Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Oldest Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

in History, Music | January 10th, 2017

Classical music enthusiasts seem to agree that the renewal of interest in period instruments made for a noticeable change in the sound of most, if not all, orchestral performances. But doesn’t the replication and use of viols, ophicleides, and fortepianos from the times of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart raise a curiosity about what people used to make music generations before them, and generations before that? How early can we get into early music and still find tools to use in the 21st century? Since the end of the 20th, we’ve had the same answer: about nine millennia.

“Chinese archeologists have unearthed what is believed to be the oldest known playable musical instrument,” wrote Henry Fountain in a 1999 New York Times article on the discovery of “a seven-holed flute fashioned 9,000 years ago from the hollow wing bone of a large bird.”

Those holes “produced a rough scale covering a modern octave, beginning close to the second A above middle C,” and the fact of this “carefully selected tone scale indicates that the Neolithic musicians may have been able to play more than single notes, but actual music.”

You can hear the haunting sounds of this oldest playable musical instrument known to man in the clip above. When would those prehistoric humans have heard it themselves? Fountain quotes ethnomusicologist Frederick Lau as saying that these flutes “almost certainly were used in rituals,” perhaps “at temple fairs, burials and other ritualistic events,” and possibly even for “for personal entertainment.” 9,000 years ago, one surely took one’s entertainment where one could find it.

If this listening experience has given you a taste for the real oldies — not just the AM-radio but the history-of-mankind sense — you can also hear in our archive the 43,000-year-old “Neanderthal flute” (found only in fragments, but reconstructed) as well as such ancient songs as 100 BC’s “Seikilos Epitaph,” a composition by Euripides from a century before that, and a 3,400-year-old Sumerian hymn known as the oldest song in the world, all of which raises an important question: what will the people of the year 11000 think when they unearth our DJ rigs, those artifacts of so many of our own ritualistic events, and give them a spin?

You can get more information on this ancient flute here.

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Hear the World’s Oldest Surviving Written Song (200 BC), Originally Composed by Euripides, the Ancient Greek Playwright

Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago

Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cover Design Forever

in Art, Music | January 10th, 2017

I am older than Evan Puschak, The Nerdwriter, one of a handful who have mastered the online video essay. But I still find myself agreeing with his take on the music video as mostly unnecessary and distracting. At least at first. Then I get nostalgic and remember some of the videos of my youth, like, say The Cure’s “Pictures of You” or Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday”—both bittersweet tracks about nostalgia—and I feel differently. The video can have a powerful emotional pull on us. But its power to sell music has perhaps never matched that of the album cover, even after the death of the record store. Puschak makes the case that The Beatles forever changed the form, making it into the “almost limitless” art we know today.

Another critic besides Puschak—one who remembers buying a first pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—might be alleged to have fallen victim to a reverie. But there is nostalgia and there are qualitative historical arguments, and Puschak, a consummately careful, if exceedingly concise, essayist, makes the latter. In times past, he informs us, during the first few decades of the industry, record covers were more or less utilitarian brown paper bags, with some exceptions. Then came Columbia Records designer Alexander Steinweiss in 1938 to revolutionize album art, initiating a “huge boom in sales.” The market followed suit and record shops bloomed with color as album covers became little billboards for their contents.

“Since music has no spatial dimension,” and we can’t hold it in our hands, “the album cover emerged as the stand-in for the commodity to be purchased. This explains the so-called “personality cover” featuring prominent band photos that look like portraits of actors’ troupes. It’s a convention The Beatles dutifully observed on their first few sleeves in the early sixties. As their stature increased, however, the band “seemed to become darkly aware of their status as commodities.” (Thus the glum looks on the cover of their unsubtly titled 1964 Beatles for Sale.)

Their evolution from the teenpop “personality cover” to the broody and surreal is self-evident, from Rubber Soul’s groovy band shot and psychedelic lettering to Revolver’s take on Aubrey Beardsley, courtesy of Klaus Vormann, “The Beatles were leaders in expanding an album cover’s function from a marketing tool to a work of art in its own right.” Then we come to Sgt. Pepper’s, and the shift is cemented. The album cover’s designer, Peter Blake, explicitly thought of the cover as “a piece of art rather than an album cover. It was almost a piece of theater design.” And the band themselves had a direct hand in its creation. “We all chose our own colours and our own materials,” noted McCartney.

They also chose most of the people on the cover (out of many who turned them down or didn’t make the final cut). By “juxtaposing highbrow artists and thinkers with pop icons,” says Puschak, “The Beatles signal the breakdown and mixing of high and low culture that they themselves exemplified.” What’s brilliant about the cover is that it taps into the band and the record buyer’s nostalgia with an open acknowledgement of the music as commerce. “We liked the idea of reaching out to the record-buyer,” McCartney recalled, “because our memories of spending our own hard-earned cash and really loving anyone who gave us value for money.”

But, as Puschak points out, the Sgt. Pepper’s cover also serves as its own critique. “By staging the scene as a performance and an audience,” he says, “the band challenges us to deal with the function of both.” That this message coincides with their decision to stop touring suggests that the band was using the album cover as they were using their music to draw the audience closer and give them the private emotional and aesthetic experiences so many inviting album covers now routinely promise. Designer Blake and the band encouraged listeners to have an intellectual relationship with the record from the very start, with the cryptic who’s‑who puzzle photomontage of famous people and the lyrics printed directly on the back. In so doing, they announced that although recorded music was inescapably a commodity, it was also, inseparably, a modern art.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

George Michael Gives a Stunning Performance of “Somebody to Love” with Queen, As David Bowie Nods Along in the Wings

in Music | January 9th, 2017

It’s been a year tomorrow since David Bowie left the planet, just two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his phenomenal and difficult final album. His death began a year of shocking losses, ending with two in quick succession that grieved not only their lifelong fans, but also people who knew their work primarily from samples, remixes, and reboots: the immortally funny Carrie Fisher and, of course, on Christmas Day, the uncanny pop music force-of-nature, George Michael. As cosmic justice would have it, these were two of the most outspoken characters in popular culture—two people who refused to be shamed into silence or apologize for their lives.

George Michael weathered what is hard to believe was a genuine scandal at the time: his 1998 Beverly Hills arrest, subsequent vicious outing by the press, and the sordid poring over of his private life. He responded to every provocation with defiance and, writes Christo Foufas, “went on the offensive.”

In his controversial video for the single “Outside,” for example, his turn as a wickedly satirical disco cop so effectively piqued the police that his arresting officer sued him for slander, and lost. The publicity surrounding Michael at the height of his post-Wham! fame seemed to liberate him to become more and more himself in the public eye, but it never obscured what made him a star in the first place—his soaring, confident voice and impeccable musical instincts.

It is these qualities—Michael’s bravado and true skill as a vocalist and performer—that also made him an absolute perfect choice to cover an earlier gay icon gone before his time, Freddie Mercury. In his rendition of “Somebody to Love” with Queen at Mercury’s 1992 tribute concert Michael delivered a stunning performance; while he lacked Mercury’s range, he nearly matched the former Queen singer in power and charisma. And while we see can this feat on display in the official concert video, above, it’s just as evident in rehearsal footage, which you can see at the top of the post.

Immediately after Michael’s death, this rehearsal video began making the rounds on social media, and people highlighted not only his mastery of a very challenging vocal melody, but the appreciation of fellow Mercury tribute performer David Bowie, whom we see nodding along in the wings at around 3:00. It’s a very poignant moment, in hindsight, that underlines some of the significant similarities between the two stars. Not only were they both sexually adventurous chameleons and riveting performers, but—as we learned in story after story shared in their many posthumous tributes—both men used their status to help others, often anonymously.

The Mercury tribute concert, an AIDS benefit, took place five years before Michael’s arrest and public full disclosure of his sexuality. But even before he felt comfortable discussing his personal life, he involved himself in the lives of others who struggled with similar issues, including depression. From the earliest Wham! days of “Choose Life” t‑shirts and “cheeky critiques of heteronormative life” to Michael’s barnburning performance with Elton John at Live Aid in 1985 and beyond, he was “a father figure for political pop,” writes Barry Walters at NPR, and a role model for a generation of young gay men and women. And “it didn’t hurt that he could write and sing soul music with effortless power and grace,” even recording a duet “with Aretha Franklin without making a fool of himself,” and filling the shoes, for one night at least, of the legendary Freddie Mercury.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Stream David Bowie’s New EP No Plan and Hear His Final Four Recordings

in Music | January 8th, 2017

Today marks what would have been David Bowie’s 70th birthday. And you can commemorate that bittersweet occasion by streaming his brand new EP called No Plan. It features four tracks–the last four songs Bowie ever recorded.

Listeners might be familiar with the first track, “Lazarus.” But not so much with the remaining three–“No Plan,” “Killing a Little Time” and “When I Met You.” You can stream the EP for free on Spotify below. (If you need their software, download a copy here.) You can also purchase copies of No Plan on Amazon and iTunes. Watch the video for “No Plan” above.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Does the World’s Oldest Surviving Piano Sound Like? Watch Pianist Give a Performance on a 1720 Cristofori Piano

in History, Music | January 2nd, 2017

Imagine your favorite works for the piano—the delicate and haunting, the thundering and powerful. The minimalism of Erik Satie, the Romanticism of Claude Debussy or Modest Mussorgsky, the rapturous swooning of Beethoven’s concertos. Maybe it’s Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard; Thelonious Monk or Duke Ellington. Tom Waits, Tori Amos, Rufus Wainwright, Prince… you get the idea.

Now imagine all of it never existing. A giant hole opens up in world culture. Catastrophic! Or maybe, I suppose, we’d never know the difference. But I’m certain we’d be worse off for it, somehow. The piano seems inevitable when we look back into music history. Its immediate predecessors, the clavichord and harpsichord, so resemble the modern piano that they must have evolved in just such a way, we think. But it needn’t have been so.

The harpsichord, writes Georgia State University’s Hyperphysics, “has a shape similar to a grand piano,” but its operation prevents one critical musical property: dynamics—“the player has no control over the loudness and quality of the tone.” On the whole, every innovation of the harpsichord’s design aimed to solve this problem. Over the instrument’s 400-year history, none of them did so as elegantly as the piano, invented around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori. In the video above, you can hear a slightly later version of his instrument from 1720 played by pianist Dongsok Shin—an excerpt from one of the first pieces of music ever written for the instrument.

Cristofori called his design the gravecembalo col piano et forte, “keyboard instrument with soft and loud” sounds. This soon shortened to simply pianoforte. It’s interesting that the word for “soft” eventually became its sole name. For all its grandeur and thunderous capability, it’s the piano’s softness that so often captures our attention—the ability of this lumbering beast of an instrument to pull its punches and move with quiet grace. As you’ll probably note in Shin’s demonstration, the earliest pianos still retained a bit of the harpsichord’s twang, but we can also clearly discern the woody thumps, rumbles, and tinkling highs of modern pianos. (Compare it to this, for example.)

True to its name, the “quiet nature of the piano’s birth around 1700,” writes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “comes as something of a surprise.” It was invented “almost entirely by one man,” Cristofori, whose expertise had made him steward of Florentine Prince Ferdinando d’Medici’s entire collection of harpsichords and other musical instruments. The first mention comes from a 1700 Medici inventory describing a harpsichord-like instrument “newly invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori with hammers and dampers, two keyboards, and a range of four octaves, C‑c.” The first pianos had 54 keys rather than 88, and used “small wooden hammers covered with deerskin.”

Other makers tried different mechanisms, but “Cristofori was an artful inventor,” the Met remarks, “creating such a sophisticated action for his pianos that, at the instrument’s inception, he solved many of the technical problems that continued to puzzle other piano designers for the next seventy-five years of its evolution.” These designers made shortcuts, since Cristofori’s “action was highly complex and thus expensive.” But nothing matched his design, and those features were “gradually reinvented and reincorporated in later decades.”

Cristofori’s ingenious innovations included an “escapement” mechanism that enabled the hammer to fall away from the string instantly after striking it, so as not to dampen the string, and allowing the string to be struck harder than on a clavichord; a “check” that kept the fast-moving hammer from bouncing back to re-hit the string; a dampening mechanism on a jack to silence the string when not in use; isolating the soundboard from the tension-bearing parts of the case, so that it could vibrate more freely; and employing thicker strings at higher tensions than on a harpsichord.

The piano Shin plays above is the oldest surviving instrument of Cristofori’s design, and it resides at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Only “two other Cristofori pianos survive today,” notes CMuse, “in Rome and another at Leipzi University.” This instrument might have represented an elegant dead end in musical evolution. Though Baroque composers at the time, including Johann Sebastian Bach, “were aware of it,” most, like Bach, harbored doubts. “It was only with the compositions of Haydn and Mozart” decades later “that the piano found a firm place in music.” A place so firm, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the last 250 years of music without it.

via CMuse

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Kill the Wabbit!: How the 1957 Bugs Bunny Cartoon, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Inspired Today’s Opera Singers to First Get Into Opera

in Animation, Music, Opera, Television | January 2nd, 2017

It comes as no surprise that many American children’s first, and often only exposure to opera comes compliments of Bugs Bunny. One of the rascally rabbit’s most enduring turns is as Brünnhilde opposite Elmer Fudd’s Siegfried in “What’s Opera, Doc?,” a 1957 cartoon spoofing Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Other well known names, including Marilyn Horne and Placido Domingo have assayed these parts over the years, but thanks to the miracle of syndication, Bugs and Elmer are the ones who truly own them, as a celebrated part of their repertoire for six decades and counting.

The law of averages dictates that a percentage—a very small percentage—of their billions of child viewers would grow up to become opera professionals.

The Wall Street Journal recently confirmed that for several prominent Wagnerians, including the executive director of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, “What’s O pera, Doc?” and an earlier work, 1949’s “Rabbit of Seville,” had a profound impact.

And no disrespect to director Francis Ford Coppola, who deployed Ride of the Valkyries so memorably in Apocalypse Now, but no one will ever use it to greater effect than the cartoon’s writer, Michael Maltese, author of the immortal lyrics:

Kiww the wabbit! Kiww the wabbit!

It’s a phrase even the least opera-inclined child can remember and sing, well into adulthood.

Read the complete Wall Street Journal article here.

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by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Stream Brian Eno’s “Magnificently Peaceful” New Album Reflection: A Thoughtful Way to Start 2017

in Music | January 2nd, 2017

Creative Commons image via Wikimedia Commons

“The consensus among most of my friends seems to be that 2016 was a terrible year, and the beginning of a long decline into something we don’t even want to imagine.” Perhaps you find yourself, here at the dawn of 2017, thinking the very same thing. But Brian Eno, who wrote those words in a new year’s Facebook message to his fans, wonders if 2016 marked “the end — not the beginning — of a long decline.” Amid all the sound and fury, he’s also noticed “a quieter but equally powerful stirring: people are rethinking what democracy means, what society means and what we need to do to make them work again.”

If share and reaction counts are any indication, Eno’s assessment of the current human situation has resonated with people, many of whom must simply feel relieved to hear that at least one of their favorite musical luminaries has made it into 2017 unscathed.

Not only has he survived, he’s put out a brand new album called Reflection which, in an essay on his web site, he calls “the latest work in a long series” that includes 1975’s Discreet Music, 1985’s Thursday Afternoon, 1993’s Neroli, 2012’s Lux, and “the first original piece of music I ever made, at Ipswich Art School in 1965 — recordings of a metal lampshade slowed down to half and quarter speed, all overlaid.”

Eno refers, broadly speaking, to the sort of music now known as “ambient,” though “I don’t think I understand what that term stands for anymore.” He more accurately describes this thread of his work as “generative music,” which means music where the pieces “make themselves. My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them. I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I’m happy with.” The album version of Reflection, which you can stream on Spotify (after downloading Spotify’s free software here) or purchase on Amazon or iTunes, represents just one “recording of one of those unfoldings.”

Reflection’s single track, writes the Guardian’s Kitty Empire, “unfurls very gradually over 54 minutes (and one second), its thrums and oscillations reverberating at a pace you might call glacial if the glaciers weren’t all melting in such a hurry. At seven minutes in, the tones gather momentum. At 21 minutes, there’s something like the twitter of an electronic bird. It gets going again at the 47-minute mark, when the bell-like nuances once again turn up a notch. The overall effect is deeply, magnificently peaceful, meditative, even; ambient certainly monopolises certain sections of the thesaurus. Naysayers may liken ambient music to watching paint dry, but this is paint drying on a Mark Rothko canvas.”

Just as a Rothko canvas provides a visual environment conducive to thought, so an ambient Eno album provides a sonic one. “Reflection is so called because I find it makes me think back. It makes me think things over,” Eno writes on his notes on the album. “It seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation. And external ones actually — people seem to enjoy it as the background to their conversations.” This goes just as much, presumably, for the the app version, which provides the generative system for a different Reflection listening experience each time. We need the kind of space it creates more than ever, now that, as Eno put it in his optimistic New Year’s dispatch, “people are thinking hard, and, most importantly, thinking out loud, together.”

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer’s Haunting, Animated Take on Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy”

in Animation, Current Affairs, Music, Politics | December 30th, 2016

The late Leonard Cohen’s 1992 anthem “Democracy” feels not just fresh, but painfully relevant these days.

Cohen, a Canadian who spent much of his adult life in the States, avowed that the song was neither sarcastic nor ironic, but rather hopeful, an “affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country.”

He started writing it in the late ’80s, churning out dozens of verses as he pondered the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests.

The press kit for the album on which the song originally appeared stated:

These are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood. What is the appropriate behavior in a catastrophe, in a flood? You know, while you’re cleaning out your orange crate in the torrent and you pass somebody else hanging on to a spar of wood. What do you declare yourself? “left wing” “right wing” “pro-abortion” “against abortion”? All these things are luxuries which you can no longer afford. What is the proper behavior in a flood?

For musician Amanda Palmer and her husband, author Neil Gaiman, the answer to Cohen’s question is the stripped down, spoken word version of “Democracy,” above—a fundraiser for the free speech defense organization, PEN America.

The video’s stirring watercolors are courtesy of artist David Mack, an official Ambassador of Arts & Story for the US State Department who has illustrated several of Gaiman’s poems. Singer-songwriter Olga Nunes, another in Gaiman and Palmer’s vast stable of talented co-conspirators, animated.

Gaiman fans will no doubt thrill to hear that unmistakable accent gamely tackling such lyrics as “the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen,” but for my money, the most memorable phrase is the description of this country as “the cradle of the best and of the worst.”

Truly.

You can purchase the track here—the project was funded by 9,408 contributors to Palmer’s Patreon and all proceeds benefit PEN America.

Hear Amanda Palmer’s Cover of “Purple Rain,” a Gorgeous Stringfelt Send-Off to Prince

Neil Gaiman Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: One Master of Dramatic Storytelling Reads Another

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Oldest Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

How The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Changed Album Cover Design Forever

George Michael Gives a Stunning Performance of “Somebody to Love” with Queen, As David Bowie Nods Along in the Wings

Stream David Bowie’s New EP No Plan and Hear His Final Four Recordings

What Does the World’s Oldest Surviving Piano Sound Like? Watch Pianist Give a Performance on a 1720 Cristofori Piano

Kill the Wabbit!: How the 1957 Bugs Bunny Cartoon, “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Inspired Today’s Opera Singers to First Get Into Opera

Stream Brian Eno’s “Magnificently Peaceful” New Album Reflection: A Thoughtful Way to Start 2017

Watch Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer’s Haunting, Animated Take on Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy”

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