Self-pro­claimed tra­di­tion­al­ists love to talk about how allow­ing women in the work­force pre­cip­i­tat­ed social decline. This is a delu­sion. “Women have always worked,” as Amer­i­can labor his­to­ri­an Alice Kessler-Har­ris argued in her book of the same name. “In prein­dus­tri­al soci­eties,” she writes, “near­ly every­body worked” in coop­er­a­tive endeav­ors, “and almost nobody worked for wages.” And in indus­tri­al soci­eties, women have always worked, and they were often the pri­ma­ry earn­ers in their fam­i­lies. But since their sto­ries do not fit a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive, they’ve been ignored. 

Mov­ing goal­posts and nar­row def­i­n­i­tions of what counts as “work” have mar­gin­al­ized women’s con­tri­bu­tions in hun­dreds of fields, includ­ing music. But women have always writ­ten music, whether or not they’ve been com­pen­sat­ed or rec­og­nized as pro­fes­sion­al com­posers.

In some cas­es, their careers were cut short before they could begin. Such was the fate of Mozart’s sis­ter, Maria Anna, who was also a child prodi­gy, trav­el­ing Europe with her broth­er and daz­zling the aris­toc­ra­cy in the 1700s. Her accom­plish­ments “were quick­ly for­got­ten,” writes Ashifa Kas­sam at The Guardian, “after she was forced to halt her career when she came of age.”

Maria Anna Mozart is one of hun­dreds of women com­posers you’ll find in the inter­ac­tive map cre­at­ed by Saki­ra Ven­tu­ra, a music teacher from Valen­cia, Spain, who has col­lect­ed 530 com­posers, placed them geo­graph­i­cal­ly on the map, and includ­ed links to Wikipedia pages, web­sites, and Spo­ti­fy. The map is in Span­ish, as are all of the short biogra­phies in each composer’s win­dow, but Ven­tu­ra links to their Eng­lish-lan­guage Wikipedia pages, mak­ing this an excel­lent resource for Eng­lish speak­ers as well, and a much-need­ed one, Ven­tu­ra found out when she began her research.

When Mozart’s sis­ter was writ­ing music, “It was tak­en for grant­ed that a work com­posed by a woman would­n’t be of the same qual­i­ty as that com­posed by a man,” Ven­tu­ra says. Not much has changed. When crit­ics have asked why she does­n’t include men on her map, “I have to explain to them that if they want to find out about male com­posers, they can open any book on music his­to­ry, go to any con­cert or tune into any radio sta­tion. But if I’m putting togeth­er a map of female com­posers, it is because these women don’t appear any­where else.” Vis­it the inter­ac­tive map, Creado­ras de la His­to­ria Músi­ca, here.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Maria Anna Mozart Was a Musi­cal Prodi­gy Like Her Broth­er Wolf­gang, So Why Did She Get Erased from His­to­ry?

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

Cel­e­brat­ing Women Com­posers: A New BBC Dig­i­tal Archive Takes You from Hilde­gard of Bin­gen (1098) to Nadia Boulanger (1979)

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

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

“There’s no love song fin­er, but how strange the change from major to minor, every­time we say good­bye.”

In the line above from Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Good­bye,” we’re moved from the hap­pi­ness of love to the sad­ness of part­ing, and so too do the chords change, from major to minor, thus sub­tly chang­ing the mood of the song. The tech­nique is a clever exam­ple of a song­writ­ing method called “word paint­ing,” or prosody, when lyrics are accom­pa­nied by a rhyth­mic, melod­ic, or har­mon­ic shift that com­ple­ments their mean­ing. We hear it in pop music all the time, draw­ing our atten­tion to sig­nif­i­cant moments, and shap­ing the emo­tion­al impact of words and phras­es.

The word “Stop,” for exam­ple, appears over and over in pop music, as the video above from David Ben­nett shows, accom­pa­nied by a full stop from the band. Span­ish-lan­guage hit “Despaci­to” (which means “slow­ly”) slows the tem­po while the tit­u­lar word is sung. There are innu­mer­able exam­ples of melodies ris­ing and falling to lyrics like “high, up, down” and “low.” A more sophis­ti­cat­ed exam­ple of word pain­ing comes from Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah,” which tells us exact­ly what the music’s doing — “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift.”

As inge­nious as these moves are, Ben­nett goes on to show us how word paint­ing can be “even more nuanced” in clas­sics like The Doors’ “Rid­ers on the Storm.” As Ray Man­zarek him­self explains in an inter­view clip, his key­board part led to an ono­matopoeia effect: lyrics, melody, and sound effects all com­ing togeth­er to express the entire theme. Ben­nett shows in his sec­ond word paint­ing video, above, how stu­dio effects can also be used to sync music and lyrics, such as the murky eq effect applied to Bil­lie Eilish’s voice on the word “under­wa­ter” in her song “Every­thing I Want­ed.”

Exam­ples of effects like this date back at least to Jimi Hen­drix, who pio­neered the stu­dio as a song­writ­ing tool, but word paint­ing as a song­writ­ing method requires no spe­cial tech­nol­o­gy. The Jack­son Five’s “ABC,” for instance, lands on E♭ and C dur­ing the line “I before E except after C,” and the famous cho­rus is sung to the notes A♭, B♭m7, and C. Here, the notes them­selves tell the sto­ry, sim­ple but undoubt­ed­ly effec­tive. All of the exam­ples Ben­nett adduces may come from pop­u­lar music, but word paint­ing is as old as poet­ry, which was once insep­a­ra­ble from song. For as long as humans have com­mu­ni­cat­ed with lit­er­ary epics, funer­al rites, tragedies, come­dies, and love songs, we have used prosody to shape words with music, and music accord­ing to the mean­ing of our words.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Pet­ty Takes You Inside His Song­writ­ing Craft

Naked­ly Exam­ined Music Pod­cast Explores Song­writ­ing with Crack­er, King Crim­son, Cut­ting Crew, Jill Sob­ule & More

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

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

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Bri­an Eno kept busy dur­ing last year’s pan­dem­ic, telling the L.A. Times this past Jan­u­ary about one of his lat­est ideas, an open source Zoom alter­na­tive, just one of any num­ber of projects he’s kick­ing around at any giv­en time. One of the most pro­lif­ic and influ­en­tial artists, musi­cians, pro­duc­ers, and thinkers of the past sev­er­al decades, Eno is such a cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion, he war­rants his own appre­ci­a­tion day. That’s just what he got on Feb­ru­ary 12, 1988 when KPFA (a radio sta­tion in Berke­ley, CA) turned over an entire day to host­ing Eno for wide-rang­ing inter­views, sto­ries about his col­lab­o­ra­tions, and con­ver­sa­tions about the musi­cal gen­res he invent­ed. He even takes ques­tions, and his replies are illu­mi­nat­ing and urbane.

Eno’s always been a gen­er­ous and wit­ty con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist. The Bri­an Eno Day broad­cast hits on near­ly all of the major high­lights of his career up to that point, with a com­pre­hen­sive overview of his work, ear­li­er inter­view record­ings, and loads of songs and excerpts from his exten­sive record­ed cor­pus. Much of this work is obscure and much of it is as well-known as the man him­self. One can­not tell the sto­ries of artists like U2, Talk­ing Heads, and David Bowie, for exam­ple, with­out talk­ing about Eno’s guid­ing hand as a pro­duc­er. Eno’s renowned for found­ing glam rock pio­neers Roxy Music, invent­ing ambi­ent music, and for his gen­er­a­tive approach­es to mak­ing art, whether on small paper cards or in soft­ware and apps.

Eno once said his first musi­cal instru­ment was a tape recorder, and he’s been obsessed with record­ing tech­nol­o­gy ever since, deliv­er­ing his influ­en­tial lec­ture “The Record­ing Stu­dio as a Com­po­si­tion­al Tool” in 1979 and demon­strat­ing its prin­ci­ples in all of the music he’s made. In these inter­views, Eno not only dis­cuss­es the major plot points, but also “reveals such tasty tid­bits as his dis­like for com­put­er key­boards; an admis­sion that even he does not know what his lyrics mean; a pref­er­ence for the music of Stock­hausen’s stu­dents rather than that of Stock­hausen him­self; and the dif­fer­ences between New Age, Min­i­mal, and Ambi­ent Music,” notes the descrip­tion on Inter­net Archive.

In the 33 years since this broad­cast, Eno has pro­duced enough music and visu­al art to fill anoth­er 10-hour day of inter­views and overviews. But his meth­ods have not changed: he has pur­sued his lat­er work with the same open­ness, curios­i­ty, and col­lab­o­ra­tive spir­it he devel­oped in his first few decades. Hear him in his ele­ment, rang­ing far afield in con­ver­sa­tions about archi­tec­ture, genet­ic evo­lu­tion, and his own video instal­la­tion pieces. Eno rarely gets per­son­al, pre­fer­ring to talk about his work, but it’s humil­i­ty, not secre­cy, that keeps him off the top­ic of him­self. As he recent­ly told a Guardian inter­view­er, “I’m not f*cking inter­est­ed at all in me. I want to talk about ideas.” Hear Eno do exact­ly that in 10 hours of record­ings just above.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold the Orig­i­nal Deck of Oblique Strate­gies Cards, Hand­writ­ten by Bri­an Eno Him­self

Bri­an Eno Presents a Crash Course on How the Record­ing Stu­dio Rad­i­cal­ly Changed Music: Hear His Influ­en­tial Lec­ture “The Record­ing Stu­dio as a Com­po­si­tion­al Tool” (1979)

Bri­an Eno Explains the Ori­gins of Ambi­ent Music

Hear Bri­an Eno Rein­vent Pachelbel’s Canon (1975)

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

Update: Two weeks after bow­ing out of the upcom­ing Rolling Stones tour, Char­lie Watts has sad­ly passed away at age 80.

Accord­ing to Char­lie Watts — the Rolling Stones’ drum­mer and rock’s best dressed man — his play­ing is noth­ing spe­cial. “I sit there, and I hear what’s going on, and if I can make it, that’s fine,” he said in 1973. There are no false notes in his mod­esty. “You have to be a good drum­mer to play with the Stones,” he lat­er remarked in 2000, “and I try to be as good as I can.” But he admits he’s not a tech­ni­cal play­er; it’s all about the feel. “It’s ter­ri­bly sim­ple what I do, actu­al­ly…. I play songs.”

Accord­ing to the rest of the band, Watts is indis­pens­able, one of a kind, the “engine” of the Rolling Stones, says Ron­nie Wood. He’s the only white drum­mer who can swing, Kei­th Richards swears: “Charlie’s always there, but he doesn’t want to let every­body know. There’s very few drummer’s like that. Every­body thinks Mick and Kei­th are the Rolling Stones. If Char­lie wasn’t doing what he’s doing on drums, that wouldn’t be true at all. You’d find out that Char­lie Watts IS the Stones.”

Audi­ences of the band’s upcom­ing tour will find out, since Watts announced he’s sit­ting this one out to recov­er from a med­ical pro­ce­dure, to be tem­porar­i­ly replaced by under­study Steve Jor­dan. Watts is prob­a­bly “not both­ered,” Wayne Blan­chard writes at Drum Mag­a­zine. He’s had a decades-long love-hate rela­tion­ship with tour­ing life. (Watts has made draw­ings of every hotel room he’s ever stayed in to stave off bore­dom). In the stu­dio, “as long as a track gets record­ed and sounds great, Char­lie doesn’t seem to care who is on the drums.”

Oth­er drum­mers have played on sev­er­al key Stones tracks, includ­ing Faces drum­mer Ken­ney Jones on “It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll” and Stones pro­duc­er Jim­my Miller on “Hap­py,” “Tum­bling Dice,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and “Shine a Light.” None of this means, how­ev­er, that Watts is replace­able or that the Rolling Stones would try to car­ry on with­out him. He has not only been the band’s engine, but its anchor, bal­last, maybe, its qui­et cap­tain. “When Char­lie plays,” said drum­mer Steve White, “it looks to me that he knows who runs the band on stage, despite what the singer might think.”

Watts resists talk of his impor­tance to the Stones. “We have a huge crowd of peo­ple who like us,” he said in 1998, because “they just love look­ing at Kei­th Richards and look­ing at Mick wig­gling his arms. They’ve been doing it for 30 years.” But he is just as much a draw as the oth­er Stones who have made up the core trio of the band since its incep­tion in 1962. Here’s hop­ing he recov­ers well. In the mean­while, we can see the Stones play “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “All Down the Line,” fur­ther up, from Charlie’s calm, cool point of view, as shot by Mar­tin Scors­ese in 2006 at New York’s Bea­con The­atre.

The footage shows “how Watts has qui­et­ly served as the back­bone of The Rolling Stones for the past 58 years,” Andy Greene writes at Rolling Stone. And it pro­vides a rare look at rock­’s most under­stat­ed drum­mer. “The only time I love atten­tion is when I walk onstage,” Watts once said, “but when I walk off, I don’t want it.” In the video just above, he’s in espe­cial­ly rare form — jok­ing on cam­era about a wig­gly dance he does before he goes on, a demon­stra­tion of the rit­u­als and in-jokes that have knit rock’s longest-run­ning band togeth­er for over half a cen­tu­ry. When they’ve all final­ly quit for good, says Keef, “I want to be buried next to Char­lie Watts.”

via Rolling Stone

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Rolling Stones Drum­mer Char­lie Watts Writes a Children’s Book Cel­e­brat­ing Char­lie Park­er (1964)

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

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