Podcasts about David Tudor

Episode 175 Chapter 34, Live Electronic Music— Foundations. Works Recommended from my book, Electronic and Experimental Music  Welcome to the Archive of Electronic Music. This is Thom Holmes. This podcast is produced as a companion to my book, Electronic and Experimental Music, published by Routledge. Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in the text and an associated list of recommended works, also called Listen in the text. They provide listening examples of vintage electronic works featured in the text. The works themselves can be enjoyed without the book and I hope that they stand as a chronological survey of important works in the history of electronic music. Be sure to tune-in to other episodes of the podcast where we explore a wide range of electronic music in many styles and genres, all drawn from my archive of vintage recordings. There is a complete playlist for this episode on the website for the podcast. Let's get started with the listening guide to Chapter 34, Live Electronic Music— Foundations from my book Electronic and Experimental music.   Playlist: LIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC FOUNDATIONS   Time Track Time Start Introduction –Thom Holmes 01:36 00:00 1.     John Cage, “Radio Music” (1956) from John Cage. Performed on radios by Gianni-Emilio Simonetti, Juan Hidalgo, Walter Marchetti. Each of these performers used a Panasonic multi-band portable Radio Model RF-1600 B receiver. 04:33 01:40 2.     John Cage, “Cartridge Music” (1960) from Music For Merce Cunningham. Phonograph Cartridges, Amplified Small Objects, David Tudor, Michael Pugliese, Takehisa Kosugi. Recorded at Paris, France in September 1988. 18:53 06:12 3.     Alvin Lucier, “Music for Solo Performer” (excerpt) (1965). Live recording from 1975. Brainwave amplification performed by Alvin Lucier; electronics, Nicolas Collins. 11:46 25:04 4.     Gordon Mumma, “Horn” (1965) from Live-Electronic Music. Electronic modification of horn sounds. Horn, Gordon Mumma; Cybersonic console, designed by Mumma, operated by William Ribbens; Recorded by George Cacioppo; Voice, George Cacioppo, Robert Ashley. For a hornist, two voices, and a cybersonic console operator. 09:36 36:48 5.     John Cage, “Variations V” (1965). Performance on November 11, 1966, Théâtre de Champs Élysées, Paris. Performers, John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma. 39:57 46:10 6.     David Tudor, “Bandoneon ! (A Combine)” (1966) from The Art Of David Tudor 1963–1992. Composed and performed by David Tudor. 14:15 01:26:43 7.     David Behrman, “Runthrough” (1967–68) from Wave Train. For homemade synthesizers and photocell mixers. Homemade Synthesizer, Photocell Mixer, Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley. 12:11 01:40:26 8.     Gordon Mumma, “Telepos” (1972) from Music For Merce 1952-2009.  Recorded live on February 2, 1972, La Fenice, Venice. Controlled Sounds Activated By Dancers With Telemetry-accelerometer Belts, Gordon Mumma. 18:38 01:52:34 9.     Pauline Oliveros, Rehearsals for “In Memoriam, Nikola Tesla” (excerpt) (1972). Recorded live September 1972, Köln, Germany.  No performers listed. 11:56 02:11:06 10.   Robert Ashley, “Automatic Writing” (1974–79) from Automatic Writing.  Electronics, Polymoog, Voice, Words, Produce, Recorded, Mixed by Robert Ashley; Mixing Assistance, Rich LePage; Switching Circuit Designed and Built by Paul DeMarinis; Translated by Monsa Norberg; Voice, Mimi Johnson. 46:00 02:23:04   Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations. Original music by Thom Holmes can be found on iTunes and Bandcamp.  

Episode 176 Chapter 35, Live Electronic Music— Historical Practices. Works Recommended from my book, Electronic and Experimental Music  Welcome to the Archive of Electronic Music. This is Thom Holmes. This podcast is produced as a companion to my book, Electronic and Experimental Music, published by Routledge. Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in the text and an associated list of recommended works, also called Listen in the text. They provide listening examples of vintage electronic works featured in the text. The works themselves can be enjoyed without the book and I hope that they stand as a chronological survey of important works in the history of electronic music. Be sure to tune-in to other episodes of the podcast where we explore a wide range of electronic music in many styles and genres, all drawn from my archive of vintage recordings. There is a complete playlist for this episode on the website for the podcast. Let's get started with the listening guide to Chapter 35, Live Electronic Music— Historical Practices from my book Electronic and Experimental music.   Playlist: LIVE ELECTRONIC MUSIC—HISTORICAL PRACTICES   Time Track Time Start Introduction –Thom Holmes 01:34 00:00 1.     Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Mikrophonie I” (1964) from Mikrophonie I · Mikrophonie II.   Mikrophonist 1, Johannes Fritsch; Mikrophonist 2, Harald Bojé; Electronic Filters and Potentiometers 1, Karlheinz Stockhausen; Electronic Filters and Potentiometers 2, Hugh Davies, Jaap Spek; Tam-tam, Aloys Kontarsky; Tam-tam, Fred Alings.  Brüsseler Version 1965 recorded at WDR, Cologne. 07:24 01:42 2.     AMM, “In The Realm Of Nothing Whatever” (1966) from AMMMusic 1966. Cello, Accordion, Clarinet, Transistor Radio, Lawrence Sheaff; Electric Guitar, Transistor Radio, Keith Rowe; Music by, Cardew, Prévost, Rowe, Sheaff, Gare; Percussion, Eddie Prévost; Piano, Cello, Transistor Radio, Cornelius Cardew; Tenor Saxophone, Violin, Lou Gare. Recorded on the 8th and 27th June 1966 at Sound Techniques. 13:22 09:06 3.     Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), “SpaceCraft” (1967) from MEV 40. Mbira Thumb Piano Mounted On A Ten-litre Agip Motor Oil Can, Contact Microphones, Amplified Trumpet, Voice, Alvin Curran; Amplified Glass Plate With Attached Springs, Contact Microphones, Frederic Rzewski; Homemade Synthesizer from Electronic Organ Parts, Allan Bryant; Moog Modular Synthesizer, Contact Microphones, Voice, Richard Teitelbaum; Tenor Saxophone, Ivan Vandor; Voice, Carol Plantamura. 30:45 22:26 4.     David Tudor, “Rainforest Version One” (1968) from Rainforest. Live electronics, David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi. Used transducers to amplify objects. Recorded by Rob Miller. 21:50 53:10 5.     Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Kurzwellen” (1968), excerpt from Festival of Hits. Composed By, Mixed By, Electronics, Filters, Potentiometers, Karlheinz Stockhausen; Electronium, Harald Bojé; Tamtam, Alfred Alings, Rolf Gehlhaar; Piano, Aloys Kontarsky; Electric Viola, Johannes G. Fritsch. This is the opening of this long work, excerpted for this strange collection of greatest “hits” by Stockhausen (you had to be in 1970 to understand this). Kurzwellen is a piece where the musicians need to improvise and react to signals they receive on randomly tuned shortwave radios. This is from the Cologne recording made in the Rhenus studio in Godorf for the Cologne Radio (WDR, Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln) on the 8th and 9th of April 1969 (53'30), which was record 2 of the original 2-record set. By the way, this ensemble also featured the Electronium Pi, made by Hohner beginning in 1952. It was a monophonic, electronic keyboard instrument and was an add-on instrument for the piano mounted under the keyboard, which is the model used by Stockhausen. His keyboardist, while Harald Bojé used the accordion-like model. 06:19 01:14:56 6.     The Music Improvisation Company, “Tuck” (1970) from The Music Improvisation Company. Electric Guitar, Derek Bailey; Live Electronics, Hugh Davies; Percussion, Jamie Muir; Soprano Saxophone, Evan Parker. 03:00 01:21:14 7.     David Tudor, “Rainforest IV” (1973) from Rainforest IV.  Composed in 1973 by David Tudor; performed by Composers Inside Electronics (David Tudor, Martin Kalve, Philip Edelstein, Ralph Jones, Bill Viola, John Driscoll). Recorded at the exhibition "Für Augen und Ohren - Von der Spieluhr zum akustischen (Environment (For eyes and ears - from the mechanical clock to the acoustic environment)" at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, January 1980. 25:12 01:24:24 8.     Maryanne Amacher, “"Head Rhythm 1" And "Plaything 2" (1999) from Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear). Electroacoustic composer of sound installations, best known for her incorporation of otoacoustic emissions -- sounds that seem to be emanating from inside one's own head. This track plays with that concept and sets your brain up to experience itself, so to speak. 10:04 01:49:36 9.     Caroline Park, “Grain 5” (2011) from Grain. This is a cassette release by Park, often known her for generative composition work and electronic improvisations based on parameters that she defines. Recorded, performed by Caroline Park. 09:05 01:59:32 10.   Caterina Barbieri. “This Causes Consciousness To Fracture” (2017) from Patterns Of Consciousness.  Italian composer and musician from Bologna. This album was created using analog synthesis. Barbieri has said, “In Patterns of Consciousness I was interested in exploring the power of sound on our consciousness. I wanted to explore how a pattern creates a certain state of consciousness and how the gradual transformation of that pattern can affect that state of consciousness. I believe that sound is a tool for the exploration, reconfiguration and expansion of human perceptions.” I find this to be in a similar psychological vein as the Amacher work also heard in this episode. 22:44 02:08:36 11.   Sarah Davachi, “First Cadence” (2021) from Antiphonals. Composed, recorded, performed, Mellotron (bass flute, recorder, oboe), Tape Echo, Sarah Davachi. 05:48 02:31:20 12.   Asha Tamirisa, “Live Performance,”(2023) at the Waterworks 2023: Festival of Experimental Sound. Laptop synthesis, snare drums, Asha Tamirisa. Soundtrack for a video recorded by Wenhua Shi & Nick Stevens, video editing by Nick Stevens, and audio recording and mixing, Matthew Azevedo. 25:10 02:37:02   Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations. Original music by Thom Holmes can be found on iTunes and Bandcamp.

Danų kompozitorė Puce Mary (g. 1989) ir amerikiečių pianistas Davidas Tudoras (1926-1996) labai skirtingi artistai, tačiau juos sieja elektroninė muzika. Itin įtakingas avangardinio repertuaro atlikėjas Tudoras vienas pirmųjų ėmėsi elektroninės kūrybos namų sąlygomis, pasitelkdamas kuklias anuometines priemones. Garso meno propaguotoja Puce Mary tai daro šiuolaikiškai, miksuodama gyvai ir siekdama begalinės transformacijos įspūdžio.Laidos autoriai Šarūnas Nakas ir Mindaugas Urbaitis

Today we explore the mythology around John Cage's visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage's experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review, Mack Hagood explores the relationship between sound, self, and meaning-making. To use a term Cage loved, the truth is indeterminate.  For our Patreon members we have bonus content: Mack's “What's Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.  Writing and media content featured in this episode:  Mack's essay “Cage's Echoes of the Anechoic,” in AHR Issue 70 (2022).  Nam June Paik's 1973 video Global Groove  John Cage's 1959 album with David Tudor, Indeterminacy  John Cage's book Silence (Wesleyan, 1961). The video Can Silence Actually Drive you Crazy by Veritasium  Terry Gross's 2014 Fresh Air interview with Trevor Cox  The album Naxi Live by Jang San and the Dayan Naxi orchestra  Shani Diluka's performance of “Glassworks: Opening” by Philip Glass  Amit Pinchevsky's book Echo (MIT, 2022) Helen Rees' book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford, 2011) Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.  Original music and sound design by Mack Hagood.  Special thanks to Monique Rooney and Australian Humanities Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today we explore the mythology around John Cage's visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage's experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review, Mack Hagood explores the relationship between sound, self, and meaning-making. To use a term Cage loved, the truth is indeterminate.  For our Patreon members we have bonus content: Mack's “What's Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.  Writing and media content featured in this episode:  Mack's essay “Cage's Echoes of the Anechoic,” in AHR Issue 70 (2022).  Nam June Paik's 1973 video Global Groove  John Cage's 1959 album with David Tudor, Indeterminacy  John Cage's book Silence (Wesleyan, 1961). The video Can Silence Actually Drive you Crazy by Veritasium  Terry Gross's 2014 Fresh Air interview with Trevor Cox  The album Naxi Live by Jang San and the Dayan Naxi orchestra  Shani Diluka's performance of “Glassworks: Opening” by Philip Glass  Amit Pinchevsky's book Echo (MIT, 2022) Helen Rees' book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford, 2011) Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.  Original music and sound design by Mack Hagood.  Special thanks to Monique Rooney and Australian Humanities Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Today we explore the mythology around John Cage's visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage's experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review, Mack Hagood explores the relationship between sound, self, and meaning-making. To use a term Cage loved, the truth is indeterminate.  For our Patreon members we have bonus content: Mack's “What's Good” segment. Join at patreon.com/phantompower.  Writing and media content featured in this episode:  Mack's essay “Cage's Echoes of the Anechoic,” in AHR Issue 70 (2022).  Nam June Paik's 1973 video Global Groove  John Cage's 1959 album with David Tudor, Indeterminacy  John Cage's book Silence (Wesleyan, 1961). The video Can Silence Actually Drive you Crazy by Veritasium  Terry Gross's 2014 Fresh Air interview with Trevor Cox  The album Naxi Live by Jang San and the Dayan Naxi orchestra  Shani Diluka's performance of “Glassworks: Opening” by Philip Glass  Amit Pinchevsky's book Echo (MIT, 2022) Helen Rees' book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford, 2011) Today's show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.  Original music and sound design by Mack Hagood.  Special thanks to Monique Rooney and Australian Humanities Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, completes his final official duties today before stepping down. So what's next for the Church of England? And how are women playing a part in the reform of safeguarding? Nuala McGovern is joined by the BBC's Religion Editor, Aleem Maqbool. Also joining the conversation is Rowena Pailing, who used to be Vice Dean of Blackburn Cathedral but who resigned over what she calls safeguarding concerns, and Reverend Jenny Penn, who was an important part of the investigation into former priest David Tudor.Pencils at the ready – because comedian and presenter Mel Giedroyc is back with a new ITV gameshow, taking Pictionary from our living rooms to the TV screen. Mel tells Nuala about getting competitive during family games nights, how she's enjoyed getting older, and why blind optimism is both her best and worst trait.Women in Syria are calling for recognition from the new regime, and asking to be involved in the running of the country. The caretaker government has made several appointments of former al-Qaeda hardliners that have caused concern about what the new leadership intends for women in the country. BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet joins Nuala to tell us more.What's the best advice you've ever had? Or even the best you've given? Nuala is joined by grandmother-granddaughter pair Christine and Christina, whose video on TikTok of Christine giving Christina advice has been seen by millions of people. They'll speak about going viral, their special relationship and how they hope their videos help other people. Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Lottie Garton

The BBC's religion editor Aleem Maqbool hears from sexual abuse victims who say they were let down by senior church leaders for decades. Priest David Tudor was allowed to continue working within the Church of England - despite widespread concerns about his behaviour. Now there are calls for the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell to resign over his handling of the case. He is due to take temporary charge of the church in the New Year following the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. The Church of England says File on 4's investigation into the case of David Tudor has 'revealed a catalogue of past safeguarding decisions, that allowed someone who was considered a risk in the 1980s to return to ministry in the 1990s.' This, they say, should never have happened.Reporter: Aleem Maqbool Producers: Steve Swann and Hayley Mortimer Technical producer: Craig Boardman Production coordinator: Tim Fernley Editor: Carl Johnston

Marcado en un principio por John Cage, de quien incorpora la aleatoriedad y los sistemas alternativos de notación musical, el compositor norteamericano evoluciona hacia obras cada vez más extensas y minimalistas que requieren—o proponen—la suspensión del tiempo._____Has escuchadoNeither (1977) / textos de Samuel Beckett. Petra Hoffmann, soprano; Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks; Kwamé Ryan, director. Col Legno (2000)Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981). Arne Deforce, violonchelo; Yutaka Oya, piano. Aeon (2008)Piece for Four Pianos (1957). David Tudor, Edwin Hymovitz, Morton Feldman, Russell Sherman, pianos. Edition RZ (2007)String Quartet II (1983). Ives Ensemble. hat[now]ART (2007)The King of Denmark (1964). Max Neuhaus, percusión. Sony (2013)_____ Selección bibliográficaBEAL, Amy C., “Time Canvasses: Morton Feldman and the Painters of the New York School”. En: Music and Modern Art. Editado por James Leggio. Routledge, 2002*BLASIUS, Leslie, “Late Feldman and the Remnants of Virtuosity”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 42, n.º 1 (2004), pp. 32-83*BOUTWELL, Brett, “Morton Feldman's Graphic Notation: Projections and Trajectories”. Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 6, n.º 4 (2011-2012), pp. 457-482CERVERÓ, Joan Josep, Hibridaciones entre música y pintura: la relación de Morton Feldman y Mark Rothko en Rothko Chapel. Tesis doctoral, Universitat Politècnica de València, 2017CLINE, David, The Graph Music of Morton Feldman. Cambridge University Press, 2016COSTELO, Catherine, “The Sounds of the Sounds Themselves: Analyzing the Early Music of Morton Feldman”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 34, n.º 1 (1996), pp. 6-27*DELIO, Thomas, The Music of Morton Feldman. Greenwood Press, 1995DOHONEY, Ryan, Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022FELDMAN, Morton, Écrits et paroles. Editado por Jean-Yves Bosseur. L'Harmattan, 1998—, Give my Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. Exact Change, 2000*—, Morton Feldman Says. Selected Interviews and Lectures, 1964-1987. Editado por Chris Villars. Hyphen Press, 2006—, Pensamientos verticales. Caja Negra, 2012GAREAU, Philip, La musique de Morton Feldman ou le temps en liberté. L'Harmattan, 2006JIMÉNEZ CARMONA, Susana, “Suspensiones temporales: sonido y temporalidad en Luigi Nono y Morton Feldman”. En: Musicología en el siglo XXI: nuevos retos, nuevos enfoques. Coordinado por Begoña Lola y Adela Presas. Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2018*JOHNSON, Steven, “Rothko Chapel and Rothko's Chapel”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 32, n.º 2, (1994) pp. 6-53*JOHNSON, Steven (ed.), The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Edgard Varèse, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg. Routledge, 2002KISSANE, Séna (ed.), Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts. Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010LAWS, Catherine, Headaches among the Overtones: Music in Beckett. Rodopi, 2013NOBLE, Alistair, Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman. Ashgate Pub, 2013SAFATLE, Vladimir, “Morton Feldman comme critique de l'idéologie: expression et politique dans Rothko Chapel”. En: Expression et geste musical: actes du colloque des 8 et 9 avril 2010 à l'Institut national d'histoire de l'art de Paris. Editado por Susanne Kogler y Jean-Paul Olive. L'Harmattan, 2013*SNIJDERS, John, “That is Not Freedom, that is Taking License: The Pitfalls in Performing Morton Feldman's Graph Scores”. En: The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts: Spontaneity, Flaws, and the Unfinished. Editado por Andy Hamilton y Lara Pearson. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021*VOLANS, Kevin, “What is Feldman?”. Tempo, vol. 68, n.º 270 (2014), pp. 7-14ZIMMERMANN, Walter, “Entretien avec Morton Feldman”. En: Musiques en création. Editado por Philippe Albèra. Contrechamps, 1997* *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Nos sumergimos en los sonidos de diferentes ambientes naturales, sonidos que han inspirado obras de muy distintas caracteristicas. Artistas que por razones diferentes, con técnicas diferentes se aproximan al rico mundo de los sonidos de la naturaleza. Escucharemos sonidos, grabaciones y obras sonoras de Chris Watson, Jana Winderen, David Tudor, Knud Viktor, Janette Cardiff y George Miller y Albert RousselEscuchar audio

En 1945 apenas quedan las ruinas de esta ciudad alemana. Quizás por ello es el lugar adecuado para recuperar, desde sus cenizas, la expresión de potencia y relevancia de la música que, durante una larga década, ha soportado la represión censora del régimen nazi._____Has escuchadoDarmstadt Aural Documents, Box 1, Composers-Conductors. Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra (1959) / Bruno Maderna. David Tudor, piano; Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra; Bruno Maderna, director. NEOS (2010)Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 1, Composers-Conductors. Continuo (1974) / Ernstalbrecht Stiebler. Hans Deinzer, clarinete; Klaus Thunemann, fagot; Kurt Schwertsik, trompa; Armin Rosin, trombón; Hubert Mayer, viola; Gaby Schumacher, violonchelo; Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, director. NEOS (2010)Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 4, Pianists. Enchiridion 2. Teil “Exerzitien”. Ostinato / Bern Alois Zimmermann. Yvonne Loriod, piano. NEOS (2016)Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 4, Pianists. Identikit (divertimento) for Five Pianists (at One Piano) and Tapes (1974) / Christina Kubisch. David Arden, Marek Mietelski, Davide Mosconi, Carlos Pellegrino, Werner Füsser, piano. NEOS (2016)Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 4, Pianists. Klavierstück XI (1956) / Karlheinz Stockhausen. Intérpretes: David Tudor, piano. NEOS (2016)Darmstadt Aural Documents, Box 4, Pianists. Passacaglia (1936) / Stefan Wolpe. David Tudor, piano. NEOS (2016)_____ Selección bibliográficaBEAL, Amy C., “Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1956”. Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 53, n.º 1 (2000), pp. 105-139*CÉLESTIN, Deliège, Cinquante ans de modernité musicale: de Darmstadt à l'IRCAM: contribution historiographique à une musicologie critique. Mardaga, 2003*ERWIN, Max, Herbert Eimert and the Darmstadt School: The Consolidation of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge University Press, 2020FOX, Christopher, “British Music at Darmstadt 1982-92”. Tempo, n.º 186 (1993), pp. 21-25*IDDON, Martin, “Darmstadt Schools: Darmstadt as a plural phenomenon”. Tempo, vol. 65, n.º 256 (2011), pp. 2-8*—, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez. Cambridge University Press, 2013*—, “Spectres of Darmstadt”. Tempo, vol. 67, n.º 263 (2013), pp. 60-67*IVERSON, Jennifer, “Statistical Form amongst the Darmstadt School”. Music Analysis, vol. 33, n.º 3 (2014), pp. 341-387*JONES, Stephanie, “Darmstadt: the ‘Artistic Laboratory'”. Tempo, vol. 69, n.º 271 (2015), pp. 66-68*ORAM, Celeste, “Darmstadt's New Wave Modernism”. Tempo, vol. 69, n.º 271 (2015), pp. 57-65*ROSS, Alex, El ruido eterno. Seix Barral, 2009*WILLIAMS, Alastair, “New Music, Late Style: Adorno's ‘Form in the New Music'”. Music Analysis, vol. 27, n.º 2-3 (2008), pp. 193-199ZUPKO, Ramon, “Darmstadt. New Directions”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 2, n.º 2 (1964), pp. 166-169* *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Los algoritmos han sido usados para componer música durante siglos: están presentes desde los primeros autómatas musicales del siglo XVIII y XIX hasta el ámbito del live coding o codificación en vivo en la actualidad._____Has escuchadoManitutshu (A New Algorithm)... LatelyBass and NewElectro, Attack Pulse Hat / Mark Fell. Editions Mego (2011)Neural Synthesis No. 9 (1994) / David Tudor. Lovely Music (1995)Sesión y presentación de Jesús Jara sobre Live Coding (2023). Audio en directo de la actividad celebrada durante la presentación de “La Biblioteca invita. Nuevas músicas. Live Coding” en la Fundación Juan March de Madrid, el 8 de marzo de 2023Turenas (1972) / John Chowning. [Creada en Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics de Stanford]. WERGO (1988) _____Selección bibliográficaAMES, Charles, “Automated Composition in Retrospect: 1956-1986”. Leonardo, vol. 20, n.º 2 (1987), pp. 169-185*COLLINS, Nick, “Live Coding of Consequence”. Leonardo, vol. 44, n.º 3 (2011), pp. 207-230*HARLEY, James, “Generative Processes in Algorithmic Composition: Chaos and Music”. Leonardo, vol. 28, n.º 3 (1995), pp. 221-224*HOLMES, Thom, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture. Routledge, 2008*LEDESMA, Eduardo, “The Poetics and Politics of Computer Code in Latin America: Codework, Code Art, and Live Coding”. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 49, n.º 1 (2015), pp. 91-120LEWIS, George E., “Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity, and Culture in Voyager”. Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 10 (2000), pp. 33-39*MAGNUSSON, Thor, “Algorithms as Scores: Coding Live Music”. Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 21 (2011), pp. 19-23*MCLEAN, Alex y Roger T. Dean (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Oxford University Press, 2018*MONTILLA, César, El uso de algoritmos y computadoras para crear música. Página oficial del compositor, consultada el 20 de junio de 2023: [PDF] *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

Episode 104 Experimental Music for Pipe Organ Playlist Bengt Hambraeus, “Doppelrohr II” (1956) from Cologne - WDR: Early Electronic Music (1992 BV Haast Records). All compositions are productions of the 'Studio für elektronische Musik des Westdeutschen Rundfunks Köln.' The earliest work I can find that combines electronic music on tape with sounds created using a pipe organ. 3:54 Bengt Hambraeus, “Constellations II For Organ Sounds” (1959) from Constellations & Interferences (1968 Limelight). Composed and played on the pipe organ by Bengt Hambraeus. 16:02 Bengt Hambraeus, “Responsorier For Two Organs, Solo Voice, Mixed Choir And Church Bells” (1964, final section) from Max Reger Och Bengt Hambræus (1970 SR Records). Swedish release conducted by Eric Erickson. Composed by, Organ, Bengt Hambræus; Choir, Kammarkören, Radiokören; Organ, Karl-Erik Welin; Tenor Vocals, Christer Solén.11:14 Christian Wolff, “For 1, 2 or 3 People” (1964) from A Second Wind For Organ (1968 Odyssey). Baroque Organ by David Tudor, Liner Notes by Richard Teitelbaum; Produced by David Behrman. 9:37 Hans Otte, “Touches” (1965) from Gerd Zacher, Organ (1970 Heliodor). Composed by Hans Otte; pipe organ, Gerd Zacher. 12:46 Mauricio Kagel, “Improvisation Ajoutée” (1966) from A Second Wind For Organ (1968 Odyssey). Organ by David Tudor; Liner Notes by Richard Teitelbaum; Produced by David Behrman. 13:41 Juan Allende-Blin, “Sons Brisés - In Memoriam Lothar Schreyer” (1967) from Gerd Zacher, Organ (1970 Heliodor). Composed by Juan Allende-Blin; pipe organ, Gerd Zacher. 12:36 György Ligeti, “Etude No. 1 "Harmonies" (1967)” from Aventures - Nouvelles Aventures / Volumina / Etude No. 1 "Harmonies" (1969 Candide). Organ of The Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, Berlin, Gerd Zacher. 6:51 Morton Feldman, “Intersection 3” (1953/1969) played by Gerd Zacher from Gerd Zacher, Orgel (1970 DGG). Zacher was an accomplished organist who had a reputation for interpreting contemporary works. This work is a realization for organ of a work from 1953, which Feldman offered to Zacher for this project. The work was originally intended for piano and written with David Tudor in mind. The original Intersection was written in 1952 and was created as part of John Cage's project for works on magnetic tape. 2:36 Gerd Zacher, “Ré” (1969) from Gerd Zacher, Orgel (1970 DGG). Composed and performed by Gerd Zacher; vocals, Juan Allende-Blin. 8:35 Diane Bish, “Laudation” from Bish, Bach & Baroque (1978 Suncoast). Interesting, oddball combination of pipe organ and synthesizer. Ms. Bish was an accomplished American organist, composer, conductor, author, organ designer, television producer and television host. Written by Diane Bish and played on pipe organ (117-rank Ruffatti pipe organ made in Padua, Italy) and ARP Pro Soloist synthesizer mounted above the organ manuals. 5:25 Sarah Davachi, “For Organ” (2015) from All My Circles Run (2017 Students of Decay). Davachi is a Canadian electroacoustic musician based in Los Angeles, primarily working with organ, piano, synthesizer, strings, woodwinds. This work is for solo pipe organ and was recorded live at Knox United Church, Calgary, Alberta, Canada on June 14, 2017. 8:02 Jonas Olesen and Sandra Boss, Teaser (excerpt) from New Works for Organ (2016 private). Work for pneumatic church organ, MIDI controlled pipe organ and prepared pump organ. Premiere at Koncertkirken, Copenhagen DK. Friday May 27th, 2016. 1:43 Opening background music: György Ligeti, “Volumina (Original Version 1961/62)” from Aventures - Nouvelles Aventures / Volumina / Etude No. 1 "Harmonies" (1969 Candide). Organ of The Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, Berlin, Gerd Zacher. 16:57 Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.

Electronic adventures at the fantastic Smokehouse in Ipswich. Friendship is a large part of the music experience. We meet friends at gigs, we're in bands with friends, and sometimes, when the stars align we get to put on gigs featuring friends. Then there are the magical occasions whereby we are able to promote a gig for a friend who has lived abroad for years and is back in the UK for just a short time. This episode is about one of those magical times. Sure, the huge acts can afford impressive light shows and enough lasers to upset commercial air traffic, but what can artists who haven't already made millions do to make gigs more interesting? This episode of the Beat Motel podcast is a review of a rare UK performance by Egypt-based Nujumi. Support from Jon Bowers, Strandings and Mawhrin Skel. NUJUMIBased in Eqypt, Nujumi describe themselves as 'green pastures and dark debris'. Orchestrated synth and strings emerging from the dusts of the Sahara.Created by Daniel Merrill, one-third of the Dead Rat Orchestra.https://nujumi.bandcamp.com/ JOHN BOWERSIn his first performance returning to Ipswich after 10 years in the Newcastle DIY scene, John Bowers will coax room feedback, chaotic noise, spectral ambience, and extreme dynamics from his modular synthesizer and Pure Data programs. John has a long history in rowdy improvised experimental electronics having performed at festivals including the Venice Biennale, Experimental Intermedia New York, Transmediale/CTM Vorspiel Berlin, Piksel Bergen, Electropixel Nantes, BEAM London, Faster Than Sound Aldeburgh, Yarmonics Great Yarmouth and Spill Ipswich, and toured with the Rambert Dance Company performing David Tudor's music to Merce Cunningham's Rainforest. He is one third of the noise rock trio Tonesucker. He has just launched a personal record label, https://unlanded.bandcamp.com/. Its first album, Unlanded Volume 1 is planned for release June 2023. https://www.instagram.com/johnthemodulator/ STRANDINGSStrandings is the new project by Dead Rat Orchestra member Robin Alderton. A combination of electro-acoustic elements featuring the folk based influences of his soundtrack work with DRO and solo textural collage work utilising turntables, electronics and manipulated vinyl. For fans of Philip Jeck, William Basinski and CST Records. MAHWRIN SKELDepending on whim, willingness and weather Mawhrin Skel makes music that is often described as noise, drone, techno-alt-orchestral and ambient. His music is characterised by its use of harsh, abrasive sounds, deep frequencies as well as long, slow, and meditative passages. Mawhrin Skel is the stage name of Andrew Culture, occasional novelist and bassist of These Are End Times.https://mawhrinskel.bandcamp.com/

Episode 99 Crosscurrents in Electronic Tape Music in the United States Playlist Louis and Bebe Barron, “Bells of Atlantis” (1952), soundtrack for a film by Ian Hugo based on the writings of his wife Anaïs Nin, who also appeared in the film. The Barrons were credited with “Electronic Music.” The Barrons scored three of Ian Hugo's short experimental films and this is the earliest, marking an early start for tape music in the United States. Bebe told me some years ago about a work called “Heavenly Menagerie” that they produced in 1950. I have written before that I think this work was most likely the first electronic music made for magnetic tape in the United States, although I have never been able to find a recording of the work. Bells of Atlantis will stand as an example of what they could produce in their Greenwich Village studio at the time. They were also engaged helping John Cage produce “Williams Mix” at the time, being recordists of outdoor sounds around New York that Cage would use during the process of editing the composition, which is described below. The Forbidden Planet soundtrack, their most famous work, was created in 1956. 8:59 John Cage, “Williams Mix” (1952) from The 25-Year Retrospective Concert Of The Music Of John Cage (1959 Avakian). Composed in 1952, the tape was played at this Town Hall concert a few years later. Premiered in Urbana, Ill., March 22, 1953. From the Cage database of compositions: “This is a work for eight tracks of 1/4” magnetic tape. The score is a pattern for the cutting and splicing of sounds recorded on tape. Its rhythmic structure is 5-6-16-3-11-5. Sounds fall into 6 categories: A (city sounds), B (country sounds), C (electronic sounds), D (manually produced sounds), E (wind produced sounds), and F ("small" sounds, requiring amplification). Pitch, timbre, and loudness are notated as well. Approximately 600 recordings are necessary to make a version of this piece. The compositional means were I Ching chance operations. Cage made a realization of the work in 1952/53 (starting in May 1952) with the assistance of Earle Brown, Louis and Bebe Barron, David Tudor, Ben Johnston, and others, but it also possible to create other versions.” This was a kind of landmark work for John as he explored the possibilities of working with the tape medium. It is the only work from this period, created in the United States, for which there is an original recording of a Cage realization. He also composed “Imaginary Landscape No. 5” in 1952 for 42-disc recordings as a collage of fragments from long-playing records recorded on tape (he preferred to use jazz records as the source), put together with the assistance of David Tudor. Though some modern interpretations exist, there is no recording from the 1950s of a Cage/Tudor realization so I am unable to represent what it would have been like at that time. 5:42 Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, “Moonflight” (1952) from Tape Music An Historic Concert (1968 Desto). This record documents tape pieces played at perhaps the earliest concert of American tape music at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 28, 1952. Realized at the composer's Tape Music Center at Columbia University, the precursor of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. 2:54 Otto Luening, “Fantasy in Space” (1952) from Tape Music An Historic Concert (1968 Desto). Realized at the composer's Tape Music Center at Columbia University, the precursor of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. 2:51 Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, “Incantation” (1953) from Tape Music An Historic Concert (1968 Desto). This record documents tape pieces played at perhaps the earliest concert of American tape music at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 28, 1952. Realized at the composer's Tape Music Center at Columbia University, the precursor of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. 2:34 Henry Jacobs, “Sonata for Loudspeakers” (1953-54) from Sounds of New Music (1958 Folkways). “Experiments with synthetic rhythm” produced by Henry Jacobs who worked at radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley. Jacobs narrates the track to explain his use of tape loops and recorded sound. 9:29 Jim Fassett, track “B2” (Untitled) from Strange To Your Ears - The Fabulous World of Sound With Jim Fassett (1955 Columbia Masterworks). “The fabulous world of sound,” narrated with tape effects, by Jim Fassett. Fassett, a CBS Radio musical director, was fascinated with the possibilities of tape composition. With this recording, done during the formative years of tape music in the middle 1950s, he took a somewhat less daring approach than his experimental counterparts, but a bold step nonetheless for a national radio audience. He hosted a weekend program called Strange to Your Ears to showcase these experiments and this album collected some of his best bits. 8:15 Harry F. Olsen, “The Well-Tempered Clavier: Fugue No. 2” (Bach) and “Nola” (Arndt) and “Home, Sweet Home” from The Sounds and Music of the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer (1955 RCA). These “experimental” tracks were intended to demonstrate the range of sound that could be created with RCA Music Synthesizer. This was the Mark I model, equipped with a disc lathe instead of a tape recorder. When it was upgraded and called the Mark II in the late 1950s, it became the showpiece of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Here we listen to three tunes created by Harry F. Olsen, one of the inventors, in the style of a harpsichord, a piano, and “an engineer's conception of the music.” 5:26 Milton Babbitt, “Composition For Synthesizer” (1960-61) (1968 Columbia). Babbitt was one of the only composers at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center who composed and produced works based solely on using the RCA Music Synthesizer. Most others took advantage of other tape processing techniques found in the studio and not controlled by the RCA Mark II. It took him quite a long time to work out all of the details using the synthesizer and his meticulous rules for composing serially. On the other hand, the programmability of the instrument made it much more possible to control all the parameters of the sound being created electronically rather than by human musicians. This work is a prime example of this kind of work. 10:41 Tod Dockstader, “Drone” (1962) from Drone; Two Fragments From Apocalypse; Water Music (1966 Owl Records). Self-produced album by independent American composer Dockstader. This came along at an interesting period for American elecgtronic music, sandwiched between the institutional studio work being done at various universities and the era of the independent musician working with a synthesizer. Dockstader used his own studio and his own devices to make this imaginative music. This was one of a series of four albums featuring Dockstader's music that were released on Owl in the 1966-67 timeframe. They have all been reissued in one form or another. Here is what Dockstader himself wrote about this piece: “Drone, like many of my other works, began life as a single sound; in this case, the sound of racing cars. But, unlike the others, the germinal sound is no longer in the piece. It's been replaced by another a guitar. I found in composing the work that the cars didn't go anywhere, except, seemingly, in circles. The sound of them that had interested me originally was a high to low glissando the Doppler effect. In making equivalents of this sound, I found guitar glissandos could be bent into figures the cars couldn't. . . . After the guitar had established itself as the base line of the piece, I began matching its sound with a muted sawtooth oscillator (again, concrete and electronic music: the guitar being a mechanical source of sound, the oscillator an electronic source). This instrument had a timbre similar to the guitar, with the addition of soft attack, sustained tones, and frequencies beyond the range of the guitar. . . . The effect of the guitar and the oscillator, working together, was to produce a kind of drone, with variations something like the procedure of classical Japanese music, but with more violence. Alternating violence with loneliness, hectic motion with static stillness, was the aim of the original piece; and this is still in Drone, but in the process, the means changed so much that, of all my pieces, it is the only one I can't remember all the sounds of, so it continues to surprise me when I play it.” (From the original liner notes by Dockstader). 13:24 Wendy Carlos, “Dialogs for Piano and Two Loudspeakers” (1963) from Electronic Music (1965 Turnabout). This is an early recording of Wendy, pre-Switched-on Bach, from her days as a composer and technician. In this work, Carlos tackles the task of combining synthesized sounds with those of acoustic instruments, in this case the piano. It's funny that after you listen to this you could swear that there were instruments other than the piano used, so deft was her blending of electronic sounds with even just a single instrument. 4:00 Gordon Mumma, “Music from the Venezia Space Theater” (1963-64) (1966 Advance). Mono recording from the original release on Advance. Composed at the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This was the studio created by Mumma and fellow composer Robert Ashley to produce their electronic tape works for Milton Cohen's Space Theater on Ann Arbor, which this piece tries to reproduce. The original was a quad magnetic tape. It was premiered at the 27th Venezia Bianale, Venice, Italy on September 11, 1964 and comprised the ONCE group with dancers. 11:58 Jean Eichelberger Ivey, “Pinball” (1965) from Electronic Music (1967 Folkways). Realized at the Electronic Music Studio of Brandeis University. This work was produced in the Brandeis University Electronic Music Studio and was her first work of electroacoustic music. In 1964 she began a Doctor of Musical Arts program in composition, including studies in electronic music, at the University of Toronto and completed the degree in 1972. Ivey founded the Peabody Electronic Music Studio in 1967 and taught composition and electronic music at the Peabody Conservatory of Music until her retirement in 1997. Ivey was a respected composer who also sought more recognition for women in the field. In 1968, she was the only woman composer represented at the Eastman-Rochester American Music Festival. Her work in electronic music and other music was characteristic of her general attitude about modern composing, “I consider all the musical resources of the past and present as being at the composer's disposal, but always in the service of the effective communication of humanistic ideas and intuitive emotion.” 6:12 Pauline Oliveros, “Bye Bye Butterfly” (1965) from New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media (1977 1750 Arch Records). This was composed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center where so many west coast composers first found their footing: Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender all did work there around this time. Oliveros was experimenting with the use of tape delay in a number of works, of which “Bye Bye Butterfly” is a great example. 8:05 Gordon Mumma, “The Dresden Interleaf 13 February 1945” (1965) from Dresden / Venezia / Megaton (1979 Lovely Music). Composed at the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music (Ann Arbor, Michigan). Remixed at The Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College (Oakland, California). This tape piece was premiered at the sixth annual ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor where Mumma configured an array of sixteen “mini speakers” to surround the audience and project the 4-channel mix. The middle section of the piece contains the “harrowing roar of live, alcohol-burning model airplane engines.” (Mumma) This anti-war piece was presented in the 20th anniversary of the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden near the end of World War II. 12:14 Kenneth Gaburo, “Lemon Drops (Tape Alone)” (1965) from Electronic Music from the University of Illinois (1967 Heliodor). From Gaburo: “Lemon Drops” is one of a group of five tape compositions made during 1964-5 referencing the work of Harry Partch. All are concerned with aspects of timbre (e.g., mixing concrete and electronically generated sound); with nuance (e.g., extending the expressive range of concrete sound through machine manipulation, and reducing machine rigidity through flexible compositional techniques); and with counterpoint (e.g., stereo as a contrapuntal system).”(see). 2:52 Steve Reich, “Melodica” (1966) from Music From Mills (1986 Mills College). This is one of Reich's lesser-known phased loop compositions from the 1960s. It is “composed of one tape loop gradually going out of phase with itself, first in two voices and then in four.” This was Reich's last work for tape before he transitioned to writing instrumental music. 10:43 Pril Smiley, “Eclipse” (1967) from Electronic Music, Vol. IV (1969 Turnabout). The selections are works by the winners of the First International Electronic Music Competition - Dartmouth College, April 5, 1968. The competition was judged by composers Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and George Balch Wilson. The winner was awarded a $500 prize. Pril Smiley was 1st finalist and realized “Eclipse” at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Smiley had this to say about the work: “Eclipse” was originally composed for four separate tracks, the composer having worked with a specifically-structured antiphonal distribution of compositional material to be heard from four corners of a room or other appropriate space. Some sections of “Eclipse” are semi-improvisatory; by and large, the piece was worked out via many sketches and preliminary experiments on tape: all elements such as rhythm, timbre, loudness, and duration of each note were very precisely determined and controlled. In many ways, the structure of “Eclipse” is related to the composer's use of timbre. There are basically two kinds of sounds in the piece: the low, sustained gong-like sounds (always either increasing or decreasing in loudness) and the short more percussive sounds, which can be thought of as metallic, glassy, or wooden in character. These different kinds of timbres are usually used in contrast to one another, sometimes being set end to end so that one kind of sound interrupts another, and sometimes being dovetailed so that one timbre appears to emerge out of or from beneath another. Eighty-five percent of the sounds are electronic in origin; the non-electronic sounds are mainly pre-recorded percussion sounds–but subsequently electronically modified so that they are not always recognizable.” (From the original liner notes by Smiley.) 7:56 Olly W. Wilson, “Cetus” (1967) from Electronic Music, Vol. IV (1969 Turnabout). The selections are works by the winners of the First International Electronic Music Competition - Dartmouth College, April 5, 1968. The competition was judged by composers Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and George Balch Wilson. The winner was awarded a $500 prize. Olly W. Wilson was the competition Winner with “Cetus.” It was realized in the studio for Experimental Music of the University of Illinois. Olly Wilson wrote about the work: “the compositional process characteristic of the “classical tape studio” (the mutation of a few basic electronic signals by means of filters, signal modifiers, and recording processes) was employed in the realization of this work and was enhanced by means of certain instruments which permit improvisation by synthesized sound. Cetus contains passages which were improvised by the composer as well as sections realized by classical tape studio procedures. The master of this work was prepared on a two channel tape. Under the ideal circumstances it should be performed with multiple speakers surrounding the auditor.” (Olly Wilson. The Avant Garde Project at UBUWEB, AGP129 – US Electronic Music VIII | Dartmouth College Competition (1968-70). 9:18 Alice Shields, “The Transformation of Ani” (1970) from Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center Tenth Anniversary Celebration (1971 CRI). Composed at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Alice Shields explained, “The text of “The Transformation of Ani” is taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as translated into English by E. A. Budge. Most sounds in the piece were made from my own voice, speaking and singing the words of the text. Each letter of the English translation was assigned a pitch, and each hieroglyph of the Egyptian was given a particular sound or short phrase, of mostly indefinite pitch. Each series, the one derived from the English translation, and the one derived from the original hieroglyphs, was then improvised upon to create material I thought appropriate to the way in which I wanted to develop the meaning of the text, which I divided into three sections.” (see). 8:59 Opening background music: John Cage, Fontana Mix (1958) (1966 Turnabout). This tape work was composed in 1958 and I believe this is the only recorded version by Cage himself as well as the only Cage version presented as a work not in accompaniment of another work. An earlier recording, from the Time label in 1962, feature the tape piece combined with another Cage work, “Aria.” This version for 2 tapes was prepared b Cage in February 1959 at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan, with technical assistance from Mario Zuccheri. From the Cage Database website. “This is a composition indeterminate of its performance, and was derived from notation CC from Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The score consists of 10 sheets of paper and 12 transparencies. The sheets of paper contain drawings of 6 differentiated (as to thickness and texture) curved lines. 10 of these transparencies have randomly distributed points (the number of points on the transparencies being 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 29, and 30). Another transparency has a grid, measuring 2 x 10 inches, and the last one contains a straight line (10 3/4 inch). By superimposing these transparencies, the player creates a structure from which a performance score can be made: one of the transparencies with dots is placed over one of the sheets with curved lines. Over this one places the grid. A point enclosed in the grid is connected with a point outside, using the straight line transparency. Horizontal and vertical measurements of intersections of the straight line with the grid and the curved line create a time-bracket along with actions to be made.” Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.

For more information on Giorgio and to explore his "labyrinthian" website, head here. Have fun!Giorgio mentions Hildegard Westerkamp in this episode, so maybe you'd like to listen to our conversations with her, in 2 episodes, #1 here and #2 here.Giorgio is the long time Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music.Giorgio mentions David Tudor's Rainforest Project And Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi    

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

Episode 91 The Silent Episode Playlist Morton Feldman, “Intersection” (1953) from First Recordings: 1950s (1999 Mode). Feldman, like Cage, had already been a proponent of including silence in his pieces. Feldman was a part of the Project of Music for Magnetic Tape (1951 to 1954), an artist's collective founded by Cage to explore experiments in magnetic tape music. From this period came several works, the most famous of which was Williams Mix (1952) by Cage. For Williams Mix, Cage commissioned the recording of hundreds of taped sounds by Louis and Bebe Barron and then specified how to splice them together using a daunting 192-page graphical composition created using chance operations. Cage conceived the work for eight tracks of magnetic tape played simultaneously. The other members of the collective, in addition to helping edit Williams Mix, also created some unique works of their own using the same library of sounds. Feldman was one of these composers but took a decidedly different approach than Cage. For Intersection, Feldman used a graphic score composed of a grid, a method he had been testing for various instrumental works such as Intersections No. 1 for Piano (1951). The score could be likened to a sheet of graph paper with one row assigned to each of the eight channels. Each square, or cell, of each row represented a unit of time to be occupied by either a sound or silence. The sounds were assigned only as numbers representing the lengths of tape snippets to be used, thus regulating the duration of individual sounds. The sequence and simultaneity of the audio was dictated by the “intersection” of sounds and silences across the columns of the score. The realization of the piece was left in the hands of Cage and Earle Brown, who assembled the tape segments by following the grid score. The choice of sounds drawn from the tape library was left to the executors of the score. Whereas Cage had not actually specified the use of silence in the score of Williams Mix, Feldman clearly had, and this is evident from the result. Speaking about the piece later, Feldman famously said that he “loathed the sound of electronic music.” He disliked the labor of executing a piece by cutting up magnetic tape and didn't feel the result was justifiably unique. He also said, “John [Cage] says that experimental music is where the outcome cannot be foreseen. . . . After my first adventure in electronic music, its outcome was foreseen.” 3:24 John Cage Variations I from Darmstadt Aural Documents Box 2 – Communication (2012 NEOS). Two Pianos, Electronics, Radio Sets, David Tudor, John Cage. This German disc is part of the Darmstadt Aural Documents projects and features recordings from 1958. This track was of the European premiere of Variations 1 and was recorded at the International Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt September 3, 1958. This track is enlightening because it not only contains a work by Cage with purposefully scored silences, albeit by chance operations, but is also a live recording with an audience. You can clearly hear how the audience responds during the silent passages, mostly in their bemusement. Whereas the implied humor was unintentional, I often experienced this phenomenon while seeing a Cage performance. I wanted to include this as an example of what can happen when silence becomes part of a live performance. Chance operations were used to determine the placement and duration of silences. 8:50 John Cage, “WBAI” (1960) from Early Electronic And Tape Music (2014 Sub Rosa). Sine wave oscillator, record player, synthesizer, radio. Description of the piece from the score in the Edition Peters catalogue (1962) of Cage's works: “Certain operations may be found impossible e.g., 3 or 4 at once. Let the operator do what he can without calling in assistants.” Chance operations were used to determine the placement and duration of silences. This performance for sine wave oscillator, record player, synthesizer, radio. Not performed by Cage and recorded in 2013 by participants following the score. Originally presented on WBAI (NY) as a solo work scored for performance with Cage's lecture ("Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?"). From the comments of the score: “This composition may be used in whole or in part by an operator of machines.” Personnel on this disc include, Square-wave oscillator, Auxiliary Sounds, Radio, Robert Worby; Performer, Langham Research Centre Auxiliary Sounds, Cassette, Open-reel tape, Radio, Iain Chambers; Synthesizer, Auxiliary Sounds, Spoken Word, Philip Tagney; Turntables, Auxiliary Sounds, Open-reel tape, Felix Carey. 7:04 John Cage, David Tudor, “Klangexperimente (Sound Experiment)” 1963 from Siemens-Studio Für Elektronische Musik (1998 Siemens Kultur Programm). Interesting collection of tracks by a variety of artists invited to explore the technological possibilities of the early "Studio for Electronic Music" built and run by Siemens since 1956 in Munich and Ulm. In the case of the Cage piece, both Cage and Tudor programmed this work using punch cards, an early computer control device. Chance operations were used to determine the placement and duration of silences. 1:58 Henri Pousseur, “Scambi (Exchanges)” (1957) from Panorama Des Musiques Expérimentales (1964 Philips) is an electronic music tape composition by the Belgian composer , realized in 1957 at the Studio di Fonologia musicale di Radio Milano. Pousseur fluidly added silence patches throughout this piece, using them to create tension due to their unpredictable nature. This is an analog recording, so the silences include an abundance of tape hiss. 6:27 Ton Bruynèl, “Reflexen (Reflexes)” (1961) from Anthology of Dutch Electronic Tape Music: Volume 1 (1955-1966) (1978 Composer's Voice). Recorded in Bruynèl private electronic music studio. Another tape work that shows the potential for splicing in silence as a tool of the composer. The silences are carefully added from about the 2:14 to 4:00 mark to underscore the accelerating pace of the music. Note that the original recording has rumble from what sounds like a turntable, plus tape hiss, so the “silences” are not as abject as they are in digital recordings. 4:41 MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), “Spacecraft” from Live Electronic Music Improvised (1970 Mainstream). Performers, Alan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Ivan Vandor, Richard Teitelbaum (Moog Modular synthesizer). The liner notes described the following editing process for this album that includes the random insertion of silent passages within the recorded live tracks: “The tape has been edited and interspersed with silence in accordance with a random number programme to give a representative cross-section of a concert lasting two hours.” 19:50 Maggi Payne, “Scirocco” from Crystal (1986 Lovely Music Ltd.). Composed, engineered, performed by Maggi Payne. This beautiful piece of ghostly, haunting sounds is long enough to create an expectation of a continuous soundscape, only to two drop off in two spots to present long silent or nearly silent passages. 10:26 Mika Vainio, “In a Frosted Lake” from Aíneen Musta Puhelin = Black Telephone Of Matter (2009 Touch). Produced and recorded in Berlin 2008. This piece seems to be about amplitude and inaudible frequencies, frameworked by silences. There is a pattern of eight peak tones from the start to the end of the piece. In between these peaks are quieter sounds and silences, with a tension that leans toward achieving a silent state. 5:53 Giancarlo Mangini, “September 14, 2020, from 4.50a.m. to 5.02a.m. ...and remember what peace there may be in silence” from Electronic Music Philosophy, Vol. 27: Silence (2020 Bandcamp). From the twenty-seventh collection of tracks from the collective known as Electronic Music Philosophy (Tustin, California) came this disc devoted to works composed using silence as a principal technique. In this work, there is a steady pattern of silences from start to finish, but the duration of the silences gradually increases in many instances as the work progresses. 11:38 Richard Chartier, “Herein, Then” from Other Materials(2002 3Particles). This disc includes is a compilation of tracks and unreleased works from 1999-2001. Limited to 500 copies. Composed, produced, programmed, and performed by Richard Chartier. As with many of his tracks, Chartier explores the outer reaches of human hearing. Many of the sounds in this track cannot be heard when played on loudspeakers with even moderate background noise. There are actually only two spots of abject, digital silence in this track, although due to the low frequency and amplitude of many of the other electronic tones, you might think there in nothing there. This is a clever, psychological trick. 5:02 Marina Rosenfeld, “Formal Arrangement” from Plastic Materials (2009 Room40). Composed and performed by Marina Rosenfeld. Among the various commissions found on this disc is this solo electronic work. A pattern of silences in which 25 evenly-spaced sound events, mostly gong- or bell-like tones, are each followed by a fade and then a discrete, abject silence. 2:35 Tetsu Inoue, “Super Digital” from Fragment Dots (2000 Tzadik). Composed, Programmed by Tetsu Inoue. I knew Tetsu and he would probably be embarrassed to know that I counted every conceivable “digital” silence in this special piece of music. There are 293 of them that I think one can perceive. Many are short, but because silence is an important structural component of this work, I thought it warranted a fresh listen. The longest of these silences is but 2.5 seconds. The shortness of all the tones, either audible or silent, works together to form a unity. 3:39 Miki Yui, “Balloon” from Small Sounds (1999 BMP Lab). Composed, engineered, and performed by Miki Yui. Recorded in Cologne, Germany. The composer wrote, “small sounds are to merge and fuse with your acoustic environment—please play in a transparent level; in different atmosphere.” In this piece, the silences are placed in the middle of sounds to break up an otherwise continuous noise. 2:57 Opening background music: Mooshzoom, “Silence” from Electronic Music Philosophy, Vol. 27: Silence (2020 Bandcamp). From the twenty-seventh collection of tracks from the collective known as Electronic Music Philosophy (Tustin, California) came this disc devoted to works composed using silence as a principal technique. Plus clips from the following as examples: Amelie Lens, “Resonance” from Contradiction (2017 Second State); Nora En Pure, “Norma Jean” from Come With Me (2013 Enormous Tunes). Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation: For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.  

Sanna Almajedi speaks to Maria Chávez on the occasion of Topography of Sound (2007–now) at e-flux. The conversation is followed by an excerpt from the performance, Maria's first public live show since a medically induced sabbatical.  Maria Chávez is an abstract turntablist, conceptual sound artist, and DJ based in New York and born in Lima, Peru. Coincidence, chance, and failures are themes that are at the heart of her practice, which expands from the world of sound to sculpture and other disciplines. Chávez is one of the only people, if not the only person, in the world that uses the double-headed RAKE turntable needles in her live performances. She uses broken needles that bounce and scratch in their attempt to play a groove. Sometimes she breaks the record itself and stacks broken shards of vinyl on the turntable. Through these experimentations, Chávez utilizes destruction as a method to discover new sonic worlds. Chávez's influences stem from improvised contemporary music; she is an avid practitioner of deep listening and was mentored by the composer Pauline Oliveros. Chávez describes her turntablism technique as taking the detritus of vinyl and repurposing it into sonic sculptures that can be compared to improvised musique concrète pieces. Her latest body of work, a series of white Carrara marble sculptures, handmade in her studio in Carrara, Italy, has revealed a parallel with her vinyl practice.  Chávez is on the cover of Thom Holmes's book Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture (Routledge, 2020). She was a David Tudor and Robert Rauschenberg arts fellow and research fellow for Goldsmith's Sound Practice Research Department. Her large-scale sound and multi-media installations along with other works have been shown at the Getty Museum, the Judd Foundation, Documenta 14, and HeK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste Basel) among others. She is also part of Don't Blame it on Zen: The Way of John Cage & Friends, currently on view at MoCA Jacksonville. Chávez is the author of Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable (2012), which is the first book about abstract turntablism. This book has developed a reputation as both an academic resource and a foundational text for a new generation of turntablists. She has contributed to many other publications including e-flux Architecture with “Too Much Reality”—a text about neuroplasticity and its place in the arts. In 2023, Chávez will be an artist-in-residence at the Counterflows Festival in Glasgow, Scotland and at the Rewire Festival in the Hague, the Netherlands. 

If truth is stranger than fiction, why shouldn't music be stranger than science fiction? Sounds manipulate space and time, unlock new dimensions and open wormholes in parallel universes. In this respect, sonic fiction does the same as fantasy literature: It distorts the present and creates space for alternative worlds. Speakers: Sarj Lynch, Sasha Perera. Editing and production: Julia Vorkefeld. Recordings: Matthias Hartenberger. Concept and script: Arno Raffeiner. With quotes from works by J. G. Ballard, Jimmy Carter, Becky Chambers, Kodwo Eshun, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daniel Oberhaus, Sun Ra, Holger Schulze, David Tudor, Whitney Wei. Music: Elysia Crampton – Morning Star-Red Glare-Sequoia Bridge; Fatima Al Qadiri – Aftermath; Earth, Wind & Fire – Jupiter; Caterina Barbieri – Closest Approach to Your Orbit; John Williams – Close Encounters of the Third Kind; Parliament – Mothership Connection (Star Child); Janelle Monáe – BaBopByeYa; Drexciya – Intro: Temple Of Dos De Agua; Drexciya – Andreaen Sand Dunes; Lonnie Holley – In It Too Deep; June Tyson – Satellites Are Spinning

Synopsis On today's date in 1952, at the aptly named Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, pianist David Tudor premiered two new works by the American composer John Cage. The first, titled "Water Music," was scored for a "prepared piano" – a piano into whose metal strings various items had been inserted to alter its sound – plus a duck call and transistor radio. For the second work, Tudor simply closed the lid of the piano, set a stopwatch for the length of the work's four sections – 4 minutes and 33 seconds to be exact – and then sat quietly on the piano bench. The composition consisted of whatever sounds occurred in that amount of time at that particular moment in time, including any breathing, coughing or snickering from the audience. Some likened the piece to the all-white canvases of the avant-garde painter Robert Rauschenberg, on which accidental aspects of dust or bumps in the canvas created an arbitrary texture. Others thought it an outrageous affront at worst, or a bad joke at best. Whatever else one might think of it, as pianist David Tudor put it, "Cage's 4:33 is one of the most intense listening experiences one can have." Cage once said: "I'm interested in making sounds that I don't understand," and insisted that random, unplanned sounds were as welcome to his ears as those he organized himself, as in this Cage piece for prepared piano titled "Mysterious Adventure." Music Played in Today's Program John Cage (1912-1992) –Nos. 5 and 12, fr Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (Robert Miller, p.) New World 80203

Episode 78 Strange Synths Little Heard Sounds from Unique Synthesizers Playlist David Behrman, “Pools Of Phase Locked Loops,” from My Dear Siegfried (2005 XI Records). Synthesizers (homemade), David Behrman, Katharine Morton Austin. Recorded live at Radio Bremen in May 1972 and commissioned by Hans Otte. At a time when commercial models of analog synths were widely available, Behrman and other musicians such as Gordon Mumma and David Tudor insisted on creating purpose-built instruments using the same principles. Behrman explains, “The homemade synthesizers had 32 voltage-controlled triangle-wave generators built around a chip utilizing a circuit design called the Phase Locked Loop. The chip made smooth glides possible from one pitch to another. The homemade synthesizers also had voltage-controlled amplifiers, rows of small knobs and frequency counters with the aid of which the performers could retune individual oscillators during a performance.” 14:00 John Ridges, “Fugue In G” (Bach) from Computer Controlled Synthesizer Performances (1977 Tesseract Records). This work was made using a computer-controlled music synthesizer which its makers dubbed Mesmerelda. It was comprised on 200 integrated circuits that could create 96 different pitches assigned to six separate channels. Only one waveform was used, a square wave, and there was no envelope control. Hence, the simple organ-like tone of the piece. 4:49 John Ridges, “Ruffles” (Ridges) from Computer Controlled Synthesizer Performances (1977 Tesseract Records). From the same album comes “Ruffles” performed by composer John Ridges. This track featured a slightly more advanced computer music synthesizer they called the AD8. It featured up to eight synthesis boards each one relating to a single channel. So, eight pitches could be played at a time and there was filtering, waveform generation other than square waves, and simple envelope generation to provide a slightly more advanced sound. As Ridges wrote in the liner notes, with pride, “these pieces are generally free of the bizarre noises usually found on electronic synthesizer albums.” The pieces were recorded in real time without overdubs. 2:36 Patrick Gleeson, “Star Wars Theme (Luke's Theme)” (Williams). (1977 Mercury). Recorded and mixed at Different Fur, San Francisco, July 1977. The piece showcases various beds, rhythms, and sounds made using the E-mu modular synthesizer, also known as an Eµ synthesizer (it's original name). "Selections from the film performed on the world's most advanced synthesizer." Drums, Billy Cobham, Harvey Mason, James Levi, Ronnie Beck; Lyricon, Lenny Picket; Vocals, Sarah Baker; keyboards, performer (Breath Controller), engineered, produced, arranged, and conducted by Patrick Gleeson. 5:36 Bennie Maupin, “Crystals” from Moonscapes (1978 Mercury). Eµ synthesizer (E-mu Modular Synthesizer) programmed by Patrick Gleeson, who owned Different Fur Studios in the San Francisco area and owned an Eµ modular synthesizer (see the earlier Star Wars album which also featured this same synth.) Here, we have a different treatment of the same instrument by jazz woodwind player Maupin, who played Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone, Bass Clarinet, Flute, Marimba, Glockenspiel, Eµ Synthesizer, and Computone Synthesizer Winddriver on this album. I picked this track because this is most stripped-down arrangement featuring only Maupin playing the Eµ synthesizer and other instruments. 1:19 Sylvester, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” from Step II (1978 Fantasy). One of the few albums to feature EML (Electronic Music Laboratories) Modular Synthesizers. String synthesizer, Electro-comp 101 synthesizer and 200 expander unit, Oberheim DS-2 Sequencer, Effects , Pat Cowley; organ, Electric piano, Clavinet, Michael C. Finden; Percussion, David Frazier; Producer, Lead Vocals, Piano, Sylvester. EML was a Connecticut-based synth maker that was around from about 1970 to 1984. They were best-known for their Electro-comp modular synths. The 101 was a duophonic semi-modular 44-note synth and the model 200 was an expander unit that added ring modulation, spring reverb, and high and low filters to the setup. It was interesting to hear this Moroder-like pulsating synth sound coming from something other than a Moog. 6:34 Pere Ubu, “I Will Wait” from Dub Housing (1978 Chrysalis). This second album from this Ohio group always figured high on my playlist of favorites. I was mostly fascinated by the synthesizer fills and hijinks by Allen Ravenstine that punctuated much of the group's music with the quirkiest of sounds, all blended and mixed to provide many weird hooks and twists. This is another example of the EML, Electro-comp duphonic modular synthesizer although almost used in a polar opposite way than Sylvester. This is a unique sound from the time. Performers, Allen Ravenstine, David Thomas, Scott Krauss, Tom Herman, Tony Maimone. Engineered by Ken Hamann at SUMA Studios, Painesville, Ohio, 8-9/78. Ravenstine is still active and an electronic musician although he has left the EML for other synthesizer frontiers. He remains very much the experimental improviser. 1:45 Pere Ubu, “Navvy” from Dub Housing (1978 Chrysalis). Performers, Allen Ravenstine, David Thomas, Scott Krauss, Tom Herman, Tony Maimone. Engineered by Ken Hamann at SUMA Studios, Painesville, Ohio, 8-9/78. Features sounds of the EML Electro-comp modular synthesizer by Allen Ravenstine. 2:40 Pere Ubu, “On the Surface” from Dub Housing (1978 Chrysalis). Performers, Allen Ravenstine, David Thomas, Scott Krauss, Tom Herman, Tony Maimone. Engineered by Ken Hamann at SUMA Studios, Painesville, Ohio, 8-9/78. Features sounds of the EML Electro-comp modular synthesizer by Allen Ravenstine. 2:37 Pascal Languirand, “O Nos Omnes” from De Harmonia Universalia (1980 Polydor). I am featuring a track that uses, among other instruments, the Farfisa Synthorchestra, the famous Italian's company entry into the string synthesizer fray. The Syntorchestra was split into two keyboard sections, strings (polyphonic), and mono synth voices. It was a hybrid organ and synthesizer and used much by Klaus Schulze and other German electronic musicians for the short time that it was available from 1975 to 1978. Nine slider controls were positioned next to a 3-octave keyboard and provided some “chaotic” control episodes for this much beloved and rare keyboard. 7:16 Moebius, “Clone Zone” from Moebius (1979 Plastic Poison). Yes, a progressive rock group that utilized the modular synthesizers developed by Serge Tcherepnin, Rich Gold, and Randy Cohen at CalArts in late 1972. By the mid-1970a, Tcherepnin left CalArts and began to manufacture his instruments in Hollywood. Serge modules were designed to bring many elements of the circuits controllable by the performer, patching them in unusual ways beyond what was considered normal for a given module. The model used on this album probably had a 16-stage sequencer introduced by the company, and I think you can hear such patterns in this song. Listen for the bubbling, sequenced sounds that are contrasted to the monophonic solos of the Minimoog and patch sounds of the ARP Odyssey. I think the track opens with the Serge pattern. Drums, Evan Kaplan; Minimoog synthesizer, Bruce Courtois; Roland Sh3a, AP 2600 synthesizers, Steve Roach; Serge modular, Minimoog synthesizer, vocals, written by, Bryce Robbley; Serge modular synthesizer, Doug Lynner. 4:55 Moebius, “Song For Lya,” from Moebius (1979 Plastic Poison). Serge, Oberheim, and Minimoog synthesizers, vocals, written by, Bryce Robbley; Serge, Oberheim synthesizers, written by, Doug Lynner; Violin, John Stubbs. Listen closely to tune-out the parts by the Odyssey and Minimoog and you will experience a lovely bed laid down by the Serge. Moebius had three members, one a violinist, heard in this tune blending with the Serge. Although the group used a Sennheiser vocoder on another track, the vocal distortion on this track may have actually been the voice processed with the Serge. 3:15 Henry Kucharzyk, “Play Dot Sam” from Walk The Line - Three New Works By Henry Kucharzyk (1985 Artifact Music). This work is performed at the Samson Box at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. This track is an escapee from the 1970s but nonetheless fills a void in that period when commercial synthesizers were moving to digital technology and were quite expensive. The Samson Box was a computer-based digital synthesizer created in 1977 by Peter Samson, who worked at the university. Samson stands for the “Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer. It was a one-off special-purpose dedicated audio computer designed for use by student composers at Center for Computer Research in Musical and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. 3:06 Salvatore Martirano, “The SalMar: Part One” from The SalMar Construction (2014 Sub Rosa). Another escapee from the 1970s was this performance at IRCAM in Paris in 1983. Salvatore Martirano, an American composer, invented the one-of-a-kind Sal-Mar Construction designed for real-time performance of electronic music. It was created from 1969 to 1972 at the University of Illinois. The analog synthesizer looked like a large drawing table with an array of 291 touch-sensitive connections to enable the sound generating circuits. Behind it all were some computer circuits salvaged from the Illiac II computer music system and they generated random sequences with which the performer could interact while managing four parallel processes governing the 16 oscillators, applying pitch, timbre, amplitude and envelope parameters to the sound. Martirano toured the world with the performing/composing music machine and described his live performances in the following manner: “The composer, in performance, interacts with the machine as it composes, creating spontaneously four melodic lines which move throughout the concert space via a network of 24 overhead speakers.” This performance was by Martirano while in Paris at IRCAM. 18:59 Herbie Hancock, “Rough” from Future Shock (1983 Columbia). Hancock was well known as an experimenter of new synthesizer technology. During the early stages of the home computer revolution, Hancock used an AlphaSyntauri synthesizer as part of his ensemble of instruments. The AlphaSyntauri was an add-in synth for the Apple II computer, with its own sound-generating circuit board. The company was around from about 1980 to 1985. Its claim to fame what that it was much more affordable than the digital synthesizers made by New England Digital and Fairlight, each of which cost in the $30,000 to $50,000 range. The AlphaSyntauri was $1500. At this price you got 16-voice polyphony, 16 digital oscillators, and envelope generator, keyboard, and a sequencer capable of storing up to 7000 notes. It's affordable sequencing was a major attraction. This was before the Apple Macintosh was introduced, and with that the AlphaSyntauri was made immediately obsolete. But not before Hancock was able to work it into some of his electronic jazz tracks. If you listen carefully you can pick-out the sounds of the AlphaSyntauri because of all of the other synths and instruments on this track. Backing Vocals, Bernard Fowler, Grandmixer D.ST., Nicky Skopelitis, Roger Trilling; Bass, Bill Laswell; Drums, Sly Dunbar; Lead Vocals, Lamar Wright; Fairlight CMI Synthesizer, AlphaSyntauri Synthesizer, Emulator Synthesizer, Herbie Hancock; Prophet-5 Synthesizer, Michael Beinhorn; Turntables, Voice, Grandmixer D.ST. 6:55 Opening background music: P.F.M. (Premiata Forneria Marconi), “Storia In "LA"” from Jet Lag (1977 Asylum Records). Italian progressive rock band founded in 1970. Album recorded at Kendun Recorders, Burbank, California, January, 1977 and Scorpio Sound Studio, London, February, 1977. Mixed at Scorpio Sound Studio, February 1977. Mastered at RCA Studio, London. Bass, Moog B12 Synthesizer, Patrick Djivas; Drums, Percussion, Franz Di Cioccio; Electric Piano, Organ, Moog Synthesizer, Flavio Premoli. 6:28 Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

Greetings & welcome to another edition of Pushing The Envelope.   The 5/14 program focused on longer pieces since I was jammed for time due to a week spent travelling (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho) with my daughter, her husband and four and a half year old twins.  When I got back I needed a vacation from the vacation. As usual, music from all over the spectrum. Enjoy! Joel e-mail: pushingtheenvelopewhus@gmail.com Twitter: @envpusher1   5-14-22 Pushing The Envelope Playlist Rainforest IV (excerpt) - composer: David Tudor / ensemble: Composers Inside Electronics - Rainforest IV - Neuma (2022) https://composersinsideelectronics.bandcamp.com/album/composers-inside-electronics-perform-david-tudors-rainforest-iv   Capriccio - Hub New Music / composer: Michael Ippolito - Cappriccio - digital release (2021) https://hubnewmusic.bandcamp.com/album/capriccio   In Zeungen - Rainer Bürck / Marko Kassl, accordion - Feurer Zeungen Glocken Saiten - Earsay Music (2022) https://earsaymusic.bandcamp.com/album/feuer-zungen-glocken-saiten   Modul 6 / Modul 8_9 - Nik Bärtsch - Hishiryo: Piano Solo -  Ronin Rhythm Records (2006) https://roninrhythmrecords.bandcamp.com/album/hishiryo-piano-solo-2   Suite Ran - Bi Kyo Ran - Parallax - Belle Antique (1983)   Silver Apples of the Moon: Revisited (50th Anniversary • LIVE at Redcat • Feb. 13, 2018) - Morton Subotnick - Dublab (2022) https://dublab.bandcamp.com/album/silver-apples-of-the-moon-revisited-50th-anniversary-live-at-redcat-feb-13-2018   Le Son Doublé (excerpt) - pä (Paulo da Fonseca) - digital release (2021) https://lesondouble.bandcamp.com/album/le-son-doubl