Podcasts about Karlheinz Stockhausen

David Mellor explores how the Yamaha NS-10M monitors became a studio staple and why, decades after being discontinued, engineers are still seeking out second-hand pairs.Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:15 - Why NS-10Ms Became a Studio Staple02:11 - Making Better Mixing Decisions03:49 - A Second Pair of NS-10Ms05:23 - Mixing With Missing Frequencies09:11 - Reflex vs Closed Box Monitors11:35 - Why Pleasant Isn't Always Better13:29 - Mixes That Translate15:40 - Making Rapid Mixing Decisions18:52 - The Case for Closed-Box MonitorsThe Phil Ward Article - https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-storyDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. David has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music. Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, also returning to guest lecture at Surrey University. From 2001 until recently David has offered courses in audio online with Audio Masterclass. David now enjoys making YouTube videos for his 84,000 subscribers and releasing music on streaming services and Bandcamp for his dozen or so listeners.YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@audiomasterclassSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/6OkaDx4vB4O2ssUA5p4M8gBandcamp - https://davidmellor.bandcamp.com/Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts

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.

In this episode, David Mellor continues his exploration of microphone polar patterns by discussing techniques for capturing stereo recordings. He examines how the choice of polar pattern and microphone placement can be used effectively to achieve a balanced and immersive stereo image.Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:10 - Defining Mono03:08 - Binaural Recording04:24 - Defining Stereo05:28 - Number Of Mics And Placement06:58 - Polar Patterns07:48 - Figure of 8 Demo09:09 - The Blumlein Pair Configuration11:05 - Coincident Cross Pair Figure Of 8 With Demonstration16:53 - Coincident Cross Pair Of Cardioid With Demonstration21:35 - Mic Spacing - The ORTF Configuration24:31 - Mic Spacing - Omnidirectional Without Angling27:28 - Medley Of Configurations29:38 - SummaryDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. David has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music. Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, also returning to guest lecture at Surrey University. From 2001 until recently David has offered courses in audio online with Audio Masterclass. David now enjoys making YouTube videos for his 84,000 subscribers and releasing music on streaming services and Bandcamp for his dozen or so listeners.YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@audiomasterclassSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/6OkaDx4vB4O2ssUA5p4M8gBandcamp - https://davidmellor.bandcamp.com/Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts

durée : 00:28:43 - Les Midis de Culture - par : Marie Labory - Dans sa nouvelle pièce "Helikopter/Licht", le chorégraphe contemporain Angelin Preljocaj rend hommage en deux parties au compositeur d'avant-garde allemand Karlheinz Stockhausen. - réalisation : Laurence Malonda - invités : Angelin Preljocaj Chorégraphe, danseur et directeur artistique

David Mellor discusses how to create custom effects in a DAW without relying on expensive plug-ins. Here he demonstrates his approach to creating a filter pan effect using an EQ with high-pass and low-pass filters, highlighting how custom effects can help give your music a unique edge.Chapters00:00 - Introduction02:05 - Pan Effect03:02 - Mono Pan04:30 - Static Pan06:21 - Music Track06:42 - Creative Pan Effect09:00 - Pan Effect Using A Low-Pass Filter 13:23 - Crossfading Using Filters17:15 - Effecting Individual Instruments #slatedigital #infinityeq #protoolsDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. David has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music. Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, also returning to guest lecture at Surrey University. From 2001 until recently David has offered courses in audio online with Audio Masterclass. David now enjoys making YouTube videos for his 84,000 subscribers and releasing music on streaming services and Bandcamp for his dozen or so listeners.YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@audiomasterclassSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/6OkaDx4vB4O2ssUA5p4M8gBandcamp - https://davidmellor.bandcamp.com/Catch more shows on our other podcast channels: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts

Aujourd'hui, je reçois Angelin Preljocaj.Du 10 avril au 3 mai, au Théâtre de la Ville, Angelin et la troupe du ballet Preljocaj présentent Helikopter, une pièce de 2001 imaginée sur une œuvre avant-gardiste de Karlheinz Stockhausen, et LICHT, sa toute nouvelle création pour 12 danseurs sur une musique de Laurent Garnier.Dans cet entretien réalisé à 3 semaines de la première, Angelin raconte comment les deux œuvres dialoguent, portées par le souffle de Stockhausen.On l'écoute avec joie,* La première de LICHT est au Théâtre de la Ville le 10 avril :https://www.theatredelaville-paris.com/fr/spectacles/saison-24-25/danse/angelin-preljocaj-helikopter* Pour en savoir plus sur le Ballet Preljocaj : https://preljocaj.org/ballet-preljocaj/

Un saludo queridos amigos y oyentes. Hoy os ofrezco una introducción al existencialismo, una corriente filosófica evolucionada desde la Fenomenología de Husserl que diserta precisamente sobre la pequeña y miserable existencia humana. Albert Camus es uno de sus representantes franceses. 📗ÍNDICE 0. Resúmenes. 1. LA EXISTENCIA ES «PODER SER». 2. IDEARIO EXISTENCIALISTA. 3. PENSADORES MÁS REPRESENTATIVOS. AQUÍ https://go.ivoox.com/rf/136448677 puedes escuchar una introducción a la Fenomenología. 🎼Música de la época: 📀 Klavierstücke de Karlheinz Stockhausen, compositor alemán fallecido en 2007. 🎨Imagen: El grito es el título de cuatro cuadros del noruego Edvard Munch. 👍Pulsen un Me Gusta y colaboren a partir de 2,99 €/mes si se lo pueden permitir para asegurar la permanencia del programa ¡Muchas gracias a todos!

Episode 154 Chapter 15, Elektronische Musik in Germany. 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. Playlist: ELEKTRONISCHE MUSIK IN GERMANY Time Track Time Start Introduction –Thom Holmes 01:32 00:00 1.     Heinz Schutz, “Morgenröte” (1952). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 03:42 01:36 2.     Karel Goeyvaerts, “Compositie Nr 5 met zuivere tonen” (1953). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 02:44 05:12 3.     Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Studie I” (1953). Elektronische musik using only processed sine waves (Cologne). 09:25 07:50 4.     Giselher Klebe, “Interferenzen” (1955). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 04:52 17:16 5.     Gottfried Michael Koenig, “Klangfiguren I” (1955). Elektronische musikusing magnetic tape (Cologne). 04:18 22:00 6.     Franco Evangelisti, “Incontri di fasce sonore” (1957). Elektronische musikusing magnetic tape (Cologne). 03:30 26:08 7.     Mauricio Kagel, “Transición” (1958). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 13:22 29:30 8.     Györgi Ligeti, “Artikulation” (1958). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 03:58 42:44 9.     Herbert Eimert, “Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama” (1960). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 22:26 46:44 10.   Michael von Biel, “Fassung” (1964). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 13:47 01:09:06 11.   Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Hymnen Region III (opening)” (1953). Elektronische musik using only processed sine waves (Cologne). 02:30 01:22:40 12.   Peter Eötvös, “Mese” (1968). Elektronische musik using magnetic tape (Cologne). 12:42 01:25:10   13.   Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Studie II” (1953). Elektronische musik using only processed sine waves (Cologne). 03:10       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.  

Un saludo queridos amigos y oyentes. Hoy os ofrezco una introducción al existencialismo, una corriente filosófica evolucionada desde la Fenomenología de Husserl que diserta precisamente sobre la pequeña y miserable existencia humana. Albert Camus es uno de sus representantes franceses. 📗ÍNDICE 0. Resúmenes. 1. LA EXISTENCIA ES «PODER SER». 2. IDEARIO EXISTENCIALISTA. 3. PENSADORES MÁS REPRESENTATIVOS. AQUÍ https://go.ivoox.com/rf/136448677 puedes escuchar una introducción a la Fenomenología. 🎼Música de la época: 📀 Klavierstücke de Karlheinz Stockhausen, compositor alemán fallecido en 2007. 🎨Imagen: El grito es el título de cuatro cuadros del noruego Edvard Munch. 👍Pulsen un Me Gusta y colaboren a partir de 2,99 €/mes si se lo pueden permitir para asegurar la permanencia del programa ¡Muchas gracias a todos!

Das renommierte SWR Experimentalstudio forscht und arbeitet seit über 50 Jahren an neuen Klängen. Pierre Boulez und Karlheinz Stockhausen gehören zu den Gründervätern, Luigi Nono prägte das Studio in den 1980er Jahren. Heute sind es viele internationale Komponisten und Komponistinnen aller Generationen, die in gemeinsam mit den Klangregisseur:innen im Freiburger Spezial-Studio Neues entwickeln. Da das sanierungsbedürftige Heimatgebäude des SWR Freiburg zum Verkauf steht, wurde intensiv ein passender neuer Standort gesucht – und nun gefunden.

Broadway Drumming 101 is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In this episode of Broadway Drumming 101, I chat with the legendary Jonathan Haas about his incredible journey from studying liberal arts to becoming a virtuoso timpanist and professional musician. We talk about his groundbreaking work in Broadway and orchestral music, his passion for drumming, and his thoughts on navigating the challenges of the entertainment industry.Highlights from the Episode:* Jonathan's Journey: How he transitioned from liberal arts to music and became a timpanist with the St. Louis Symphony before moving to New York to study at Juilliard.* NYU Broadway Percussion Seminar: The creation of a one-of-a-kind program that brought over 400 students from around the world to learn from Broadway professionals, observe live pits, and engage with union leaders.* Broadway Experiences: Jonathan shares stories about his early days as a sub on Broadway, a memorable sword accident during Pirates of Penzance, and the lessons he learned.* Making Connections: Why being a good person and building relationships is essential for success in the music industry.* The Role of Luck and Hard Work: Jonathan reflects on serendipity, the reality of hard work, and balancing dreams with practical goals.Key Takeaways:* Aspiring percussionists need to sound exactly like the person they're subbing for—the best compliment is being mistaken for the regular.* Always respond promptly to emails and calls, and don't take on tasks you're not ready for.* Hard work, connections, and adaptability are crucial in building a sustainable career in entertainment.Subscribe and Don't Miss Out!Make sure to subscribe to Broadway Drumming 101 on your favorite podcast platform and turn on notifications to be the first to hear this inspiring episode with Jonathan Haas!Virtuoso timpanist Jonathan Haas has raised the status of the timpani to that of a solo instrument throughout his unique career that has spanned more than twenty years. From classical concertos to jazz and rock & roll, from symphonic masterpieces to the most experimental compositions of living composers, Haas has championed, commissioned, unearthed and celebrated music for his instrument, becoming, as Ovation magazine hailed him, "The Paganini of the timpani."His concerts on the world's most prestigious musical stages and his ground-breaking recordings have delighted critics and listeners on both sides of the ocean. The New York Times wrote, "Wherever one finds a percussion instrument waiting to be rubbed, shook, struck or strummed, [Haas] is probably nearby, ready to fulfill his duties with consummate expertise... he is a masterful young percussionist."Most recently, Haas has garnered widespread praise and attention for his performances of Philip Glass' Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra, a piece conceived by Haas and completed because of his quest to spotlight the timpani. The Concerto Fantasy features not only two timpanists, but also 14 timpani, all placed downstage in front of the orchestra. In 2000, Haas performed the world premiere of the piece with the American Symphony, and he has subsequently performed it at Carnegie Hall and in Phoenix, New Jersey, Baltimore, Pasadena, Long Beach (California), St. Louis and Mexico City. Haas also performed the European premiere with the BBC Symphony in London, the world premiere of a chamber orchestra version with the Iris Chamber Orchestra in Memphis, the Czechoslovakian premiere with the Prague Symphony Orchestra at the International Music Prague Spring Festival, the Norwegian premiere with the Bergen Philharmonic, and he will perform the Australian premiere with the Sydney Symphony and the Turkish premiere with the Istanbul Philharmonic.Haas' successful efforts to expand the timpani repertoire have led him to commission and premiere more than 25 works by composers in addition to Philip Glass such as Stephen Albert, Marius Constant, Irwin Bazelon, Eric Ewazen, Thomas Hamilton, Robert Hall Lewis, Jean Piche, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Andrew Thomas, and many others.Haas built the world's largest timpani and debuted it in 2003 at the Aspen Music Festival. This unprecendented, incredible instrument -- nearly 6' wide and nearly 4' tall – beats the world's second-largest timpani — a 48-incher used by Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra — by almost half.Haas' recordings include the trail-blazing 18th Century Concertos for Timpani and Orchestra and Johnny H. and the Prisoners of Swing, both on Sunset Records. The latter was named for his jazz group and features innovative renderings of jazz compositions featuring "hot timpani" in front of a full jazz ensemble. His rediscovery of Duke Ellington's brilliant composition for jazz timpani, "Tympaturbably Blue," is included on this recording, as are other jazz standards played on a set of ten kettledrums.Demonstrating a remarkable versatility as a musician, Haas has performed and recorded with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, played on the Grammy Award-winning recording Zappa's Universe, recorded with Aerosmith, Michael Bolton, Black Sabbath, and explored heavy metal with his rock group Clozshave.The rarest of modern virtuosi, Haas embarked on his career as a solo timpanist by performing the only solo timpani recital ever presented at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1980. As an orchestral soloist, he made his debut with the New York Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich and his European solo debut with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. He made his French debut performing Andrez Panufnick's Concerto for Percussion, Timpani and Orchestra with the Orchestra de la Garde Republicaine. He was the soloist in the Druschetsky Concerto for Eight Timpani, Oboe and Orchestra with the Aspen Chamber Orchestra. He has also performed as a solo timpanist for the Distinguished Artists Recital Series at New York's 92nd Street ‘Y' and as a guest artist with the Lincoln Center Chamber Society, the Chamber Music at the ‘Y' Series, and the Newport Chamber Music Festival. He has championed new music by presenting adventuresome programming such as The Music of Frank Zappa, showcasing the music of Edgar Varese and Frank Zappa, under the auspices of Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series.Haas is the principal timpanist of the New York Chamber Orchestra, the Aspen Chamber Orchestra and EOS Ensemble, principal percussionist of the American Symphony Orchestra, and a member of the American Composers Orchestra. He performs with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, New York Pops, and New Jersey Symphony and has performed and recorded with the New York Philharmonic, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Haas received his Master's Degree from the Juilliard School as a student of Saul Goodman. An inspiring teacher, he has been the director of the Peabody Conservatory Percussion Studio for twenty years and a faculty artist of the Aspen Music School, and he conducts the percussion ensembles at both schools. He has presented master classes throughout the United States and internationally at the Toho Gauken, Hanoi Conservatory, Paris Conservatory, and the Graz Percussion School. Sharing his enthusiasm for music with young people, he has presented over two hundred concert-demonstrations with his "Drumfire" program, under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Institute, the New York Chamber Symphony's Sidney Wolff Children's Concert Series, and the Aspen Festival Young Person's Concert Series.As active an entrepreneur as he is an artist, Haas heads Sunset Records, Kettles and Company, and Gemini Music Productions which contracts musicians for Lincoln Center, New York Pops, and many other organizations. He also works closely with percussion industry manufacturers Pearl/Adams, Promark and Zildjian, among others.Clayton Craddock founded Broadway Drumming 101, an in-depth online platform offering specialized mentorship and a carefully curated collection of resources tailored for aspiring and professional musicians.Clayton's Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Ain't Too Proud – The Life and Times of The Temptations, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical. As a skilled sub, he's contributed his talents to Motown, Evita, Cats, Avenue Q, The Color Purple, Rent, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical, Hadestown (tour), and many more. He has also appeared on major shows, including The View, Good Morning America, Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, and the TONY Awards, and performed with legends like The Stylistics, The Delfonics, Mario Cantone, Laura Benanti, Kristin Chenoweth, Kerry Butler, Christian Borle, Norm Lewis, Deniece Williams, Chuck Berry, and Ben E. King.Clayton proudly endorses Ahead Drum Cases, Paiste Cymbals, Innovative Percussion drumsticks, and Empire Ears.Learn more about Clayton Craddock here: www.claytoncraddock.com Get full access to Broadway Drumming 101 at broadwaydrumming101.substack.com/subscribe

Get ready for an exciting upcoming episode of Broadway Drumming 101! I'll be talking with the legendary timpanist Jonathan Haas about his groundbreaking work with the NYU Broadway Percussion Seminar. Jonathan shares how the program started, its impact on over 400 students worldwide, and how it gave young musicians a real taste of Broadway—playing with top percussionists, sitting in active pits, learning about unions at Local 802, and getting advice from icons like contractor John Miller.We'll also dive into how a simple lunchroom conversation sparked the creation of the NYU Broadway Orchestra Program. You won't want to miss these incredible behind-the-scenes stories about Broadway music education and what it takes to succeed.Subscribe now to Broadway Drumming 101 on your favorite platform and turn on notifications so you'll be the first to know when this episode drops!Virtuoso timpanist Jonathan Haas has raised the status of the timpani to that of a solo instrument throughout his unique career that has spanned more than twenty years. From classical concertos to jazz and rock & roll, from symphonic masterpieces to the most experimental compositions of living composers, Haas has championed, commissioned, unearthed and celebrated music for his instrument, becoming, as Ovation magazine hailed him, "The Paganini of the timpani."His concerts on the world's most prestigious musical stages and his ground-breaking recordings have delighted critics and listeners on both sides of the ocean. The New York Times wrote, "Wherever one finds a percussion instrument waiting to be rubbed, shook, struck or strummed, [Haas] is probably nearby, ready to fulfill his duties with consummate expertise... he is a masterful young percussionist."Most recently, Haas has garnered widespread praise and attention for his performances of Philip Glass' Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra, a piece conceived by Haas and completed because of his quest to spotlight the timpani. The Concerto Fantasy features not only two timpanists, but also 14 timpani, all placed downstage in front of the orchestra. In 2000, Haas performed the world premiere of the piece with the American Symphony, and he has subsequently performed it at Carnegie Hall and in Phoenix, New Jersey, Baltimore, Pasadena, Long Beach (California), St. Louis and Mexico City. Haas also performed the European premiere with the BBC Symphony in London, the world premiere of a chamber orchestra version with the Iris Chamber Orchestra in Memphis, the Czechoslovakian premiere with the Prague Symphony Orchestra at the International Music Prague Spring Festival, the Norwegian premiere with the Bergen Philharmonic, and he will perform the Australian premiere with the Sydney Symphony and the Turkish premiere with the Istanbul Philharmonic.Haas' successful efforts to expand the timpani repertoire have led him to commission and premiere more than 25 works by composers in addition to Philip Glass such as Stephen Albert, Marius Constant, Irwin Bazelon, Eric Ewazen, Thomas Hamilton, Robert Hall Lewis, Jean Piche, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Andrew Thomas, and many others.Haas built the world's largest timpani and debuted it in 2003 at the Aspen Music Festival. This unprecendented, incredible instrument -- nearly 6' wide and nearly 4' tall – beats the world's second-largest timpani — a 48-incher used by Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra — by almost half.Haas' recordings include the trail-blazing 18th Century Concertos for Timpani and Orchestra and Johnny H. and the Prisoners of Swing, both on Sunset Records. The latter was named for his jazz group and features innovative renderings of jazz compositions featuring "hot timpani" in front of a full jazz ensemble. His rediscovery of Duke Ellington's brilliant composition for jazz timpani, "Tympaturbably Blue," is included on this recording, as are other jazz standards played on a set of ten kettledrums.Demonstrating a remarkable versatility as a musician, Haas has performed and recorded with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, played on the Grammy Award-winning recording Zappa's Universe, recorded with Aerosmith, Michael Bolton, Black Sabbath, and explored heavy metal with his rock group Clozshave.The rarest of modern virtuosi, Haas embarked on his career as a solo timpanist by performing the only solo timpani recital ever presented at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1980. As an orchestral soloist, he made his debut with the New York Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich and his European solo debut with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. He made his French debut performing Andrez Panufnick's Concerto for Percussion, Timpani and Orchestra with the Orchestra de la Garde Republicaine. He was the soloist in the Druschetsky Concerto for Eight Timpani, Oboe and Orchestra with the Aspen Chamber Orchestra. He has also performed as a solo timpanist for the Distinguished Artists Recital Series at New York's 92nd Street ‘Y' and as a guest artist with the Lincoln Center Chamber Society, the Chamber Music at the ‘Y' Series, and the Newport Chamber Music Festival. He has championed new music by presenting adventuresome programming such as The Music of Frank Zappa, showcasing the music of Edgar Varese and Frank Zappa, under the auspices of Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series.Haas is the principal timpanist of the New York Chamber Orchestra, the Aspen Chamber Orchestra and EOS Ensemble, principal percussionist of the American Symphony Orchestra, and a member of the American Composers Orchestra. He performs with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, New York Pops, and New Jersey Symphony and has performed and recorded with the New York Philharmonic, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Haas received his Master's Degree from the Juilliard School as a student of Saul Goodman. An inspiring teacher, he has been the director of the Peabody Conservatory Percussion Studio for twenty years and a faculty artist of the Aspen Music School, and he conducts the percussion ensembles at both schools. He has presented master classes throughout the United States and internationally at the Toho Gauken, Hanoi Conservatory, Paris Conservatory, and the Graz Percussion School. Sharing his enthusiasm for music with young people, he has presented over two hundred concert-demonstrations with his "Drumfire" program, under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Institute, the New York Chamber Symphony's Sidney Wolff Children's Concert Series, and the Aspen Festival Young Person's Concert Series.As active an entrepreneur as he is an artist, Haas heads Sunset Records, Kettles and Company, and Gemini Music Productions which contracts musicians for Lincoln Center, New York Pops, and many other organizations. He also works closely with percussion industry manufacturers Pearl/Adams, Promark and Zildjian, among others.Clayton Craddock founded Broadway Drumming 101, an in-depth online platform offering specialized mentorship and a carefully curated collection of resources tailored for aspiring and professional musicians.Clayton's Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Ain't Too Proud – The Life and Times of The Temptations, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical. As a skilled sub, he's contributed his talents to Motown, Evita, Cats, Avenue Q, The Color Purple, Rent, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical, Hadestown (tour), and many more. He has also appeared on major shows, including The View, Good Morning America, Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, and the TONY Awards, and performed with legends like The Stylistics, The Delfonics, Mario Cantone, Laura Benanti, Kristin Chenoweth, Kerry Butler, Christian Borle, Norm Lewis, Deniece Williams, Chuck Berry, and Ben E. King.Clayton proudly endorses Ahead Drum Cases, Paiste Cymbals, Innovative Percussion drumsticks, and Empire Ears.Learn more about Clayton Craddock here: www.claytoncraddock.com Get full access to Broadway Drumming 101 at broadwaydrumming101.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Broadway Drumming 101, I sit down with Jonathan Haas, a percussion legend who revolutionized the timpani and built an extraordinary career performing with major orchestras, rock bands, and jazz icons. We talk about what it really takes to make it on Broadway—the hard work, the unexpected breaks, and the reality of starting at the bottom. Jonathan shares real-world advice and stories from his career, giving you a no-nonsense look at the industry. If you're serious about breaking into Broadway or curious about what it takes to succeed as a musician, you have to listen to this episode!Virtuoso timpanist Jonathan Haas has raised the status of the timpani to that of a solo instrument throughout his unique career that has spanned more than twenty years. From classical concertos to jazz and rock & roll, from symphonic masterpieces to the most experimental compositions of living composers, Haas has championed, commissioned, unearthed and celebrated music for his instrument, becoming, as Ovation magazine hailed him, "The Paganini of the timpani."His concerts on the world's most prestigious musical stages and his ground-breaking recordings have delighted critics and listeners on both sides of the ocean. The New York Times wrote, "Wherever one finds a percussion instrument waiting to be rubbed, shook, struck or strummed, [Haas] is probably nearby, ready to fulfill his duties with consummate expertise... he is a masterful young percussionist."Most recently, Haas has garnered widespread praise and attention for his performances of Philip Glass' Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra, a piece conceived by Haas and completed because of his quest to spotlight the timpani. The Concerto Fantasy features not only two timpanists, but also 14 timpani, all placed downstage in front of the orchestra. In 2000, Haas performed the world premiere of the piece with the American Symphony, and he has subsequently performed it at Carnegie Hall and in Phoenix, New Jersey, Baltimore, Pasadena, Long Beach (California), St. Louis and Mexico City. Haas also performed the European premiere with the BBC Symphony in London, the world premiere of a chamber orchestra version with the Iris Chamber Orchestra in Memphis, the Czechoslovakian premiere with the Prague Symphony Orchestra at the International Music Prague Spring Festival, the Norwegian premiere with the Bergen Philharmonic, and he will perform the Australian premiere with the Sydney Symphony and the Turkish premiere with the Istanbul Philharmonic.Haas' successful efforts to expand the timpani repertoire have led him to commission and premiere more than 25 works by composers in addition to Philip Glass such as Stephen Albert, Marius Constant, Irwin Bazelon, Eric Ewazen, Thomas Hamilton, Robert Hall Lewis, Jean Piche, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Andrew Thomas, and many others.Haas built the world's largest timpani and debuted it in 2003 at the Aspen Music Festival. This unprecendented, incredible instrument -- nearly 6' wide and nearly 4' tall – beats the world's second-largest timpani — a 48-incher used by Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra — by almost half.Haas' recordings include the trail-blazing 18th Century Concertos for Timpani and Orchestra and Johnny H. and the Prisoners of Swing, both on Sunset Records. The latter was named for his jazz group and features innovative renderings of jazz compositions featuring "hot timpani" in front of a full jazz ensemble. His rediscovery of Duke Ellington's brilliant composition for jazz timpani, "Tympaturbably Blue," is included on this recording, as are other jazz standards played on a set of ten kettledrums.Demonstrating a remarkable versatility as a musician, Haas has performed and recorded with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, played on the Grammy Award-winning recording Zappa's Universe, recorded with Aerosmith, Michael Bolton, Black Sabbath, and explored heavy metal with his rock group Clozshave.The rarest of modern virtuosi, Haas embarked on his career as a solo timpanist by performing the only solo timpani recital ever presented at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1980. As an orchestral soloist, he made his debut with the New York Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Shostakovich and his European solo debut with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. He made his French debut performing Andrez Panufnick's Concerto for Percussion, Timpani and Orchestra with the Orchestra de la Garde Republicaine. He was the soloist in the Druschetsky Concerto for Eight Timpani, Oboe and Orchestra with the Aspen Chamber Orchestra. He has also performed as a solo timpanist for the Distinguished Artists Recital Series at New York's 92nd Street ‘Y' and as a guest artist with the Lincoln Center Chamber Society, the Chamber Music at the ‘Y' Series, and the Newport Chamber Music Festival. He has championed new music by presenting adventuresome programming such as The Music of Frank Zappa, showcasing the music of Edgar Varese and Frank Zappa, under the auspices of Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series.Haas is the principal timpanist of the New York Chamber Orchestra, the Aspen Chamber Orchestra and EOS Ensemble, principal percussionist of the American Symphony Orchestra, and a member of the American Composers Orchestra. He performs with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, New York Pops, and New Jersey Symphony and has performed and recorded with the New York Philharmonic, the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Haas received his Master's Degree from the Juilliard School as a student of Saul Goodman. An inspiring teacher, he has been the director of the Peabody Conservatory Percussion Studio for twenty years and a faculty artist of the Aspen Music School, and he conducts the percussion ensembles at both schools. He has presented master classes throughout the United States and internationally at the Toho Gauken, Hanoi Conservatory, Paris Conservatory, and the Graz Percussion School. Sharing his enthusiasm for music with young people, he has presented over two hundred concert-demonstrations with his "Drumfire" program, under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Institute, the New York Chamber Symphony's Sidney Wolff Children's Concert Series, and the Aspen Festival Young Person's Concert Series.As active an entrepreneur as he is an artist, Haas heads Sunset Records, Kettles and Company, and Gemini Music Productions which contracts musicians for Lincoln Center, New York Pops, and many other organizations. He also works closely with percussion industry manufacturers Pearl/Adams, Promark and Zildjian, among others.Clayton Craddock founded Broadway Drumming 101, an in-depth online platform offering specialized mentorship and a carefully curated collection of resources tailored for aspiring and professional musicians.Clayton's Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Ain't Too Proud – The Life and Times of The Temptations, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical. As a skilled sub, he's contributed his talents to Motown, Evita, Cats, Avenue Q, The Color Purple, Rent, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical, Hadestown (tour), and many more. He has also appeared on major shows, including The View, Good Morning America, Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, and the TONY Awards, and performed with legends like The Stylistics, The Delfonics, Mario Cantone, Laura Benanti, Kristin Chenoweth, Kerry Butler, Christian Borle, Norm Lewis, Deniece Williams, Chuck Berry, and Ben E. King.Clayton proudly endorses Ahead Drum Cases, Paiste Cymbals, Innovative Percussion drumsticks, and Empire Ears.Learn more about Clayton Craddock here: www.claytoncraddock.com Get full access to Broadway Drumming 101 at broadwaydrumming101.substack.com/subscribe

Von der studierenden Straßenmusikerin zur Dozentin, Ensemblemitglied, Solistin und Coach. Camilla Hoitenga spricht im ACHT BRÜCKEN Podcast mit Katherina Knees über ihren Werdegang, Zufälle, Gelegenheiten und den Mut, den eigenen Weg zu gehen. Sie berichtet über ihre Zusammenarbeit mit Karlheinz Stockhausen und ihre erste Begegnung mit Kaija Saariaho 1982 in Darmstadt und die sich daraus entwickelte Freundschaft und den musikalischen Austausch mit der Porträtkomponistin von ACHT BRÜCKEN 2025. www.achtbruecken.de www.hoitenga.com

Smooth...chilled...and mysterious: the electronic orchestrations of the late German electronic music pioneer KLAUS SCHULZE — just one of the new styles to emerge from the hyper-creative incubator that was Berlin in the 1960s and 70s. Electronic synthesizers ultimately fueled dozens of new genres, the most famous being “Kraut Rock.” But the confluence of cosmic electronic soundscapes and the classical music of Europe led to a widely popular genre that came to be known as “spacemusic.” It was well-suited to the winter months, when listeners could easily make the perceptual leap from the new sound to the frigid vacuum of interstellar space—a natural conjunction that was recognized by the first generation of academic electronic musicians, like German composer KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN. On this transmission of Hearts of Space, another interstellar flight on electronic wings, on a program called WINTERTRONIC 4. Music is by KLAUS SCHULZE, MARK DWANE, ANDREW LAHIFF, DREAMSTATE LOGIC, ISOSTATIC, OXIA PALACE, and HOLLAN HOLMES. [ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]

Hors-série consacré à un concert hors Indre-et-Loire, au Musée d'Art Moderne de l'Abbaye de Fontevraud pour l'exposition Bernard Buffet, médiéval et pop Programme • Michel Magne, "Danse des flammes", musique pour Le Rendez-vous manqué • Interview de Dominique Gagneux, Directrice du Musée d'Art Moderne de l'Abbaye de Fontevraud • Erik Satie, "Sonnerie pour réveiller le Bon Gros Roi des Singes" * • Denis Dufour, "Cinq formes d'appel. N°4 - Invite" * • Arrivée De La Cloche Gabrielle À L'Abbaye De Fontevraud • Giacinto Scelsi, "Quattro Pezzi" pour trompette N°1 * • Giacinto Scelsi, "Preghiera per un' ombra" pour clarinette * • Pierre Henry - Michel Colombier, "Psyché Rock" • Entretien mené par Michel Droit avec les invités Bernard Buffet et Annabel Buffet • Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Der Kleine Harlekin" pour clarinette (extrait) * • Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Tierkreis - Le Lion" * • Pierre Henry, "La Reine Verte - Rock électronique" * enregistré en concert le 26/08/2024, au Musée d'Art Moderne de l'Abbaye de Fontevraud. ensemble PTYX : Antoine Moulin, clarinette, clarinette basse / Christophe Rostang, trompette / Jean-Baptiste Apéré, mélodica Plus de détails et des photos sur ensembleptyx.com ********************************************* Émission radiophonique sur les musiques contemporaines proposée par l'ensemble PTYX. Présentation : Jean-Baptiste Apéré réalisation, production, sans concession : ptyx fan club vnrpe (c) 2024

James Ingram is a composer, music engraver and author. He lived and worked with Stockhausen for 28 years. Recorded December 3rd, 2024.==PRIVATE LESSONS IN COMPOSITION AND ANALYSISContact me via samuel.andreyev (at) gmail (dot) comSUPPORT THIS PODCASTPatreonDonorboxSAMUEL ANDREYEV'S NEW ALBUMhttps://divineartrecords.com/recording/samuel-andreyev-in-glow-of-like-seclusion/LINKSYouTube channelOfficial WebsiteTwitterInstagramEdition Impronta, publisher of Samuel Andreyev's scoresEPISODE CREDITSPost production: Arkadiusz BuchalaPodcast artwork photograph © 2019 Philippe StirnweissSupport the show

Hasta bien entrado el siglo XX, las ideas musicales se exponen de acuerdo con un desarrollo ordenado según una estructura previamente estudiada, escrita o planteada. Mediado el siglo, algunos compositores se acogen a una tendencia que deja margen al indeterminismo, la flexibilidad y el azar._____Has escuchadoAngelica Music. Exercise 10 (1973-1974) / Christian Wolff. Apartment House; Christian Wolff, melódica. I Dischi di Angelica (2015)Aus den sieben Tagen. Liaison (1968) / Karlheinz Stockhausen. Ensemble Musique Vivante; Diego Masson, director. Harmonia Mundi (1988)HPSCHD. Solo VII: For Harpsichord & Computer-Generated Sound Tapes (1967) / John Cage y Lejaren Hiller. Jukka Tiensuu, clave. Ondine (1999)Pithoprakta (1956) / Iannis Xenakis. Orchestre philharmonique du Luxembourg; Arturo Tamayo, director. Timpani (2008)_____Selección bibliográficaADORNO, Theodor W., “Vers une musique informelle”. En: Escritos Musicales I-III, vol. 16. Akal, 2006*BEHRMAN, David, “What Indeterminate Notation Determines”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 3, n.º 2 (1965), pp. 58-73*BOULEZ, Pierre, “Alea”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 3, n.º 1 (1964), pp. 42-53*CARDEW, Cornelius, Scratch Music. The MIT Press, 1974CHARLES, Daniel, “L'interprète et le hasard”. Musique en Jeu, n.º 3 (1971), pp. 45-51*DELIÈGE, Célestin, “Indétermination et improvisation”. IRASM, vol. 2 (1971), pp. 155-191HARBINSON, William G., “Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez's Third Sonata”. Tempo, n.º 169 (1989), pp. 16-20*JENSEN, Marc G., “John Cage, Chance Operations, and the Chaos Game: Cage and the I Ching”. The Musical Times, vol. 150, n.º 1907 (2009), pp. 97-102*MEDINA, Ángel, “Apuntes sobre la recepción de la música abierta en España”. Anuario Musical, n.º 51 (1996), pp. 217-232*MORO VALLINA, Daniel, “Aleatoriedad y flexibilidad en la vanguardia musical española”. Actas do I Encontro Iberoamericano de Jovens Musicólogos (2012), pp. 236-248: [PDF]NIETO, Velia, “La forma abierta en la música del siglo XX”. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, vol. 30, n.º 92 (2008), pp. 191-203O'GRADY, Terence J., “Aesthetic Value in Indeterminate Music”. The Musical Quarterly, vol. 67, n.º 3 (1981), pp. 366-381*PEYROU, Mariano, Oídos que no ven. Taurus, 2022POLO PUJADAS, Magda y Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny, Pensamiento y música a cuatro manos: la creatividad musical en los siglos XX y XXI. Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2015*REYNOLDS, Roger, “Indeterminacy: Some Considerations”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 4, n.º 1 (1965), pp. 136-140*TRENKAMP, Anne, “The Concept of Alea in Boulez's Constellation-Miroir”. Music & Letters, vol. 57, n.º 1 (1976), pp. 1-10* *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

Mit "Autobahn" bringt die Düsseldorfer Band Kraftwerk 1974 ihr viertes Album raus. Ein echtes Meilensteine Album – und das, obwohl das Album nur ganze fünf Titel hat. Die Gruppe Kraftwerk hat ihre Wurzeln in der nordrhein-westfälischen Hauptstadt Düsseldorf. Genauer gesagt aus dem direkten Umfeld der Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie, in denen sich auch andere große zeitgenössische Künstler bewegt haben wie Joseph Beuys, Karlheinz Stockhausen oder Györgi Ligeti. Die New York Times hat die Band Kraftwerk einmal als "die Beatles der elektronischen Musik" bezeichnet. Was genau das Album "Autobahn" zu einem Meilenstein macht, verrät Podcast-Gast und Kraftwerk-Fan Sascha Simnovec in seinen eigenen Worten: "Autobahn ist bis heute so konsequent anders und stilprägend! [...] Ein Kunstprofessor, genauso wie ein Taxifahrer, der ihn zur Ausstellung fährt, versteht das Album. Es gibt keine intellektuellen Fallen, obwohl das Album so intelligent ist." Das Herzstück von "Autobahn" ist der Titelsong selbst. Über 22 Minuten erstreckt sich diese romantisierte Reise auf der deutschen Autobahn, die dabei auch künstlerisch unterstützt wird von dem ursprünglichen Plattencover des Albums. Darauf sehen wir genau die dort beschriebene Landschaft mit zwei typisch deutschen Autos auf der Autobahn. Die Sonne scheint im Hintergrund über die Berge und im Rückspiegel sehen wir tatsächlich dann auch die vier Bandmitglieder von Kraftwerk sowie die beiden Gründer der Band, Ralf Hütter und Florian Schneider. Der Titelsong "Autobahn" ist mit seinen 22:30 Minuten tatsächlich der einzige Song auf der A-Seite des Albums und damit auf mehreren Ebenen in sich geschlossen. Ralf Hütter von Kraftwerk hat das Stück auch nicht unbedingt als Song betitelt, sondern eher als "Soundmalerei". Im SWR1 Meilensteine Podcast zu "Autobahn" von Kraftwerk sprechen wir natürlich auch über die zweite Seite der Platte und auch darüber, ob die Platte jetzt eigentlich aus zwei oder aus drei großen Themenbereichen besteht, welche kosmischen Kräfte die Platte beeinflusst haben und darüber, wie genau viele dieser damals neuen Sounds entstanden sind. __________ Über diese Songs vom Album "Autobahn" wird im Podcast gesprochen (17:43) – "Autobahn"(55:47) – "Kometenmelodie 1 und 2"(01:00:58) – "Mitternacht"(01:09:51) – "Morgenspaziergang" __________ Alle Shownotes und weiterführenden Links zur Folge "Autobahn" findet ihr hier: https://www.swr.de/swr1/rp/meilensteine/kraftwerk-autobahn-100.html __________ Ihr wollt mehr Podcasts wie diesen? Abonniert die SWR1 Meilensteine! Fragen, Kritik, Anregungen? Meldet euch gerne per WhatsApp-Sprachnachricht an die (06131) 92 93 94 95 oder schreibt uns an meilensteine@swr.de

Episode 136 Sun Ra and Stockhausen—An Imaginary Encounter in Electronic Music Playlist   Time Track Time Start Introduction –Thom Holmes 14:28 00:00 Karlheinz Stockhausen,  “Es (It)” (1969) from Aus Den Sieben Tagen (from the Seven Days) (1973 Deutsche Grammophon). Composed by, electronics (Filters, Potentiometers), spoken voice, technician (Sound Direction), liner notes, Karlheinz Stockhausen; Elektronium, Harald Bojé; Piano, Aloys Kontarsky; Drums, Percussion (Tam-tam, Flexatone, Guero, Bamboo Flute, Jew's Harp, Rolf Gehlhaar; Drums, Percussion (Tam-tam, Flexatone, Guero, Jew's Harp, Alfred Alings; Viola, Johannes G. Fritsch. The Elektronium was an electronic instrument in the form of an accordion, invented by Hohner in 1952. From the cycle of compositions entitled Aus den Sieben Tagen. Es (10th May 1968). This is the complete cycle for the work consisting of 7 albums recorded at the Georg-Moller-Haus (Loge) in Darmstadt, from the 26th to 31st August 1969. This is different than the earlier recordings from Cologne that were released separately. Comes in a sturdy box together with a tri-lingual 20-page booklet. Each record is packed in its own cover. 23:04 14:30 Sun-Ra and his Astro Infinity Arkestra, “Space Probe” (1969) from My Brother The Wind Vol. 1 (2017 Cosmic Myth Records). Moog Modular Synthesizer solo, two keyboards, Sun Ra; Moog programming and mixing, Gershon Kingsley.” Recorded at Gershon Kingsley's New York studio before Sun Ra had acquired a prototype Minimoog from Bob Moog the following year. 17:45 37:30 Sun-Ra and his Astro Infinity Arkestra, “The Code Of Interdependence” (1969) from My Brother The Wind Vol. 1 (2017 Cosmic Myth Records). Moog Modular Synthesizer solo, two keyboards, Sun Ra; Moog programming and mixing, Gershon Kingsley; Drums, Danny Davis, John Gilmore; Oboe, Marshall Allen; Tenor Saxophone, John Gilmore. Recorded at Gershon Kingsley's New York studio before Sun Ra had acquired a prototype Minimoog from Bob Moog the following year. 16:50 55:16   Opening background music: Sun Ra and his Solar Myth Arkestra, “Seen Three Took Four” from The Solar-Myth Approach Vol. 1 (1970 Actuel). Piano, Minimoog, Electric Organ, Clavinet, Sun Ra; Tenor Saxophone, Percussion, John Gilmore; among a huge host of others. Introduction to the podcast voiced by Anne Benkovitz. 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.

Join our poetry Salon and Open Mic: https://parallax-media-network.mn.co/share/5hSLvQW7bNszFGEo?utm_source=manual About David Herz: Hello. My names are David Salzmann Herz. I was born in Boston 70 years ago when McCarthy was getting his comeuppance. I lived with my family somewhere in Massachusetts before moving to Belo Horizonte, Brazil , as part of the Department of the Interior's Punto Quatro program where my father was instrumental in mapping the geology and training a generation of Brazilian geologists. I began writing aged ten at the American school of Sao Paolo which had scorpions in the sandbox. I won a turtle for my prose. Then we lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland before moving to Athens, Ga. Where I met the poet Colman Barks and other luminaries. I moved to Chicago and studied briefly under Del Close at Second City and David Mamet who was then directing the Goodman Theater. As well as Richard McKeon at the University of Chicago who taught Susan Sontag among others. Then I returned home and drove a car from Selma, Alabama to Warminster Pennsylvania, possibly damaging the transmission while accelerating against the snow and ice. The next three years in a bankrupt New York City were richness incarnate. I worked at the Oh Ho So restaurant in SoHo and as a busboy served Harry Belafonte, one of the reasons God created humans, a glass of water. I had Alice Notley, poetess supreme, for a teacher and read my prose work at the Saint Marks in the Bowery Poetry Project. Those were wild times, buildings burning, trash uncollected, rapes a'plenty, and great generosity from compassionate lawyers, doctors and dentists for the impoverished lot we were. You could easily meet people such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, John Giorno, Ted Berrigan, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Fred Sherry, Nam June Paik, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bernstein, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Eileen Myles, Ted Greenwald, John Cale, Lydia Lunch, Alan Vega, and avoid others such as Valerie Solanas. And then just as I was about to join a rock and roll band I moved to Paris. It's been 45 years. Odd jobs subtitling movies and Sipa Photopress Agency photographs. Doing journalism for English language papers, interviewing the B- 52's, Peter Brook, Zouc, Herbert Achternbusch, Paul Lederman, Boris Bergman and then working for Bull and Alcatel two fine French corporations employing hundreds of thousands who equally vanished into the capitalist sunset. Thanks to a flutist friend in Ircam I got to meet Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez but I don't think they remember me. I did a translation for Sophie Calle before she became Sophie Calle. Also some work for the Royal family of Afghanistan. Back when there was one. At Paris VIII University still in the Bois de Vincennes with the whores whom we did not try to lead to culture I got to attend classes by Lyotard & Deleuze and the Miller Brothers, Lacan's son in laws? Noam Chosmky spoke. I thought to become a consultant in a moment of delusion and ended up teaching for the last 24 years: Polytechnique, SciencesPo, ENST, INT, Supelec, Ecole Centrale, ENPC, ENSTA, Paris V, ICP, ESIEE, ECE, Ecole du Louvre. Before that I was a technical translator, a field I am happy to report that has been almost entirely taken over by machines, bless their soulless bodies. I also got married and my wife and I had two children. But we hadn't really grown up much to the needless suffering of the children and so that marriage went painfully bust...Then I married again and we had a daughter. She's on the phone right now, de rigueur for all 16 year olds. I am a loving observer of the human experiment of which I am inextricably a part, how so ever much I would like to be apart. As we advance, not necessarily progress, into the numbing, memory erasing age of AI, already sinking its canines deep into our pranic jugulars, lose ourselves in our beloved electronic devices, we must look to our hands, our analog writing devices such as pencils and pens and give them a try. Along with all the rest.

durée : 01:40:59 - Les Nuits de France Culture - Conférence de Karlheinz Stockhausen aux Rencontres internationales d'art contemporain de la Rochelle, diffusée la première fois le 27 août 1974 sur France Culture. - invités : Karlheinz Stockhausen Compositeur allemand ( Mödrath, Allemagne, 1928 - Kürten,Allemagne 2007 )

Andreas Fisher and Guillermo Anzorena of Neue Vocal Solisten on working with Karlheinz Stockhausen on the composer's epic of vocal improvisation, Stimmung, which they'll perform at the Lovely Music festival in Dundalk this weekend.

Music Used:Space Town - What Happened to Chiptune Themedot.AY - VibraslopReference:- Square Sounds Melbourne - https://www.squaresoundsfestival.com/- Karlheinz Stockhausen - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Stockhausen- Music Concrete - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concrète](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concr%C3%A8te)- Henry Homesweet - https://x.com/henryhomesweet- 10k Free Men and their Families/Tom Gilmore - http://10kfreemen.com/- Girl Talk - https://www.girltalkmusic.com/- Dan Deacon - https://dandeacon.com/- Crystal Castles - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Castles- Pictureplane - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictureplane- Kristy Dossor - [https://www.sifter.com.au/post/chiptune-is-an-instrument-not-a-genre-square-sounds-festival-2020](https://www.instagram.com/postitmandala/)- Eugene Davoren-Britton - https://www.instagram.com/hyphencutlery/- Little-scale - http://little-scale.blogspot.com/- cTrix - https://ctrix.net/- Sound Bytes - https://www.facebook.com/SoundBytesOz/- Doshy - https://ra.co/dj/doshy- Robert Parker - https://www.instagram.com/robertparkerofficial/?hl=en- Tom Foolery and the Family Jewelry - https://tomfooleryandthefamilyjewellery.bandcamp.com/- Jamatar - https://jamatar.bandcamp.com/- Reception Festival - https://receptionfestival.com/- Melbourne Chiptune Academy - https://chiptuneacademy.com.au/- Avrilcadabra - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8OqqNTPR_s9TNIXiBZfOcg

Hösten 1978 bytte den unga synthduon VCL XI (som döpt sig efter ett diagram på baksidan av Kraftwerks album "Radio-activity") namn till Orchestral Manouvres in the Dark och gjorde sin första spelning på Eric's Club i Liverpool. Andy McCluskey och Paul Humphreys kom från arbetarhem. De hade inte råd med keyboards så Paul byggde egna elektroniska instrument genom att plocka ut kretskorten ur sina mostrars radioapparater. Till slut köpte de en Korg-500 på avbetalning och skickade en demo med låten "Electricity" till Tony Wilson på skivbolaget Factory i Manchester. Han hatade den, minns Andy och Paul när de hälsar på hemma hos Strage."One week Tony Wilson was saying to his wife: 'Oh, they played the club. They were shit. I hate them. They're two hairy blokes from Liverpool playing electric nonsense.' And his wife says: 'No, this is a hit.' And the next week we met Tony and he said: 'You are the future of pop music!' He totally changed his mind. And we said: "We're not fucking pop. We're experimental.'"I nya "Hemma hos Strage" pratar OMD om sitt 14:e album "Bauhaus staircase", om hur regissören John Hughes fick dem att skriva "If you leave" eftersom han ändrat slutet på sin nya film "Pretty in pink", om Kraftwerks spelning på Liverpool Empire 1975 (dit Paul inte fick gå för sin mamma), om kärleken till Oskar Schlemmer och abstrakt 1900-talskonst, om skivbolaget som sa att de var tvungna att välja om de ville vara Karlheinz Stockhausen eller Abba (varpå de svarade "Why can't we be both?") och om att spela förband till Depeche Mode på den legendariska Rose Bowl-konserten i Pasadena 1988. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"From Europe 1972 to Las Vegas Residency: The Music World Buzz"On today's show Larry Mishkin discusses various topics related to music, particularly focusing on the Grateful Dead and their Europe 1972 tour. He shares personal anecdotes, insights, and analysis of specific songs from the tour, such as "Bertha" and "Mr. Charlie." Additionally, the he covers upcoming events in the music world, including Fish's residency in Las Vegas and an upcoming album honoring Stanley Mouse, a renowned psychedelic poster artist. He also mentions the charitable aspect of the album's release, aiming to provide preschool scholarships to underprivileged children. Larry concludes with a discussion of a specific performance of "Dark Star" from the Europe 1972 tour, highlighting Pigpen's rare involvement with the keyboard during the song.   Grateful DeadApril 8, 1972Wembley Empire PoolLondonGrateful Dead Live at Wembley Empire Pool on 1972-04-08 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive Second show of Europe '72 tour  INTRO:                           Bertha                                         Track # 1                                         0:00 – 1:22 SHOW No. 1:               Mr. Charlie                                         Track # 3                                         :43 – 2:07 Pig/Hunter "Charlie: white men regarded as oppressors of blacks.--used contemptuously. Also Mr. Charlie, Boss Charlie. An article by John Cowley, "Shack Bullies and Levee Contractors: Bluesmen as Ethnographers," in The Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 28, nos. 2/3, pp. 135-162, recounts the story of the Lowrence family, a set of seven brothers, the oldest named Charley, who were notorious contractors of cheap labor, mostly African American, to build the levees alongside the Mississippi in the 1920's. A number of songs quoted in the article refer to "Mr Charley" specifically in this context, giving rise to speculation on the part of Alan Lomax that he may have "discovered the identity of the elusive "Mr. Charley." Cowley's article goes on, however, to quote a comment by Alan Dundes on Lomax' article that 'Mr. Charley' "would appear to date from antebellum times." But the repeated reference to a "Mr. Charley" by southern bluesmen was undoubtedly in reference to Charley Lowrence. OR  this is a song about heroin abuse. After McKernan died, the GD quit performing it. The "drums" apparently refer to a throbbing noise in the ears while in the throes of using heroin. The "shotgun" refers to a loaded syringe. Sad. Eurpoe '72 is, in my opinion, the quintessential GD album and McKernan really carries it. He died at the insanely early age of 23 or so. Does not appear on any Dead studio album.  Released on the original Europe '72 album in 1972 Played 51 times1st:  July 31, 1971 at the Yale Bowl in New Haven CTLast:  May 26, 1972 at Lyceum Ballroom, London, England  SHOW No. 2:             Dark Star                                         Track # 19                                         20:19 – 21:51 I love this clip.  A very famous Dark Star, first on the tour, exchanged with The Other One each night as the long spacey and trippy tune in the midst of the mostly Americana Dead.  Check out how pig's organ makes an appearance.  By that point, it was mostly Keith on the Grand piano, but this performance, and others on this tour, Pig jumps into the psychedelic mix with Keith.  Very cool to hear that.  After this tour, Pig was basically done. When it comes to the early years of the Grateful Dead, it cannot be overstated just how important Ronald Charles McKernan - known as Pigpen to his friends and fans - was to the band.In a perfect world, he would've been playing with them all the way up through the band's conclusion after the death of Jerry Garcia, but instead things went a different way, with Pigpen's unrelenting alcohol abuse resulting in hospitalization in August 1971, at which point doctors told him that he needed to stop touring, which he did...until he started again in December 1971. It didn't last: Pigpen's final show with the Grateful Dead took place on June 17, 1972 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, after which he's quoted as having said, “I don't want you around when I die,” at which point he cut off all ties with his fellow band members. Unfortunately, he got his wish: his landlady was the one who found him dead on March 8, 1973, of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage.  SHOW No. 3:               Sugar Magnolia                                         Track # 20                                         1:18 – 2:52 SHOW No. 4:               Caution                                         Track #21                                         15:00 – 16:35 The lyrics, although simple, carry a profound message. The protagonist seeks guidance from a gypsy woman, hoping to find answers to their internal struggles. Asking, “What's wrong with me?”, they are seeking a solution or a way to alleviate their pain. The gypsy woman tells them that all they need is a “mojo hand,” implying that a physical object has the power to change their fortunes and bring about well-being. In African American folklore, a mojo hand refers to a magical charm or amulet believed to bring luck, protection, or power. By singing about a mojo hand, The Grateful Dead taps into the rich tapestry of blues and folk traditions, adding a touch of mysticism to the song. “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” is a timeless piece of music that captures the essence of The Grateful Dead's exploratory spirit. The song's meaning goes beyond its surface-level interpretation, delving into deeper human desires for guidance and personal transformation.For me, this song serves as a reminder that sometimes we must look beyond ourselves for answers or support. Whether it be through music, spirituality, or community, seeking solace in something greater can provide the strength and encouragement needed to navigate life's challenges.The Grateful Dead's live rendition of “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” is a testament to the band's unique ability to captivate and touch the souls of their listeners. It serves as a timeless reminder of the power of music to connect, inspire, and offer solace in all walks of life.Anthem of the Sun is the second album by rock band the Grateful Dead, released in 1968 on Warner Bros/Seven Arts. It is the first album to feature second drummer Mickey Hart. The band was also joined by Tom Constanten, who contributed avant-gardeinstrumental and studio techniques influenced by composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The album was assembled through a collage-like editing approach helmed by members Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh (along with soundman Dan Healy), in which disparate studio and live performance tapes were spliced together to create new hybrid recordings. The band also supplemented their performances with instruments such as prepared piano, kazoo, harpsichord, timpani, trumpet, and güiro. The result is an experimental studio amalgam that is neither a pure studio album nor a live album.In 1972, a more commercial alternate mix of the album was officially released to capitalize on the band's recent success. A 2018 reissue on Rhino Records collects both the 1968 and 1972 mixes. The album was ranked number 288 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, in both the 2003 and 2012 iterations of the list.[7][8] It was voted number 376 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.[9] Played 71 times1st: November 3, 1965 at Mother's, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  October 27, 1979 at Cape Cod Coliseum, South Yarmouth, MA, USA  OUTRO:                         Saturday Night                                         Track # 22                                         2:08 – 3:56 From ACE Ace is an album by Grateful Dead singer and guitarist Bob Weir. His first solo album, it was released in 1972. Weir's fellow bandmates in the Grateful Dead back him on the album, and all but one of the songs became staples of the band's live shows Great song.  In later years, only on Saturdays, but in the beginning, it would be played whenever Bob was in the mood. Usually an encore, but every now and then a second set closer or once as an opener.  Since we knew on a Saturday they would play the song, the game was to guess when. Encore was almost always the sure winner, except when it wasn't. .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

A valuable test for recording engineers, David Mellor gives examples of different mic types to emphasise the importance of knowing your mic collection in detail so that you're using the correct one for the recording task at hand. Cardioid, Supercardioid, Figure of 8 and Omnidirectional are compared.Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:23 - Testing The Schoeps CMC 601:44 - Cardioid Examples05:39 - Testing With Percussion06:33 - Supercardioid Examples08:40 - Figure Of 8 Examples11:22 - Omnidirectional Examples14:05 - Testing With Percussion14:58 - Testing Each Mic Type at 0 Degrees17:00 - Testing Each Mic Type at 45 Degrees18:19 - Testing Each Mic Type at 90 Degrees19:42 - Testing Each Mic Type at 180 Degrees21:15 - SummaryDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music, including the Chappell and Carlin music libraries (now combined into Universal Publishing Production Music). Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, and also returning to lecture at Surrey University. He also worked with John Cage on the International Dance Course at the University of Surrey. David now specialises in online audio education and has been Course Director of Audio Masterclass since 2001.https://www.audiomasterclass.com/

Wie schreibt man über Kompositionen? Welche Musik ist der passende Soundtrack zu einem richtig guten Buch? Gemeinsam mit Musiker*innen des NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchesters feierten die eat.READ.sleep.-Hosts Jan Ehlert und Daniel Kaiser einen Abend lang das Zusammenspiel von Wort und Klang: mit Werken von Mörike bis Murakami, von Brahms bis zu den Beatles - und mit einem literarisch-musikalischen Quiz zum Mitraten. https://ndr.de/eatreadsleep Mails an: eatreadsleep@ndr.de Lesekreise: https://ndr.de/eatreadsleep-lesekreise Newsletter: https://ndr.de/eatreadsleep-newsletter Podcasttipp: Klassik für Klugscheißer https://www.ardaudiothek.de/sendung/klassik-fuer-klugscheisser/72079106/ Die Bücher - und Musikstücke dieser Folge (00:06:17) Eduard Mörike: "Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag" Musiktitel - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Eine kleine Nachtmusik KV, daraus: I. Allegro (00:09:41) Daniel Speck: "Yoga Town" (00:16:01) Haruki Murakami: "Naokos Lächeln" Musiktitel - John Lennon /Paul McCartney: Norwegian Wood (00:19:27) Françoise Sagan: "Lieben Sie Brahms?" Musiktitel - Johannes Brahms: Streichquartett c-Moll op. 51 Nr. 1 | daraus: III. Allegretto molto moderato e comodo (00:32:03) Thomas von Steinaecker und David von Bassewitz: "Stockhausen - der Mann, der vom Sirius kam" Karlheinz Stockhausen: "Skorpion" aus "Tierkreis" (00:35:23) Robert Schneider: "Schlafes Bruder" Musiktitel - Johann Sebastian Bach Kantate BWV: "Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen" daraus: V. Choral. "Komm, o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder" (00:41:40) George Bernard Shaw: "Pygmalion" Musiktitel - Frederick Loewe: "On the Street Where You Live", aus dem Musical "My Fair Lady" Das Rezept für die Mozartkugeln http://www.ndr.de/kultur/buch/eatREADsleep-Sonderfolge-Der-Klang-der-Buecher,eatreadsleep818.html eat.READ.sleep. ist der Bücherpodcast, der das Lesen feiert. Jan Ehlert, Daniel Kaiser und Katharina Mahrenholtz diskutieren über Bestseller, stellen aktuelle Romane vor und präsentieren die All Time Favorites der Community. Egal ob Krimis, Klassiker, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Kinder- und Jugendbücher, Urlaubsbücher, Gesellschafts- und Familienromane - hier hat jedes Buch seinen Platz. Und auch kulinarisch (literarische Vorspeise!) wird etwas geboten und beim Quiz am Ende können alle ihr Buch-Wissen testen und Fun Facts für den nächsten Smalltalk mitnehmen.

Formed in 1968, the German group Can's founding members included Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay who had both studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen. Joined by jazz drummer Jaki Liebezeit, guitarist Michael Karoli and Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki for the group's 'classic' line-up that recorded Tago Mago (1971) and Ege Bamyasi (1972), their fourth album - Future Days - saw them exploring a more ambient, blissed-out sound, in contrast to their previous releases. Matthew Sweet is joined by musicians Jah Wobble and Gwenno, novelist Alan Warner and cultural historian Mererid Puw Davies to take a deep dive into the album and explore the blend of influences that made Can such a unique musical proposition.Producer: Torquil MacLeodAn expanded edition of Jah Wobble's autobiography Dark Luminosity: Memoirs of a Geezer is out on 7th March.

In the first of this two-part series, David Mellor gives us an introduction to mic polar patterns, explaining the best type of mic to use for various recording situations.Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:43 - Influenced By The EMI Emiguide Tapes04:08 - What Is A Polar Pattern?06:46 - Omnidirectional and Figure Of 808:43 - Cardioid, Hypercardioid and Super-Cardioid11:14 - Pressure-Sensitive and Pressure Gradient11:58 - Imperfections In Higher And Lower Frequencies13:01 - The Decca Tree14:06 - Abbey Road Demonstration15:32 - 0 degree axis Figure Of 816:10 - 90 degree axis Figure Of 816:48 - 180 degree axis Figure Of 817:30 - 270 degree axis Figure Of 819:01 - Multi-Pattern Microphones19:58 - Best Usage24:26 - Interference Tube, Parabolic Reflector26:23 - Experimenting With Off-AxisDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music, including the Chappell and Carlin music libraries (now combined into Universal Publishing Production Music). Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, and also returning to lecture at Surrey University. He also worked with John Cage on the International Dance Course at the University of Surrey. David now specialises in online audio education and has been Course Director of Audio Masterclass since 2001.https://www.audiomasterclass.com/

UNLOCKED - We've made public this previously patrons-only episode following the death of Can singer Damo Suzuki. If you'd like to become a patron, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod. W do you call it? Krautrock, space rock, the Great Komische Music? It's all German to me. In a little under two hours the guys cover the history of post-WW2 Germany (East and West), anti-Communist geopolitics, what you want to hear when you're tripping, Pop Art, post-rock and playfulness, all in reference to the music of Can, NEU!, Ash Ra Tempel and more. We hear about the characteristics of the German counterculture from which many of these players came, the various tendencies of revolutionary European socialism, the Green Party, and the problems of De-Nazification. We consider the avant-garde compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the impact of American acid rock, Ancient Egypt, and the many ways James Brown's funk filtered into the motor rhythms of Dusseldorf 1971. More than anything, we survey a formidable body of work that is at once mesmeric and danceable - both things we like here at Love is the Message! Produced by Matt Huxley. Books:Julian Cope - Krautrock Sampler: One Head's Guide  to the Great Kosmische MusikDavid Stubbs - Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany Tracklist:Ash Ra Tempel & Timothy Leary - TimeshipKarlheinz Stockhausen - Spiral (Realization A)Amon Duul ii - Yeti (Improvisation)Ash Ra Tempel - AmbossKraftwerk - StratovariusTangerine Dream - GenesisTangerine Dream - Flute Organ PieceCan - HalleluwahNEU! - HallogalloCan - MoonshakeKraftwerk - AutobahnHarmonia & Eno '76 - AtmosphereKraftwerk - Trans Europe Express

Edward Colver is essentially a self taught photographer; Largely influenced by Dada and Surrealism. Three months after he began taking photographs, Edward had his first photo published: an image of performance artist Johanna Went, featured in Bam magazine. Since then he has shot photos for dozens of record labels including EMI, Capitol, and Geffen. His photographs have been featured on more than 500 album covers and include some of the most recognizable and iconic covers of the late 20th century. His work as a rock photographer is well documented in the film American Hardcore. He has photographed bands like Black Flag, T.S.O.L, Christian Death, Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, Adolescents, Social Distortion, Vandals, X, Red Hot Chili Peppers, X, Tom Waits, Alice Cooper and so much more! https://www.instagram.com/edwardcolver/ BUY A TEESHIRT HERE From Ed: https://edwardcolver.com/t-shirts/ Check out his galleries: https://edwardcolver.com/ Kevin Vonesper has his own youtube channel - Check it out HERE: https://www.youtube.com/@VonesperStudios www.frumess.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join this channel to get access to videos not available on the public channel: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6pX3ePQjr8TKBQqKRiobNQ/join⁠⁠⁠ FRUMESS is POWERED by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.riotstickers.com/frumess⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ GET 200 DIECUT STICKERS FOR $69  RIGHT HERE - NO PROMO CODE NEED JOIN THE PATREON FOR LESS THAN A $2 CUP OF COFFEE!! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/Frumess ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

SUPER fun conversation with Chinese national Jiang Zi Xiu (Klaire) of the Shanghai band GUJI about one of her favorite records: 'Monster Movie' by the German experimental band CAN! "You made a believer out of me..." Songs discussed in this episode: Can Dialog - The Can Project (Irmin Schmidt with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre, London 2017); I Like To Hang Out In China, Judgement Day - GUJI; Billy - Round Eye; Come sta, La Luna - Can; I Can't Stand It - The Velvet Underground; Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger (Zweite Version, 1959) - Karlheinz Stockhausen; Father Cannot Yell - Can; Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary - Mediaeval Baebes; Pale Blue Eyes - The Velvet Underground; Mary, Mary So Contrary - Can; Ballad of North Henan Province - Yu Hongmei; Outside My Door, Yoo Doo Right - Can; Build A Friend For Me, My Mao Suit - GUJI

In the 1950s and 60s, the new sounds of electronic music emerged from academic laboratories in Europe and the United States. The motivations were self-consciously experimental, artistic, and technical. In Cologne, Germany, one great innovator was the powerful theorist and teacher KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN. One of his surprising early discoveries was that unlike acoustic instruments, abstract electronic sounds seemed to create the impression of cosmic space. "In my imagination," Stockhausen said, "I can fly anywhere—to the stars—use the music as a flying device, to unify with the cosmic forces. I think it's important that...we are instruments ourselves, and that cosmic vibrations create sounds through us." It was the beginning of what we now call Electronic Spacemusic. Today, inexpensive instruments and recording software allow anyone to create electronic music, and the sounds of space are all around us — in music and film, games and video. On this transmission of Hearts of Space, another cosmic-electronic journey, on a program called STARSCAPES. Music is by VANGELIS, MICHAEL STEARNS, DAVE LUXTON, JIM OTTOWAY, JONN SERRIE, and JAJA (JANA ROCKSTROH). [ view playlist ] [ view Flickr image gallery ] [ play 30 second MP3 promo ]

Today's guest on the podcast is Barbara Borowicz, who is an international performing artist with a specialization in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Harlekin" for solo clarinet. This work involves not only 50 minutes of challenging, memorized music, but also dance, acting, stage lighting effects, and even an iconic costume. We discuss how Barbara came to love the piece, why it should be performed more often, how to get started with this type of music if you're interested in performing it, and other similar pieces that might be of interest in this genre. This is truly one of the "neatest" episodes yet, and I hope you enjoy our conversation! Go to https://www.bovedainc.com and save 10% on your purchase with code CLARINEAT Help support indie music recording at https://www.teesfortunes.com and get 10% off your first purchase with code CLARINEAT at checkout. Thank you for watching Clarineat! Want to watch future interviews LIVE and ask guests YOUR listener questions? Join Clarineat LIVE. https://clarineat.com/live You can also join on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/clarineat Subscribe to Clarineat: https://youtube.com/clarineat 

Nicht nur die Mondlandung und das letzte Konzert der Beatles haben 1969 stattgefunden – auch György Ligeti und der Gottseibeiuns für Brahmsliebhaber, Karlheinz Stockhausen, haben in diesem Jahr bedeutende Werke geschaffen. Warum diese Musik für unsere Ohren auch heute noch manchmal schwer zu verstehen sind, wie es Leonard Bernstein zur gleichen Zeit geschafft hat, einen Kassenschlager nach dem andern zu schreiben und was das RSO Wien 1969 so gemacht hat, erzählt uns RSO Fagottist und Podcaster Leonard Eröd in dieser letzten Folge der 4. Staffel von „Warum Klassik?“ Die vierte Staffel von "Warum Klassik?" lief im Herbst 2023 in der Ö1 Reihe "Des Cis" und ist Teil des zeit- und kulturgeschichtlichen Archivs auf oe1.ORF.at.

In this episode Tim and Jeremy begin a series of shows for patrons that flesh out some of the other musical currents of the UK and Europe in the late 60s and early 70s, beginning with… well, what do you call it? Krautrock, space rock, the Great Komische Music? It's all German to me. In a little under two hours the guys cover the history of post-WW2 Germany (East and West), anti-Communist geopolitics, what you want to hear when you're tripping, Pop Art, post-rock and playfulness, all in reference to the music of Can, NEU!, Ash Ra Tempel and more. We hear about the characteristics of the German counterculture from which many of these players came, the various tendencies of revolutionary European socialism, the Green Party, and the problems of De-Nazification. We consider the avant-garde compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the impact of American acid rock, Ancient Egypt, and the many ways James Brown's funk filtered into the motor rhythms of Dusseldorf 1971. More than anything, we survey a formidable body of work that is at once mesmeric and danceable - both things we like here at Love is the Message! Produced by Matt Huxley. Become a patron at Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod For rights reasons, we can only play excerpts of the tracks we discuss. However, if you'd like to listen along in full, with updates every episode, follow our Spotify playlist at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ZylmJYk5SxyyTI2OQp0iy Books: Julian Cope - Krautrock Sampler: One Head's Guide  to the Great Kosmische Musik David Stubbs - Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany Tracklist: Ash Ra Tempel & Timothy Leary - Timeship Karlheinz Stockhausen - Spiral (Realization A) Amon Duul ii - Yeti (Improvisation) Ash Ra Tempel - Amboss Kraftwerk - Stratovarius Tangerine Dream - Genesis Tangerine Dream - Flute Organ Piece Can - Halleluwah NEU! - Hallogallo Can - Moonshake Kraftwerk - Autobahn Harmonia & Eno '76 - Atmosphere Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express

My guest in this very special bonus episode is Irmin Schmidt Irmin studied composition, piano and conducting under legendary composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Between 1968 and 1978 he was the keyboard player and co-composer of the hugely influential German band Can. Irmin has released several critically acclaimed solo albums and has written more than 120 film scores. Impressive stuff! It was a real honour to have a such a legend of electronic music on the podcast. For more information on Irmin's work, visit: https://www.spoonrecords.com

In this fourth and final episode, David Mellor, a sound engineer and the founder and Course Director of Audio Masterclass, delves into Gain Staging your plug-ins and how to avoid clipping during the mixing and mastering stages.Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:50 - Gain Staging Your Plug-ins08:08 - 32-Bit Float11:35 - Mixing And Mastering16:27 - Gain Staging The Mix19:32 - Headroom21:50 - Mastering Using LUFSDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music, including the Chappell and Carlin music libraries (now combined into Universal Publishing Production Music). Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, and also returning to lecture at Surrey University. He also worked with John Cage on the International Dance Course at the University of Surrey. David now specialises in online audio education and has been Course Director of Audio Masterclass since 2001.https://www.audiomasterclass.com/

David Mellor, a sound engineer and the founder and Course Director of Audio Masterclass, introduces us to Gain Staging in a brand new series of podcasts. In the third episode David continues looking at preamps, outlines the use of VU Meters and talks about the benefits of balancing a track prior to mixing. Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:56 - More About Preamps05:38 - Preamps With Valves09:20 - The Mixing Process16:17 - Using VU Meters24:05 - Mixing During RecordingListen to Gain Staging Episode 1Listen to Gain Staging Episode 2David Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music, including the Chappell and Carlin music libraries (now combined into Universal Publishing Production Music). Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, and also returning to lecture at Surrey University. He also worked with John Cage on the International Dance Course at the University of Surrey. David now specialises in online audio education and has been Course Director of Audio Masterclass since 2001.https://www.audiomasterclass.com/

David Mellor, a sound engineer and the founder and Course Director of Audio Masterclass, introduces us to Gain Staging in a brand new series of podcasts. In the second episode David focuses on gain staging during recording, by balancing mic input, preamps and gain within your DAW to achieve the optimal sound level.Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:40 - Dynamic Microphones05:19 - Capacitor Microphones11:25 - Gain Staging First Step14:00 - The Pre-amp16:39 - Headroom20:49 - Audio ExamplesDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music, including the Chappell and Carlin music libraries (now combined into Universal Publishing Production Music). Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, and also returning to lecture at Surrey University. He also worked with John Cage on the International Dance Course at the University of Surrey. David now specialises in online audio education and has been Course Director of Audio Masterclass since 2001.https://www.audiomasterclass.com/

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

David Mellor, a sound engineer and the founder and Course Director of Audio Masterclass, introduces us to Gain Staging in a brand new series of podcasts. In this first episode he teaches the correct use of terminology and gives his three golden rules of Gain Staging.Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:38 - Using The Correct Terminology05:56 - Why Use Gain Staging?11:04 - The Benefits Of Gain Staging15:31 - Working In Digital Audio27:17 - Three Golden Rules Of Gain StagingDavid Mellor BiogDavid Mellor got his start in pro audio through the Tonmeister course at Surrey University studying music, piano performance, acoustics, electronics, electro-acoustics and recording.He went on to work at London's Royal Opera House, with responsibilities including sound design, front-of-house operation, stage monitoring and electronic design satisfying the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has also had over 600 works published in the field of production music, including the Chappell and Carlin music libraries (now combined into Universal Publishing Production Music). Notable uses of his music include the BBC's Horizon, Fahrenheit 911, and the Oprah Winfrey Show.David has been actively involved in Audio Education since 1986, teaching students of City of Westminster College and Westminster University, and also returning to lecture at Surrey University. He also worked with John Cage on the International Dance Course at the University of Surrey. David now specialises in online audio education and has been Course Director of Audio Masterclass since 2001.https://www.audiomasterclass.com/

Synopsis During the last 20 years of his life, the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen concentrated on completing an ambitious cycle of seven operas, collectively titled Licht or, in English Light. Each opera was named for a day of the week and inspired by familiar and obscure world mythologies associated with each day.  The opera titled Montag (or Monday), for example, is devoted to the Moon and the feminine architype of Eve as the mother of all creation.  Each opera begins with a “Greeting,” or overture, often an electronic piece heard in the theater lobby while the audience gathers, and ends with a “Farewell,” sometimes intended for performance outside the theater, to be heard as the audience disperses. Story lines in Stockhausen's operas have more in common with symbolic Renaissance courtly masques and pageants than works by Verdi or Puccini, but might be considered a 21th century response to Wagner's 19th-century cycle of four mythological “Ring” operas. Portions of Stockhausen's operas were premiered piecemeal starting in 1977, and only on rare occasions staged in their entirety.  The last to be completed, Sontag (or Sunday) was performed complete for the first time in Cologne, Germany, on today's date in 2011, more than three years after Stockhausen's death. Music Played in Today's Program Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) "Lichter-Wasser" (Sonntags-Gruss), from "Sonntag aus Licht" Barbara van den Boom, sop; Hubert Mayer, t, Antonio Pérez Abellán, synthesizer; SW Radio Symphony Baden-Baden/Freiburg; Karlheinz Stockhausen, conductor. Stockhausen Verlag CD 58

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