The Green Freak

I should say at the start that the headline of this post isn’t especially original. Mark Parisi, of the “Off the Mark” cartoons, drew a courtroom scene in which Santa Claus tells a judge that “this green freak” (the ‘Jolly Green Giant’ of vegetable-sales fame, pictured above) has ripped off Santa’s signature phrase.

And so it goes.

In 2005, Coldplay’s singer, Chris Martin, told a magazine interviewer, “We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that original. I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.”

He was presumably trying to be humble, and at the same time a bit provocative. Still, in hindsight those words seem reckless.

I wrote in my last blog post about Men at Work, the great ‘80s group, and the recent death of Greg Ham. I mentioned a successful plagiarism lawsuit over their song Land Down Under, and promised further discussion of the broad issue of musical plagiarism. Instead of re-hashing that case, though, I think I’ll highlight another today, because it is better adapted to the broader issues involved.

Long Live Life

In 2008 Martin’s group, Coldplay, came out with an album, featuring the single “Viva La Vida.” Listen to it here.

Soon a nearly-unknown U.S. band, Creaky Boards, claimed briefly that the song was too similar to one of theirs, and a video on YouTube in which they made this claim went viral.

Read about it here.

There is a certain similarity. It is certainly greater and more extended than the overlap between “Land Down Under” and “Kookaburra Sits in the old Gum Tree”!

But in the case of Coldplay and Creaky Boards, there clearly wasn’t copying. According to the theory by Creaky Boards member Andrew Hoepfner, Coldplay’s Chris Martin dropped in on a performance of theirs in New York in October 2007. Hoepfner and his bandmates recognized Martin there on a specified day and were delighted that he seemed to be so ‘into’ their music. Perhaps too much so….

Unfortunately for this claim, Martin was in London at the time he supposedly heard the song. Also, there was a demo version of the song in existence as early as March 2007, long before CB had ever done the similar song of theirs.

So decisive was the proof that Creaky Boards themselves went out of their way (honorably) to say: Oops. “Our bad.” Hoepner himself then offered another explanation of the similarity: “Coldplay and I are just heavily influenced by The Legend of Zelda.”

The Legend of Zelda? They get their inspiration from the soundtrack of fantasy video games? Well … I guess everybody gets inspiration from somewhere.

Education is Theft?

But this raises an intriguing question. When, for music, does “influence” become theft? It isn’t a bad thing to be influenced, after all. It is synonymous with education. No musician escapes the influence of colleagues: even Johann Sebastian Bach, as original a composer as ever lived, shows the distinct influence of Dietrich Buxtehude and Antonio Vivaldi.

Antonio Vivaldi

It is precisely because there exists reason to be concerned that influence will be stigmatized as theft that the idea of a “Creative Commons” has taken off recently.

Consider, for that matter, the artwork (above) for the album Viva la Vida. It is simply a reproduction of the Eugène Delacroix painting “La Liberté guidant le people,”(Liberty Leading the People) in which an allegorical figure who looks like a bustier version of the lady in New York Harbor stands on top a mound of corpses holding the tricolor flag in her right hand and urging a new wave of cannon fodder forward.

The only difference between the Delacroix painting and the Coldplay album cover is that the latter has the album’s title superimposed – in a way that looks spray painted, like a bit of graffito.

It isn’t a copyright issue so long as that image is in the public domain. But even in a loose metaphorical sense we wouldn’t think of this as “stolen” from Delacroix unless we thought that Coldplay were somehow trying to take credit for it themselves. Otherwise, we would simply say that they are visually quoting Delacroix.

If you can “quote” visually then presumably you can “quote” musically, too.

Aaron Copland

A quite well known example of this may be found in the use of an old Shaker hymn by Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring.

Yet I don’t think that Hoepfner was claiming that Coldplay and Creaky Boards were both paying homage to The Legend of Zelda in the same way that Copland was paying homage to the Shakers. No, there is a degree of “influence” that is neither explicit quotation nor plagiarism/theft. It is tough to get to precision in these matters.

There is a coda. The issue of the originality (or otherwise) of Viva La Vida didn’t go away after Creaky Boards abandoned their own claims. Two other claimants came forward: Joe Satriani and Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens). Satriani said the sing incorporates much of his “If I Could Fly,” whereas Islam says it’s a lot like his “Foreigner Suite.”

What is behind the flurry of claims to have been the source of that particular song?

There is the simple fact that these songs – any songs – are not made by stringing together notes at random. There are combinations of sounds we are “hard wired” to like, and those that we aren’t. You can imagine that a composer is at the piano, or strumming his guitar, plucking out notes. When he hits upon a neat-sounding combination, and it isn’t something he has heard before, he notes it down and smiles.

But you and I, dear reader, have very similar brains. Our wiring is determined by God – or, if you prefer, by the path-dependent history of our species. What may strike you as a neat and new combination of sounds is very likely to strike me likewise. In the case of the common features of Viva la Vida and the similar songs by Creaky Boards, Satriani, Cat Stevens, and whoever composes for The Legend of Zelda!, and so forth, the likeliest explanation is simply that some very plausible, frequently traveled, neural pathway is involved. Let us leave it at that!

And no, Santa doesn’t own “Ho Ho Ho.”

Let’s end this meditation with that tune Copland appropriated, sung wonderfully by Judy Collins:

Gregory Norman "Greg" Ham (27 September 1953 – approx. 19 April 2012)

Greg Ham was found dead in his home on April 19, 2012. The 58 year old musician lived alone, and friends who had not heard from him went to his home to check on his welfare, and found him deceased. The cause remains unknown. Although authorities initially spoke of “unexplained circumstances” more recently they have been saying that the postmortem turned up nothing suspicious.

There has still been no straight answer as to how he died, though. Drug abuse is suspected in some quarters. The Sydney Morning Herald cited an anonymous “close friend” who said he had been using heroin.

Men at Work

Ham will be fondly remembered as a member of the ‘80s group Men at Work, which gave us the album Business as Usual, released in November 1981, with singles “Who Can It Be Now?” and “A Land Down Under.”

In 1978, Aussie Colin Hay (1953- ) formed the band with his buddy Ron Strykert. Though they began as a guitarist duo, over the next couple of years they brought in Jerry Speiser (a drummer), John Rees (bassist) and Greg Ham (who could play any of a number of instruments, as a particular song demanded.) The photo above shows Colin Hay and Ham together: Ham is the fellow with the sax.

In 1981, the resulting group, Men at Work, signed a contract with Mercury Records, which was headed at that time by Peter Karpin. Their first album: “Business as Usual.” This was released in November of that year in Australia. It came to the US in April 1982.

Ham plays his sax to good effect in “Who Can It Be Now.” Listen for a brief solo at around the 1:20 mark of this YouTube video. The song would not have been the hit it was without that wailing sax at that moment. As Karpin said, Ham gave the band color, “both in the recording and [in his] stage presence.”

But “A Land Down Under” has left an even bigger mark. The lyrics of this song are not just, as might seem the case at first hearing, a few Aussie-themed stereotypes humorously contorted. Rather, there is a plot. The song tells the story of a young Australian touring the world, and discovering, perhaps at least somewhat to his surprise, that his homeland has made its mark amongst the different people he encounters, the “strange lady” who thinks of Australia as the land where women glow and men plunder, the man from Brussels who (naturally!) serves his Aussie guest a Vegemite sandwich, etc.

Marcus Breen, the author of Rock Dogs (2006),a history of the Australian music industry, said that the song represented the consolidation of that industry, and its “new state of global engagement.”

Breen quotes Ham on this point, telling us that Ham congratulated earlier Aussie groups for “establishing themselves” in Europe and the US, “It was like a groundswell that served us well.” (He surely had in mind the Little River Band, as well as AC/DC. Even, perhaps, a successful global solo artist, Olivia Newton-John.)

Aussie musicians might have been aided, too, by the global recognition of all those philosophers named “Bruce.” Those comedians from pommeyland, also known as Britain’s Monty Python troupe, contributed to a sort of Aussie chic in the 1970s.

The Implications

In 1983 the band came out with its second album, Cargo. According to Rolling Stone’s reviewer, Christopher Connelly, this album lacked any single song with the “body-slamming intensity” of either of the two great hits from its predecessor. But, he also said, it is still a “stronger overall effort,” extending “the darker side” of their skills.

The darker side is perhaps best exemplified by “Overkill.” Vocalist Colin Hay starts by telling us that he can’t “get to sleep” because he thinks about the implications.

The implications of … what? He doesn’t know, but he does know something is very wrong: “Diving in too deep, and possibly the complications….”

As Connelly also wrote, the first album already had a sense of mild paranoia, but it was the second one extended that sentiment into thoroughgoing solipsism.

If you follow the above link to the YouTube video, you’ll find that there’s a guitar solo around 2:00 with a terrific build-up, until Ham jumps in with his sax at 2:26.

Going Through Changes

Speiser and Rees appear to have been kicked out of the band in 1984.

The three remaining members recorded another album that year, Two Hearts. Strykert left the band even while work on that album was underway, leaving a two-man operation, Hay and Ham. The album’s reception showed the effects of the band’s disarray. Hay and Ham went their separate ways not long thereafter.

In 1996, Hay and Ham re-united for a tour, and gathered around them four musicians new to the “Men and Work” brand: Tony Floyd and John Watson (drums), Stephen Hadley (bass), and Simon Hosford (guitar). Out of this tour came a live album, Brazil.

A critic listening to Brazil tended to become both enthusiastic and nostalgic. “[W]ith a stellar star list composed almost entirely of classic material, it’s nearly impossible to hear the difference between the Men at Work lineups of 1996 and 1983. Positively electric versions of all their hits are here,” one wrote.

In the autumn of 2005, this song “Overkill” was featured in the US television show “Scrubs,” a sitcom with a medical theme.

Final Thoughts

I would like to say again, “Rest in Peace, Greg Ham” and leave it here, leaving the issue of the cause of death to the authorities and questions of the full merits of the group’s music to posterity. I can’t do that, quite. One cannot write in May 2012 about this group or that man without noting the litigation brought against them, and in particular against him, by Larrikin Music, claiming that the song Land Down Under – particularly, that haunting riff from Ham’s flute – was plagiarized from a nursery rhyme.

In 2009, Norman Lurie, then the head of Larrikin Music, decided that Ham’s riff sounded too much like a bit of the song “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,” to which Larrikin owned the rights. Listen for yourself.

Side by Side.

Here is some footage of an actual Kookaburra sitting in an actual gum tree.

I hope to post my thoughts about musical plagiarism, the realities and the accusations, in a few days. In the meantime I’ll only say: Wherever Mr. Ham is now, he is Beyond all that. Rest in peace, sir.

Let us conclude by listening to what Monty Python was telling us about the Land Down Under:

20th /21st Century Music and EMI

Vivendi SA’s subsidiary, Universal Music, plans to buy the EMI Group. This represents the continuing consolidation of the music recording and publishing industries, and the Independent Music Companies Association, a Euro-centered trade group, says it will fight the merger. Furthermore, various regulators and state attorneys general may in principle yet threaten it. But the likelihood remains that EMI – one of the most renowned music studios of the 20^th century – think of Queen, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones! – and these early years of the 21^st century too, will lose its existence as an independent entity. And this occasion requires some reminiscence.

Two Beatles Album Covers

Beatles’ album, Please Please Me

EMI (the letters come from the phrase “Electric and Musical Industries”) dates its corporate history back to 1931. Also in 1931, the new company opened a studio on Abbey Road, in London. Beginning in 1960, their corporate headquarters was at 20 Manchester Square, also in London. The stairwell in the Manchester Square building is featured on the cover of a Beatles’ album, Please Please Me.

For a special trip down memory lane, here’s the full track list from that album:

I Saw Her Standing There

Misery

Anna (Go to Him)

Chains

Ask Me Why

Please Please Me

Love Me Do

P.S. I Love You

Baby It’s You

Do You Want to Know a Secret

A Taste of Honey

There’s a Place

Twist and Shout.

Of course Abbey Road itself, right outside their recording studio, is also featured in a Beatles’ cover – the one in which Paul McCartney is notoriously barefoot.

Many Labels

Nowadays, EMI is known under many labels, divided into groups, many of which have their own distinctive histories. There is the Blue Note Label Group, the Capitol Music Group (which now includes Virgin Records), Caroline Distribution, and the EMI Christian Music Group.

Angel Records, part of the Blue Note Group, has focused on recordings of classical music, notably including Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

The mainstay of EMI’s Capital Music Group has been, as one might expect, Capital Records. Its former HQ, the Capitol Tower, constructed in 1957, remains a major Hollywood, California landmark.

Capitol Records

Capitol Records began life as an independent company, founded by singer/composer Jonny Mercer, in 1942. Its first recording session saw Martha Tilton sing “Moon Dreams,” accompanied by The Mellowaires & Orchestra. Johnny Mercer himself was there to supervise.

EMI acquired most of the equity in Capital in 1955.

It acquired Virgin Records in 1983. Virgin Records had been created by Richard Branson, Simon Draper, and Nik Powell eleven years before and its performers – both before and since EMI’s acquisition – have included Roy Orbison, Devo, Janet Jackson, Lenny Kravitz, and so forth. Though Branson has applied the “Virgin” label to a lot of other enterprises since then, including the airline company he set up in 1984, the record company was his first use of that moniker. The “virgin” use of “Virgin,” so to speak.

Virgin Records (Twins logo)

Virgin Records also came into the world with a striking logo, a young naked woman sitting on top a red serpent. We see her in mirrored form – thus, this has become known as the “Twins” logo.

The Spice Girls were an EMI/Virgin act in their heyday, formed in 1994, and according to one survey they were the biggest pop-cultural figures of the 1990s. One of their members, “Posh Spice,” became Victoria Beckham with her marriage to the soccer phenom David Beckham in 1999. Her solo career appears to have been a disappointment: EMI dropped her in 2002.

Along with Virgin Records, EMI acquired the rights to what are now known as the Caroline Distribution labels, an eclectic collection including Nature Sounds and Vanguard. Nature Sounds is a rap label, issuing artists such as Ayatollah, DJ Babu, and Strong Arm Steady. Vanguard began life as a classical label, but nowadays is better known for a variety of folk and blues artists.

EMI also has, as noted above, a Christian Music Group, headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, which has signed such artists as Jon Foreman, Patty Griffin, and Seabird. Foreman has distinguished himself from the rest of the Christian rock fraternity because he has found a place in the soundtrack of a film within the Transformers franchise.

Here’s a sample of Seabird’s music, from their album Rocks into Rivers.

Recent History

In 2007, British financier Guy Hands took over EMI. Hands quickly ticked off a number of people, including Mick Jagger, who soon moved The Rolling Stones’ catalogue to Universal. Ed O’Brien, drummer for Radiohead, was also unhappy about Hands. O’Brien said that EMI had been taken over by “somebody who’s never owned a record company before … they don’t know what they’re dealing with.”

(I’m afraid I write as someone who only knows of the existence of Radiohead because the television show South Park once paid them tribute.)

O’Brien drummer for Radiohead

Nonetheless, O’Brien (pictured right) had a point: the main accomplishment of EMI during the years of Hands’ control was the acquisition of a lot of debt. They were borrowing, specifically, from Citigroup.

In February 2011, after extensive litigation, Citigroup was able to take EMI away from Hands in an effort to recoup its losses.

As Hands has admitted, the whole affair made him look like a “chump.” Heck, the expenditure on lawyers for the futile fight against Citigroup alone cost him $1 million (GB £630,000).

More important, Hands never seems to have worked at the underlying problem facing the music recording industry: it is an industry still in large measure set up to sell tangible things, CDs, in stores. It has still not quite accommodated itself to the very different world created by the internet.

Apple’s success with the iTunes store shows that it is possible for the music industry to make this transition. People are willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to purchase songs lawfully over the internet. But if their only choice is either to trudge out to a mall and buy a CD or to stay home in comfort and download a song for free: they’ll do the latter.

But let’s end where we began, with Johnny Mercer.

Since I take this mails very serious I always take a very close look on
the website itself and for the website Puresheetmusic.comm, I had a good look
and was astonished.

PurseSheetMusic.com

The first reason I was amazed first of all was the look of the website
which is really fresh and it has a design that is ready for the future, the website also includes all the things you expect nowadays including formatted sheet music for the iPad, Kindle, Nook and many more.

Puresheetmusic.com is also the first and leading seller of sheet music eBooks on iTunes and don’t forget Puresheetmusic.com is one of the few online sheet music shops were
you can get all the sheet music for a price as low as $1.99.

Lars Chistian Lundholm

Lars Chistian Lundholm owner of purseheetmusic.com

The Website puresheetmusic.com is run by Lars Chistian Lundholm who has 15 years’ experience as an arranger/composer and also has a degree from Berklee College Of Music in classical. He also composed music for movies and video games.

Since I had direct contact with Lars I told him I was astonished and asked him if he was willing to answer some questions for a site review about Puresheetmusic.com.

Below you will find the question and answers by Lars.

15 years experience as arranger/composer, that’s a lot of experience.
What is the accomplishment you are most proud in those 15 years?

Without doubt it’s the launch of Puresheetmusic.

That said, I do and have done other things as well.
I have a degree in classical composition and my love and passion is in writing and arranging music for others to enjoy performing.

I run another project called band-charts.com specializing in arranging sheet music for cabaret shows.

I’ve had my sheet music arrangements performed in shows in Vegas, NYC, London, Sydney and on all major cruise lines and been involved in some great charity projects on Broadway.

About a decade ago I was part of the start-up of what was then called Amazing Music World.
In connection with this I spent time in Russia working with local music publishers and were among the first outsiders to lay hands on a previously unpublished piano piece by Tchaikovsky. It was published in its original form with CNN, NY Times, Financial Times and other media covering the event
as Mikhail Gorbachev joined the project as protector.

More recently my arrangements have been performed by The Czech Philharmonics and I’m this very moment finishing a show for the US Army Air Force Band.

I noticed you have a lot of experience with composing and arranging music, what is the reason you created the website?

The idea comes from a period in my life where I spent a lot of time on the road.
I’ve been blessed to have visited more than 100 countries in the name of music and to have played on all 7 continents (including the Antarctic).
However, this brought a few things to my attention.
So often I’ve had to carry 12 kilos (24 pounds) of sheet music through an empty airport or sitting in a taxi through a crowded city with piles of luggage around me while dreaming of more simple ways of doing things.
During this time I had the great pleasure of meeting so many gifted colleagues from all around the world and the conversation at night after gigs always turned to accessibility and quality of sheet music.
Sitting in a cafe in a foreign country with your laptop, having a cup of coffee while searching for sheet music that you are about to perform that evening can be challenge.
And when you finally find what you need it’s often not the quality you are looking for in the arrangement or it’s a scanned piece of sheet music that is more than 75 years old.
And it gets even more challenging. What do you do when asked to download a piece of software just to print
your sheet music, the price is very high for what you get and there is no way to transfer the file to another device while enjoying that good cup of coffee in that cafe?
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could access all your sheet music on your iPad, Kindle or Nook and not have to worry about whether or not your brought a particular piece of music with you that day?
To make a long story short, this is the reason I set out to launch Puresheetmusic.com

To make good quality sheet music available for everyone free of constraints of software and complicated apps. To set the music free!

So I decided to launch a website where all sheet music is priced at $1.99 and where there are no restrictions, an “iTunes for sheet music” so to say.

I wish this to be a place where the music has been set free. A place where it doesn’t matter if you play the alto saxophone or the viola, where you are able to find unique arrangements written for your instrument knowing that these aren’t old scanned copies but newly engraved and that they are arranged by a professional composer/arranger who understand and cares for your particular needs as a musician.

When I look at your website it seems everything is ready for a sheet music website in 2012 with the social media and mobile apps, how did you made this possible?

I had a vision of this pure sheet music website where all sheet music is one low price, where aesthetics matter and I wanted to keep it as simple and as pure possible. The easy solution would have been to hire someone to do the website, set up social media relations and mobile apps implementation but at the end of the
day it goes against what Puresheetmusic means to me.

You have been one of the first and leading sellers of sheet music as ebooks on iTunes. This is a great achievement, how do you compete with the other big sheet music companies.

Well, this has completely taken me by surprise.
I am through Puresheetmusic the first and leading seller of sheet music as ebooks on iTunes and my sheet music arrangements have been:
no. 1 on the UK arts and entertainment best seller book chart,
simultaneously no. 2 and 3 in France,
simultaneously no. 2, 3 and 4 in Canada,
simultaneously no. 3 and 5 in Spain,
no. 4 in Germany,
top 20 in Australia and
top 25 in the US
and the list goes on…
Within the first 3 months of publishing sheet music on iTunes I’ve had more than 100 titles on the top 50 best selling charts around the world.

To me it proves that there is a need for pure and good quality sheet music.
iPad, Kindle, Nook and so forth are tailor made to put on a music stand in front of you.

You are one of the great sheet music websites available right now, how do you make sure it will stay that way and compete with the other big companies.

I had a vision of this pure sheet music website where all sheet music is one low price, where aesthetics matter and I wanted to keep it as simple and as pure possible. The easy solution would have been to hire someone to do the website, set up social media relations and mobile apps implementation but at the end of the
day it goes against what Puresheetmusic means to me.

I’m a real hands-on person who likes to learn new things so I sat down and learned what I needed to and did it all myself.
The next step besides constantly adding more repertoire to the website is to introduce Pure Premium titles.
It will be sheet music that includes mp3 backing tracks of the piano part and you’ll never have to be without a pianist again.

About 90% of all future sheet music titles will be available both as regular titles for 1.99 as well as Pure Premium titles.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned but I don’t believe in every unnecessary feature that modern technology makes possible.
In my eyes it takes away from the very essence of playing music if you are distracted by gimmicks wrapped in apps.
After all it’s the companionship, about being able to express your feelings through music and sharing it with others that really matter. It’s about
pure music!

My one aim is to make the sheet music available to as many music lovers as possible and this is done through accessibility.
I wish to make sure that a musician will be able to purchase pure quality sheet music no matter where he/she prefers to do their shopping and that this sheet music is formatted to his or hers preferred device when not
printed.
We touched upon iTunes earlier but I’m also making the sheet music available at Sony, Barnes & Noble, WHSmith and FNAC.

And in the immediate future I’m expanding it to Amazon, specialized websites in Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan as well as Walmart in the US.

I still don’t understand why sheet music has to be so expensive and why you need to download apps and constraining printing programs just to play music.

My sheet music will always be the very best quality, free of restrictions and priced at $1.99.

Maybe I’m idealistic and on a bit of a philanthropic mission here but I’ll compete with the other companies by setting the music free and making it available to as many music lovers as possible.

I really enjoyed this review and your answers. Since you have received the final copy of the results are you satisfied also?

Thanks hugo, I’m so very honored by this. As a website i always make sure everybody gets what he needs, if i receive a problem the first thing i do within seconds  is sent a mail back.

Closing comments

Although it’s one of the first real reviews i did except for the IMSLP website (which mostly doesn’t need a explanation), I’m wondering if any of the site reviews will score any higher.

The reason behind this is that the owners of smaller web shops pay a lot of attention on the users and do everything to keep the users satisfied.
When you have a problem and ask a question you will mostly get a response immediately within a few hours and that’s also the case with PureSheetMusic.com.

I tried to order a sonata from Beethoven which i could find easily, after that i had some small problems figuring out where my shopping cart was but i was soon able to purchase it which i did trough paypal. After the final pay button in paypal i was redirected to the website with my Beethoven sonata’s ready for download. I’ve opened them and played a bit and yes this is great, the arrangement is perfect. With the whole process and testing i did I’m really sure this website deserves attention and that all for $1.99.

See our final score below.

Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Halford

I recently attended an extraordinary performance of Verdi’s Requiem, at St. Joseph’s Cathedral, in Hartford, Connecticut.

Hartford is a small but artistically distinguished city about halfway between New York and Boston. It is the site, for example, of the Hartt School, an internationally renowned conservatory, teaching music, dance, and theatre.

(The word “Hartt” in the name of the school has two “t”s, not one, because it is named after one of the founders, Julius Hartt, not after the city itself!)

St. Joseph’s Cathedral, right in the center of Hartford, (near the tourist-trap Mark Twain House), is itself an impressive structure built fifty years ago, entirely of concrete so as never to be threatened by fire. Indeed, the Verdi Requiem was scheduled for the evening of March 16, 2012, in celebration of the 50^th anniversary of this structure.

Giuseppe Verdi

The performers included 400 singers in various choirs (the Hartford Chorale, the Cathedral Choral, the Hartt Choir, etc.), 85 instrumentalists, four wonderful soloists, and as conductor, one should say perhaps as the Maestro, Edward Bolkovac.

The four soloists were: soprano Amanda Hall; mezzo-soprano Lucille Beer; tenor Raffaele Sepe; and bass Ryan Green. For reasons I don’t understand, I find that somebody has posted a YouTube clip of the same Lucille Beer singing on a polo ground. The setting is bizarre, but you will likely enjoy the singing.

The tenor is also available on YouTube, apparently a clip from a television talent show. The clip is a fun listen, although you’ll have to skip to about the 1:40 part on that clip if you want to avoid the inane introductory chit-chat of the TV host.

Since Thomas of Celano’s Day

But let’s say a few words about the tradition of the Requiem itself. A Requiem Mass for the repose of one or more newly departed persons is a very old rite within the Roman Catholic Church, and had taken the form in which Verdi found it as early as the 13^th century, when Thomas of Celano, a follower of St Francis of Assisi, wrote the hymn “Dies Irae.”

Thomas’ hymn begins thus:

Dies iræ! Dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla!

Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus!

Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum,
Coget omnes ante thronum.

In straightforward unversified English, that is: “The day of wrath! That day will dissolve the world into ashes; As David foretold, and the Sibyll! How much trembling there will be when the judge arrives, and investigates everything strictly! The trumpet will spread a wondrous sound through the burial vaults of the regions, and will summon all before the throne.”

Musical settings of the Requiem Mass became a distinctive musical genre – often performed in concert halls and thus at least topographically separated from the initial purpose of the music – by the mid 16^th century. One of the great composers of that era, Palestrina, set it this way.

Mozart, Berlioz, Liszt

Between Palestrina and Verdi, the outstanding Requiems came from Mozart (1791), Berlioz (1837) and Liszt (1867). Something of a music-history “A Team” there!

Mozart's Requiem manuscript

Of Mozart’s Requiem there is little to be said that hasn’t been said abundantly over the centuries.

Here, though, is a bit of Hector Berlioz’ Requiem (also known as the Messe des morts), not quite so well known as Mozart’s, but just as beloved by those who have known it. This was composed as a Mass for those soldiers who had died during the Revolution of July 1830. Specifically, I present you with Berlioz’ Dies iræ.

There’s an amusing story in connection with the premiere of the Messe des morts. The conductor, Francois Antoine Habeneck, put his baton down in mid-performance in order to take a pinch of snuff! Berlioz was there, and was understandably furious. As he says in his memoir, this was “the one bar where the conductor’s direction is absolutely indispensable”! It came about during the Tuba mirum passage quoted above.

Berlioz leapt up, took a position between Habeneck and the orchestra, and started conducting by himself. I hope Habeneck enjoyed the snuff, because he didn’t get the orchestra back – Berlioz continued this way through the rest of the performance, “and the effect which I had dreamed of was produced,” he reports.

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt’s Requiem of 1867 is historically remarkable because nobody seems to know whose death inspired it. It might have been composed as a lament for the Emperor Maximilian, the unlucky fellow who became Emperor of Mexico with the backing of French Emperor Napoleon III and who was captured and executed by the forces of Benito Juarez in 1867. That’s possible. But the uncertainty on this subject shows that it was no longer all that important: by this time the Requiem as a musical genre has detached itself from its origins: it was still a Mass in form, not necessarily in motivation.

On to Verdi

So we return to Giuseppe Verdi, one of the towering musical figures in the history of the music-mad Italian peninsula. Verdi first began contemplating the Requiem form at the end of 1868, with news of the death of his colleague, Gioachino Rossini (the composer of The Barber of Seville, Otello, and La Cenerentola, among much else)

Gioachino Rossini

Verdi and Rossini had never been friends, and their musical styles are very different, but Verdi of all people understood the depth of the loss. “A great name has disappeared from the world!” he said.

So Verdi set out to organize the outstanding Italian composers of the day in a collaborative effort to create a Requiem worthy of Rossini. Verdi’s own contribution to this joint effort was to be the final movement, Libera me.

The project never came to fruition, and Verdi was left with his Libera me sitting in his desk. Yet since death is the one inevitability in life, it was certain that – if Verdi himself only lived to see it – there would come another death that would affect him sufficiently that he would take up his pen again and write a complete Requiem with that fragment as a point of departure.

That day came with the death of Alessandro Manzoni in May 1873. Verdi’s Requiem was firm performed a year later, in the Church of San Marco in Milan. Verdi himself conducted, thus avoiding any snuff-based threats to its perfection.

Since Vatican II

One sad theological point, though, is that the Roman Church no longer holds the old style Masses for the Dead, with the various hymns that have inspired so many great conductors through the centuries. This all fell victim to the Second Vatican Council’s ecclesiastical reforms. The new “Rite of Funerals,” issued in 1969, does away with black vestments and with words that focus on trembling or ashes. Instead, we are to see death as a hopeful event, a step into a better world for the deceased.

All quite comforting in a sense: but that sense is not musical. The new Rite of Funerals has yet to produce anything analogous to the masterpieces composed on behalf of that Old Time Religion!

In closing, I’m afraid I have to admit that I can’t give you a link to any recording of the performance in Hartford. Perhaps you will accept the following, with my best wishes, pending

In The Center of the Semicircle, Part II

Today we’ll discuss how in recent decades some conductors have become superstars. As is the case with other sorts of superstar, so with high-powered globe-trotting conductors: they are still human, they are prone to do controversial things, and they end up taking a lot of heat for their presence in their particular musical kitchen.

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein like Stokowski before him, became known to mass audiences through the new 20^th century media – beginning in 1954 he gave lectures on classical music to television cameras. He kept this up until his death in 1990. These lectures discussed (and provided aural illustrations of) Beethoven, jazz, conducting itself, musical comedy, and much else. Only recently have they been made into a DVD set.

Bernstein also became the maestro of the Young People’s Concerts, hosted by CBS.

But other achievements pale besides the fact that in 1958 Bernstein became conductor of the single most influential orchestra in the United States, the New York Philharmonic. It was a post he would hold for twelve years. Yehudi Menuhin, a renowned violinist and the founder of a prestigious school of music, has said that this was the perfect post for Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein

He was “the embodiment, the crystallization of much of the life of New York, not only the Jewish expression by the various bases and the quality of the town itself.”

Politically, Bernstein was a man of the left and quite outspoken in this. The expression “radical chic” was invented for the sake of a satirical story about a party Bernstein threw for the Black Panthers. At Just Sheet Music, we take no side on political controversies, but we must note as a matter of history that his political activism, which did seem to too many like the recreational slumming of a high-brow, hurt him in the eyes of his public. He stepped down from the Philharmonic in the year of that notorious party.

That hardly meant an end to his conducting, or his influence. In 1972, Bernstein conducted several performances of the great Bizet opera, Carmen, at the Metropolitan Opera.

Throughout his career, Bernstein was the recipient of GRAMMY awards from The Recording Academy, beginning with a 1961 award for Best Recording for Children (for Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf). In 1967, he won Album of the Year, Classical, for a recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8. Bernstein had by then been for years the leading figure in bringing Mahler’s music to the attention of a mass audience. And in 1973, Bernstein won a Grammy for Best Opera Recording – for the aforesaid Carmen.

Seiji Ozawa

Seiji Ozawa was born of Japanese parents in occupied Manchuria in 1935. He didn’t see his/their homeland until after the war. Once there, he immediately began rigorous piano instruction under Noboru Toyomasu, focused on the works of J.S. Bach. But after an accident on a rugby field broke two of his fingers, he turned to composition, and to conducting, under the tutelage of Hideo Saito.

Yet Ozawa

Yet Ozawa

Ozawa was an assistant to Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic through the first half of the 1960s.

From 1965 to 1970, he held two quite demanding positions simultaneously: artistic director of the Ravinia Festival (an outdoor music festival sponsored by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Much criticism has arisen from his alleged habit of spreading himself too thin, something that continued into the 70s and 80s.

For 25 years beginning in 1973, his base of operations was Boston, but again he drew irritated attention for his jet-setting ways.

A violinist said to a music critic: “He gets off the plane from Paris and starts to rehearse, and when he opens up the score of the symphony, he may not have looked at it since the last time he conducted it a year, maybe four years ago….we call it panic time when he’s around.”

Yet Ozawa obviously retained his admirers, and he won an Emmy in 1976 for a television series that aired on PBS, “Evening at Symphony.”

Since 2002, Ozawa has been the music director of the Vienna State Opera.

James Levine

James Levine(1943 – ) was the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 2001 to 2011. He succeeded

James Levine

Ozawa in that post. Even before doing that, Levine had in 2000 usurped Stokowski’s old role in the Disney remake of Fantasia. The newer version was, unsurprisingly, named Fantasia 2000.

Levine also has a long history with the New York Metropolitan Opera, directing its orchestra and chorus.

Before any of that, he was a figure of note in the Wagnerian world centered around Bayreuth, Germany. In a press conference at Bayreuth in 1989, Levine set off something of a storm, after conducting the orchestra for a performance of Parsifal produced by Götz Friedrich. Friedrich is known for his innovative stagings. Levine complained that with Parsifal, Friedrich was “going too far.”

Why did Levine go public with this thought? It is difficult to say. Heck, it was confusing to Friedrich, who said at the time, “he never communicated his reservations to me.”

It is well to remember in the face of such a story that the man standing in the center of the orchestral semicircle is never a god or even a demigod. Not even when he has been as built up by publicity machinery as each of these three men has been. Each is of course a dedicated and brilliant musical professional – each is human with faults and foibles.

Ton Koopman

Ton Koopman. I’d like to close this two-part discussion of conducting with a few words about with a few words about a contemporary conductor of note, Ton Koopman (1944 – ), a Dutchman who hasn’t received the publicity tsunami of a Bernstein, Ozawa or Levine, but who has become a central figure in the “authenticity” movement. This is a trend, of which I am personally an enthusiast, toward the creation of period music (most often, Baroque) in a manner appropriate to that time, informed by the state of the art in historical study. Thus, strivers for authenticity don’t bring in a 21^st century style pianos for playing the works of Dietrich Buxtehude.

The instruments have to be authentic in construction, and in the mix that would be employed to make an ensemble, and of course any orchestra or other ensemble aiming at a historically informed performance will want a conductor attuned (excuse the pun) to that same end.

Koopman leads the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. He generally conducts from the harpsichord, giving the orchestra members the needed visual clues with vigorous nodding of the head rather than with baton (or any potentially-fatal staff!) You may judge the results for yourself:

In The Center of the Semicircle

By standard dictionary definition, a conductor is an individual who leads an orchestra, choir, or other musical ensemble by visual clues – we think characteristically of a conductor standing at the front of a semi-circle of musicians, posed with his back to their audience, waving his baton majestically or frenetically (one or the other depending on the style of music and the conductor’s personality).

We think in terms of such an image, but the art of conducting precedes the orchestra, or the baton. Historians of ancient music call it “chironomy,” the use of hand gestures as musical cues.

The above illustration is taken from an ancient Egyptian tomb, a mastaba. You see that some of the individuals depicted are playing musical instruments – others are making hand gestures, presumably giving guidance to the performers.

There are seven individuals, four playing musical instruments. Two of them seem to be playing the same instrument, although they’re leaning it in opposite directions. There is also a flute-like object and something held close to the ground that may be a drum. The flute player is the only instrumentalist who doesn’t seem to have his own distinct facing conductor/chironomist.

Professor Hans Hickmann studied several such carvings and sought to derive from them some definite meaning for the hand signals shown. As he deciphers them, the gestures were a musical scale of sort – watching the chironomist was akin to reading notes off a sheet.

Of course the goal of the conductors we know isn’t to tell the musicians what notes to play (or sing) but to give them assistance with the rhythm and to keep a common tempo. Conducting in that sense may have begun in the middle ages, as a choir became a routine part of worship services.

Skipping forward to the 17^th century and the Baroque era, we must tell of one famous fatality attributed to overly vigorous conducting. The great French composer/conductor Jean-Baptiste Lully used to keep time in rehearsals not with a baton but with a heavy staff, which he would bang up and down on the floor. One day, conducting a Te Deum in honor of the recent recovery from sickness of his patron, King Louis XIV, Lully struck his toe with the staff and gave himself an abscess. The wound turned gangrenous, and Lully died two and a half months later.

No wonder a small wand waved about horizontally at chest level became the preferred sort of baton!

But the great era of the conductor as a central musical figure came about only after romanticism had paved the way. As an artistic movement, more than any such movement before it, (and much more than some since) romanticism glorified the individual creative genius. The conductor was an obvious expression of this – he was the individual genius who was able to turn a lot of other individual geniuses into a collectivity, getting them to act as one. It was a paradoxical sort of individual expression – and for a romanticist the paradoxical sort is the best kind!

One thinks in this context of Hans von Bulow, Arthur Nikisch, or Johann Strauss II. Let us say a word about each.

The gossip-inviting aspects of Von Bulow’s life tend to overwhelm talk of his musicianship – we remember that he wooed Frank Liszt’s daughter Cosimo, married her, and lost her later to Richard Wagner. But it was von Bulow who conducted the premier of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B Minor, in Berlin, in 1857, who became director of the Munich University of Music in 1867, and who produced in a scholarly edition of all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas – one that is still available.

Nikisch was a Hungarian conductor who led orchestras to much-praised performances of the works of Tchaikovsky, Liszt, and Brahms. He became the principal conductor of the Leipzig orchestra in 1879 and the conductor of the Royal Opera in Budapest in 1893. He conducted the Berlin Philharmonic from 1895 until his death in 1922. Nikisch seems to be the first conductor of importance of whose performance we have a visual record — film survives.

And it was Johann Strauss who, on a triumphal tour of America in the 1870s, conducted the 1,000 performers of the so-called Monster Concert in Boston.

Modernism and Movies

The 20^th century brought with it changes in musical theory and temperament. Perhaps the cult of the individual genius receded a bit and the special role of the conductor in the mind of the musical public might have receded too. Except.

Except that the 20^th century also brought new visual mass media. It brought motion pictures as a form of mass entertainment, and in the fullness of time it brought television. Conductors like Stokowski and Bernstein, from the 1930s through the 1960s, were celebrities who came to rival lead actors and baseball players.

It was Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who appeared in the Disney film Fantasia in (1940), where he is seen chatting amiably with Mickey Mouse between the musical selections, and he did the orchestrations for two of those selections. The image used in the movie’s advertising was of a Stokowski-Mickey handshake.

Historian Norman Lebrecht has written of this movie that “Serious music had never been so attractively portrayed” and Lebrecht supposes that “untold youngsters were drawn to Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky by the snippets they heard in Fantasia.”

This was not Stokowski’s first appearance on the silver screen (although it was the first time he shared a screen with an animated mouse). He was familiar to music-goers from The Big Broadcast of 1937 and One Hundred Men and a Girl.

Stokowski once said: “Painters paint pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.” It is a marvelous analogy, but it manages to suggest that the musicians of an orchestra are collectively but a brush, and the composer’s music is the paint. The actual painter, in this image, is the conductor: Stokowski himself.

There is much more that must be said. I will devote a separate column here to post-Fantasia developments in conducting.
For now, though, let us simply enjoy the London Symphony Orchestra, which Stokowski at the ripe age of 90 conducted in this performance of Debussy: L’après-midi d’un faune.

Madonna and the Super Bowl Halftime Show

The above cartoon was circulating around Facebook on the morning of the Superbowl.

As you can see, the cartoonist is playing on one of Madonna’s several personae in advance of the Super Bowl, the championship of what the United States calls “football” and what the rest of the world calls “American football,” (because it clearly isn’t soccer!), a central event on the pop-cultural calendar.

Before we, the viewers, got to the halftime show, we had already seen not only half of the athletic event, but several of the famously high-priced commercials. Creative talent is poured into these ads every year, to draw our eyes and delay our bathroom breaks yet again.

One of the first-half commercials involved Elton John, Melanie, and Flavor Flav, combining their efforts to sell us Pepsi.

But we came in time to half time and to the usual musical extravaganza. Some of the greatest musical performers and celebrities of our day have performed at Super Bowl’s half time, including Ella Fitzgerald (Super Bowl VI), Chubby Checker (XXII), The Rolling Stones (XL), and – the last time the Super Bowl matched the Giants against the Patriots, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (XLII). That game was certainly a heartbreaker for Patriots fans – and this one only compounded that fracture.

The Jackson family has been represented twice. Michael in 1993 (XXVII), and Janet, whose wardrobe notoriously suffered a malfunction, in 2004 (XXXVIII)

This year, for Super Bowl XLVI, Madonna joined that august company, singing “Vogue,” “Music,” “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” and “Like a Prayer.” Here it is for you: click.

Three of those four songs were among her classics. The fourth, “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” was new; it had become available on iTunes just two days before.

Marilyn Monroe

The first airing of the video to the new song took place in the context of an interview on Anderson Cooper’s show, in which she confessed to some nerves. Though this video opens with rows of football jerseys thrown at Madonna’s feet, like palm fronds, Madonna is seen soon thereafter briefly doing a Marilyn Monroe look-alike schtick. She had gone to that well before.

One of her classic early videos, Material Girl, includes about as explicit a bit of Monroe impersonation as one can find. Madonna does an almost step-by-step emulation of the number “Diamond’s Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from Monroe’s 1953 movie “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” But don’t take my word for it. Here’s the original.

What is not hype, is perhaps synchronicity. The day after the Super Bowl, a new television series called “Smash” is set to air on NBC. “Smash” is an innovation in the TV series format – a use of the series format to look at the creation of a Broadway musical.

The musical that the main characters are struggling to create will be about the life of (you guessed it) Marilyn Monroe, object of Madonna’s, and everybody else’s, retrospective obsession. Indeed, the obsessive nature of our interest in Marilyn was evidenced in 1997, by the otherwise unlikely success of the song “Candle in the Wind,” by the aforementioned Elton John.

By the way, there was a real-life Broadway musical about Marilyn’s life. Marilyn: An American Fable (1983). It included the number, “Can’t Keep My Heart From Racin’,”by Beth Lawrence. You can listen to it here.

Alas, “An American Fable” was a flop, closing after only seventeen performances. Let’s hope the TV series fares better.

Back to Madonna

Ah, but enough with my train-of-association. Back to Madonna and the halftime show. In a pre-game interview with ABC News, Madonna said, “I actually wanted to have 100 drummers come from the ceiling, a drumline from the ceiling.”

That would be the ceiling of Lucas Oil Stadium, in Indianapolis. Apparently, though, somebody nixed the drumline-from-roof idea. Instead, she was carried about by Roman legions.

The contrast between an oak tree and a willow comes to mind here. The gist of it is that the oak tree is impressive and strong looking, but vulnerable to a storm. The wispy looking willow, due to its flexible, is more apt to survive a storm. In show business terms, Marilyn Monroe was an oak tree, destroyed by her own success and the machinery of celebrity. Madonna is a willow, whose flexibility in re-creating herself every few years has allowed her career to thrive decade after decade.

Madonna first came to the attention of much of the public in the film Desperately Seeking Susan, a 1985 movie in which she plays Susan Thomas, the free spirit of the title who, by example, liberates bored suburban housewife Roberta Glass, played by Rosanna Arquette. The two are dressed up as twins on the movie poster:

Through the remainder of 1985, young girls called “wannabes” did their best to imitate the “Susan” look. But of course Madonna herself soon moved on, to the bullet bras that seem to have stuck in the mind of the cartoonist with whom we began, for example.

The bullet bra was the creation of designer Jean-Paul Gaultier for Madonna’s 1990 tour, “Blonde Ambition.”

The year 1990 saw another development we have to mention here. It was the year Madonna came out with “Vogue,” a song and video named after a dance style associated with the gay men’s ballroom scene, and one that was simultaneously popularized by the documentary “Paris is Burning.”

Lyrics to Vogue

The lyrics to Madonna’s “Vogue” combine gay sensibility with the suggestion that heteros should join in the fun, and some good-ole-days nostalgia for classic Hollywood.

Greta Garbo, and Monroe
Deitrich and DiMaggio
Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean
On the cover of a magazine

Grace Kelly; Harlow, Jean
Picture of a beauty queen
Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire
Ginger Rodgers, dance on air

They had style, they had grace
Rita Hayworth gave good face
Lauren, Katherine, Lana too
Bette Davis, we love you

Ladies with an attitude
Fellows that were in the mood
Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it
Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.

Allow us to conclude with our best wishes to all, our hope that all of those who read and enjoy this blog and website have decades upon decades of vigorous life ahead not as candles in the wind, but as defiant fluorescent light bulbs!

Healing at the Speed of Sound

Healing at the Speed of Sound

By Don Campbell and Alex Doman

Hudson Street Press, New York City, 2011.

288 pages, $25.95

This is the latest in a recent spate of books treating of the psychological, indeed the neurological and embryological, origins of our appreciation for and our human ability to create music.

Such books have been very popular ever since Don Campbell came out with The Mozart Effect in 1997. That book argued for the beneficial effects of exposing infants to classical music, including although of course not exclusively that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This book is Campbell’s latest in the same line, with the assistance of Alex Doman. Doman is an entrepreneur, founder of Advanced Brain Technologies, which provides tools for music based therapies.

Campbell and Doman ask you to think about the first sound you ever heard. It was the beating of your mother’s heart, which your developing nervous system began to process as a central fact in its uterine world sometime in the second trimester of development. Your appreciation of steady rhythmic sounds – the backbone of musical appreciation – began there.

Soon enough, you discriminated other sounds, like the gurgling noise of the digestive system, and “the comforting vibration of your mother’s voice resonating throughout her body and yours.” Indeed, you eventually began to pick up on the existence of a world outside your mother’s body. Campbell and Doman quote a Penn State neuroscientist who has said “there is a lot of information in that filtered and muted sound stream.”

The music that makes it through the filter is stored away and continues to exercise an influence on post-natal life. Research indicates, for example, that infants respond to the theme songs of the television shows that their mothers watched most often during pregnancy. One natural conclusion is that mothers who are interested in musically gifted children might want to surround themselves with fine music during gestation. (And, by the way, what’s the downside? What harm could it do, even if speculation about the benefits is overblown?)

Another natural conclusion is that music has helped to shape who we are in a deep way, so that everyone – even the most tone-deaf among us – is entitled to say, along with Kiki Dee, “I’ve got the music in me.”

Indeed, let’s pause to enjoy that one on YouTube.

The Castrato and His Wife

The Castrato and His Wife

By Helen Berry

Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2011.

288 pages, $29.95

This book is certainly a change of pace from that one. It takes us from timeless truths to some very contingent historical facts. On September 8, 1773, William Long Kingsman married the daughter of the Maunsell family, Dorothea. Both families had musical associations, so it probably seemed especially appropriate that the wedding took place in the Parish Church of St George, Hanover Square, in London. This was the church where George Frideric Handel had been the appointed organist half a century before. It was, writes historian Helen Berry in this new book, still in the 1770s “the venue for many of the most prestigious concerts of sacred music in the capital….”

But why should this particular marriage in that church be deemed important for us, in the early 21^st century? Because the bride was already married, and she would have to seek an annulment of her earlier marriage (something she didn’t get around to doing for another year and a half) in order to throw retrospective legitimacy over this one. And because the estranged husband she had left for Kingsman was … Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, a renowned international opera performer, and a castrato.

Tenducci was sufficiently renowned to have been immortalized by the above painting, by no less a figure than Thomas Gainsborough.

The fact that Tenducci was a castrato, and thus in the language of the legal documents of the day “totally incapable of the Act of Procreation,” would prove adequate grounds for the annulment, although there was nothing straightforward about that. Tenducci acknowledged being a eunuch, and it was in his line of work something of a selling point. Back in the 1660s, eunuchs as singers had been new for London musical aficionados and the diarist Samuel Pepys had written, disapprovingly, that many in his social circles “dote of the Eunuchs.”

Pepys, in a famous portrait (below), has turned to his right. Gainsborough, as above, is looking left. When you put the two together, it appears the two men are ignoring each other, each in favor of the document in his hand.

Pepys

By the 1770s though, the novelty of eunuchs had worn off. Tenducci was a member of a class of singers who had been an established part of the musical scene for a long time. At any rate, there was no secret about his anatomy.

Still, the law required proof, not mere notoriety. The Kingsman family seems to have gone to a good deal of trouble to hunt down witnesses, not just to Tenducci in naked adult moments but to the operation itself, which had been performed in his boyhood, in 1748, by a physician who had died in the meantime.

The story of the Tenducci-Maunsell marriage, and its annulment to legitimate the Kingsman-Maunsell wedding, gives Berry, and she gives us, a visa into both the sexual/social mores of the European Enlightenment and its musical scene.

Steve Jobs

By Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, New York City, 2011.

656 pages, $35.

For our last selection we will stay within the realm of the contingent, but the history involved is quite recent. Steve Jobs, co-founder and for long periods the central figure at Apple, died last year, just as Simon & Schuster was readying this book for the stores.

Jobs’ life and work had an incalculable impact on the music industry. Some even claimed that he saved it from itself. Thus, Isaacson’s book, which devotes a good deal of careful attention to the musical side of the Jobs/Apple story, deserves its part in our triptych.

Remember Napster in its heyday? Shawn Fanning and his buddies became fodder for the cover of major news magazines by helping music lovers share MP3 files over the internet, cutting the music industry out of the loop. Metallica discovered that a demo of a song they hadn’t released, “I Disappear” was circulating in this way in early 2000, and that triggered the litigation, and eventually the court order, that shut down this early incarnation of Napster.

Still, it had been a scary trip for the music moguls, there were other similar services out there, and Jobs persuaded the moguls (or enough of them) that unless they did something drastic, their day was done. That something drastic turned out to be: industry cooperation with iTunes and the iPod.

Isaacson tells us that Jobs knew he could have effectively encouraged and enabled pirating, offering his iPad (without of course saying so) as a new tool. But he didn’t want to go that route because he believed creative people should have property rights and a profit incentive for further creation.

He quotes from an interview Jobs gave Esquire, “So we said, let’s create a legal alternative to this. Everybody wins. The artists win. Apple wins. And the user wins, because he gets a better service and doesn’t have to be a thief.”

And we will let that be our happy ending, too. These books are each suitable for any music lover’s shelf, or eReader.

And we can all enjoy Metallica.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYSDC3cHoZs&ob=av2n

Simone Dinnerstein - JS Bach Goldberg Variations

The standard account of Johann Sebastian Bach’s composition of his famous ‘Goldberg Variations’ comes from a biography of Bach, by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, which first appeared in 1802. Forkel says that Bach wrote these works as an insomnia cure for a patron, Count Keyserlingk. Specifically, he wrote them for the performances of a former student of his, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, in the Count’s employment.

They seem to have worked! Goldberg would play them in the evening, the Count would drift off happily to sleep, and – in recognition of this success – the Count gave Bach a golden goblet filled with 100 gold coins.

Anna Harwell Celenza has even made a children’s book out of this touching incident.

Some historians have sought to throw cold water over this story. They note, for example that the music isn’t even remotely lullaby-like, and that the title page of the work, which Bach called simply “Aria with Divers Variations,” contains no dedication. If Bach had written it with a specific patron in mind, the custom of the time would have suggested some flowery dedicatory words about the munificence of the Count.

Anyway, it is a lovely story, and the simple fact is that the works we know by Goldberg’s name were first published in 1741, though they only slowly attained the status as Classics that they possess now.

Bach Outside of Church

For a quick take on this historical context, consider what Mehmet Okonsar, a Turkish-Belgian pianist, is trying to tell us here. He explains why the Variations constituted a “revolutionary instrumental accomplishment,” and why we should resist the temptation to see all of Bach through the lens of his church-commissioned works: we shouldn’t work to find a religious sensibility in his “profane and purely instrumental works.” Relax, and let yourself be entertained.

Franz Liszt

The Goldberg variations were not often played in the early decades of the 19^th century, though. They may have seemed old-fashioned to the musicians of the time, whereas other aspects of Bach’s oeuvre had more continuing appeal to the romantics.

There were exceptions to the general rule of neglect. Notably, in 1838-48, Franz Liszt went on tour, and among the music he played were his favorites of Bach, the Goldberg variations among them. These tours may have kept up interest in them.

Glenn Gould

But let us skip forward a bit from there and get to the moment when, in 1955, the Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould made the Goldberg Variations the content of his debut album. One intriguing coincidence here – Gould, like Count Keyserlingk before him, suffered from insomnia.

Glenn Gould

Gould revisited this material in 1981, (by which time his 1955 album had sold 100,000 copies), when he recorded a new version. The two recordings show the width of interpretive freedom the material Variationsallow.

Gould was unhappy with the tempo he had kept through the first album, and in the second he slows things down considerably. The 1955 album is just 33 minutes and 34 seconds long. The 1981 album is 51 minutes, 18 seconds. (Still, there are some who like it slower than that. Another Canadian classicist, Angela Hewitt, in 1999 recorded it at 78 minutes, 32 seconds.)

Gould was especially unhappy with his original take on the 25^th variation. He said he had made it sound “like a Chopin nocturne” – which perhaps doesn’t sound like a devastating critique to you or me, but obviously did to Gould! Gould had a long list of distinguished composers of whom he had a low opinion – Chopin was on it.

At least one critic, Colin Fleming, has noted that Gould’s 1981 take on that 25^th variation accomplished the goal of taking the Chopin out of the piece. But the result doesn’t really sound like a Bach variation either. Gould’s second version of that variation ends up, Fleming says, as “something purely autonomous, amorphous and still distinct, conjuring a feeling of impenetrable isolation.”

Gustav Leonhardt, a Dutch harpsichordist, has recorded the Goldberg Variations three times in the course of his illustrious career. The first of his recordings precedes the first of Gould’s. The latest was a 2004 CD brought out by DHM.

Since Gould

Leonhardt stands out in the recent history of Goldberg Variations performers because he is also a scholar of the history of instrumentation. I was amused to see that an interviewer had asked him about the three sorts of keyboard that were in common domestic use in Bach’s day: the harpsichord the clavichord, and the portative organ. What, the interviewer asked, was the relationship between them?

Leonhardt gave a down-to-earth answer, “I think they were largely overlapping, and the composers couldn’t care less. Someone at home would use indifferently whichever was practical…”

In 1979, computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter sought to popularize then-new ideas about artificial intelligence in a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach. Gödel was part of this “eternal golden braid” because his mathematical discoveries were historically critical to the development of ideas about AI. Escher’s prints seem to give visual form to the weird loopiness that is necessary for the production of anything akin to consciousness. Bach joined the braid because … well, in large part because of the Goldberg Variations.

Hofstadter was fascinated by the way in which the final ‘Variation’ breaks the rules that Bach had imposed upon himself for all those that had preceded it. The last one “contains extraneous musical ideas having little to do with the original Theme – in fact, two German folk tunes.” This feeds back into the philosophical contemplation of artificial intelligence, for it gives the work as a whole the appearance of something that can step outside of itself, of self-transcendence we associate with creativity itself, not its productions.

In 2007, Simone Dinnerstein (pictured above) released her own recording of the Goldberg Variations. A writer in the on-line magazine Slate hailed this as the best thing since Gould. The writer, Evan Eisenberg, said that Dinnerstein’s performance of Variation 13 in particular was pensive, wistful, and possessed “an ebb and flow as natural as breathing.”

Courtesy of YouTube, you can listen to how Dinnerstein performed the basic air whence it all sprang, then listen to how Gould (in his 1981 incarnation), did likewise.