Taught by Yale professor Craig Wright, this course, Listening to Music, operates on the assumption that listening to music is “not simply a passive activity one can use to relax, but rather, an active and rewarding process.” When we understand the basic elements of Western music (e.g., rhythm, melody, and form), we can appreciate music in entirely new ways. That includes everything from classical music, rock and techno, to Gregorian chant and the blues.
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Like another famous Okie from Muskogee, Woody Guthrie came from a part of Oklahoma that the U.S. government sold during the 1889 land rush away from the Quapaw and Osage nations, as well as the Muscogee, a people who had been forcibly relocated from the Southeast under Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. By the time of Guthrie’s birth in 1912 in Okfuskee County, next to Muskogee, the region was in the hands of conservative Democrats like Guthrie’s father Charles, a landowner and member of the revived KKK who participated in a brutal lynching the year before Guthrie was born.
Guthrie was deeply embedded in the formative racial politics of the country. While some people may convince themselves that a time in the U.S. past was “great”—unmarred by class conflict and racist violence and exploitation, secure in the hands of a benevolent white majority, Guthrie’s life tells a much more complex story. Many Indigenous people feel with good reason that Guthrie’s most famous song, “The Land is Your Land,” has contributed to nationalist mythology. Others have viewed the song as a Marxist anthem. Like much else about Guthrie, and the country, it’s complicated.
Considered by many, Stephen Petrus writes, “to be the alternative national anthem,” the song “to many people… represents America’s best progressive and democratic traditions.” Guthrie turned the song into a hymn for the struggle against fascism and for the nascent Civil Rights movement. Written in New York in 1940 and first recorded for Moe Asch’s Folkways Records in 1944, “This Land is Your Land” evolved over time, dropping verses protesting private property and poverty after the war in favor of a far more patriotic tone. It was a long evolution from embittered parody of “God Bless America” to “This land was made for you and me.”
But whether socialist or populist in nature, Guthrie’s patriotism was always subversive. “By 1940,” writes John Pietaro, he had “joined forces with Pete Seeger in the Almanac Singers,” who “as a group, joined the Communist Party. Woody’s guitar had, by then, been adorned with the hand-painted epitaph, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” (Guthrie had at least two guitars with the slogan scrawled on them, one on a sticker and one with ragged hand-lettering.) The phrase, claims music critic Jonny Whiteside, was originally “a morale-boosting WWII government slogan printed on stickers that were handed out to defense plant workers.” Guthrie reclaimed the propaganda for folk music’s role in the culture. As Pietaro tells it:
In this time he also founded an inter-racial quartet with Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Cisco Houston, a veritable super-group he named the Headline Singers. This group, sadly, never recorded. The material must have stood as the height of protest song—he’d named it in opposition to a producer who advised Woody to “stop trying to sing the headlines.” Woody told us that all you can write is what you see.
You can hear The Headline Singers above, minus Lead Belly and featuring Pete Seeger, in the early 1940’s radio broadcast of “All You Fascists Bound to Lose.” “I’m gonna tell you fascists,” sings Woody, “you may be surprised, people in this world are getting organized.” Upon joining the Merchant Marines, Guthrie fought against segregation in the military. After the war, he “stood shoulder to shoulder with Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, and Pete Seeger” against violent racist mobs in Peekskill, New York. Both of Guthrie’s anti-fascist guitars have seemingly disappeared. As Robert Santelli writes, “Guthrie didn’t care for his instruments with much love.” But during the decade of the 1940’s he was never seen without the slogan on his primary instrument.
“This Machine Kills Fascists” has since, writes Motherboard, become Guthrie’s “trademark slogan… still referenced in pop culture and beyond” and providing an important point of reference for the anti-fascist punk movement. You can see another of Guthrie’s anti-fascist slogans above, which he scrawled on a collection of his sheet music: “Fascism fought indoors and out, good & bad weather.” Guthrie’s long-lived brother-in-arms Pete Seeger, carried on in the tradition of anti-fascism and anti-racism after Woody succumbed in the last two decades of his life to Huntington’s disease. Like Guthrie, Seeger painted a slogan around the rim of his instrument of choice, the banjo, a message both playful and militant: “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
Seeger carried the message from his days playing and singing with Guthrie, to his Civil Rights and anti-war organizing and protest in the 50s and 60s, and all the way into the 21st century at Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan in 2011. At the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, Seeger sang “This Land is Your Land” onstage with Bruce Springsteen and his son, Tao-Rodriquez Singer. In rehearsals, he insisted on singing the two verses Guthrie had omitted from the song after the war. “So it was,” writes John Nichols at The Nation, “that the newly elected president of the United States began his inaugural celebration by singing and clapping along with an old lefty who remembered the Depression-era references of a song that took a class-conscious swipe at those whose ‘Private Property’ signs turned away union organizers, hobos and banjo pickers.”
Both Guthrie and Seeger drew direct connections between the fascism and racism they fought and capitalism’s outsized, destructive obsession with land and money. They felt so strongly about the battle that they wore their messages figuratively on their sleeves and literally on their instruments. Pete Seeger’s famous banjo has outlived its owner, and the colorful legend around it has been mass-produced by Deering Banjos. Where Guthrie’s anti-fascist guitars went off to is anyone’s guess, but if one of them were ever discovered, Robert Santelli writes, “it surely would become one of America’s most valued folk instruments.” Or one of its most valued instruments in general.
After TheVillage Voiceannounced this week that it was folding its print operation, a couple people compared the venerable NYC rag’s demise to the end of Gawker, the snarky online tabloid taken down by Hulk Hogan and his shadowy financier Peter Thiel. For too many reasons to list, this comparison seems to my mind hardly apt. There’s a gesture toward the Voice’s profane unruliness, but the alternative weekly, founded in 1955, transcended the blog age’s sophomoric nihilism. The hermetic container of its newsprint sealed out frothing comment sections; no links ferried readers through rivers of personalized algorithms.
The Voice published hard journalism that many, including Voice writers themselves, have ruefully revisited of late. Its music and culture writers like Nat Hentoff, Lester Bangs, Sasha Frere-Jones, Robert Christgau and so many others are some of the smartest in the business. Its columnists, editors, and reviewers—Andrew Sarris, J. Hoberman, Robert Sietsema, Tom Robbins, Greg Tate, Michael Musto, Thulani Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates—equally so.
In its over sixty-year run, Voice writers sat in the front rows for the birth for hard bop, free jazz, punk, no wave, and hip-hop, and all manner of downtown experimentalism in-between and after.
Amongst the many remembrances from current and former Voice staff in a recent Esquire oral history, one from editor and writer Camille Dodero stands out: “The alt-weekly’s purpose was, in theory, speaking truth to power and the ability to be irreverent, and print the word ‘fuck’ while doing so.’” Mission accomplished many times over, as you can see yourself in Google’s Village Voice archive, featuring 1,000 scanned issues going all the back to 1955, when Norman Mailer founded the paper with Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and John Wilcock. There are “blind spots” in Google’s archive of the Voice, noted John Cook at the erstwhile Gawker. In 2009, his “searches didn’t turn up any coverage of Norman Mailer’s 1969 campaign or the Stonewall riots… and there’s not much on Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral bid.” Many years later, months and years in the Google archive remain blank, “no editions available.”
The Voice has had its own blind spots. Writer Walter Troy Spencer referred to Stonewall, for example, as “The Great Faggot Rebellion” and used a phrase that has perhaps become the most wearisome in American English: “there was mostly ugliness on both sides.” This anti-gay prejudice was a regular feature of the paper’s first few years, but by 1982, just as the AIDS crisis began to filter into public consciousness, the Voice was the second organization in the US to offer extended benefits to domestic partners. It became a prominent voice for New York’s LGBTQ culture and politics, through all the buyouts, cutbacks, and unbeatable competition that brought it to its current pass.
The paper also became a voice for the most interesting things happening in the city at any given time, such as the goings on at a Bowery dive called CBGB in 1975. Character studies have long been a Voice staple. Lester Bangs’ write-up of Iggy Pop two years later cut to the heart of the matter: “It’s as if someone writhing in torment has made that writhing into a kind of poetry.” Back in ’75, Andrew Sarris wrote a rather jaw-dropping profile of Hervé Villechaize (in which he begins a sentence, “The problem of midgets….”). …. the more I look through Voice back issues, the more I think it might have been a Gawker of its time, but as onetime columnist Harry Siegel tells Esquire, “what made it unique depends a lot on the age of who you’re asking. It was a very different paper in different decades. It was valuable enough for a long time that people paid money to read it.”
Indeed its first issue cost 5 cents, though by the nondescript cover, above, you wouldn’t guess it would amuse or titillate in the ways the Village Voice became well-known for—in its columns, photos, cartoons, and libertine advertising and classifieds. But most people these days remember it as “free every Wednesday,” to proffer dance, film, theater, music, restaurants, to line subway cars and birdcages, and to open up the city to its readers. The Voice is dead, long live the Voice.
The vibrations of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad in Manhattan, a recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the announcements issuing forth from an inventor’s attempt at a talking clock — hardly a mix with which to get the party started, but one that provides the closest experience we can get to traveling in a sonic time machine. With Centuries of Sound, James Errington has assembled those recordings and a few others into its 1878–1885 mix, an early chapter in his project of creating one listening experience for each year in the history of recorded sound.
“Things get a little more listenable in 1887 with a recording of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’ ” writes The A.V. Club’s Matt Gerardi. “It’s also with this third mix that we start to get a sense for Centuries Of Sound’s editing style, as speeches start to be layered over musical performances, creating a listening experience that’s as pleasurable as it is educational.”
In so doing, “Errington calls attention to the issue of representation, as one of his primary goals is to paint a global, multi-cultural picture of recording history,” digging past all the “marching bands, sentimental ballads, novelty instrumentals and nothing much else” in the historical archives while putting out the call for expert help sourcing and evaluating “Rembetika, early microtonal recordings, French political speeches, Tagore songs or anything else.”
Putting up another year’s mix each month, Centuries of Sound has so far made it up to 1893, the year of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago which “set the tone for the next twenty-five years of architecture, arts, culture and the electrification of the world,” and also the first age of “ ‘hits’ – music produced with an eye to selling, even if only as a souvenir or a fun novelty.” With a decade remaining until Centuries of Sound catches up with the present moment, Errington has put together a taste of what its sonic dose of the almost-present will sound like with a 2016 preview mix featuring the likes of the final album by A Tribe Called Quest and Lazarus, the musical by David Bowie, both of whom took their final bows last year. We’re definitely a long way from the time of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” But how will it all sound to the ears of 2027?
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When synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7 became consumer products, the possibilities of music changed forever, making available a wealth of new, often totally unfamiliar sounds even to musicians who’d never before had a reason to think past the electric guitar. But if the people at Project Magenta keep doing what they’re doing, they could soon bring about a wave of even more revolutionary music-making devices. That “team of Google researchers who are teaching machines to create not only their own music but also to make so many other forms of art,” writes the New York Times’ Cade Metz, work toward not just the day “when a machine can instantly build a new Beatles song,” but the development of tools that allow artists “to create in entirely new ways.”
Using neural networks, “complex mathematical systems allow machines to learn specific behavior by analyzing vast amounts of data” (the kind that generated all those disturbing “DeepDream” images a while back), Magenta’s researchers “are crossbreeding sounds from very different instruments — say, a bassoon and a clavichord — creating instruments capable of producing sounds no one has ever heard.”
You can give one of the results of these experiments a test drive yourself with NSynth, described by its creators as “a research project that trained a neural network on over 300,000 instrument sounds.” Think of Nsynth as a synthesizer powered by AI.
Fire it up, and you can mash up and play your own sonic hybrids of guitar and sitar, piccolo and pan flute, hammer dulcimer and dog. In the video at the top of the post you can hear “the first tangible product of Google’s Magenta program,” a short melody created by an artificial intelligence system designed to create music based on inferences drawn from all the music it has “heard.” Below that, we have another piece of artificial intelligence-generated music, this one a polyphonic piece trained on Bach chorales and performed with the sounds of NSynth.
If you’d like to see how the creation of never-before-heard instruments works in a bit more depth, have a look at the demonstration just above of the NSynth interface for Ableton Live, one of the most DJ-beloved pieces of audio performance software around, just above. Hearing all this in action brings to mind the moral of a story Brian Eno has often told about the DX7, from which only he and a few other producers got innovative results by actually learning how to program: as much as the prospect of AI-powered music technology may astound, the music created with it will only sound as good as the skills and adventurousness of the musicians at the controls — for now.
Many guitarists are of two minds about tribute models. In some cases, they seem like shameless cash grabs, particularly when the artist is no longer with us and can’t consent to the process. Fender’s “Jimi Hendrix Stratocaster” (registered trademark) is in no way, after all, Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster. His white Strat was a right-handed guitar he modified himself, turning it upside down to play as a lefty. Born of necessity, it was nonetheless a brilliant mechanical innovation that defined his sound. The mass-market version flips everything over on a left-handed guitar for the more numerous righty customers, undermining the purpose of the design, mass-producing Hendrix’s handmade alterations, and turning a one-of-a-kind historical artifact into a commodity.
Fellow lefty Kurt Cobain’s ingenious Jag-Stang—a mashup of Fender’s Mustang and Jaguar guitars—seems more legit, on the other hand, since Fender made prototypes for Cobain from a design he himself sent to the company (or rather from two Polaroids he taped together). There’s a proprietary relationship here between artist and guitar maker, a prior arrangement. We don’t see that relationship between another famous player and his guitar’s famous maker. Like Hendrix and Cobain and their Fenders, Willie Nelson has inspired generations of players to pick up Martin acoustics. But I very much doubt that Martin would ever produce a replica based on Trigger, Nelson’s stalwart classical ax, even if such a thing were possible.
That’s for the best. Trigger is and should remain an entirely unique object. It has an aura of its own, much of it emanating from a huge hole in the middle of the guitar. Like its owner, Trigger is weathered and worn, and instantly recognizable. It has been with Nelson since he restarted his career in Austin after his first bout of Nashville fame, and it represents Nelson’s transformation from traditional crooner into the outlaw troubadour who emerged in the early seventies to change the course of country music. (Read the story of the man and his guitar here.) To really appreciate Trigger’s ragged mysteries, you don’t need to hear from Martin guitars, but from one of the instrument’s elite hostlers, so to speak. Respected luthier Mark Erlewine takes care of Trigger when it’s at home in Austin and can explain, as he does in the video above, every one of the guitar’s peculiarities.
“There are a number of things wrong with it,” says Erlewine, “but they’re just minor repairs to keep it going.” As for that hole and the craters surrounding it, he seems unconcerned. Though it looks like it might cave in at any moment, Erlewine has kept it structurally sound. “Willie is not concerned about the looks of this guitar so much as the playability and functionality of it.” How did Trigger come to take on its distinctive wounds? Not in the way you might expect. Rather than a stage accident or tour mishap, the way these things can happen, Nelson’s guitar became damaged through the sheer passion of his fingerstyle playing. Over the years his fingernails would “often chip into the wood and pull out wood as he plays.”
In perfect condition when he bought it, Trigger has recorded in its beaten-up top the motor memories of “over 10,000 shows and recording sessions” in the deep impressions of only its owner’s fingers and personality. There is no way to duplicate this phenomenon for mass consumption. Stick with the video, from guitar tool and parts giant Stewart-MacDonald, and see how Erlewine keeps Trigger healthy, “alive,” and “shored up over the years.”
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