students of Women’s History will find much to chew on in the second edition of American Cookery as well, though they may find a few spoonfuls of pearl ash dissolved in water necessary to settle upset stomachs after reading Simmons’ introduction.
Stavely and Fitzgerald observe how “she thanks the fashionable ladies,” or “respectable characters,” as she calls them, who have patronized her work, before returning to her main theme: the “egregious blunders” of the first edition, “which were occasioned either by the ignorance, or evil intention of the transcriber for the press.”
Ultimately, all of her problems stem from her unfortunate condition; she is without “an education sufficient to prepare the work for the press.” In an attempt to sidestep any criticism that the second edition might come in for, she writes: “remember, that it is the performance of, and effected under all those disadvantages, which usually attend, an Orphan.”
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
If you’ve ever dreamed about mounting that “Great Gatsby” musical, or writing that sci-fi adaptation based on Gatsby but they’re all androids, there’s some good news: as of January 1, 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel finally entered the public domain. (Read a public domain copy here.) Creatives can now do what they want with the work: reprint or adapt it any way they like, without having to negotiate the rights.
Or you could, just like Minneapolis-based artist K. Woodman-Maynard adapt the work into a beautiful graphic novel, pages of which you can glimpse here. Her version is all light and pastel watercolors, with a liberal use of the original text alongside more fantastic surreal imagery, making visual some of Fitzgerald’s word play. At 240 pages, there’s a lot of work here and, as if it needs repeating, no graphic novel is a substitute for the original, just…a jazz riff, if you were.
But Woodman-Maynard was one of many waiting for Gatsby to enter the public domain, which apart from Disney property, will happen to most recorded and written works over time. Many authors have been waiting for the chance to riff on the novel and its characters without worrying about a cease and desist letter. Already you can find The Gay Gatsby, B.A. Baker’s slash fiction reinterpretation of all the suppressed longing in the original novel; The Great Gatsby Undead, a zombie version; and Michael Farris Smith’s Nick, a prequel that follows Nick Carraway through World War I and out the other side. And there are plenty more to come.
Copyright law stipulates that any work after 95 years will enter the public domain. (Up until 1998, this used to be 75 years, but some lawyers talked to some congresscritters).
The New Negro — Alain Locke (the first major compendium of Harlem Renaissance writers)
An American Tragedy — Theodore Dreiser (adapted into the 1951 film A Place in the Sun)
The Secret of Chimneys — Agatha Christie
Arrowsmith — Sinclair Lewis
Those Barren Leaves — Aldous Huxley
The Painted Veil — W. Somerset Maugham
Now, the thing about The Great Gatsby is that it is both loved by readers and hard to adapt into other mediums by its fans. It has been adapted five times for the screen (the Baz Luhrmann-Leonardo DiCaprio version is the most recent from 2013) and they have all dealt with the central paradox: Fitzgerald gives us so little about Gatsby. The author is intentionally hoping the reader to create this “great man” in our heads, and there he must stay. The novel is very much about the “idea” of a man, much like the idea of the “American Dream.” But film must cast somebody and Hollywood absolutely has to cast a star like Leonardo DiCaprio or Robert Redford. A graphic novel, however, does not have those concessions to the market. Woodman-Maynard’s version is not even the first graphic novel based on Fitzgerald’s book—-Scribner published a version adapted by Fred Fordham and illustrated by Aya Morton last year—-and it certainly will not be the last. Get ready for a bumper decade celebrating/critiquing the Roaring ‘20s, while we still figure out what to call our own era.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
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