Bob Dylan Reads “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” On His Holiday Radio Show (2006)

in Music | December 24th, 2024

Allow me to name just a few of the peo­ple I want to hear host­ing and curat­ing radio shows—former Sex Pis­tols’ singer John Lydon, for­mer Clash front­man Joe Strum­mer, for­mer Woody Guthrie imper­son­ator Bob Dylan.…

Luck­i­ly for me, this ain’t just fan­ta­sy base­ball; at var­i­ous times, and with vary­ing lev­els of com­mit­ment, each of these tastemak­ers has host­ed a pro­gram show­cas­ing their own favorite artists. In Dylan’s case, the com­mit­ment was pret­ty sub­stan­tial. His show, Theme Time Radio Hour, ran for almost three years—once a week from 2006 to 2009—on satel­lite radio.

Each episode cen­tered on a gen­er­al theme, hence the title, but the selec­tions were all over the place—more or less what you’d expect from Dylan: an eclec­tic col­lec­tion of folk, blues, gospel, soul, coun­try, mod­ern pop, and rock ‘n’ roll mixed with old-time radio jin­gles, nov­el­ties, and pro­mos, and the host’s odd­ball com­men­tary and hokey humor. Record­ed while Dylan was on the road, then edit­ed togeth­er with pho­ny “lis­ten­er calls” and emails, Theme Time Radio Hour aimed, Dylan said, “to expand the musi­cal taste” of his lis­ten­ers. That it did, even in its most tra­di­tion­al episode, name­ly the hol­i­day spe­cial on Christ­mas and New Year’s, or as Dylan calls it, “a Yule­tide extrav­a­gan­za.”

In his 2006 Christ­mas broad­cast, above, Dylan bounces from Bob Seger to the Sta­ples Singers to Lord Nel­son, “uncrowned king of Soca,” and Mabel Mafuya, who plays “a Mara­bi style, sort of like South African rag­time.” The wide vari­ety of well- and less­er-known artists—all play­ing Christ­mas music—combined with Dylan’s wry inter­jec­tions, makes for delight­ful­ly weird lis­ten­ing. But when it comes time for his own con­tri­bu­tion, he goes for the obvi­ous and recites Clement Clarke Moore’s “‘Twas the Night Before Christ­mas.” You may not have thought much of this the first time you heard it, much less the mil­lionth. But in Dylan’s read­ing, the stock­ings sound like they were hung with care in some dim, smoky beat­nik cof­fee­house and the sug­ar plums dance to the fin­ger-snap­ping bop rhythms of jazz poet­ry while a harp­si­chord plays “O Tan­nen­baum” in the back­ground.

It’s a very cool ren­di­tion, in oth­er words, of a very corny piece of writ­ing. Through­out the spe­cial, Dylan dis­plays a real knack for suss­ing new sounds and angles from old, tired hol­i­day clich­es. His exten­sive knowl­edge of hol­i­day tunes may place him in the com­pa­ny of John Waters and the many oth­er “men who love Christ­mas music” pro­filed in the doc­u­men­tary Jin­gle Bell Rocks! Whether he is a col­lec­tor or just an avid lis­ten­er, I do not know, but by the time you’ve fin­ished lis­ten­ing to his 2006 Theme Time Radio Hour Christ­mas spe­cial, you will find your appre­ci­a­tion for the hol­i­day genre thor­ough­ly expand­ed.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Dylan’s Thanks­giv­ing Radio Show: A Playlist of 18 Delec­table Songs

The Top 10 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions Read by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

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

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How A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Its Beloved Soundtrack Album, Almost Never Happened

in Music, Television | December 24th, 2024

A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas uses a cast of ama­teur child voice actors, deals with the theme of sea­son­al depres­sion, and cul­mi­nates in the recita­tion of a Bible verse, all to a jazz score. It was not, safe to say, the spe­cial that CBS had expect­ed, to say noth­ing of its spon­sor, the Coca-Cola Com­pa­ny. In all like­li­hood, it would have been can­celed, but see­ing as it had already been announced and pro­mot­ed (and in any case, was com­plet­ed only a few days before it was sched­uled to air), the show went on. In the event, not only did it please the view­ers of Amer­i­ca, it went on to become one of the most beloved pieces of Christ­mas ani­ma­tion — and that jazz score went on to become one of the most beloved Christ­mas albums.

In the new Dig­ging the Greats video above, bassist Bran­don Shaw breaks down some of the dis­tin­guish­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of Vince Guaral­di’s score, with help from drum­mer Ryan Shaw (not just Bran­don’s broth­er, but also a musi­cian with his own direct con­nec­tion to Peanuts pro­duc­tions) and pianist Jon­té Moore.

“There’s beau­ty, because of the major 9 sound­ing, but there’s, like, this ten­sion,” Moore explains while play­ing the imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able chords of “Christ­mas­time Is Here.” “Some­thing’s maybe miss­ing: it could be peo­ple who have lost a loved one, or are maybe just tired of the hol­i­day sea­son, so they have this weight that they car­ry.” We’re a long way indeed from the insipid cheer of many a hol­i­day pro­duc­tion.

“Christ­mas­time Is Here” may be the sin­gle most influ­en­tial piece of A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas’ musi­cal lega­cy. But it’s best heard in the con­text of the whole sound­track, where it sounds of a piece with the “jazz arrange­ments of Christ­mas clas­sics,” as Shaw puts it, as well as with “Linus and Lucy,” the Peanuts theme song Guaral­di had pre­vi­ous­ly com­posed. This coher­ent aes­thet­ic and sen­si­bil­i­ty — the com­poser’s, of course, but also that of the world Charles Schulz cre­at­ed — goes a long way toward mak­ing the project not just a col­lec­tion of Christ­mas songs, but an endur­ing Christ­mas album: one that, over the next cou­ple of days, even those of us with­out enthu­si­asm for Christ­mas music in gen­er­al will be spin­ning as many times as we can get away with.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Vince Guaral­di, the Jazz Com­pos­er Who Cre­at­ed the Best Christ­mas Album Ever, A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas

Enjoy Clas­sic Songs from A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas, Per­formed by Vince Guaral­di Trio Drum­mer Jer­ry Granel­li

How Inno­v­a­tive Jazz Pianist Vince Guaral­di Became the Com­pos­er of Beloved Char­lie Brown Music

Charles Schulz Draws Char­lie Brown in 45 Sec­onds and Exor­cis­es His Demons

The Endur­ing Appeal of Schulz’s Peanuts — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #116

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music

in Jazz, Math, Music | December 18th, 2024

Physi­cist and sax­o­phon­ist Stephon Alexan­der has argued in his many pub­lic lec­tures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Ein­stein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in com­mon. Alexan­der in par­tic­u­lar draws our atten­tion to the so-called “Coltrane cir­cle,” which resem­bles what any musi­cian will rec­og­nize as the “Cir­cle of Fifths,” but incor­po­rates Coltrane’s own inno­va­tions. Coltrane gave the draw­ing to sax­o­phon­ist and pro­fes­sor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who includ­ed it in his sem­i­nal text, Repos­i­to­ry of Scales and Melod­ic Pat­terns. Where Lateef, as he writes in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, sees Coltrane’s music as a “spir­i­tu­al jour­ney” that “embraced the con­cerns of a rich tra­di­tion of auto­phys­iopsy­chic music,” Alexan­der sees “the same geo­met­ric prin­ci­ple that moti­vat­ed Einstein’s” quan­tum the­o­ry.

Nei­ther descrip­tion seems out of place. Musi­cian and blog­ger Roel Hol­lan­der notes, “Thelo­nious Monk once said ‘All musi­cians are sub­con­scious­ly math­e­mati­cians.’ Musi­cians like John Coltrane though have been very much aware of the math­e­mat­ics of music and con­scious­ly applied it to his works.”

Coltrane was also very much aware of Einstein’s work and liked to talk about it fre­quent­ly. Musi­cian David Amram remem­bers the Giant Steps genius telling him he “was try­ing to do some­thing like that in music.”

Hol­lan­der care­ful­ly dis­sects Coltrane’s math­e­mat­ics in two the­o­ry-heavy essays, one gen­er­al­ly on Coltrane’s “Music & Geom­e­try” and one specif­i­cal­ly on his “Tone Cir­cle.” Coltrane him­self had lit­tle to say pub­licly about the inten­sive the­o­ret­i­cal work behind his most famous com­po­si­tions, prob­a­bly because he’d rather they speak for them­selves. He pre­ferred to express him­self philo­soph­i­cal­ly and mys­ti­cal­ly, draw­ing equal­ly on his fas­ci­na­tion with sci­ence and with spir­i­tu­al tra­di­tions of all kinds. Coltrane’s poet­ic way of speak­ing has left his musi­cal inter­preters with a wide vari­ety of ways to look at his Cir­cle, as jazz musi­cian Corey Mwam­ba dis­cov­ered when he infor­mal­ly polled sev­er­al oth­er play­ers on Face­book. Clar­inetist Arun Ghosh, for exam­ple, saw in Coltrane’s “math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples” a “musi­cal sys­tem that con­nect­ed with The Divine.” It’s a sys­tem, he opined, that “feels quite Islam­ic to me.”

Lateef agreed, and there may be few who under­stood Coltrane’s method bet­ter than he did. He stud­ied close­ly with Coltrane for years, and has been remem­bered since his death in 2013 as a peer and even a men­tor, espe­cial­ly in his ecu­meni­cal embrace of the­o­ry and music from around the world. Lateef even argued that Coltrane’s late-in-life mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme might have been titled “Allah Supreme” were it not for fear of “polit­i­cal back­lash.” Some may find the claim ten­den­tious, but what we see in the wide range of respons­es to Coltrane’s musi­cal the­o­ry, so well encap­su­lat­ed in the draw­ing above, is that his recog­ni­tion, as Lateef writes, of the “struc­tures of music” was as much for him about sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery as it was a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. Both for him were intu­itive process­es that “came into exis­tence,” writes Lateef, “in the mind of the musi­cian through abstrac­tion from expe­ri­ence.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Saint John Coltrane: The San Fran­cis­co Church Built On A Love Supreme

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

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

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Watch the Sex Pistols’ Christmas Party for Kids–Which Happened to Be Their Final Gig in the UK (1977)

in Music | December 17th, 2024

I’m not sure the Sex Pis­tols had “avail­able for children’s par­ties” on their press release, but on a cold and grim Christ­mas in 1977, that’s exact­ly what hap­pened. While many Britons were set­tling in for a warm yule­tide, the Pis­tols decid­ed to host a party/benefit for the chil­dren of strik­ing fire­men and min­ers at a venue called Ivanhoe’s in Hud­der­s­field, UK.

It turned out that this after­noon gig, along with an evening con­cert with full-grown punks in the audi­ence, would be the Pis­tols’ final UK appear­ance. In a few weeks the band would fly to Amer­i­ca for a set of ill-fat­ed gigs and then break up. Soon after that Sid Vicious would be dead.

At the children’s con­cert John Lydon hand­ed out t‑shirts, but­tons, records, and posters. There was a pogo danc­ing com­pe­ti­tion with a skate­board as a prize, dis­co music on the sound sys­tem, and a gigan­tic cake with “Sex Pis­tols” writ­ten on it. (A food fight not only broke out, but was encour­aged.)

Under­stand that by Decem­ber 1977, the Pis­tols were pret­ty much banned from play­ing any­where in Britain, so the announce­ment of this ben­e­fit show was a big deal, and what we would now call “com­mu­ni­ty out­reach” was the oppo­site of the mon­strous image that the British gut­ter press had whipped up against the band.

But Lydon knew they weren’t mon­sters or any threat at all, except towards the estab­lish­ment. And his mem­o­ry of the day is noth­ing but sweet.

Fan­tas­tic. The ulti­mate reward. One of my all-time favourite gigs. Young kids, and we’re doing Bod­ies and they’re burst­ing out with laugh­ter on the ‘f*ck this f*ck that’ verse. The cor­rect response: not the shock hor­ror ‘How dare you?’ Adults bring their own filthy minds into a thing. They don’t quite per­ceive it as a child does. Oh, Johnny’s used a naughty word. ‘Bod­ies’ was from two dif­fer­ent points of view. You’ll find that theme runs through a lot of things I write like ‘Rise’ – “I could be wrong, I could be right”. I’m con­sid­er­ing both sides of the argu­ment, always.

Film direc­tor Julian Tem­ple caught the entire gig on a “big old crap­py U‑matic low-band cam­era” and while clips from the footage have been used in var­i­ous docs before­hand, it was only in 2013 that the entire footage was shown on British tele­vi­sion, along with rem­i­nis­cences from the adults who were chil­dren at the time of the gig.

In the Guardian inter­view with Tem­ple, he looked back at the footage and com­ment­ed on the strange­ness of a UK Christ­mas in 1977:

“In a way, the Pis­tols seem the only thing that’s con­nect­ed with today. Every­thing else seems halfway into the Vic­to­ri­an peri­od, where­as the Pis­tols seem very mod­ern and aware of what’s going to hap­pen. Hope­ful­ly, there’s res­o­nance in the fuel bills and fire­men’s strikes of today. Even though it’s a dif­fer­ent plan­et, peo­ple face the same prob­lems.
“The sound with just one cam­era is raw and sear­ing. I hope kids watch­ing it today will go: ‘Fuck me, bands like that just don’t exist.’ ”

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Con­certs in Dal­las, Mem­phis, Tul­sa & More

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

The Sex Pis­tols’ 1976 Man­ches­ter “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began

When the Sex Pis­tols Played at the Chelms­ford Top Secu­ri­ty Prison: Hear Vin­tage Tracks from the 1976 Gig

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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How Keith Jarrett Played on a Broken Piano & Turned a Potentially Disastrous Concert Into the Best-Selling Piano Album of All Time (1975)

in Music | December 16th, 2024

Near­ly fifty years ago, the cel­e­brat­ed young pianist Kei­th Jar­rett arrived in the West Ger­man city of Köln (bet­ter known in Eng­lish as Cologne). Hav­ing just come off a 500-mile-long road trip from Switzer­land, where he’d played a con­cert the pre­vi­ous day, he was left with bare­ly any time to recov­er before going onstage at the Köln Opera House that night — at 11:30 that night, to be pre­cise, the only time that august cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion would give a jazz musi­cian. Because the restau­rant where he attempt­ed to have din­ner before­hand mixed up his order, he could bare­ly eat a thing before show­time. And his back was act­ing up.

Yet all of those dif­fi­cul­ties were as noth­ing against the mis­er­able instru­ment await­ing Jar­rett at the opera house. He’d request­ed a Bösendor­fer 290 Impe­r­i­al grand piano, but a series of errors led to the staff set­ting up a dilap­i­dat­ed, frail-sound­ing baby grand of the same make.

Unable to pro­cure a replace­ment, the con­cert’s teenage orga­niz­er Vera Bran­des called in a tuner to do his best to bring the piano up to playa­bil­i­ty and man­aged to per­suade Jar­rett to go on with the show. All the seats were sold, after all, and the record­ing engi­neers had their gear ready to roll; in the worst case sce­nario, he’d end up with anoth­er tape for the archives.

In the event, the con­cert was more of a best-case sce­nario. “What Kei­th Jar­rett did so bril­liant­ly was to take this bro­ken piano and use it to play music that only that piano could have played,” says Youtu­ber David Hart­ley in the video above. “He did­n’t hide away from the faults of the piano; instead, he embraced them and put them in the music. This is the very essence of impro­vi­sa­tion.” A clas­si­cal musi­cian with a defined set of pieces could nev­er have worked at all under these con­di­tions, but Jar­rett end­ed up putting on quite a suc­cess­ful show — and, with the record­ing, putting out a huge­ly suc­cess­ful album.

After it came out in Novem­ber that same year, The Köln Con­cert went on to become both the best-sell­ing solo jazz album and the best-sell­ing piano album. For decades, it was eas­i­ly found even in the record col­lec­tions of those who owned no oth­er releas­es from ECM, the Ger­man jazz and avant-garde label with which Jar­rett has long been asso­ci­at­ed, and heard on the sound­tracks of films by auteurs like Nico­las Roeg and Nan­ni Moret­ti. Still today, it stands in sup­port of any num­ber of proverbs about neces­si­ty being the moth­er of inven­tion, play­ing the hand you’re dealt, and not wait­ing for ide­al con­di­tions. If we lis­ten to it enough, we may even find our­selves wait­ing for ter­ri­ble ones.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Brains of Jazz and Clas­si­cal Musi­cians Work Dif­fer­ent­ly, New Research Shows

The Piano Played with 16 Increas­ing Lev­els of Com­plex­i­ty: From Easy to Very Com­plex

Neu­ro­science & Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: How Impro­vi­sa­tion Shapes Cre­ativ­i­ty and What Hap­pens Inside Our Brain

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Piano Jazz Album by Come­di­an H. Jon Ben­jamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear the Evolution of Electronic Music: A Sonic Journey from 1929 to 2019

in History, Music | December 10th, 2024

It’s easy to get the impres­sion that enthu­si­asts of elec­tron­ic music lis­ten to noth­ing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to rel­e­gate them­selves to small­er sub­gen­res: con­sult Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music for a map of the son­ic ter­ri­to­ry.) And it’s equal­ly easy to believe that, if you aren’t explic­it­ly into elec­tron­ic music, then you don’t lis­ten to it. But in fact, its his­to­ry is one of long-term inte­gra­tion so thor­ough that many of us fre­quent­ly lis­ten to elec­tron­ic music — or at any rate, elec­tron­ic-adja­cent music — with­out being con­scious of that fact.

Watch the video above, a 24-minute jour­ney through the evo­lu­tion of elec­tron­ic music from 1929 to 2019, and take note of how many songs you know after hear­ing them for only a few sec­onds. Ear­ly exper­i­ments by the likes of Olivi­er Mes­si­aen, Hal­im El-Dabh, and Rune Lind­blad may ring no bells (and to the unini­ti­at­ed, may not sound like music at all). Doc­tor Who fans will perk up when the time­line reach­es 1963, with the appear­ance of that show’s theme song — a record­ing by Delia Der­byshire, inci­den­tal­ly, whose pio­neer­ing work we’ve often fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. The first piece of full-fledged pop music is Ger­shon Kings­ley’s “Pop­corn,” from 1969, one of those songs whose melody we all know even if we’d nev­er be able to come up with the title.

In the mid-sev­en­ties, the names now wide­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the devel­op­ment of mod­ern elec­tron­ic music start to emerge: Kraftwerk’s “Auto­bahn” in 1974, Tan­ger­ine Dream’s “Ruby­con” in 1975, Jean-Michel Jar­re’s “Oxy­gene” in 1976. But more impor­tant to the his­to­ry of pop­u­lar cul­ture is the song that rep­re­sents the fol­low­ing year: Don­na Sum­mer’s hit “I Feel Love,” which was co-pro­duced by a cer­tain Gior­gio Moroder. Per­haps the defin­ing fig­ure of elec­tron­ic music’s pas­sage through the dis­cos into the main­stream, Moroder made an even big­ger impact in 1978 with his own instru­men­tal com­po­si­tion “Chase,” which won him an Acad­e­my Award by being includ­ed in the film Mid­night Express.

The movies did a great deal to sell the world on the fusion of elec­tron­ic tech­nol­o­gy and pop music in the eight­ies. Who in the devel­oped world — or indeed, in most of the devel­op­ing world — could fail to rec­og­nize, for instance, Harold Fal­ter­mey­er’s “Axel F”? (And sure­ly nobody who came of age at the time of A Night at the Rox­bury can claim igno­rance of Had­daway’s “What Is Love.”) As this video assem­bles its his­to­ry, elec­tron­ic music finds its way back to the dance floor in the nineties, and it more or less stays there through the twen­ty-tens; per­haps you would’ve had to spend a lot of time in the clubs in that decade to know such seem­ing­ly era-defin­ing names as Marsh­mel­lo, Armin van Buuren, Shapov, Major Laz­er, and DJ Snake. But from an elec­tron­ic-influ­enced hit like Ed Sheer­an’s “Shape of You,” alas, there was no escape.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music: An Inter­ac­tive, Ency­clo­pe­dic Data Visu­al­iza­tion of 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music

How Gior­gio Moroder & Don­na Summer’s “I Feel Love” Cre­at­ed the “Blue­print for All Elec­tron­ic Dance Music Today” (1977)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

What is Elec­tron­ic Music?: Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

A Huge Anthol­o­gy of Noise & Elec­tron­ic Music (1920–2007) Fea­tur­ing John Cage, Sun Ra, Cap­tain Beef­heart & More

Dis­cov­er­ing Elec­tron­ic Music: 1983 Doc­u­men­tary Offers a Fun & Edu­ca­tion­al Intro­duc­tion to Elec­tron­ic Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s “100% Accurate”

in History, Music | December 6th, 2024

Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks com­posed songs meant to be accom­pa­nied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and var­i­ous per­cus­sion instru­ments. More than 2,000 years lat­er, mod­ern schol­ars have final­ly fig­ured out how to recon­struct and per­form these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accu­ra­cy.

Writ­ing on the BBC web­site, Armand D’An­gour, a musi­cian and tutor in clas­sics at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, notes:

[Ancient Greek] instru­ments are known from descrip­tions, paint­ings and archae­o­log­i­cal remains, which allow us to estab­lish the tim­bres and range of pitch­es they pro­duced.

And now, new rev­e­la­tions about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient doc­u­ments inscribed with a vocal nota­tion devised around 450 BC, con­sist­ing of alpha­bet­ic let­ters and signs placed above the vow­els of the Greek words.

The Greeks had worked out the math­e­mat­i­cal ratios of musi­cal inter­vals — an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.

The nota­tion gives an accu­rate indi­ca­tion of rel­a­tive pitch.

So what did Greek music sound like? Below you can lis­ten to David Creese, a clas­si­cist from the Uni­ver­si­ty of New­cas­tle, play­ing “an ancient Greek song tak­en from stone inscrip­tions con­struct­ed on an eight-string ‘canon’ (a zither-like instru­ment) with mov­able bridges. “The tune is cred­it­ed to Seik­i­los,” says Archae­ol­o­gy Mag­a­zine.

For more infor­ma­tion on all of this, read D’An­gour’s arti­cle over at the BBC.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Octo­ber, 2013.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

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

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an, the Lan­guage of Mesopotamia

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The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973–2023)

in History, Music | November 29th, 2024

Hip-hop was once a sub­cul­ture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unques­tion­ably dom­i­nant forms of pop­u­lar music — not just in Amer­i­ca, and not just among young peo­ple. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop hold­outs, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through cul­tur­al osmo­sis alone. They’re aware, for exam­ple — whether or not they approve of it — that rap­pers usu­al­ly per­form over music con­struct­ed through sam­pling: that is, stitched togeth­er out of pieces of oth­er songs. If you’re not sure how it works, you can see the process clear­ly visu­al­ized in the video above from sam­ple provider Track­lib.

Offer­ing a break­down of sam­pling as it’s hap­pened through “fifty years of hip-hop,” the video begins even before the genre real­ly took shape, in 1973. It was then that DJ Kool Herc devel­oped what he called “the ‘Mer­ry-Go-Round’ Tech­nique,” an ear­ly exam­ple of which involved using dual turnta­bles to switch back and forth between the instru­men­tal breaks of James Brown’s “Give It Up or Tur­nit a Loose” and the Incred­i­ble Bon­go Band’s “Bon­go Rock.” The orig­i­nal idea was to give dancers more time to do their thing, but when the MCs picked up their micro­phones and start­ed get­ting cre­ative, a new music took shape almost imme­di­ate­ly.

Main­stream Amer­i­ca got its first taste of hip-hop in 1979, with the release of “Rap­per’s Delight” by the Sug­arhill Gang. In its repeat­ing rhythm part, many would have rec­og­nized Chic’s “Good Times,” which actu­al­ly was­n’t a sam­ple but an inter­po­la­tion, i.e. a re-record­ing. This drew a law­suit — hard­ly the last of its kind in hip-hop — but it also set thou­sands of DJs-to-be dig­ging through their record col­lec­tions in search of usable breaks. Dis­co proved a fount of inspi­ra­tion for ear­ly hip-hop, but so did jazz and even elec­tron­ic music, as demon­strat­ed by Afri­ka Bam­baataa and the Soul Son­ic Force’s “Plan­et Rock,” which sam­pled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”

As sam­pling goes, noth­ing is artis­ti­cal­ly off-lim­its; in some sense, the less imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able, the bet­ter. With the evo­lu­tion of audio edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, hip-hop artists have long gone even fur­ther in mak­ing these bor­rowed clips their own by slow­ing them down; speed­ing them up; chop­ping them into pieces and rear­rang­ing them; and lay­er­ing them one atop anoth­er. This some­times caus­es prob­lems, as when the dif­fi­cul­ty of licens­ing De La Soul’s many and var­ied source mate­ri­als kept their cat­a­log out of offi­cial avail­abil­i­ty. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, also fea­tured in this video, De La Soul are, of course, known as hip-hop groups beloved by music nerds. But if you seri­ous­ly break down any major work of hip-hop, you’ll find that all its artists are music nerds at heart.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of Sam­pling: From the Bea­t­les to the Beast­ie Boys

How Sam­pling Trans­formed Music and Cre­at­ed New Tapes­tries of Sound: An Inter­ac­tive Demon­stra­tion by Producer/DJ Mark Ron­son

The “Amen Break”: The Most Famous 6‑Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sam­pling Rev­o­lu­tion

The Sur­pris­ing­ly Long His­to­ry of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Pro­cess­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Music Crit­ics Love to Hate

Hear Every Sam­ple on the Beast­ie Boys’ Acclaimed Album, Paul’s Bou­tique – and Dis­cov­er Where They Came From

Hear De La Soul’s High­ly Acclaimed & Influ­en­tial Hip-Hop Albums Stream­ing Free for the First Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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