Podcasts about Charles Ives

Vi försöker reda ut betonings-gate från förra avsnittet. Robert spelar en låt med engelsk titel och tysk text av ett svenskt band med franskt namn samt hajpar Stora Popboxen. Love spelar The Raincoats från Testbild-Petters topplista över fånigt obskyra 1981-låtar. Michael B. Tretows frånfälle uppmärksammas med hjälp av Trafik-Trolle, Mikael Ramel och en kille som heter Gustavsson i Åmotfors. På temana "65" och "68" hör vi Grisen Skriker respektive David Sandström. Robert slår ett slag för den provokativa finkulturen och lägger ut en sladdrig röd tråd mellan Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Igor Stravinskij, Conlon Nancarrow, Lubomyr Melnyk och James Blackshaw, med start och slut i Sköldinge utanför Katrineholm. Love spelar en märklig rundgrensk/zappask/wyattsk låt med Cheer-Accident. I Bisarra hörnan hör vi en sedelärande historia om speedrun av narkomani. Vi får veta hur Ola Magnell och Cat Stevens knyter samman Sheffield, Alabama (755 mil från Kikkistudion) med Skärmarbrink (3 km från Kikkistudion), och så har Love gjort en låt. _Karikatyr av Henry Cowell, 1920-talet_

In Hannover ist Ingo Metzmacher geboren, hier wuchs er auf, studierte und ist, neben vielen anderen atemberaubenden Ämtern, seit 2016 Intendant der KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen. Seine Arbeit hat die Grenzen Hannovers längstens überschritten. Die musikalische Karriere startete Ingo Metzmacher 1997 als Generalmusikdirektor der Hamburgischen Staatsoper. 2005 kam er als Chefdirigent an die Niederländische Staatsoper Amsterdam. Danach wurde er Chefdirigent des Deutschen Symphonie-Orchesters Berlin. Heute steht Ingo Metzmacher in den großen Konzert- und Opernhäusern am Pult, dirigiert in Salzburg, Genf, London, Mailand, Zürich, Paris oder Wien. Seine wegweisenden Schriften: "Keine Angst vor neuen Tönen" und "Vorhang auf! Oper entdecken und erleben" prägen die zeitgenössische Musikwelt. Nun beendet Ingo Metzmacher seine Arbeit als Intendant bei den KunstFestSpielen Herrenhausen. Die nächste Ausgabe 2026 wird die Komponistin Brigitta Muntendorf verantworten. Bevor Ingo Metzmacher in seine letzte Ausgabe der KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen startet, spricht er in NDR Kultur à la carte mit Friederike Westerhaus über das Programm, seine Highlights in Herrenhausen und über das Abschlusskonzert "The Unanswered Question" von Charles Ives, das er am 8. Juni im Kuppelsaal dirigieren wird.

Een piano heeft 88 toetsen + het is vandaag de 88e dag van het jaar = Pianodag! In deze aflevering dus een ode aan de piano; van de ingetogen schoonheid van Lili Boulanger, tot de spetterende energie van Joey Roukens en van de wonderlijke stemming van Charles Ives tot het grootse klankuniversum van George Crumb en de klapspelletjes van Mayke Nas: snaren, hamers, toetsen, vilt, hout en meer!

On the latest episode of ‘New Classical Tracks,' with host Julie Amacher, pianist Simone Dinnerstein combines Charles Ives' ‘Concord Sonata' with her father's most famous painting to create her latest recording, ‘The Eye Is the First Circle.' Listen now!

Interlochen Arts Academy students have a unique challenge ahead of them. During the 2025-26 Academy year, they will learn one of the most challenging pieces in the orchestral repertoire: the Symphony no. 4 by Charles Ives. Scholar Jan Swafford visited Interlochen to give the Academy students and faculty an introduction to composer Charles Ives. Regarded as one of the most important of American composers, Ives has been called everything from "iconoclast" to "maverick" with his unique approach to music composition. Ives' music often features complex orchestrations, references to American transcendentalism and a strong sense of the composer's spirituality. The music of Charles Ives is also characterized by his frequent use of musical borrowing, with melodies of hymns, patriotic songs, band music and popular tunes woven into each piece. Pieces by Charles Ives excerpted in this presentation Holiday Quickstep Psalm 67 Symphony no. 1 Symphony no. 1 Decoration Day Symphony no. 4 Ragtime Dance Fourth of July

All Classical Radio's John Pitman speaks with American pianist Simone Dinnerstein about her latest album, 'The Eye is the First Circle,' featuring iconic American composer Charles Ives' Concord Sonata. Keep reading on the All Classical Arts Blog: https://www.allclassical.org/pitman-reviews-dinnerstein-eye/

Today I present to you the extraordinarily versatile, even chameleon-like singer and actor Marni Nixon (22 February 1930 – 24 July 2016), who is no doubt best-known today as the so-called “Ghostess with the Mostest.” Born into a musical family in California, she became involved from an early age with the movies, and by a marvelous set of circumstances became The Voice for a number of Hollywood actresses not known for their singing voices. Her skill in matching the vocal and speech characteristics of each of these performers is exceptional, but she was so much more than that. She pioneered the work of many 20th century giants, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives, and Anton Webern. She hosted a local Seattle children's television program called Boomerang that netted her four Emmy Awards. She performed on opera stages and concert platforms around the world. She recorded widely, everything from Mary Poppins to Pierrot Lunaire, and in the mid-1970s was the first singer to perform and record Schoenberg's cabaret songs, his so-called Brettl-Lieder, works that are now standard repertoire. Reminiscences of Marni are provided by my good friend Thomas Bagwell, currently a coach and conductor at The Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen, who was a colleague and good friend of Marni Nixon's for the last 25 years of her life. This episode features a cross-section of this stunning artist's extensive recorded output, recorded over six decades, including repertoire from Webern to Rodgers and Hammerstein. In between we have examples of Nixon's performances of songs by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ives, Fauré and her former husband Ernest Gold; concert and song repertoire by Villa-Lobos, Boulez, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Copland, and Gershwin; plus a few outliers, from a live performance of Korngold's Mariettas Lied to the jazzed-up exotica of Buddy Collette's Polynesia to Mr. Magoo's Mother Goose Suite, not to mention a spoonful of Mary Poppins. Overall, “It's a Jolly ‘Oliday with Marni!” Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly or yearly support at whatever level you can afford.  

durée : 00:04:25 - L'art d'aimer la nature comme soi-même : The Alcott's selon Charles Ives - par : Max Dozolme - Max Dozolme nous fait visiter un lieu magique. La ville de Concord fondée au XVIIe siècle dans le Massachussets peut s'enorgueillir d'être le berceau du transcendantalisme américain. Une ville qui a aussi inspiré à Charles Ives l'une de ses plus belles partitions : sa Concord Sonata.

durée : 01:27:47 - En pistes ! du lundi 06 janvier 2025 - par : Emilie Munera, Rodolphe Bruneau Boulmier - Des découvertes en ce lundi : des oeuvres inédites de Palestrina par un choeur de Cambridge, la musique de Charles Ives réunie en un seul coffrer pour les 150 ans de sa niassance ou des raretés de la BNF éditées par Naive

durée : 01:27:47 - En pistes ! du lundi 06 janvier 2025 - par : Emilie Munera, Rodolphe Bruneau Boulmier - Des découvertes en ce lundi : des oeuvres inédites de Palestrina par un choeur de Cambridge, la musique de Charles Ives réunie en un seul coffrer pour les 150 ans de sa niassance ou des raretés de la BNF éditées par Naive

Charles Ives - A Christmas CarolSan Francisco Symphony Chorus Vance George, conductorMore info about today's track: Delos DE3238Courtesy of Naxos of America Inc. SubscribeYou can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed.Purchase this recordingAmazon

On the latest episode of ‘New Classical Tracks' with host Julie Amacher, pianist Jeremy Denk collaborates with violinist Stefan Jackiw to highlight Charles Ives' piano and violin sonatas in celebration of the composer's 150th birth anniversary. Listen now!

Music by Charles Ives, with commentary and spoken word by poet Aleph Ba. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/alephba/support

On the October 14 edition of the Music History Today podcast, Pearl Jam breaks a record, JoJo finally gets to release a record, & Pulp Fiction breathes life into older music. Also, happy birthday to Usher. For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday On this date: * In 1906, legendary entertainer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson was not allowed to play for the Rutgers University football team because their opponents that day, Washington and Lee University, refused to play against a team that had a black person on it. * In 1939, music company BMI started operations. * In 1954, the musical movie White Christmas premiered. * In 1964, Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones married his wife Shirley Shepherd. * In 1966, Grace Slick first appeared with Jefferson Airplane. * In 1968, the Beatles finished work on the White Album. * In 1971, John Lennon & Yoko Ono appeared on the Dick Cavett Show. * In 1994, the movie Pulp Fiction premiered. From a musical standpoint, the movie helped revive interest in Dick Dale's music (he did the song Misirlou: the song with the crazy surf guitar & the screaming in the beginning of it). It also sparked interest in the early Kool & the Gang funk classic Jungle Boogie & Link Wray's classic Rumble. * In 2000, Pearl Jam broke a record on Billboard's albums chart when 5 of their released live albums from their European tour hit the chart in the same week. * In 2006, Rascal Flatts' opening act Eric Church was kicked off the tour after he repeatedly played over his allotted opening slot time. Apparently, that was the last straw with Rascal Flatts. Eric's replacement was a hotshot country newcomer at the time: Taylor Swift. * In 2006, singer Melina Leon married her husband Ruy Fernando Delgado. * In 2014, singer Kesha started her lawsuit against producer Dr. Luke in order to be released from her contract with him. * In 2017, country singer Kacey Musgraves married singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly. * In 2018, Steppenwolf performed in Baxter Springs, Kansas, which was their final show. * In 2023, Madonna started her Celebration tour, after having to delay it to deal with a bacterial infection which sent her to the hospital. In the world of classical music: * In 1924, the opera Die Gluckliche Hand premiered. * In 1956, the overture Robert Browning by Charles Ives premiered. In the world of theater: * In 1930, the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy premiered on Broadway & made stars out of Ginger Rogers & especially Ethel Merman. * In 1961, the Frank Loesser musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying premiered on Broadway. In award ceremonies that were held on this date: * In 1970, Merle Haggard won at the Country Music Association awards. * In 1974, Charlie Rich won at the Country Music Association awards. * In 1985, Ricky Skaggs won at the Country Music Association awards. In 2009, opera superstar Placido Domingo received the first Birgit Nilsson million dollar prize. In 2020, Post Malone & Billie Eilish were the big winners at the Billboard Music Awards. In 2022, Jefferson Airplane received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support

In 1929, the conductor Nicolas Slonimsky contacted the American composer Charles Ives about performing one of his works. This was a bit of a surprise for Ives, since he had a checkered reputation among musicians and audience members, if they even were familiar with his name at all. In fact, he was much more famous during his lifetime as an extremely successful insurance executive! Ives mostly composed in his spare time, and his music was mostly ignored or ridiculed as that of a person suffering from a crisis of mental health. Most of his music was never performed during his lifetime, and even today, he is thought of as a great but extremely eccentric composer, and orchestras and chamber ensembles often struggle to sell tickets if his name appears on the program. But for those who love Ives, there is an almost evangelical desire to spread his music to the world. I'm one of those people who loves Ives, and it is one of my personal missions to bring his music to as many places as possible. The piece I chose to talk about today is Three Places in New England, or the New England Symphony, a piece that is a perfect amalgam of what makes Ives such a spectacular composer - his radical innovations, his ahead of his time experiments, his humor, his humanity, his warmth, and the staggering creativity that marked all of Ives' great works. We'll start with a little biography of Ives in case you're not familiar with him, and then we'll dive into Three Places in New England.  By the end of the show, I hope, if you're not already, that I will have converted you into an Ives fan for life!

Kate Molleson delves into the life and music of the “Yankee Maverick”, Charles Ives.Charles Ives is considered a leading American composer of the early 20th century. Known for many musical innovations, his was a unique voice, a pioneer who combined elements of Western and American music traditions. He's also been called a Yankee Maverick and much of his creative life was spent in obscurity. Marking the 150th anniversary since his birth, Kate Molleson shines the spotlight on the life and music of Charles Ives. This journey begins in Danbury where Ives grew up, going on to study at Yale, then working in Insurance in New York, and coming to a close in the mid twentieth century. In those final decades, and largely due to ill health, Ives had stopped composing. Ironically, it was at this point when his creative endeavours had ceased, that his music started to generate much interest.Music Featured: Memories (excerpt) Four Ragtime Dances for Theatre Orchestra, No 1 (Allegro moderato) String Quartet No 1 ‘From the Salvation Army' (excerpt) Variations on ‘America' Psalm 67, God Be Merciful Unto Us Symphony No 1 (excerpt) March No 6, with “Here's to Good Old Yale” The Circus Band Adeste Fideles Feldeinsamkeit Mists Symphony No 2 (excerpt) Central Park in the Dark The Children's Hour The Unanswered Question General William Booth Enters into Heaven Tom Sails Away (Three Songs of War) Orchestral Set No 1 ‘Three Places in New England' (Putnam's Camp) Sonata for Violin and Piano No 3 (Adagio - Cantabile) Symphony No 4 (excerpt) At the River Serenity Piano Sonata No 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-60 (Thoreau) A Symphony. New England Holidays (excerpt) Two Little Flowers Romanzo di Central Park Violin Sonata No 2 A Christmas Carol Three Quarter Tone Pieces (Allegro) Symphony No 4 (Allegretto) Sunrise Piano Sonata No 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-60 (The Alcotts) Symphony No 3 ‘The Camp Meeting'Presented by Kate Molleson Produced by Luke Whitlock for BBC Audio Wales & West For full track listings, including artist and recording details, and to listen to the pieces featured in full (for 30 days after broadcast) head to the series page for Charles Ives (1874-1954) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0023nw8And you can delve into the A-Z of all the composers we've featured on Composer of the Week here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3cjHdZlXwL7W41XGB77X3S0/composers-a-to-z

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 10, 2024 is: numinous • NOO-muh-nus • adjective Numinous is a formal, often literary, word that typically describes things that have a mysterious or spiritual quality. It can also describe something holy or something that appeals to one's aesthetic sense. // We were overcome by the numinous atmosphere of the catacombs. // The artist's sculptures dominate the space, their numinous presence welcoming museum-goers to a foreign world. See the entry > Examples: “The breakthrough for me was the idea of embedding the hymnlike harmonies of Charles Ives's sublime ‘The Unanswered Question' within my music. Ives gives this hushed hymn to a string orchestra, playing pianississimo throughout. A lone trumpet, seeming to come from another planet, asks ‘the question' repeatedly—five notes without a text but full of numinous meaning.” — John Adams, The New Yorker, 4 Dec. 2023 Did you know? When people of the 1600s were ruminating on an adjective to reflect their awe of the mystical and supernatural elements of their experiences, they gave the nod to numinous, and quite aptly so. Numinous comes from the Latin word numen, which can mean both “a nod of the head” and “divine will,” the latter sense suggesting a figurative divine nod indicating approval or command. (English users were already using the noun numen, a direct borrowing from Latin, to refer to a spiritual force or influence associated with a particular place or phenomenon.) Numinous is not a common or everyday word, which seems fitting for one used to describe what is far from quotidian, and instead part of the realm of the spiritual, the holy, or the transcendent.

Will Ferrell and his longtime friend and former SNL writing partner Harper Steele traveled from New York to California, talking along the way about Steele coming out as a trans woman. Their documentary, Will & Harper, is now streaming on Netflix. Also, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reflects on "maverick" composer Charles Ives.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Will Ferrell and his longtime friend and former SNL writing partner Harper Steele traveled from New York to California, talking along the way about Steele coming out as a trans woman. Their documentary, Will & Harper, is now streaming on Netflix. Also, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reflects on "maverick" composer Charles Ives.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Jeremy Denk is one of America's foremost pianists.  He is also the recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Jeremy is known for his interpretations of the music of American composer Charles Ives.He is also known for his original and insightful writing on music. His New York Times best-selling memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine was published to universal acclaim by Random House in 2022.  His latest album of Mozart piano concertos was deemed “urgent and essential” by BBC Radio 3, while his recording of the Goldberg Variations reached No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts.

Members of Scotland's cultural community discuss the controversy around a cut to vital funding. Ahead of his third year performing at the Lammermuir Festival of classical music, leading American pianist Jeremy Denk talks about his passion for musical maverick Charles Ives, whose 150th birthday he is celebrating with a special concert and a new album of his sonatas. And debut playwright Harry Mould discusses their production The Brenda Line, which inspired by the volunteers who responded to obscene phone calls made to The Samaritans in the 1970s and 80s. The Brenda Line is on at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre. Presenter: Kirsty Wark Producer: Mark Crossan

Join the Paul Winter Consort in celebration of composer Charles Ives' 150th birthday

As one half of influential band Gastr del Sol along with David Grubbs, Jim O'Rourke's work has reached many through that project alone. However, his additional work as an esteemed solo artist and producer as well as a guitarist in Sonic Youth have extended his reach even further, solidifying him as one of the most prominent artists to emerge from the American underground. On this episode, he talks about how songs by David Ackles, Genesis and Charles Ives informed his development as a musician. Essential Tremors is produced by Matt Byars and Lee Gardner and distributed by Your Public Studios.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hillary Simms is a virtuosic Canadian trombone player with the esteemed American Brass Quintet and is on faculty at the Julliard School. Hillary's warmth and love of music comes through in this candid interview, from her childhood in Newfoundland to playing on the world's biggest stages, and also the unusual situation she found herself in when  her engagement to her husband became a viral sensation in China.  As the first woman to join the Amercian Brass Quintet since 1960,  Hillary spoke to me about gender disparity in the brass world and some of her strong female role models.    Hillary shares wonderful insights for all of us, whether you pursue music as a career or follow a different path,  of the need to have self-compassion and have an awareness of the big picture of your life.  Hillary has performed as a soloist a couple of times with my orchestra, Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra, and you'll hear us talk about the arc of her career so far as a chamber musician, soloist, educator and busy freelancer. We decided to delay the release of this episode slightly in order to include a wonderful recent recording of the Amercian Brass Quintet, a movement from David Biedenbender's wonderful work Sacred Geometry. This is the first recording of the group with Hillary performing,  and you'll find more information and links below.  You'll find the video and transcript here: https://www.leahroseman.com/episodes/hillary-simms Hillary Simms website: https://www.hillarysimmstrombone.com/ American Brass Quintet: https://www.americanbrassquintet.org/ ABQ Sacred Geometry Il. Gaudi by David Biedenbender https://youtu.be/YOBA2gjpnKo?si=PNJHPuQ3ZOPS_pAV Song for Japan Trombone Quintet https://youtu.be/2lVH_vesCUA?si=iD2fZsxKWi0TNDg8 Songs My Mother Taught Me by Charles Ives https://youtu.be/I7ZdF-gH9mg?si=YwJ1T4t2K2sSdy6Y Hillary Simms with NACO https://nac-cna.ca/en/event/27460 Original Merch for sale: https://www.leahroseman.com/beautiful-shirts-and-more Can you buy this independent podcaster a coffee? ⁠https://ko-fi.com/leahroseman⁠ Complete Catalog of Episodes: ⁠https://www.leahroseman.com/about⁠ Newsletter sign-up: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/ebed4a237788/podcast-newsletter⁠ Linktree for social media: ⁠https://linktr.ee/leahroseman⁠ Timestamps: (00:00) intro (04:02) solo opportunites with NACO pandemic, Tomasi, David, Raum (08:26) American Brass Quintet, Julliard teaching, auditioning for ABQ (14:10) commissioning new compositions (20:41) second movement,Gaudi, from Sacred Geometry by David Biedenbender (25:29) recital in Toronto, Charles Ives songs (27:51) Songs My Mother Taught Me by Charles Ives (27:49) benefits of singing (31:44) Hillary's story of becoming a  trombone player (37:55) Newfoundland (39:49) different ways to support this independent podcast! (40:43) Hillary's career path and love of chamber music, Dr. Karen Bulmer, Douglas Burden (47:39) Gord Wolfe trombone mentor, getting through burnout (50:47) husband Ricky Nan, the strangeness of being part of a viral sensation (56:36) need for mentorship (01:00:10) recording the Song for Japan video, help from Zach Haas (01:04:42)  Song for Japan by Steven Verhelst  (01:11:00) self-care and routine, practice routine (01:15:54) gender disparity, female role models (01:21:16) Michael Mulcahy, playing with Chicago symphony (01:25:58) advice for musicians

durée : 00:11:53 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Albane Penaranda - Cet épisode de l'émission "Coda", "Les fiançailles de Satan", diffusé pour la première fois en 1995, entremêle des lectures du sabbat d'après "La Sorcière" de Jules Michelet et "Les Batailles nocturnes" de Carlo Ginzburg, avec des musiques de Franz Liszt, Charles Ives et Philippe Hersant.

For years Professor Brian Cox has encouraged us to look up to and beyond the stars and to understand that the universe is very, very large and our place in it very, very small. He is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester – and through his extensive work on television and radio, he's shared the wonders of the universe and of science with millions of us around the world. As a teenager and then a student, Brian combined his passion for physics with a parallel career in pop music as a keyboard player. His choices include music from the jazz improviser Keith Jarrett, Mahler, Charles Ives and Richard Strauss.

durée : 00:17:53 - Disques de légende du mardi 21 mai 2024 - Leonard Bernstein a beaucoup défendu la musique de Charles Ives. En 1987, il enregistre à la tête de son orchestre philharmonique de New York la Deuxième Symphonie, la Question sans réponse et Central Park in the dark.

David First “I define immersive as the first time I realized that there was a bigger universe than my daily life.”  David First is a many-sided composer-musician having played in Dead Cheese, a hippie guitar band in his youth, performed with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall, produced many records of minimalist drone music some of which were released on Phill Niblockʼs XI label, he's played in rowdy bar bands, led the no-wavish band the Notekillers, which had a significant influence on Sonic Youth and he has even conducted a Mummerʼs String Band in various Philly parades. The Village Voice once described him as "a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young." He's performed at most of the avant garde's hallowed halls including The Kitchen, Bang On A Can, Central Park Summerstage, The Knitting Factory, Tonic, the Deep Listening Institute, CBGBʼs as well as De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam and many festivals throughout Europe.  Other projects include working with the sonification of the atmospheric phenomena known as the Schumann Resonances and human brainwaves and other esoteric projects such as The Western Enisphere, a drone and micro-pulse acoustic-electric ensemble. Samples Playlist Wave Music III - 60 Clarinets & a Boat • Charlie Morrow Tape Letter to Michigan • David First Dead Cheese Twice Daily live @ Cheese Nation 1971 • David First Harmonic Dance • David First The Distant Softening Spirit Wave Pulse Tape Girder Interference Etude • Wreck, First & Morrow  Live at AmbientChaos • David First  Wave Music V - Conch Chorus and Bagpipe • Charlie Morrow Tell Tale • David First Etude 15 • David First Distant Signals • Charlie Morrow Pulse Piece • David First Blossom Dearie Snippet of her Air • Wreck Mix Spirit Voices • Charlie Morrow Subjects touched upon: drones, bar bands, rock & roll bands, Lamonte Young, Dave's Waves, Sunview Luncheonette Greenpoint, psychedelic revolution, poet Jerome Rothenberg, bending notes, Douglas Kahn, minimalist tendencies, free jazz, world music, Meteor Crater AZ, the heavens, the Kitchen, Phill Niblock, guitar, oscillators, signal generators, Muddy Waters, electronic music, Dennis Sandole, Hermann von Helmholtz, ancient voltaic cells, Harry Partch, Charles Ives, the minor third, blues, Gert Stern, new age, pseudo-science, Schumann resonances, improv, Discman, electrical engineer father, heterodyning, pursuit of magic, Canal Street ... 

Alex Jordan joins us to discuss his new album “Queen Kerosene” as well as “Pacific Dust” from The Mother Hips.  Plenty of other discussion including The Jayhawks, getting produced by Steve Berlin, Black Crowes, Charles Ives, Bad Company (no, it's not really a Bad Company cover) and places to visit in the Bay Area.  And we discuss why we vetoed his first pick.Check out Alex Jordan at:  https://www.alexjordanjams.com/Check out The Mother Hips here: https://www.motherhips.com/Check out other episodes at RecordsRevisitedPodcast.com, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, iHeartMedia, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Additional content is found at: Facebook.com/recordsrevisitedpodcast or twitter @podcastrecords or IG at instagram.com/recordsrevisitedpodcast/ or join our Patreon at patreon.com/RecordsRevisitedPodcast

SynopsisAt Carnegie Hall on today's date in 2015, the Met Chamber Ensemble gave the posthumous premiere of a new work by American composer Elliott Carter, who died in November 2012, a month or so shy of what would have been his 104th birthday.The debut of The American Sublime marked the last world premiere performance of Carter's 75-year-long composing career.Hearing Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at Carnegie Hall in the 1920s inspired Carter to become a composer. A high school teacher introduced him to Charles Ives, who became a mentor. By the mid-1930s, Carter was writing music in the “populist modern” style, à la Copland, but during a year spent in the Arizona desert in 1950, Carter finished his String Quartet No. 1 — 40 minutes of music uncompromising in both its technical difficulty and structural intricacy."That crazy long first quartet was played in Belgium," Carter recalled. "It was played over the radio, and I got a letter from a coal miner, in French, who said, 'I liked your piece. It's just like digging for coal.' He meant that it was hard and took effort."Music Played in Today's ProgramElliott Carter (1908-2012): Horn Concerto (2006); Martin Owen, fh; BBC Symphony; Oliver Knussen, cond. Bridge 9314

SynopsisPerhaps there is some poetic justice in the fact that maverick American composers like Charles Ives had a hard time getting performances of their music during their lifetime, only to be both lionized and frequently performed after their deaths. Conversely, many mainstream American composers who were lionized and frequently performed when they were alive seldom show up on concert programs anymore — and in some cases, that's a darn shame.Take Walter Piston, for example, who in his day was regarded as one of America's premier composers. On today's date in 1957, his Viola Concerto received its premiere performance by the Boston Symphony, in a concert conducted by Charles Munch, with soloist Joseph de Pasquale, a Curtis Institute professor and first-chair violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra.It's a lovely, lyrical work and a terrific showcase for a great violist. But have you ever heard it in concert — or on the radio, for that matter? A British reviewer, writing in the UK's Gramophone magazine, was bowled over by this music, writing, “Piston's concerto opens pensively, quickly builds to an aching climax … in the final pages, a sweeter lyricism that prepares the listener perfectly for the playful syncopations of the exuberant finale.”Music Played in Today's ProgramWalter Piston (1951-1987): Viola Concerto; Randolph Kelly, viola; Latvian National Symphony; Alexandrs Vilumanis, cond. Albany TROY-558

SynopsisHenry Cowell was one of the most prolific of all 20th-century American composers. Some of his works are aggressively experimental in nature, while others tap into folk traditions and world music. The range and variety are quite remarkable. Cowell wrote so many works, in fact, that even the composer himself often had trouble keeping track of all he had written.Take today's genial little Woodwind Quintet, for example. It was written in the early 1930s for the great French flute virtuoso Georges Barrère, who commissioned and premiered many new works involving his instrument. In 1934, Barrère even made a recording of the suite for New Music Quarterly, a publishing venture bankrolled by none other than the retired insurance executive and part-time composer Charles Ives.After that recording, Cowell went on producing new works, and the manuscript of his Woodwind Quintet remained with Barrère, who apparently just filed it away. The music didn't surface again until 1947, when it was discovered among the late flutist's collection of scores.On today's date in 1948, Cowell's Woodwind Suite received its first concert performance at Columbia University in New York City and quickly established itself as one of Cowell's most popular compositions.Music Played in Today's ProgramHenry Cowell (1897-1965): Suite for Woodwind Quintet; Solaris Capstone 8677

Joel Sachs talks about his way into new music, New music in New York City, the New Juilliard Ensemble and the Focus Festival, Charles Ives, an Indonesian opera, the new productions at the Metropolitan Opera. He shares his huge wisdom and experience.

My friend Paul Kirby is a musical polymath: a tenor of excellence who performs throughout the world as both a soloist and as a valued member in small vocal ensembles; he is also a killer banjo player and bluegrass singer, and a member of the Norwegian group Stemmespesialisten that combines voice lessons, voice massage and coaching. In addition he has worked as a musical administrator and is a Timani teacher in training: an education that focuses on in-depth anatomical knowledge in order to enhance movement and playing for musicians. He has also been a valued and trusted friend of mine for the past twenty years, and was a major encouragement and support when I was putting Countemelody on its feet. For his favorite episode of the podcast, Paul has chosen the Fourth of July episode I posted in 2021. In this episode I bring you a gorgeous conglomeration of great baritones and bass-baritones performing songs by the emblematic American composer Charles Ives. In this episode we hear thirty of his songs which display a wide range of compositional, musical, and literary styles. Some of the greatest Ives interpreters are represented here, including Thomas Stewart, Samuel Ramey, Donald Gramm, Sanford Sylvan, Kurt Ollmann, Gerald Finley, William Sharp, and William Parker, accompanied by Alan Mandel, Dalton Baldwin, Alan Feinberg, Warren Jones, Steven Blier, Craig Rutenberg, and others. I finish the program with Jerry Hadley performing that most celebratory of Ives's songs, “The Circus Band.” Since this episode was first posted I have gone on to produce full episodes on Donald Gramm, William Parker, and Jerry Hadley. Thanks, Paul, for your support, encouragement, and wonderful introduction to this episode that also does not shy away from the question of Ives's alleged homophobia, but remains focused on the composer himself as well as the array of wonderful performers who celebrate Ives's fascinating combination of old-fashioned Americana and revolutionary compositional techniques. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford.

SynopsisOn today's date in 1939, pianist John Kirkpatrick gave a recital at Town Hall in New York City that included the New York premiere of the Concord Sonata, by American composer Charles Ives.Ives had self-published his Concord Sonata some 20 years earlier and sent copies of it free to anyone he thought might be interested, including then-prominent composer and teacher Rubin Goldmark, who, in 1921, was giving composition lessons to young Aaron Copland. Copland recalled seeing the Concord Sonata on Goldmark's piano but was not allowed to borrow it. “You stay away from it,” Goldmark warned him. “I don't want you to be contaminated by stuff like that.”In 1934, Kirkpatrick saw a copy of the Concord Sonata in Paris and wrote Ives: “I have decided quite resolutely to learn the whole sonata.” It would take him five years, but Kirkpatrick's Town Hall recital would put both him and Ives on the map.A New York Times critic wrote, “This sonata is exceptionally great music — it is, indeed, the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply felt and essential. ... Kirkpatrick's performance was that of a poet and a master, an unobtrusive minister of genius.”Music Played in Today's ProgramCharles Ives (1874-1954) Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840-1860) Marc-André Hamelin, piano New World 378

In this episode, Dave and Andrew explore a work for string orchestra that Kyle Gann opined was the first experimental composition to win the Pulitzer since Charles Ives. Given how much Dave loves Ives, how does he react to Whispers Out of Time? How does the piece fit in the context of music written in the late 1980s?   If you'd like more information about Roger Reynolds, we recommend: Kyle Gann's American Music in the 20th Century (Schirmer, 1997). Roger Reynolds's "Ideals and Realities: A Composer in America" American Music Vol. 25, No. 1 (2007): 4-49.

SynopsisOn today's date in 1949, at Carnegie Hall, Leopold Stokowski conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of the last major work of American composer Carl Ruggles.In a letter to his friend Charles Ives, or “Charlie” as he called him, Ruggles hinted that in this piece, he was perhaps, "stumbling on something new.” Another composer-friend, Edgard Varèse, agreed, but wrote: “The use [of intervals of] 5ths and 4ths is very remarkable, because that was done hundreds of years ago — let's call it Organum.” And so Organum, a word referring to an early medieval polyphony, became the title of Ruggles' final orchestral piece.After that, Ruggles, then already 73, pretty much gave up on the musical establishment and devoted himself to painting. In 1966, he moved to a nursing home, where he died in 1971 at 95.Shortly before his death, Ruggles was visited by Michael Tilson Thomas, who recalls the feisty old man saying, “Now don't go feeling sorry [for me]. I don't hang around this place, you know. Hell, each day I go out and make the universe anew — all over!”Music Played in Today's ProgramCarl Ruggles (1876-1971) Organum; Japan Philharmonic; Akeo Watanabe, cond. CRI 715

Baritone and composer Roderick Williams and violinist Jennifer Pike - the youngest ever winner of BBC Young Musician of the Year at the time in 2002, aged just 12 - join Cerys Matthews and Jeffrey Boakye to add five more tracks to the playlist. The musical choices take us from one of the most famous tunes in the UK (composer unknown) to a Labi Siffre hit famously sampled by Eminem, via arguably the most recognisable film theme of all time. Labi Siffre makes an appearance to look back on his 1975 classic. Producer Jerome Weatherald Presented, with music direction, by Cerys Matthews and Jeffrey Boakye The five tracks in this week's playlist: God Save the Queen (from 1888 and 1898) In Flanders Fields by Charles Ives and John McCrae Jaws – Main Title by John Williams Violin Sonata No.2 in G Major: III Perpetuum mobile by Maurice Ravel I Got the... by Labi Siffre Other music in this episode: Yeke Yeke by Mory Kante Let's Go Fly a Kite from Mary Poppins God Save the King, performed by Roderick Williams and Le Concert Spirituel Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers) - the National Anthem of Wales Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja from The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Vespers of 1610: Deus in adiutorium meum intende by Claudio Monteverdi Opening of La Valse by Maurice Ravel To Those Who Pass the Borough from Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov My Name Is by Eminem

durée : 00:11:53 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Albane Penaranda - Cet épisode de Coda - Les fiançailles de Satan, diffusé pour la première fois en 1995, entremêle des lectures du sabbat d'après "La Sorcière" de Jules Michelet et des "Batailles nocturnes" de Carlo Ginzburg, avec des musiques de Franz Liszt, Charles Ives et Philippe Hersant.

SynopsisOn today's date in 1959, Leonard Bernstein celebrated his 41st birthday in Moscow. The New York Philharmonic was embarked on an extensive world tour, which included three weeks in the Soviet Union.Their August 25th concert proved controversial, offering two works of Igor Stravinsky, a composer still condemned in the Soviet Union as “bourgeois” and “decadent.” Even more daring, Bernstein opened his concert with “The Unanswered Question,” a short piece by the American composer, Charles Ives.Even worse, Bernstein broke traditional Soviet protocol by talking directly to the audience through an interpreter, explaining Ives' unusual philosophy of music. The enthusiastic audience response after the Ives led to it being encored.This really upset the Soviet authorities, and the music critic of the Ministry of Culture wrote, “Before this four-minute piece Bernstein spoke for six minutes. Only the good manners of the hospitable public resulted in a ripple of cool applause. Nevertheless, the conductor, setting modesty aside, himself suggested that the piece be repeated.”Bernstein, although furious at what he called “an unforgivable lie,” was persuaded to forgo any further controversial lectures from the podium for the remainder of the Soviet tour.Music Played in Today's ProgramCharles Ives (1874 – 1954) The Unanswered Question New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor. Sony Classical 46701

Posting a few days early in celebration of the Fourth of July and in further recognition of the beloved American soprano Roberta Alexander, whose birthday we celebrated on Countermelody last March. Ms. Alexander has made a number of exquisite recordings over the years, many of them for the small Dutch label Etcetera. Many of these releases feature songs by the greatest American composers: Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Samuel Barber, as well as two releases featuring light classical and Broadway songs. The recordings range in date from 1976 (a live performance of Ives at the Holland Festival, in honor of the American Bicentennial) through 2009 (a live performance of Roberta as Maria in Porgy and Bess conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt). We also hear material by Berlin, Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Alec Wilder, Bock and Harnick, John Jacob Niles, and Tom Lehrer, accompanied by pianists Reinbert de Leeuw, Roger Vignoles, Alfred Heller, Brian Masuda, Tan Crone, and David Triestram and conductors Kees Bakels and Edo de Waart. Throughout, Roberta Alexander's approach to this material is perfectly on target, revealing both pathos and a crackling sense of (often sardonic) humor, all grounded in a love of the music of her native country and wrapped in a red, white, and blue bow. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season.

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

Synopsis These days composer John J. Becker is almost totally forgotten, but back in the 1930s his name was linked with Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Wallingford Riegger as one of the so-called "American Five" composers of what was dubbed "ultra-modern" music. From 1928 to 1935, Becker taught at the College of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and briefly assembled a "Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra" to give Midwest premieres of works by Ives and other ultra-modernists. From 1935 to 1941, Becker was the Minnesota State director of the Federal Music Project, one of President Roosevelt's initiatives to provide work for American musicians during the Depression years. On today's date in 1937, at the old St. Paul Auditorium, Becker conducted the Federal Music Project's Twin Cities Orchestra in a program that included the premiere performance of his own Symphony No. 3, subtitled "Symphonia Brevis." This "ultra-modern" symphony was met with an "ultra-conservative" review in The Saint Paul Pioneer Press, whose critic wrote: "It consists of spasmodic little excursions… percussive barrages… ideas that seem to run out before the score comes to a close, with the consequent suggestion of that spurious vitality exhibited by decapitated fowls." Decades later, three years before his death in 1961, Becker, along with a few other surviving members of the "American Five," was invited to take a bow from the stage of Carnegie Hall at one of Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic concerts which featured his "Sinfonia Brevis." Music Played in Today's Program John J. Becker (1886 - 1961) Sinfonia Brevis (Symphony No. 3) Louisville Orchestra; Jorge Mester, conductor. Albany TROY-027

Synopsis On today's date in 1961, the American composer Wallingford Riegger died in New York City, a month shy of what would have been his 76th birthday. Riegger was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1885. Like many American musicians back then, he studied in Germany. In the years before America entered World War I, Riegger worked in both the US and Europe: for three years he was the principal cellist with the St. Paul Symphony in Minnesota; he then served as an assistant voice coach and conductor at German opera houses in Würzburg and Königsberg. Returning home in 1918, Riegger spent ten years teaching, eventually settling in New York in 1928. There he got to know Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, and other “ultra-modern” composers. Riegger's early music had been in the traditional mode, but he quickly established himself as one of the leading figures in the more experimental American music scene. In the ‘30s, Riegger, like Copland, worked with the pioneers of modern American dance, including Martha Graham, and composed ballet scores. From 1938 on, however, he concentrated on non-theatrical scores, including symphonies and chamber works. Riegger's mature works blend atonality with traditional musical forms and dance rhythms, even on occasion some jazzy American syncopation. Music Played in Today's Program Wallingford Riegger (1885 – 1961) Wind Quintet New York Woodwind Quintet Bridge 9068

Synopsis It's time once again for our "Composer Quiz": Name a famous American composer who was also a successful businessman. If you answered insurance executive "Charles Ives," Jay will show you what's under the box. But if your answer was "John Alden Carpenter," vice president of George B. Carpenter and Co., supplies and equipment dealer, we'll just pull back the curtain and show you all your prizes! John Alden Carpenter was born in 1876 near Chicago, and, after studies out East, entered his father's business back home, eventually becoming its Vice President. Fortunately for the budding composer, the firm was largely run by his brothers, and Carpenter had enough free time to devote to his music. On today's date in 1915, the Chicago Symphony premiered Carpenter's first big orchestral work, a suite entitled Adventures in a Perambulator. (You get extra points if you knew a perambulator is a baby buggy.) Anyway… Carpenter's pram piece was a big success, and he wrote a string of other popular works, including a ballet based on the "Krazy Kat" comic strip of his day, and one entitled Skyscrapers, a jazzy and topical tribute to the transformation of urban America in the 1920s. Unlike the unconventional Charles Ives, who toiled away in obscurity, the more conventional Carpenter was very famous in his day. Ironically, while Ives' fame only increased after his death in 1954, when Carpenter died in 1951, his music rapidly fell from fashion. Music Played in Today's Program John Alden Carpenter (1876 -1951) Adventrues in a Perambulator National Symphony of Ukraine; John McLaughlin Williams, conductor. Naxos 8.559065

Synopsis It might seem farfetched that Winona Ryder, Emma Watson, and Charles Ives might have anything in common, but there IS a connection of sorts: Ryder appeared in a 1994 film based on Louisa May Alcott's classic 19th century novel, “Little Women,” Emma Watson appears in the 2019 remake, and, in 1913, American composer Charles Ives composed the second movement of his “Concord” sonata for piano, a movement titled “The Alcotts,” which evokes Louisa May, her novel and her real-life family and friends, who included the New England “Transcendentalists,” Emerson and Thoreau. Set during the American Civil War, Alcott's “Little Women” chronicles the coming of age of four young women in Concord, Massachusetts.  The story of has charmed readers and film-goers around the world.  Ives's music, like Alcott's novel, is nostalgic, affectionate, and quietly powerful. The contemporary American composer, Mark Adamo, crafted an opera based on Alcott's “Little Women” which premiered on today's date in 1998 at the Opera Studio of Houston Grand Opera.  After its premiere, that company's general director, David Gockley, pronounced Adamo's opera “destined to become an American classic,” and since its successful Houston Opera revival in 2000, Adamo's “Little Women” has been staged again and again, to equal acclaim from audiences and critics. Music Played in Today's Program Charles Ives (1874 - 1954) The Alcotts, fr Concord Sonata Anthony de Mare, piano CRI 837 Mark Adamo (b. 1962) Little Women Houston Grand Opera; Patrick Summers, conductor. Ondine 988

Synopsis Today's date marks the birth anniversaries of two major 20th century American composers: Carl Ruggles was born in East Marion, Massachusetts on today's date in 1876, and Henry Cowell, in Menlo Park, California in 1897. Ruggles was a tough old bird, who wrote a small handful of tough, uncompromising musical works. He was the conductor of a symphony orchestra in Winona, Minnesota from 1908-1912, a teacher at the University of Miami from 1937-1943, and a talented painter to boot. His first music to be performed in public was entitled A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, an apt description of Ruggles himself, a crusty loner who once claimed the only man he ever met who could out-swear him was his friend and colleague Charles Ives. He eventually retired to an old schoolhouse in Arlington, Vermont. Ruggles's striking orchestral works, with titles like Sun-Treader and Men and Mountains, are occasionally revived, but he remains just a name for most 21st century concert-goers. Henry Cowell was a much more genial, out-going sort: a composer, performer and teacher who wrote a great deal of music, ranging from the dissonant and experimental to the beguilingly lyrical. Cowell was an early apostle of what we now call "world music," and in 1956 undertook a world tour, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the US State Department, which included lengthy stays in Iran, India and Japan, and resulted in Cowell writing a number of musical works incorporating ideas and musical instruments from those countries. Music Played in Today's Program Carl Ruggles (1897 - 1971) Sun-Treader Cleveland Orchestra; Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor. Cleveland Orchestra 75th Anniversary CD Edition 093-75 Henry Cowell (1897 - 1965) Homage to Iran Leopold Avakian, violin; Mitchell Andrews, piano; Basil Bahar, Persian drum CRI 836

Is classical music dying? For John Adams the answer is an emphatic no. Considered by Tyler to be America's greatest living composer, he may well be one of the people responsible for keeping it alive. John's contemporary classical music is some of the most regularly performed and he is well-known for his historically themed operas such as Nixon in China, Doctor Atomic, and most recently Antony and Cleopatra. He is also a conductor and author of, in Tyler's words, a “thoughtful and substantive” autobiography. He joined Tyler to discuss why architects have it easier than opera composers, what drew him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, why he prefers great popular music to the classical tradition, the “memory spaces” he uses to compose, the role of Christianity in his work, the anxiety of influence, the unusual life of Charles Ives, the relationship between the availability and appreciation of music, how contemporary music got a bad rap, his favorite Bob Dylan album, why he doesn't think San Francisco was crucial to his success, why he doesn't believe classical music is dead or even dying, his fascination with Oppenheimer, the problem with film composing, his letter to Leonard Bernstein, what he's doing next, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded September 14th, 2022 Support the podcast by making a donation during this holiday season! Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Charles Ives loved to put hymns into his music. Several other composers borrowed hymn tunes; here are several examples from 20th Century American compositions.

In 1929, the conductor Nicolas Slonimsky contacted the American composer Charles Ives about performing one of his works. This was a bit of a surprise for Ives, since he had a checkered reputation among musicians and audience members, if they even were familiar with his name at all. In fact, he was much more famous during his lifetime as an extremely successful insurance executive! Ives mostly composed in his spare time, and his music was mostly ignored or ridiculed as that of a person suffering from a crisis of mental health. Most of his music was never performed during his lifetime, and even today, he is thought of as a great but extremely eccentric composer, and orchestras and chamber ensembles often struggle to sell tickets if his name appears on the program. But for those who love Ives, there is an almost evangelical desire to spread his music to the world. I'm one of those people, and I'm finally fulfilling a pledge to myself to do a full show devoted to a single work of arguably the greatest and most under appreciated American composer of all time, Charles Ives. The piece I chose to talk about today is Three Places in New England, or the New England Symphony, a piece that is a perfect amalgam of what makes Ives such a spectacular composer - his radical innovations, his ahead of his time experiments, his humor, his humanity, his warmth, and the staggering creativity that marked all of Ives' great works. We'll start with a little biography of Ives in case you're not familiar with him, and then we'll dive into Three Places in New England, and by the end, I hope , if you're not already, that I will have converted you into an Ives fan for life! Join us!