Leonard Cohen had an inti­mate rela­tion­ship with despair. “I’ve seen the future,” he dead­panned, “Broth­er, it is mur­der.” But for many peo­ple, there is no one from whom we’d rather hear the news. In her har­row­ing essay “Fac­ing Extinc­tion,” med­i­ta­tion teacher and for­mer cli­mate jour­nal­ist Cather­ine Ingram frames the cat­a­stro­phe of cli­mate change with Cohen’s lyrics and the many con­ver­sa­tions she had with him before his death in 2016.

Cohen “under­stood human nature and assumed we would do our­selves in,” Ingram writes. Yet, with his razor-sharp gal­lows wit, he deliv­ered his grim prophe­cies with deep love and con­cern. Con­fronting her own despair, Ingram asked the ail­ing poet for advice on how to wake up peo­ple who’d rather tune it all out. “There are things,” he said, “we don’t tell the chil­dren.”

Com­ing from some­one else, this might sound supreme­ly patron­iz­ing. From Cohen, it reminds me of what Japan­ese Zen mas­ter Dogen called “grand­moth­er mind”—pro­tec­tive, uncon­di­tion­al com­pas­sion for oth­ers who may not, and may nev­er, be ready to take in the facts. It also speaks of some­one liv­ing with clin­i­cal depres­sion, car­ry­ing the weight of the world. Cohen once called the con­di­tion a life­long “back­ground of anguish and anx­i­ety.”

He met his suf­fer­ing with med­i­ta­tion, prac­tic­ing Rin­zai Zen for decades and liv­ing as a monk for five years at the Mount Baldy monastery in Los Ange­les. This peri­od pro­vides the inspi­ra­tion for the new video above, direct­ed by Daniel Askill, that dra­ma­tizes Cohen’s trans­for­ma­tion from grief to “ordi­nary silence,” the mean­ing of his Japan­ese ordi­na­tion name, Jikan.

Askill calls the video a “qui­et, sym­bol­ic nar­ra­tive that charts the let­ting go of ego and the trap­pings of fame.” The inter­pre­ta­tion is “straightforward—almost pious,” says Matthew Gindin at Tri­cy­cle, and also “an intel­li­gent update and homage” to imagery from Cohen’s first album.

The song, “Hap­pens to the Heart” is the first on “an unex­pect­ed har­vest of new songs” released on the posthu­mous album Thanks for the Dance, com­ing Novem­ber 22. “Hap­pens to the Heart,” is a dis­til­la­tion of clas­sic Cohen themes: the weari­ness of plea­sure, cos­mic absur­di­ty, com­pas­sion, and despair.

I had no trou­ble bet­ting
On the flood against the ark
You see I knew about the end­ing
What hap­pens to the heart

Its title refrain turns each stan­za into a case for how and why to care, inves­ti­gat­ing the mind’s life­time of turn­ings from “the heart”—the con­stant split­ting in two that Zen sees as the source of suf­fer­ing. “I fought for some­thing final,” Cohen intones at the song’s end, “not the right to dis­agree.”

Cohen talks about his jour­ney into the monastery in the inter­view fur­ther up. “Maybe this whole activ­i­ty,” the for­mal prac­tice of Zen, “is a response to a sense of despair that I’ve always had.… By and large, I didn’t have what it took to real­ly enjoy my suc­cess, or my celebri­ty. I was nev­er able to locate it. I was nev­er able to use it.” He learned how to dis­as­so­ci­ate and quar­an­tine him­self.

In the prison of the gift­ed
I was friend­ly with the guards
So I nev­er had to wit­ness
What hap­pens to the heart

In the aus­ter­i­ties of the monastery, Cohen dis­cov­ered “a volup­tuous sense of econ­o­my that you can’t find any­where else,” a dai­ly prac­tice “nec­es­sary to open the heart to the fact that you’re not alone,” even if, as he says wry­ly in “The Goal,” above—the first release from Thanks for the Dance—you “can’t stop the rain, can’t stop the snow.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Pub­lished: Dis­cov­er His Final Poems, Draw­ings, Lyrics & More

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

Hal­lelu­jah!: You Can Stream Every Leonard Cohen Album in a 22-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist (1967–2016)

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

When peo­ple hear Anna-Maria Hefele sing, they won­der how she does it, and not just because of her impres­sive tra­di­tion­al chops. “While most of us strug­gle to voice one clear, dis­tinct note,” writes the Inde­pen­dent’s Christo­pher Hooton, the poly­phon­ic over­tone singer Hefele “can sing two at once, and move them around in sep­a­rate scales.” Also known as “throat singing,” this tech­nique “allows her to estab­lish a fun­da­men­tal note and then move the over­tone above it through dif­fer­ent notes, cre­at­ing an astound­ing, ethe­re­al effect.” With noth­ing more than what nature gave her, in oth­er words, Hefele man­ages to achieve a vocal effect more strik­ing than most any­thing heard as a result of even today’s most com­pli­cat­ed dig­i­tal process­es.

But what, exact­ly, is going on when she sings? These two videos, record­ed with Hefele per­form­ing inside a mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing machine at the Insti­tute for Musi­cian’s Med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter Freiburg, shed light on the mechan­ics of poly­phon­ic over­done singing. “What you see in this dynam­ic MRI-record­ing is the tongue move­ment in the vocal tract while doing over­tone singing and nor­mal singing,” says the descrip­tion.

“The posi­tions of the tongue forms the res­o­nance cav­i­ties which delete all not-want­ed over­tones in the sound of the voice at a cer­tain point in time, and then ampli­fy a sin­gle over­tone that is left, which can be heard as a sep­a­rate note above the fun­da­men­tal.” It has, in oth­er words, as much to do with sup­press­ing all the tones you don’t want to sing as with empha­siz­ing the ones you do. Hard­ly the eas­i­est musi­cal trick to pull off, much less inside an envi­ron­ment as unfor­giv­ing­ly noisy as an MRI machine.

But you can still learn the basic tech­niques, and from Hefele her­self at that: pre­vi­ous­ly here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured Hefele’s own demon­stra­tion of and how-to lessons on over­tone singing. No mat­ter how well we our­selves learn to sing two notes at once, though, we’d nev­er­the­less have lit­tle idea what’s going on to let us make such sounds with­out these reveal­ing MRI videos. (Oth­ers have sim­i­lar­ly exposed the inner work­ings of beat­box­ing and opera singing.) The footage also under­scores the respectable musi­cal taste of Hefele her­self or her col­lab­o­ra­tors in this research project, select­ing as they have the musi­cal exam­ples of “Sehn­sucht nach dem Früh­linge” by Hefele’s coun­try­man Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart and “By This Riv­er” from singing advo­cate Bri­an Eno’s clas­sic LP Before and After Sci­ence — though you might call this an exam­ple of music made dur­ing sci­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Musi­cian Shows How to Sing Two Notes at Once in Mes­mer­iz­ing Video

How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Poly­phon­ic Over­tone Singing): Lessons from Singer Anna-Maria Hefele

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

The Hu, a New Break­through Band from Mon­go­lia, Plays Heavy Met­al with Tra­di­tion­al Folk Instru­ments and Throat Singing

What Beat­box­ing and Opera Singing Look Like Inside an MRI Machine

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

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 Face­book.

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It’s every researcher’s dream: that some­where among the pile of mate­ri­als lies gold, an undis­cov­ered mas­ter­piece, or an unknown piece to a puz­zle that com­pli­cates con­ven­tion­al knowl­edge. That’s what Cor­nell University’s Judith Peraino dis­cov­ered while going through some of the 3,500 cas­settes in the Andy Warhol archive. Here she found a mix-tape cas­sette that Lou Reed had made for Andy in the mid-sev­en­ties, with one side a selec­tion of songs from recent live gigs, the oth­er side con­tain­ing 12 unknown and unre­leased songs by Reed, accom­pa­nied by only his gui­tar, record­ed at home in New York City.

Labeled “The Phi­los­o­phy Songs (From A to B and Back),” the songs are Reed’s response to Warhol’s 1975 book The Phi­los­o­phy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, which his men­tor had sent to Reed in gal­ley proof. Their rela­tion­ship was always dif­fi­cult. After an unpleas­ant breakup after the Vel­vet Under­ground came out from under Warhol’s shad­ow, the two nev­er worked togeth­er again. But they kept in touch in the way that cer­tain bit­ter exes do: keep­ing it cor­dial, pos­si­bly con­sid­er­ing work­ing togeth­er again, then real­iz­ing why they broke up in the first place.

Prof. Peraino sur­mised that the tape is relat­ed to a musi­cal Warhol want­ed to cre­ate with Reed based on Warhol’s book. And in fact Reed uses pas­sages from the book as jump­ing off points for the lyrics, she found. There’s a song each about “fame, sex, and the busi­ness of art,” and two about drag queens. But Reed used oth­er songs to crit­i­cize Warhol for his seem­ing indif­fer­ence to the deaths of Fac­to­ry stars Can­dy Dar­ling and Eric Emer­son, adding that he should have died after being shot in 1968. Reed then apolo­gies to Warhol at the end of the song.

Because her research was about the begin­nings of mix­tape cul­ture, queer­ness, and Warhol’s end­less box­es of cas­settes, she is excit­ed about both sides of the tape. Mix­tapes, she explains, were a way for peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate com­plex emo­tions with­out hav­ing to sim­ply write them down. Songs strike emo­tion­al chords in so many ways.

The tape “is an exam­ple of Lou Reed curat­ing him­self, putting togeth­er an ide­al set list for Andy Warhol,” Peraino says in Cornell’s video inter­view. “I see the mes­sage of the tape as being both courtship and breakup in a sense. The one side is say­ing, look at me, what I’ve able to do this year…and now look at you.”

Apart from a 30-sec­ond excerpt, found on Variety’s web page, there are no cur­rent plans to release some­thing so rough, and with so many rights issues at stake.

Lou Reed did go on to make some­thing sim­i­lar how­ev­er, when in 1990 he wrote Songs for Drel­la with fel­low Vel­vet John Cale.

via Cor­nell

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whopper–While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fied: Four Videos Explain His Ground­break­ing Art and Its Cul­tur­al Impact

The Lou Reed Archive Opens at the New York Pub­lic Library: Get Your Own Lou Reed Library Card and Check It Out

Meet the Char­ac­ters Immor­tal­ized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”: The Stars and Gay Rights Icons from Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry Scene

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.

There is no wrong way to lis­ten to the music of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach. You may pre­fer the aus­tere, idio­syn­crat­ic piano inter­pre­ta­tions of Glenn Gould; you may pre­fer the ground­break­ing ana­log-syn­the­siz­er ren­di­tions painstak­ing­ly record­ed by Wendy Car­los (whose ear­ly fans includ­ed Gould him­self); or you may pre­fer faith­ful per­for­mances using only the instru­ments extant in the late 17th to mid-18th cen­tu­ry peri­od in which Bach lived. In that last case, the San Fran­cis­co ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music has you cov­ered. You may remem­ber us pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tur­ing their per­for­mances of Vival­di and Pachel­bel; in the video above, you can hear and see them play Bach.

More specif­i­cal­ly, you can hear them play the sec­ond move­ment, Aria, from Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major, BWV 1068. The instru­ments they play it on include an Ital­ian baroque vio­lin from 1660 and an Aus­tri­an baroque vio­la from 1680, as well as more recent­ly craft­ed exam­ples rig­or­ous­ly mod­eled after instru­ments from that same era. “As instru­ments became mod­ern­ized in the 19th cen­tu­ry, builders and play­ers tend­ed to focus on the vol­ume of sound and the sta­bil­i­ty of tun­ing,” says VoM’s expla­na­tion of their use of peri­od instru­ments. “Mod­ern steel strings replaced the old­er mate­ri­als, and instru­ments were often machine made. His­tor­i­cal instru­ments, built indi­vid­u­al­ly by hand and with over­all lighter con­struc­tion, have extreme­ly com­plex over­tones — which we find delight­ful.”

Any lover of Bach’s music has heard this piece many times, not least due to its pop­u­lar­iza­tion in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, in an arrange­ment by Ger­man vio­lin­ist August Wil­helmj, as “Air on the G String.” The orig­i­nal work dates to “some time between the years 1717 and 1723,” writes music blog­ger Özgür Nevres, when Bach com­posed it for his patron Prince Leopold of Anhalt. It also holds the hon­or of being the first work by Bach ever record­ed, “by the Russ­ian cel­list Alek­san­dr Verzh­bilovich and an unknown pianist, in 1902 (as the Air from the Over­ture No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068).” But no mat­ter how many dif­fer­ent record­ings from dif­fer­ent eras of Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major in which you’ve steeped your­self, if you’ve only heard it played on mod­ern instru­ments, a per­for­mance like Voic­es of Music’s shows that it still has sur­pris­es to offer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Sounds of the Actu­al Instru­ments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Han­del Orig­i­nal­ly Com­posed Their Music

The Authen­tic Vivaldi’s The Four Sea­sons: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on Orig­i­nal Man­u­scripts & Played with 18th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

The Authen­tic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on the Orig­i­nal Man­u­script & Played with Orig­i­nal 17th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

Watch Glenn Gould Per­form His Last Great Stu­dio Record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions (1981)

All of Bach for Free! New Site Will Put Per­for­mances of 1080 Bach Com­po­si­tions Online

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant

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.