Podcasts about Leopold Stokowski

Conheça o Native Brazilian Music, um disco raro, de 1942, gravado num navio norte-americano que atracou no Rio de Janeiro, sob o comando do maestro Leopold Stokowski, com a missão de registrar a mais genuína música brasileira da época. A iniciativa fez parte da política da boa vizinhança, contou com a colaboração do maestro Villa-Lobos e guarda registros importantes de nomes como Zé da Zilda, Donga e Pixinguinha. A música que ilustra o programa é Quem Me Vê Sorrir, a primeira gravação feita por Cartola, presente no disco Native Brazilian Music.

durée : 00:06:31 - Le Bach du matin du vendredi 17 janvier 2025 - Notre Bach du matin est un Bach qui divise, la toccata et fugue en ré mineur pour orgue orchestré par Leopold Stokowski. Il y a ceux qui adorent ce nouvel équilibre créé entre les voix et d'autres qui en reprochent la grandiloquence ici interprété par Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

durée : 00:06:31 - Le Bach du matin du vendredi 17 janvier 2025 - Notre Bach du matin est un Bach qui divise, la toccata et fugue en ré mineur pour orgue orchestré par Leopold Stokowski. Il y a ceux qui adorent ce nouvel équilibre créé entre les voix et d'autres qui en reprochent la grandiloquence ici interprété par Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Welcome to PTBN Pop's Video Jukebox Song of The Day! Every weekday will be featuring a live watch of a great and memorable music video. On today's episode, Steve Riddle is watching “Night On Bald Mountain” by Leopold Stokowski from 1940. The YouTube link for the video is below so you can watch along! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC3t8n-ZcaE

Steven Spielberg is the most successful director of his generation and the highest-grossing director of all time: his films have taken more than $10 billion worldwide. From Jaws to E.T. and Jurassic Park to Schindler's List, his storytelling has captivated audiences around the world.Steven grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he started making films as a young boy. In 1958 he made a short Western which won him a Boy Scout merit badge. He screened it to his entire Scout troop and their laughter and applause got him hooked on film making.In 1971 he directed a television movie called Duel about a motorist who is pursued by a murderous truck driver. The film attracted good reviews from critics, and before the age of 30, Steven had directed his first global hit: Jaws grossed $471 million worldwide and is credited as heralding the arrival of the blockbuster era. He now says Jaws was ‘a free pass into my future.'He has won three Academy Awards, and has received eight nominations for best director. The Fabelmans, his most recent film, is a semi-fictionalised account of his own coming of age, drawing on his film-making experiences as a child.Steven is married to the actor Kate Capshaw, who starred in his film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and they have seven children.DISC ONE: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Gene Pitney DISC TWO: Fugue in G minor, BMW 578 – “The Little” arranged by Leopold Stokowski, composed by J.S Bach, performed by Philadelphia Orchestra and conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin DISC THREE: Michelle by The Beatles DISC FOUR: What the World Needs Now Is Love by Jackie DeShannon DISC FIVE: Come Fly with Me by Frank Sinatra DISC SIX: The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen DISC SEVEN: Somewhere, composed by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, performed by Reri Grist DISC EIGHT: Coolhand by Buzzy LeeBOOK CHOICE: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck LUXURY ITEM: H-8 Bolex camera CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Coolhand by Buzzy LeePresenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

durée : 00:05:29 - Le Bach du matin du jeudi 21 novembre 2024 - Notre Bach du matin est un Bach symphonique ! Le chef britannique Leopold Stokowski adorait Bach et a orchestré plusieurs pièces du compositeur, comme cette fantaisie et fugue en sol mineur BWV 542, initialement écrite pour l'orgue.

durée : 00:05:29 - Le Bach du matin du jeudi 21 novembre 2024 - Notre Bach du matin est un Bach symphonique ! Le chef britannique Leopold Stokowski adorait Bach et a orchestré plusieurs pièces du compositeur, comme cette fantaisie et fugue en sol mineur BWV 542, initialement écrite pour l'orgue.

durée : 01:28:51 - Leopold Stokowski, chef d'orchestre original et prodigieux - par : Aurélie Moreau - Né à Londres en 1882, Leopold Stokowski a mené une immense carrière de chef qui l'a notamment conduit à la tête de l'Orchestre de Philadelphie pendant 23 ans. Il a connu une gloire comparable à celle des plus grandes stars de Hollywood.

durée : 01:58:31 - Les vies rêvées de Leopold Stokowski - par : Christian Merlin - Il donnait différents dates et lieux de naissance selon l'interlocuteur. Le chef qui serra la main de Mickey dans Fantasia et eut une liaison avec Greta Garbo, ne fut cependant pas seulement un mystificateur. C'était aussi un musicien d'une curiosité universelle et un magicien du son d'orchestre. - réalisé par : Marie Grout

durée : 00:28:25 - Les vies rêvées de Leopold Stokowski (4/4) - par : Christian Merlin - Il donnait différents dates et lieux de naissance selon l'interlocuteur. Le chef qui serra la main de Mickey dans Fantasia et eut une liaison avec Greta Garbo, ne fut cependant pas seulement un mystificateur. C'était aussi un musicien d'une curiosité universelle et un magicien du son d'orchestre. - réalisé par : Marie Grout

durée : 00:28:25 - Les vies rêvées de Leopold Stokowski (3/4) : Pionnier de la démocratisation musicale - par : Christian Merlin - Il donnait différents dates et lieux de naissance selon l'interlocuteur. Le chef qui serra la main de Mickey dans Fantasia et eut une liaison avec Greta Garbo, ne fut cependant pas seulement un mystificateur. C'était aussi un musicien d'une curiosité universelle et un magicien du son d'orchestre. - réalisé par : Marie Grout

durée : 00:28:32 - Les vies rêvées de Leopold Stokowski (2/4) : En technicolor - par : Christian Merlin - Il donnait différents dates et lieux de naissance selon l'interlocuteur. Le chef qui serra la main de Mickey dans Fantasia et eut une liaison avec Greta Garbo, ne fut cependant pas seulement un mystificateur. C'était aussi un musicien d'une curiosité universelle et un magicien du son d'orchestre. - réalisé par : Marie Grout

durée : 00:28:16 - Les vies rêvées de Leopold Stokowski (1/4) : De Londres à Philadelphie - par : Christian Merlin - Il donnait différents dates et lieux de naissance selon l'interlocuteur. Le chef qui serra la main de Mickey dans Fantasia et eut une liaison avec Greta Garbo, ne fut cependant pas seulement un mystificateur. C'était aussi un musicien d'une curiosité universelle et un magicien du son d'orchestre. - réalisé par : Marie Grout

Um seine Schreibblockade zu überwinden, macht sich Rachmaninow 1934 an Variationen über sein Lieblingsthema von Paganini. Das Ergebnis ist eines seiner berühmtesten Werke für Klavier und Orchester mit romantischen Ohrwürmern und einem Gruß aus dem Jenseits. Von Michael Lohse.

En 1940, les studios Disney sortait le premier film en stéréo de l'histoire du cinéma commercial, qui compte aussi parmi les premiers films sonores sans parole, dont la bande son est intégralement musicale, puisqu'on entend l'Orchestre de Philadelphie sous la direction de Leopold Stokowski interpréter des œuvres fameuses du répertoire classique, comme Casse-noisette de Tchaïkovski … Continuer la lecture de « Metaclassique bonus – Audiodécrire »

In Episode 15 Antonia and special guest Ben Norris wander into a wood and get lost in John Burnside's poem ‘Lost', They try to work out if there are different ways of being lost and how this might relate to the Gospel (Matthew 10:7-15) of being sent out without shoes, haversack or purse. Since it is the feast of St Benedict on 11th July, they wonder about his rule and the relation between the manual work of the garden and prayer and how this might create a ‘rule of peace'. Music: Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67: Nos. 1 by Sergei Prokofiev connected by Leopold Stokowski and performed by the Stadium Symphony Orchestra of New York. Florilegium is a programme on Radio Maria which seeks to weave together liturgy, literature and  gardening in rambling, hopefully fruitful ways. It is written and presented by Kate Banks and Antonia Shack. About the Creators Antonia leads a patchwork life with jobs including but not limited to mother, book designer, editor, actor and teacher. She and Kate began discussing poetry, liturgy and gardening at the Willibrord Fellowship reading group in London and are delighted to be continuing these conversations on Radio Maria.  Kate (currently on leave from Florilegium) is a teacher of Literature, Philosophy and Theology, with a particularly keen regard for the poet and artist David Jones around whom many of her studies and her teaching-subjects have been based. She also briefly worked as a gardener in London, though she now lives with her little boy on the river Exe in Devon. If you enjoyed this programme, please consider making a once off or monthly donation to Radio Maria England by visiting www.RadioMariaEngland.uk or calling 0300 302 1251 during office hours. It is only through the ongoing support of our listeners that we continue to be a Christian voice by your side.

The misfits are sporting their tuxedo t-shirts as they review the 1940 Disney animated musical feature film Fantasia. This film features music by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski and hosted by Deems Taylor. Ranking: AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies: 58th AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies – 10th Anniversary List: Not Ranked All original content including sound effects, graphics, photos and music is © Classic Movie Misfits.  Movie audio clips and music are used in accordance with Fair Use, and are property of the film copyright holders. #Fantasia #Disney #WaltDisney #LeopoldStokowski #PhiladelphiaOrchestra #DeemsTaylor #ToccataAndFugue #JohanSebastianBach #NutcrackerSuite #Tchaikovsky #SorcerersApprentice #PaulDukas #MickeyMouse #RiteOfSpring #IgorStravinsky #PastoralSymphony #Beethoven #DanceOfTheHours #Ponchielli #NightOnBaldMountain #Mussorgsky #AveMaria #Schubert #ClassicMovies #AFI100 #ClassicMovieMisfits

This Countermelody episode is the last in my miniseries featuring artists from Baltimore. It is also the last in my new episodes for Black History Month 2024 featuring “Forgotten Divas.” Today I offer to you the absolutely divine soprano of Veronica Tyler (1939-2020), who fits all three categories. In the 1960s, Veronica Tyler was a name on everyone's lips: she appeared on three different episodes of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, she was the second prize winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1966, the first time this venerable contest had featured singers, she was a featured artist at the New York City Opera, where, in their first season at Lincoln Center, she sang a Pamina in The Magic Flute of such humanity and transcendent vocal beauty that audiences were transported into another world. She sang under conductors Leopold Stokowski, Erich Leinsdorf, Zubin Mehta, Eugene Ormandy, Carlo Maria Giulini, Robert Shaw, and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Later on she made a belated Met debut in 1985 as Serena in their premiere production of Porgy and Bess, but gradually her high profile appearances became fewer and fewer and eventually she disappeared from view. Her death on 21 March 2020 was only announced three months later, and with little fanfare. But during her heyday, Veronica Tyler was among the most elegant, compelling, and ingratiating lyric sopranos in the business. I have scoured the archives to bring to light some of the artist's most beautiful performances, some of them virtually unheard for decades, including a 1980 album of spirituals that ranks among the best of this repertoire ever committed to disc. What inexpressible joy it brings me to present to you the unforgettable Veronica Tyler! Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford.

The start of the new year saw near mountain top views for the Washington Husky football team before descending into absolute chaos with a coaching change at the top. We dive into our reactions of the two post season games, the gratitude we have for the players on this shooting star of a team, the emotional whiplash of the past six days, and our thoughts on the new coach. Plus a discussion about where UW sits in the pecking order of this new look of college football, some heated thoughts about agents, and how sports truly do build bonds. @32:54: The Looney Tunes episode is called “Long-Haired Hare” where Bugs Bunny impersonates Leopold Stokowski. #2 Washington defeats #3 Texas 37-31 in the Sugar Bowl: https://www.espn.com/college-football/game/_/gameId/401551788/longhorns-huskies #1 Michigan defeats #2 Washington 34-13 in the National Championship game: https://www.espn.com/college-football/game/_/gameId/401551789/huskies-wolverines Head coach Kalen DeBoer to Alabama as the new Crimson Tide head coach: https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/uw-husky-football/report-uw-huskies-coach-kalen-deboer-negotiating-contract-to-succeed-nick-saban-at-alabama/ Washington hires Jedd Fisch, formerly at Arizona, as new head football coach: https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/uw-husky-football/reports-washington-targeting-arizonas-jedd-fisch-to-be-next-head-coach/ Husky player portal/draft tracker: https://www.uwdawgpound.com/2024/1/12/24036481/husky-portal-draft-player-tracker-uw-washington-huskies-football

SynopsisIt might seem odd to think of Max Bruch as a 20th-century composer. After all, his three greatest hits — his Violin Concerto No. 1, his Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, and his setting of the Hebraic liturgical chant Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra — were all written in the 19th century.But this archetypal German Romantic composer, who was born in 1838, lived to the ripe old age of 82, and kept producing new works up to the time of his death in 1920.One of these, a Concerto for Two Pianos, was commissioned by an American duo piano team, Ottilie and Rose Suttro, who premiered it with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra on today's date in 1916. The new work was well-received and its composer praised.But there is a somewhat ironic historical footnote to this successful premiere: It appears the Suttro Duo drastically revised and even rewrote parts of Bruch's score for their 1916 performance, unbeknown to the composer. It wouldn't be until 1971 that the concerto was performed as he had actually written it.Music Played in Today's ProgramMax Bruch (1838-1920) Concerto for Two Pianos; Güher and Süher Pekinel, pianos; Philharmonia Orchestra; Neville Marriner, cond. Chandos 9711

SynopsisThe short career of Charles Tomlinson Griffes is one of the more tragic “might-have-beens” of American music history. Griffes died at 35 in 1920 just as his music was being taken up by the major American orchestras of his day.As most American composers of his time, Griffes studied in Germany, and his early works were, not surprisingly, rather Germanic in tone. But beginning around 1911, he began composing works inspired by French impressionism and the art of Asia.The Boston Symphony, under Pierre Monteux, premiered his tone poem The Pleasure Dome of Kubla-Khan and the New York Symphony, under Walter Damrosch, his Poeme for flute and orchestra. On today's date in 1919, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Leopold Stokowski, premiered four orchestral pieces: Nocturne, Bacchanale, Clouds and one of his best works, The White Peacock. The Philadelphia newspaper reviews of the premieres called Griffes' work “one of the hopeful intimations for the future of American music.”A severe bout of influenza left Griffes too weak to attend these Philadelphia premieres under Stokowski, and he died of a lung infection the following spring.Music Played in Today's ProgramCharles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) The White Peacock; Dallas Symphony; Andrew Litton, cond. Dorian 90224

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

This week on Cultural Manifesto listen to an interview with violinist David Harrington, founder of the groundbreaking Kronos Quartet. They've been called the most important new music ensemble in the world — over 1,000 new works and arrangements have been commissioned for the group. Kronos Quartet will bring their 50th anniversary tour to West Lafayette, Indiana's Loeb Theatre. The Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) returns to Indianapolis this November. Every year, PASIC brings some of the greatest percussionists in the world to Indianapolis for a week of performances and clinics. We'll celebrate PASIC by listening back to a 2019 interview with the late Elayne Jones, a member of the Percussive Arts Society's Hall of Fame. Jones was a prominent tympanist who performed with music luminaries including Leopold Stokowski and Duke Ellington. Throughout her career, Jones fought against racial and gender discrimination.

This week on Cultural Manifesto listen to an interview with violinist David Harrington, founder of the groundbreaking Kronos Quartet. They've been called the most important new music ensemble in the world — over 1,000 new works and arrangements have been commissioned for the group. Kronos Quartet will bring their 50th anniversary tour to West Lafayette, Indiana's Loeb Theatre. The Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) returns to Indianapolis this November. Every year, PASIC brings some of the greatest percussionists in the world to Indianapolis for a week of performances and clinics. We'll celebrate PASIC by listening back to a 2019 interview with the late Elayne Jones, a member of the Percussive Arts Society's Hall of Fame. Jones was a prominent tympanist who performed with music luminaries including Leopold Stokowski and Duke Ellington. Throughout her career, Jones fought against racial and gender discrimination.

SynopsisOn today's date in 1955, Leopold Stokowski gave his first concert as the new music director of the Houston Symphony — or, as Stoki pronounced it, the “Hooston Symphony.” It was a major cultural event in those days. NBC even televised a bit of the famously white-maned conductor rehearsing the Texans in a brand-new work that Stokowski had commissioned for the occasion: the second symphony of Alan Hovhaness, subtitled Mysterious Mountain.At the time, Hovhaness explained his subtitle as follows: “Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual worlds.” The new piece proved to be a terrific success for all concerned. The next day, the Houston Post's music critic wrote, “The real mystery of Mysterious Mountain is that it should be so simple, sweetly, innocently lovely in an age that has tried so terribly hard to avoid those impressions in music.” For his part, Hovhaness once said, “Things that are complicated tend to disappear and get lost. Simplicity is difficult, not easy.”Before his death in 2000, Hovhaness would complete 67 symphonies.Music Played in Today's ProgramAlan Hovhaness (1911 – 2000) Symphony No. 2 (Mysterious Mountain) - London Symphony; John Williams, cond. Sony Classical 62729

SynopsisToday's date in 1899 marks the birthday of the famous African-American composer, choir director, and teacher, William L. Dawson, in Anniston, Alabama. After musical studies in Kansas City and Chicago, from 1931 to 1956 Dawson taught at the Tuskegee Institute, where he developed the Institute's Choir into an internationally-renowned ensemble.Dawson's arrangements of African-American spirituals, which he preferred to call folksongs, are justly famous, but in 1934 he produced his masterwork, a Negro Folk Symphony, modeled on Dvorak's New World Symphony, but exhibiting Dawson's own distinctive mastery and development of his themes. His goal, he said, was for audiences to know that it was "unmistakably not the work of a white man.""The themes,” wrote Dawson, “are taken from what are popularly known as Negro Spirituals. In this composition, the composer has employed themes … over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother's knee."Dawson's symphony was successfully premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who took the new work to Carnegie Hall, where its 35-year old composer was repeatedly called to the stage. The symphony was revised in 1952 with added African rhythms inspired by the composer's trip to West Africa.Music Played in Today's ProgramWilliam L. Dawson (1899 – 1990) Negro Folk Symphony Symphony of the Air; Leopold Stokowski, cond DG 477 6502

Fantasia is a 1940 American animated musical anthology film produced and released by Walt Disney Productions, with story direction by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer and production supervision by Walt Disney and Ben Sharpsteen. The third Disney animated feature film, it consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Music critic and composer Deems Taylor acts as the film's Master of Ceremonies who introduces each segment in live action.   Fantasia 2000 is a 1999 American animated musical anthology film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Produced by Roy E. Disney and Donald W. Ernst, it is the 38th Disney animated feature film and sequel to 1940's Fantasia. Like its predecessor, Fantasia 2000 consists of animated segments set to pieces of classical music. Celebrities including Steve Martin, Itzhak Perlman, Quincy Jones, Bette Midler, James Earl Jones, Penn & Teller, James Levine, and Angela Lansbury introduce a segment in live action scenes directed by Don Hahn.   Opening Credits; Introduction (1.00); Background History (15.06); Fantasia (1940) Film Trailer (18.19); Opening Presentation (21.15); Let's Rate (41.33); Introducing Our Second Feature (43.40); Fantasia 2000 (1999) Film Trailer (46.11); Lights, Camera, Action (48.12); How Many Stars (1:19.57); End Credits (1:24.29); Closing Credits (1:25.46)   Opening Credits– Epidemic Sound – Copyright . All rights reserved   Closing Credits:  The Age of Not Believing  by Angela Lansbury.  From the album Bedknobs and Broomsticks Original Soundtrack.  Copyright 1971 Disney Records ​ Original Music copyrighted 2020 Dan Hughes Music and the Literary License Podcast.    All rights reserved.  Used by Kind Permission.   All songs available through Amazon Music.

SynopsisThe American composer Henry Cowell lived from 1897 to 1965 and wrote thousands of musical works in a wide variety of styles. As a young boy, Cowell lived near San Francisco's Chinatown, so Asian influences are as likely to crop up in his music as European models. And among Cowell's aggressively experimental works are piano pieces that employ what he called “tone clusters”—chords played with a fist or forearm. Those pieces piqued the interest of European composers like Bartók and Janáček, but in addition to avant-garde scores, Cowell wrote dozens of conventionally tonal works, often hauntingly beautiful.In 1941, Cowell discovered a collection of evocative 19th century American hymns titled Southern Harmony. These reminded him of even earlier works by the 18th century American composer William Billings, who liked to write what he called “Fuguing Tunes.” Combining these two influences, Cowell came up with his own series of “Hymns AND Fuguing Tunes” for various combinations of instruments.Cowell's Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10 for oboe and strings, for example, was premiered on today's date in 1955, in Santa Barbara, California, by oboist Bert Gassman and the Pacific Coast Music Festival orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.Music Played in Today's ProgramHenry Cowell (1897 - 1965) Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10 Humbert Lucarelli, oboe; Manhattan Chamber Orchestra; Richard Auldon Clark, cond. Koch 7282

Interpreten: The Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézét-Séguin Label: DG EAN: 0028948647750 Yannick Nézét-Séguin gehört zu den wichtigsten Dirigenten Generation (noch) unter Fünfzig. Als Chefdirigent des Philadelphia Orchestra und des kanadischen Orchestre Métropolitain sowie Musikdirektor der Metropolitan Opera in New York spielt sich sein berufliches Leben, abgesehen von diversen Gastspielen in Europa, vorwiegend jenseits des „großen Teiches“ ab. Mit seinem Philadelphia Orchestra ist er kürzlich auch wieder auf CD in den Mittelpunkt gerückt, mit den Symphonien zwei und drei auf seiner neuen Rachmaninow Doppel-CD. Yannick Nézét-Séguin dürfte an Sergej Rachmaninow, wie man auf gut Wienerisch so schön sagt, einen Narren gefressen haben. 2015 begleitete er erstmals den Pianisten Daniil Trifonov bei den Rachmaninow Variationen, mit dem er sich dann ab 2018 auf zwei CDs auch der Destination Rachmaninow annäherte. 2021 erschien dann mit der ersten Symphonie und den symphonischen Tänzen die erste CD mit reinen Orchesterwerken und nun legt Nézét-Séguin mit den Rachmaninow'schen Symphonien zwei und drei, sowie der Tondichtung „Die Toteninsel“ nach. Mein erster Gedanke beim Anhören dieser CD war, wieso reden eigentlich immer alle nur von Rachmaninows Klaviermusik, wenn er doch eigentlich auch so geniale Orchestermusik geschrieben hat. Tiefgründig, schwermütig und vorwiegend düster die zweite Symphonie.  Von der russischen Presse nach der Uraufführung mit dem Untertitel „Mütterchen Russlands gesammelter Weltschmerz in e-Moll“ versehen. Schwermut ja, aber auch absoluter Schwung, orchestrale Rafinesse und dann ein Adagio, das dann ja doch auch wieder spätromantisch versöhnlich klingt. Mit kräftigem Zugriff, aber nie ins Brutale abgleitend, sattem Streicherklang und wohl dosiertem, jedoch auch manchmal losgelassenem Blech auch die Dritte. Ein Werk, das Rachmaninow Mitte der 30er Jahre im Exil am Vierwaldstätter See skizzierte. Uraufgeführt wurde sie dann übrigens vom Philadelphia Orchestra, unter Leopold Stokowski und ist somit fest in der DNA des Orchesters verankert. Das ist spannende Musik allererster Güte, die einen nicht so schnell loslässt. (mg)

SynopsisDuring WWII, German troops encircled the city of Leningrad for 900 days, a siege that caused immense suffering for that city's residents. One of them, composer Dimtri Shostakovich, appeared on the cover of a July 1942 issue of TIME magazine, grim-faced and wearing the helmet of a Leningrad fireman.The publicity was for the American premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, subtitled “Leningrad,” as a live NBC Symphony radio broadcast on today's date in 1942. The broadcast was dedicated to the Russian War Relief, and the NBC announcer explained how the score of the recently-completed symphony had been flown from the Soviet Union to the West via Teheran. Two famous conductors, Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, had been hotly contesting who would conduct the American premiere. The older conductor pulled rank. “Don't you think, my dear Stokowski,” wrote Toscanini, “it would be interesting to hear the old Italian conductor play this work of a young Russian anti-Nazi composer?”Friends of Shostakovich later suggested he may have had more than just the Nazis on his mind and quote him as saying: “Fascism is not simply National Socialism.  This is music about terror, slavery, and oppression of the spirit.” Music Played in Today's ProgramDimtri Shostakovich Leningrad Symphony No. 7 NBC Symphony; Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA Toscanini Edition Vol. 22

What can one say about John David Mann? He has mastered, well he wouldn't say that, but I would, writing non-fiction, parable and fiction writing. He has also shown us how a marriage can be lived fully and be written about, how to start your own school, and how to run a business with over 100,000 people. And those are just a few of his achievements to date. My favorite is that he has launched almost every book he has written or co-authored on my show since 2015. Yup, that one is special to me because his words lift my spirits, awaken my brain and bring me joy. Well not just to me but to over 3 million people in 38 languages. Blind Fear is John's latest novel with Brandon Webb and it does not disappoint. Today we talked about what his latest novel means, how he manages to take a more 'Hitchcockian" approach to writing than many others (my choice of words as you will hear), and how crime writing taught him to fall in love with the world.  These aren't the usual questions John gets asked, and his answers may surprise you.  Take a listen as we dive deep with John David Mann on life, fiction, writing mastery mentoring and a few other things. John David Mann has been creating careers since he was a teenager. Before turning to business and journalism, he forged a successful career as a concert cellist and prize-winning composer. At fifteen he won the prestigious BMI Awards to Student Composers and received the award at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, where he met such twentieth-century-music luminaries as William Schumann and Leopold Stokowski. He apprenticed as a choral conductor under his father, Dr. Alfred Mann, which gave him the chance to meet more legendary figures of classical music, including Randall Thompson, Leonard Bernstein, Boris Goldovsky, Robert Shaw, and George Crumb. His musical compositions were performed throughout the U.S. and his musical score for Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (written at age thirteen) was performed as part of a theatrical production of the play at the stone amphitheater in Epidaurus, Greece—the very one, in fact, where the play was originally premiered a few thousand years earlier. At age seventeen, he and a few friends started their own high school in New Jersey (called Changes, Inc.). “Alternative” though they were, his school successfully placed its students in such universities as Harvard and Yale. After graduating, he joined the school's faculty. In the years since he has taught children in affluent Boston suburbs, Indiana farms, and the poorest neighborhoods on the outskirts of Philadelphia. John never planned to go into business; it just seemed to keep working out that way. He has founded one school, one food distribution business, one graphic design business, and two publishing companies. John's diverse career has made him a thought leader in several different industries. In 1986 he founded and wrote for Solstice, a journal on health, nutrition, and environmental issues. His series on the climate crisis, “Whither the Trees?” (yes, he was writing about this back in the eighties), was selected for national reprint in 1989 in Utne Reader for a readership of over one hundred thousand. In 1992 John helped write and produce the underground bestseller The Greatest Networker in the World, by John Milton Fogg, which became the defining book in its industry. During the 1990s, John built a multimillion-dollar sales/distribution organization of over a hundred thousand people. He was cofounder and senior editor of the legendary Upline journal and editor in chief of Networking Times. As a public speaker he has addressed audiences of thousands. John is an award-winning author whose writings have earned the Axiom Business Book Award (Gold Medal, for The Go-Giver), the Nautilus Award (for A Deadly Misunderstanding), and Taiwan's Golden Book Award for Innovation (for You Call the Shots). The Go-Giver was also honored with the Living Now Book Awards “Evergreen Medal” in 2017 for its “contributions to positive global change,” and cited on Inc.'s “Most Motivational Books Ever Written” and HubSpot's “20 Most Highly Rated Sales Books of All Time”; The Go-Giver Leader was listed on Entrepreneur magazine's “10 Books Every Leader Should Read” and Forbes magazine's “8 Books Every Young Leaders Should Read.” His 2012 Take the Lead (with Betsy Myers) was named Best Leadership Book of 2011 by Tom Peters and the Washington Post. His first novel, Steel Fear (2021, with former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb), was hailed by Lee Child as “an instant classic, maybe an instant legend” and nominated for a Barry Award. Jeffery Deaver called the sequel, Cold Fear (2022), “one of the best crime novels of the year.” You can read his thoughts on entering the world of crime fiction at JohnDavidMann.com His books are published in 38 languages and have sold more than 3 million copies. John coauthored the international bestselling classic The Go-Giver (with Bob Burg), the New York Times bestsellers The Latte Factor (with David Bach), The Red Circle (with Brandon Webb), and Flash Foresight (with Daniel Burrus), and The Answer (ghost-written for John Assaraf and Murray Smith) and the national bestsellers The Slight Edge (with Jeff Olson), Among Heroes (with Brandon Webb), Out of the Maze (with Spencer Johnson) and Real Leadership (with John Addison). He has written for American Executive, CNBC, CrimeReads, Financial Times, Forbes.com, Huffington Post, Ivey Business Journal, Leader to Leader, Leadership Excellence, Master Salesmanship, Strategy & Leadership, and Wired. You can find his writings on Huffington Post here. He is married to Ana Gabriel Mann (check out their wedding photos and vows), his coauthor on The Go-Giver Marriage, and considers himself the luckiest mann in the world.

Not every music student or even professional musician has explored classical music, much like not necessarily every classical musician will know something about jazz or any other genre.  However, each genre has certain pieces that one should know from each genre regardless of your preference.  These are 25 of many possible choices, not necessarily "the best", but some pieces you should recognize by title and composer upon hearing. Musical examples used in this episode: 06:53 P. Tchaikovsky: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker - (Montreal Symphony; Charles Dutoit) 12:49 J.S. Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 (Hannes Kästner, organ) 13:15 J.S. Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 (Czech Philharmonic; Leopold Stokowski) 17:26 S Barber: Adagio for Strings (New York Philharmonic; Thomas Schipps) 19:48 Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 (Vienna Philharmonic; Carlos Klieber) mvt 1 and 4 24:03 Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Berlin Philharmonic; Von Karajan) mvt. 4 and 2 28:33 Brahms: Hungarian Dances 4, 5, 6 (Vienna Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado) 30:56 A Copland: "Hoe-Down" from Rodeo (St. Louis Symphony; Leonard Slatkin) 32:33 F Chopin: Grand Valse Brillante op. 18 (Valentina Lisitsa) 34:22 Debussy: Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Royal Concertgebouw; Bernard Haitink) 36:01 Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" mvt 2 (London Philharmonic; Charles MacKerras) 38:16 Grieg: Peer Gynt and Peer Gynt suite no.1 (San Francisco Symphony; Herbert Blomstedt) 40:13 Handel: The Messiah "Hallelujah" (London Symphony; Colin Davis) 40:43 Handel: Water Music selections (English Chamber Orchestra; Raymond Leppard) 41:30 Holst: The Planets "Mars" - (Montreal Symphony; Charles Dutoit) 42:13 Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (Marc-Andre Hamelin) 43:22 Mendelssohn: Overture and Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream (London Symphony, Andre Previn) 45:11 Mozart: Overture to The Marriage of Figaro (Academy of St Martin in the Fields; Neville Marriner) 46:16 Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition - Promenade and Great Gate of Kiev (Berlin Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado) 48:25 Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 (Vladimir Ashkenazy; Moscow Symphony; Kirill Kondrashin) 49:38 Ravel: Bolero (Boston Symphony; Seiji Ozawa) 51:42 Ravel: Daphnis & Chloe (Rotterdam Philharmonic; Yannick Nézet-Séguin) 52:46 Rimsky-Korsakov: Flight of the Bumblebee (Berlin Philharmonic; Zubin Mehta) 53:08 Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade mvt IV and III (London Symphony; Charles MacKerras) 55:06 Schubert: Ave Maria (Barbara Booney) 55:31 R Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra (Chicago Symphony; Fritz Reiner) 57:15 Stravinsky: Rite of Spring (from Part 1) (New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein) 58:21 Tchaikovsky: Russian Dance, Arabian Dance, Dance of the Reed Flutes from The Nutcracker (Montreal Symphony; Dutoit)   Do you have a different recording of these pieces that you'd recommend?  Let me know by telling me directly at https://www.speakpipe.com/MusicianToolkit or you can send me a written message at https://www.davidlanemusic.com/contact  The blog post that goes with this episode can be found here: https://www.davidlanemusic.com/post/25-essential-classical-pieces-to-know You can find this episode and links to this show on all podcast apps from https://musiciantoolkit.podbean.com/ . If you enjoyed this, please give it a rating and review on the podcast app of your choice.  You can also now find the podcast at https://www.davidlanemusic.com/toolkit You can follow David Lane AND the Musician Toolkit podcast on Facebook @DavidMLaneMusic, on Instagram and TikTok @DavidLaneMusic, and on YouTube @davidlanemusic1 This episode is sponsored by Fons, an online platform that helps private teachers of all types (music, yoga, martial arts, academic tutoring, coaches, etc) with smooth, automated assistance such as securing timely automatic payments and scheduling.  Click here for more information or to begin your free trial.

Je dagelijkse portie muzikale verwondering. Welkom in mijn wonderkamer, vol muziek, verhalen en voorwerpen. Een muzikale reis door eeuwen, windstreken en genres. ‘De laatste verjaardag van Sergei R.' Het is geen grap, maar op 1 april viert Sergei Rachmaninov zijn 150ste geboortedag. In deze aflevering enkele unieke, recent ontdekte opnamen van deze romantische alleskunner op de piano. Zo ga je naar zijn laatste verjaardag, in 1942… Meer zien? Klik hier (https://www.nporadio4.nl/klassiek/podcasts/f32bc497-7b61-4ffb-99d4-16b765eb0c53/dit-hoor-je-deze-week-in-franks-klassieke-wonderkamer-week-13-27-t-m-31-maart) Sergei Rachmaninov Pianoconcert nr.2, II. Adagio sostenuto Sergei Rachmaninov, piano Philadelphia Orchestra olv Leopold Stokowski (opn.1929) (album: Rachmaninov plays Rachmaninov)   Sergei Rachmaninov div. historische uitvoeringen Sergei Rachmaninov, piano  (album: Rachmaninov plays Symphonic Dances; newly discovered 1940 recording)   Sergei Rachmaninov 10 Preludes op.23; IV. Andante cantabile Sergei Babayan, piano (album: Babayan plays Rachmaninoff) Franks Klassieke Wonderkamer is straks niet meer via de Bach van de Dag feed te beluisteren. Niks missen? Abonneer je dan op de podcast Franks Klassieke Wonderkamer.

Synopsis The Russian émigré composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff was himself the soloist on today's date in 1927 in the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Rachmaninoff had premiered his Third Concerto in New York in 1909, and he'd been thinking about writing another one for over a decade. In the meantime, his life had been disrupted by both the Russian Revolution and the exhausting business of earning a living as a touring virtuoso pianist. In 1926, Rachmaninoff finally felt he could afford to take some time off and put a Fourth Piano Concerto down on paper. In its original form, it turned out to be a much longer work than even Rachmaninoff thought practical. He joked to a friend that its movements would have to be "performed on successive nights, like Wagner's Ring operas." Rachmaninoff made a number of cuts before the Philadelphia premiere, but even so, the new work was not well received, and so Rachmaninoff kept cutting. Audiences and critics still remained cool, and Rachmaninoff eventually shelved the work for a time—quite a time. In 1941 he prepared a "final cut" version, which ended up considerably shorter than his other three Piano Concertos, and recorded it with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Music Played in Today's Program Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 - 1943) Piano Concerto No. 4 Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano; Cleveland Orchestra; Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor. London 458 930

CPA and Auditor Joe Fried joins the program to lay out the election fraud from 2020 from an auditors point of view. Now that time has passed, auditors have had the time to review the public data and its not pretty for Biden. The 2020 election under any reasonable measure was illegitimate and would not have been certifiable under any reasonable auditing standards. His new book, "Debunked?" lays out the fraud in the six swing states that change the history of the United States. You can see more of his work on his Substack at https://joefriedcpa.substack.com/ See Important Proven Solutions to Keep Your from getting sick even if you had the mRNA Shot - Dr. Nieusma Protect your family and your assets with Silver & Gold - Contact info@milesfranklin.com, tell them "Sarah sent you" and receive excellent service and the lowest prices in the country, guaranteed! MUSIC CREDITS: "Do You Trust Me" by Michael Vignola, licensed for broad internet media use, including video and audio       See on Bastyon | Bitchute | Odysee | Rumble | Freedom.Social | SarahWestall.TV   Biography of Joe Fried, CPA Joe Fried attended Case Western Reserve University on full scholarship, graduated with an MBA, and was hired as an auditor by Ernst & Young. In 1983 he formed his own firm, from which he retired in 2022. During his 43-year career, Joe performed and supervised countless audits and was an AICPA-authorized peer reviewer for dozens of other audit firms. In 2003, Joe published his first book, How Social Security Picks Your Pocket, which chronicled the waste in the program and called for a private option for participants. While researching the book, Joe discovered that thousands of teachers in Texas were participating in a shameful scam that cost the Social Security program an estimated 2 billion dollars. (They were pretending to be full-time janitors.) He notified the Social Security Inspector General who replied, “We take your concern seriously and will open an audit ....” Thirteen months later, the audit was done and the IG agreed with Joe's 64-page analysis, without exception. Before long, however, Joe learned of the power of the teachers' union and the weakness of Social Security Administrators, who refused to cut off the phony benefits. Following the 2008 financial crisis, Joe wrote a unique book called, Who Really Drove the Economy into the Ditch. Unlike other analysts, Joe described the roots of the crisis, which went back to the early days of the Clinton Administration and its push to eliminate the down payment requirement for home mortgage loans. Joe expects his new book— Debunked? — to be his most controversial and important work as it takes on the sanctity of our vote. As a young man, Joe won first place in a national music competition. He performed on his clarinet under Leopold Stokowski in Carnegie Hall, and he still performs occasionally with his wife, Nina, a pianist. He says that the transition from music to business is a long story, best told over a couple of cold beers.  

I lead off my new episodes for Black History Month 2023 with one of the most glorious voices ever captured on recordings, Dorothy Maynor (03 September 1910 – 19 February 1996), one of the most glorious lyric soprano voices ever captured on recording. Discovered by Serge Koussevitzky in the late 1930s and championed by him and a host of other conductors (including Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy), she became renowned as a recitalist but, because of restrictions of the era placed upon Black singers, never sang on any operatic stage. Nevertheless, her studio recordings of arias by Mozart, Debussy, and Charpentier are legendary. Our appreciation of Maynor the singer is greatly enhanced by the presence of live radio recordings as well as a recently-issued live 1940 song recital from the Library of Congress. It is one of the great injustices of musical history that gifted Black singers of Maynor's caliber from that era were outrightly denied the opportunity to perform in staged opera performances at venues like the Metropolitan Opera. Dorothy Maynor nonetheless persevered and left an incredible legacy, and not just a vocal one: in 1963, the year of her retirement from singing, she founded the Harlem School of the Arts, for which, before she stepped down as President in 1979, she raised more than $2 million dollars for the construction of a new facility for the institution. She also was the first African American singer to perform at a presidential inaugural (both for Harry S. Truman in 1949 and Dwight D. Eisenhower four years later), as well as the first African American to sit on the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera. This episode features Maynor in live, studio, and radio recordings of repertoire by Bach, Handel, Schubert, and Mendelssohn, as well as some of the finest recordings of spirituals ever made. Also heard are the songs of three Black composers, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Cecil Cohen, and R. Nathaniel Dett, the latter of which Maynor studied with at the Hampton Institute, whose work Maynor frequently programmed on her recitals. The episode opens with a joyous birthday tribute to next week's subject, Martina Arroyo, whose 1974 album of spirituals was backed by the Choir of the Harlem School of the Arts conducted by Maynor herself. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season.

Steven Spielberg is the most successful director of his generation and the highest-grossing director of all time: his films have taken more than $10 billion worldwide. From Jaws to E.T. and Jurassic Park to Schindler's List, his storytelling has captivated audiences around the world. Steven grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he started making films as a young boy. In 1958 he made a short Western which won him a Boy Scout merit badge. He screened it to his entire Scout troop and their laughter and applause got him hooked on film making. In 1971 he directed a television movie called Duel about a motorist who is pursued by a murderous truck driver. The film attracted good reviews from critics, and before the age of 30, Steven had directed his first global hit: Jaws grossed $471 million worldwide and is credited as heralding the arrival of the blockbuster era. He now says Jaws was ‘a free pass into my future.' He has won three Academy Awards, and has received eight nominations for best director. The Fabelmans, his most recent film, is a semi-fictionalised account of his own coming of age, drawing on his film-making experiences as a child. Steven is married to the actor Kate Capshaw, who starred in his film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and they have seven children. DISC ONE: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Gene Pitney DISC TWO: Fugue in G minor, BMW 578 – “The Little” arranged by Leopold Stokowski, composed by J.S Bach, performed by Philadelphia Orchestra and conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin DISC THREE: Michelle by The Beatles DISC FOUR: What the World Needs Now Is Love by Jackie DeShannon DISC FIVE: Come Fly with Me by Frank Sinatra DISC SIX: The Ghost of Tom Joad by Bruce Springsteen DISC SEVEN: Somewhere, composed by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, performed by Reri Grist DISC EIGHT: Coolhand by Buzzy Lee BOOK CHOICE: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck LUXURY ITEM: H-8 Bolex camera CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Coolhand by Buzzy Lee Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

Synopsis On today's date in 1948, Maestro Efrem Kurtz led the first subscription concert of the newly reorganized Houston Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was founded in 1913, but after struggling through the “minor” disruptions of two World Wars and the Great Depression, the symphony's 1948 season marked its rebirth as a major player among American orchestras. Since then, the Houston Symphony's roster of conductors has included some of the greatest: Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Barbirolli, André Previn, to name just a few. For its 1948 debut concert, the new Houston Symphony commissioned and premiered a new work by Aaron Copland—a concert suite adapted from his latest film score. Copland had gone to Hollywood early in 1948 to write the music for the cinematic version of John Steinbeck's novella, “The Red Pony,” and spent ten weeks writing about an hour's worth of music for the new film, which was scheduled for release in 1949—so that meant his 1948 concert suite from “The Red Pony” debuted even before the movie. The Houston Post's review called Copland's suite “clean, joyous, ingenious and irresistibly spirited,” and correctly predicted “Mr. Copland's ‘Red Pony' has grand little gaits, and will stand playing again—here and in a lot of other places.” Music Played in Today's Program Aaron Copland (1900-1990) The Red Pony Suite Dallas Symphony; Andrew Litton, cond. Delos 3221

蹦藝術EP77 華格納 - 他的人生、音樂與故事（一）從華格納的年輕歲月談起 用耳朵閱讀古典音樂 - 蹦藝術 | BONART

Avlana Eisenberg conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with violinist Zina Schiff — William Grant Still: Summerland/Violin Suite/Pastorela/American Suite (Naxos) Jump to giveaway form New Classical Tracks - Avlana and Celeste by ”It's crucial to remember this is not new music. These manuscripts have been around for generations. I'm aware that there are many more pieces from William Grant Sill and other composers who have been neglected over the years,” conductor Avlana Eisenberg said about Still, who has 13 world premieres on her latest release, William Grant Still: Summerland/Violin Suite/Pastorela/American Suite. “I think it's incumbent upon us to make sure that this is not a passing phase but momentum that gets carried forth.” Eisenberg is joined by journalist Celeste Headlee, who is the granddaughter of Still. Tell us about the relationship you have with your mother, violinist Zina Schiff, who is featured on the album. Eisenberg: “She has been, for as long as I can remember, my primary musical inspiration. So much of my notion of what it is to be a musician comes, whether I'm aware of it or not, from growing up with her. She's also the person who can press my buttons more than anyone else. It really is a special thing when we can come together in a musical context. I just feel a tremendous closeness, and I learn something every time. It's really a magical collaboration.” How has Still's importance of family reflected in the music on this recording? Headlee: “His family life was his joy. When he wasn't composing and even when he was composing, he was at home. When he wasn't composing music, he was building toys for his children, like train sets. He composed a couple of pieces that he dedicated to his dog. It was about hearth and home for him. That started in his upbringing. He was raised by a mother who was fierce in her determination that he would make something of himself. “When I listen to any of these pieces that sounds like my grandfather, it's hard to point to one or another that sounds more like family to me. It all does.” Eisenberg: “I agree so much with what Celeste said in terms of his works being so varied, but they're also so quintessentially him. When I first started poring over the different scores I was sent, I was most struck by the variety. “In my very first conversation with Celeste, she told me that Mother and Child was one of her favorites. That was a real moment of connection. As you can probably imagine, getting to record this most intimate piece and standing up there with my mother was just remarkable. It continues to be one of the most emotional tracks for me.” Could you talk about Summer Land? Headlee: “He wrote this for my grandmother, his wife. She premiered it originally. She was of Russian-Jewish descent and an accomplished concert pianist. He wrote that she had this incredible spread in her hands for a tiny woman. She was around 4-foot-10 and could just flatten out her hands completely. When that gets translated into the orchestra, it becomes magic.” Do you believe that Still's music has achieved its goal of serving a purpose larger than music? Headlee: “His mother was the first of the family born at the end of the Civil War. They both came from a generation that believed if white people knew how smart and accomplished Black people could be; if they could impress people with their accomplishments, intellect, taste and wit; and if Black people could prove that they were deserving of equal treatment, that would make racism disappear. They were wrong about that. “That was heartbreaking to my grandfather when he finally realized that no matter how talented he was, no matter what he achieved and attained, he would never be welcomed in the vaulted halls of classical music. He is now, but he wasn't when he died. He was forgotten. He was making his living writing pieces for elementary school textbooks, a job that Leopold Stokowski got him.” What can we do to make people more aware of who he is and what he accomplished? Headlee: “Avlana and her colleagues are doing that right now by seeking out those pieces that have not been heard or recorded before. We should listen to his music and feel the same kind of pride people feel when they hear [John Philip] Sousa. This is the sound of our soil. This is the sound of our nation.” To hear the rest of my conversation, click on the extended interview above, or download the extended podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch now More on William Grant Still Learning to Listen William Grant Still Rhapsody in Black William Grant Still, the dean of African American composers Giveaway Giveaway You must be 13 or older to submit any information to American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio. The personally identifying information you provide will not be sold, shared, or used for purposes other than to communicate with you about things like our programs, products and services. See Terms of Use and Privacy. This giveaway is subject to the Official Giveaway Rules. Resources Avlana Eisenberg conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with violinist Zina Schiff — William Grant Still: Summerland/Violin Suite/Pastorela/American Suite (Amazon) Avlana Eisenberg (official site) Celeste Headlee (official site)

Winnie Byanyima is a human rights advocate and executive director of Unaids, the joint UN Programme which was set up to eradicate Aids as a threat to public health by 2030. Winnie was born in the village of Ruti, in south west Uganda, where her teacher parents raised her and her siblings to follow their example of doing good things for others. From an early age Winnie adopted the family motto of ‘truth and justice'. Winnie fled the country in 1978, during the regime of President Idi Amin, and came to the UK as a refugee. She won a scholarship to study aeronautical engineering at Manchester University, graduating in 1981. She returned home where she found a job as an engineer for Ugandan Airlines while secretly working for Yoweri Museveni's resistance movement that opposed Amin's successor, Milton Obote. In 1994 Winnie was elected as an MP in the Ugandan Parliament and was instrumental in drawing up a new constitution for the country. In 2013 she was appointed executive director of Oxfam International and became executive director of Unaids in 2019. She currently lives in Geneva. DISC ONE: Sanyu Lyange by Juliana Kanyomozi DISC TWO: Cantata No. 147: Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring by New London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, with the Norman Luboff Choir DISC THREE: Le Bûcheron by Franklin Boukaka DISC FOUR: Heart of Glass by Blondie DISC FIVE: Umqombothi by Yvonne Chaka Chaka DISC SIX: Steal Away (Remastered) by Nat King Cole DISC SEVEN: Don't Worry Be Happy by Bobby McFerrin DISC EIGHT: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free by Nina Simone BOOK CHOICE: The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir LUXURY ITEM: A basket weaving needle CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free by Nina Simone Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Paula McGinley

Francis Xavier Dercum grew up in Philadelphia and trained as a neurologist.  When President Woodrow Wilson had his massive stroke in 1919, Dercum was called in as consultant.  Years later when Wilson's widow Edith wrote her memoirs, she insisted that it was Dr. Dercum who had encouraged her to run things while he recovered. Francis's sister Clara also became a physician and spent much of her career giving charity care to the poor in Philadelphia, while working tirelessly for women's rights.  Their half-sister Susanna went in a different direction and became Leopold Stokowski's choice for the voice of Maria Aegyptica when he conducted the American premier of Mahler's 8th Symphony in 1916.  Three Dercums, three different stories for the April edition of Biographical Bytes from Bala: West Laurel Hill Stories. 

Episode one hundred and forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, and the history of the theremin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "You're Gonna Miss Me" by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. 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/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it, including the single version of "Good Vibrations". Oddly, the single version of "Good Vibrations" is not on the The Smile Sessions box set. But an entire CD of outtakes of the track is, and that was the source for the session excerpts here. Information on Lev Termen comes from Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky Transcript In ancient Greece, the god Hermes was a god of many things, as all the Greek gods were. Among those things, he was the god of diplomacy, he was a trickster god, a god of thieves, and he was a messenger god, who conveyed messages between realms. He was also a god of secret knowledge. In short, he was the kind of god who would have made a perfect spy. But he was also an inventor. In particular he was credited in Greek myth as having invented the lyre, an instrument somewhat similar to a guitar, harp, or zither, and as having used it to create beautiful sounds. But while Hermes the trickster god invented the lyre, in Greek myth it was a mortal man, Orpheus, who raised the instrument to perfection. Orpheus was a legendary figure, the greatest poet and musician of pre-Homeric Greece, and all sorts of things were attributed to him, some of which might even have been things that a real man of that name once did. He is credited with the "Orphic tripod" -- the classification of the elements into earth, water, and fire -- and with a collection of poems called the Rhapsodiae. The word Rhapsodiae comes from the Greek words rhaptein, meaning to stitch or sew, and ōidē, meaning song -- the word from which we get our word "ode", and  originally a rhapsōdos was someone who "stitched songs together" -- a reciter of long epic poems composed of several shorter pieces that the rhapsōdos would weave into one continuous piece. It's from that that we get the English word "rhapsody", which in the sixteenth century, when it was introduced into the language, meant a literary work that was a disjointed collection of patchwork bits, stitched together without much thought as to structure, but which now means a piece of music in one movement, but which has several distinct sections. Those sections may seem unrelated, and the piece may have an improvisatory feel, but a closer look will usually reveal relationships between the sections, and the piece as a whole will have a sense of unity. When Orpheus' love, Eurydice, died, he went down into Hades, the underworld where the souls of the dead lived, and played music so beautiful, so profound and moving, that the gods agreed that Orpheus could bring the soul of his love back to the land of the living. But there was one condition -- all he had to do was keep looking forward until they were both back on Earth. If he turned around before both of them were back in the mortal realm, she would disappear forever, never to be recovered. But of course, as you all surely know, and would almost certainly have guessed even if you didn't know because you know how stories work, once Orpheus made it back to our world he turned around and looked, because he lost his nerve and didn't believe he had really achieved his goal. And Eurydice, just a few steps away from her freedom, vanished back into the underworld, this time forever. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop: "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Lev Sergeyevich Termen was born in St. Petersburg, in what was then the Russian Empire, on the fifteenth of August 1896, by the calendar in use in Russia at that time -- the Russian Empire was still using the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world, and in the Western world the same day was the twenty-seventh of August. Young Lev was fascinated both by science and the arts. He was trained as a cellist from an early age, but while he loved music, he found the process of playing the music cumbersome -- or so he would say later. He was always irritated by the fact that the instrument is a barrier between the idea in the musician's head and the sound -- that it requires training to play. As he would say later "I realised there was a gap between music itself and its mechanical production, and I wanted to unite both of them." Music was one of his big loves, but he was also very interested in physics, and was inspired by a lecture he saw from the physicist Abram Ioffe, who for the first time showed him that physics was about real, practical, things, about the movements of atoms and fields that really existed, not just about abstractions and ideals. When Termen went to university, he studied physics -- but he specifically wanted to be an experimental physicist, not a theoretician. He wanted to do stuff involving the real world. Of course, as someone who had the misfortune to be born in the late 1890s, Termen was the right age to be drafted when World War I started, but luckily for him the Russian Army desperately needed people with experience in the new invention that was radio, which was vital for wartime communications, and he spent the war in the Army radio engineering department, erecting radio transmitters and teaching other people how to erect them, rather than on the front lines, and he managed not only to get his degree in physics but also a diploma in music. But he was also becoming more and more of a Marxist sympathiser, even though he came from a relatively affluent background, and after the Russian Revolution he stayed in what was now the Red Army, at least for a time. Once Termen's Army service was over, he started working under Ioffe, working with him on practical applications of the audion, the first amplifying vacuum tube. The first one he found was that the natural capacitance of a human body when standing near a circuit can change the capacity of the circuit. He used that to create an invisible burglar alarm -- there was an antenna sending out radio waves, and if someone came within the transmitting field of the antenna, that would cause a switch to flip and a noise to be sounded. He was then asked to create a device for measuring the density of gases, outputting a different frequency for different densities. Because gas density can have lots of minor fluctuations because of air currents and so forth, he built a circuit that would cut out all the many harmonics from the audions he was using and give just the main frequency as a single pure tone, which he could listen to with headphones. That way,  slight changes in density would show up as a slight change in the tone he heard. But he noticed that again when he moved near the circuit, that changed the capacitance of the circuit and changed the tone he was hearing. He started moving his hand around near the circuit and getting different tones. The closer his hand got to the capacitor, the higher the note sounded. And if he shook his hand a little, he could get a vibrato, just like when he shook his hand while playing the cello. He got Ioffe to come and listen to him, and Ioffe said "That's an electronic Orpheus' lament!" [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Termen figured out how to play Massenet's "Elegy" and Saint-Saens' "The Swan" using this system. Soon the students were all fascinated, telling each other "Termen plays Gluck on a voltmeter!" He soon figured out various refinements -- by combining two circuits, using the heterodyne principle, he could allow for far finer control. He added a second antenna, for volume control, to be used by the left hand -- the right hand would choose the notes, while the left hand would change the volume, meaning the instrument could be played without touching it at all. He called the instrument the "etherphone",  but other people started calling it the termenvox -- "Termen's voice". Termen's instrument was an immediate sensation, as was his automatic burglar alarm, and he was invited to demonstrate both of them to Lenin. Lenin was very impressed by Termen -- he wrote to Trotsky later talking about Termen's inventions, and how the automatic burglar alarm might reduce the number of guards needed to guard a perimeter. But he was also impressed by Termen's musical invention. Termen held his hands to play through the first half of a melody, before leaving the Russian leader to play the second half by himself -- apparently he made quite a good job of it. Because of Lenin's advocacy for his work, Termen was sent around the Soviet Union on a propaganda tour -- what was known as an "agitprop tour", in the familiar Soviet way of creating portmanteau words. In 1923 the first piece of music written specially for the instrument was performed by Termen himself with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Andrey Paschenko's Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra. The score for that was later lost, but has been reconstructed, and the piece was given a "second premiere" in 2020 [Excerpt: Andrey Paschenko, "Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra" ] But the musical instrument wasn't the only scientific innovation that Termen was working on. He thought he could reverse death itself, and bring the dead back to life.  He was inspired in this by the way that dead organisms could be perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost. He thought that if he could only freeze a dead person in the permafrost, he could then revive them later -- basically the same idea as the later idea of cryogenics, although Termen seems to have thought from the accounts I've read that all it would take would be to freeze and then thaw them, and not to have considered the other things that would be necessary to bring them back to life. Termen made two attempts to actually do this, or at least made preliminary moves in that direction. The first came when his assistant, a twenty-year-old woman, died of pneumonia. Termen was heartbroken at the death of someone so young, who he'd liked a great deal, and was convinced that if he could just freeze her body for a while he could soon revive her. He talked with Ioffe about this -- Ioffe was friends with the girl's family -- and Ioffe told him that he thought that he was probably right and probably could revive her. But he also thought that it would be cruel to distress the girl's parents further by discussing it with them, and so Termen didn't get his chance to experiment. He was even keener on trying his technique shortly afterwards, when Lenin died. Termen was a fervent supporter of the Revolution, and thought Lenin was a great man whose leadership was still needed -- and he had contacts within the top echelons of the Kremlin. He got in touch with them as soon as he heard of Lenin's death, in an attempt to get the opportunity to cryopreserve his corpse and revive him. Sadly, by this time it was too late. Lenin's brain had been pickled, and so the opportunity to resurrect him as a zombie Lenin was denied forever. Termen was desperately interested in the idea of bringing people back from the dead, and he wanted to pursue it further with his lab, but he was also being pushed to give demonstrations of his music, as well as doing security work -- Ioffe, it turned out, was also working as a secret agent, making various research trips to Germany that were also intended to foment Communist revolution. For now, Termen was doing more normal security work -- his burglar alarms were being used to guard bank vaults and the like, but this was at the order of the security state. But while Termen was working on his burglar alarms and musical instruments and attempts to revive dead dictators, his main project was his doctoral work, which was on the TV. We've said before in this podcast that there's no first anything, and that goes just as much for inventions as it does for music. Most inventions build on work done by others, which builds on work done by others, and so there were a lot of people building prototype TVs at this point. In Britain we tend to say "the inventor of the TV" was John Logie Baird, but Baird was working at the same time as people like the American Charles Francis Jenkins and the Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi, all of them building on earlier work by people like Archibald Low. Termen's prototype TV, the first one in Russia, came slightly later than any of those people, but was created more or less independently, and was more advanced in several ways, with a bigger screen and better resolution. Shortly after Lenin's death, Termen was invited to demonstrate his invention to Stalin, who professed himself amazed at the "magic mirror". [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] Termen was sent off to tour Europe giving demonstrations of his inventions, particularly his musical instrument. It was on this trip that he started using the Romanisation "Leon Theremin", and this is how Western media invariably referred to him. Rather than transliterate the Cyrillic spelling of his birth name, he used the French spelling his Huguenot ancestors had used before they emigrated to Russia, and called himself Leo or Leon rather than Lev. He was known throughout his life by both names, but said to a journalist in 1928 "First of all, I am not Tair-uh-MEEN. I wrote my name with French letters for French pronunciation. I am Lev Sergeyevich Tair-MEN.". We will continue to call him Termen, partly because he expressed that mild preference (though again, he definitely went by both names through choice) but also to distinguish him from the instrument, because while his invention remained known in Russia as the termenvox, in the rest of the world it became known as the theremin. He performed at the Paris Opera, and the New York Times printed a review saying "Some musicians were extremely pessimistic about the possibilities of the device, because at times M. Theremin played lamentably out of tune. But the finest Stradivarius, in the hands of a tyro, can give forth frightful sounds. The fact that the inventor was able to perform certain pieces with absolute precision proves that there remains to be solved only questions of practice and technique." Termen also came to the UK, where he performed in front of an audience including George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Henry Wood and others. Arnold Bennett was astonished, but Bernard Shaw, who had very strong opinions about music, as anyone who has read his criticism will be aware, compared the sound unfavourably to that of a comb and paper. After performing in Europe, Termen made his way to the US, to continue his work of performance, propagandising for the Soviet Revolution, and trying to license the patents for his inventions, to bring money both to him and to the Soviet state. He entered the US on a six-month visitor's visa, but stayed there for eleven years, renewing the visa every six months. His initial tour was a success, though at least one open-air concert had to be cancelled because, as the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker put it, "the weather on Saturday took such a counter-revolutionary turn". Nicolas Slonimsky, the musicologist we've encountered several times before, and who would become part of Termen's circle in the US, reviewed one of the performances, and described the peculiar audiences that Termen was getting -- "a considerable crop of ladies and gentlemen engaged in earnest exploration of the Great Beyond...the mental processes peculiar to believers in cosmic vibrations imparted a beatific look to some of the listeners. Boston is a seat of scientific religion; before he knows it Professor Theremin may be proclaimed Krishnamurti and sanctified as a new deity". Termen licensed his patents on the invention to RCA, who in 1929 started mass-producing the first ever theremins for general use. Termen also started working with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, including developing a new kind of theremin for Stokowski's orchestra to use, one with a fingerboard played like a cello. Stokowski said "I believe we shall have orchestras of these electric instruments. Thus will begin a new era in music history, just as modern materials and methods of construction have produced a new era of architecture." Possibly of more interest to the wider public, Lennington Sherwell, the son of an RCA salesman, took up the theremin professionally, and joined the band of Rudy Vallee, one of the most popular singers of the period. Vallee was someone who constantly experimented with new sounds, and has for example been named as the first band leader to use an electric banjo, and Vallee liked the sound of the theremin so much he ordered a custom-built left-handed one for himself. Sherwell stayed in Vallee's band for quite a while, and performed with him on the radio and in recording sessions, but it's very difficult to hear him in any of the recordings -- the recording equipment in use in 1930 was very primitive, and Vallee had a very big band with a lot of string and horn players, and his arrangements tended to have lots of instruments playing in unison rather than playing individual lines that are easy to differentiate. On top of that, the fashion at the time when playing the instrument was to try and have it sound as much like other instruments as possible -- to duplicate the sound of a cello or violin or clarinet, rather than to lean in to the instrument's own idiosyncracies. I *think* though that I can hear Sherwell's playing in the instrumental break of Vallee's big hit "You're Driving Me Crazy" -- certainly it was recorded at the time that Sherwell was in the band, and there's an instrument in there with a very pure tone, but quite a lot of vibrato, in the mid range, that seems only to be playing in the break and not the rest of the song. I'm not saying this is *definitely* a theremin solo on one of the biggest hits of 1930, but I'm not saying it's not, either: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "You're Driving Me Crazy" ] Termen also invented a light show to go along with his instrument -- the illumovox, which had a light shining through a strip of gelatin of different colours, which would be rotated depending on the pitch of the theremin, so that lower notes would cause the light to shine a deep red, while the highest notes would make it shine a light blue, with different shades in between. By 1930, though, Termen's fortunes had started to turn slightly. Stokowski kept using theremins in the orchestra for a while, especially the fingerboard models to reinforce the bass, but they caused problems. As Slonimsky said "The infrasonic vibrations were so powerful...that they hit the stomach physically, causing near-nausea in the double-bass section of the orchestra". Fairly soon, the Theremin was overtaken by other instruments, like the ondes martenot, an instrument very similar to the theremin but with more precise control, and with a wider range of available timbres. And in 1931, RCA was sued by another company for patent infringement with regard to the Theremin -- the De Forest Radio Company had patents around the use of vacuum tubes in music, and they claimed damages of six thousand dollars, plus RCA had to stop making theremins. Since at the time, RCA had only made an initial batch of five hundred instruments total, and had sold 485 of them, many of them as promotional loss-leaders for future batches, they had actually made a loss of three hundred dollars even before the six thousand dollar damages, and decided not to renew their option on Termen's patents. But Termen was still working on his musical ideas. Slonimsky also introduced Termen to the avant-garde composer and theosophist Henry Cowell, who was interested in experimental sounds, and used to do things like play the strings inside the piano to get a different tone: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell was part of a circle of composers and musicologists that included Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, and Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, who Cowell would introduce to each other. Crawford would later marry Seeger, and they would have several children together, including the folk singer Peggy Seeger, and Crawford would also adopt Seeger's son Pete. Cowell and Termen would together invent the rhythmicon, the first ever drum machine, though the rhythmicon could play notes as well as rhythms. Only two rhythmicons were made while Termen was in the US. The first was owned by Cowell. The second, improved, model was bought by Charles Ives, but bought as a gift for Cowell and Slonimsky to use in their compositions. Sadly, both rhythmicons eventually broke down, and no recording of either is known to exist. Termen started to get further and further into debt, especially as the Great Depression started to hit, and he also had a personal loss -- he'd been training a student and had fallen in love with her, although he was married. But when she married herself, he cut off all ties with her, though Clara Rockmore would become one of the few people to use the instrument seriously and become a real virtuoso on it. He moved into other fields, all loosely based around the same basic ideas of detecting someone's distance from an object. He built electronic gun detectors for Alcatraz and Sing-Sing prisons, and he came up with an altimeter for aeroplanes. There was also a "magic mirror" -- glass that appeared like a mirror until it was backlit, at which point it became transparent. This was put into shop windows along with a proximity detector -- every time someone stepped close to look at their reflection, the reflection would disappear and be replaced with the objects behind the mirror. He was also by this point having to spy for the USSR on a more regular basis. Every week he would meet up in a cafe with two diplomats from the Russian embassy, who would order him to drink several shots of vodka -- the idea was that they would loosen his inhibitions enough that he would not be able to hide things from them -- before he related various bits of industrial espionage he'd done for them. Having inventions of his own meant he was able to talk with engineers in the aerospace industry and get all sorts of bits of information that would otherwise not have been available, and he fed this back to Moscow. He eventually divorced his first wife, and remarried -- a Black American dancer many years his junior named Lavinia Williams, who would be the great love of his life. This caused some scandal in his social circle, more because of her race than the age gap. But by 1938 he had to leave the US. He'd been there on a six-month visa, which had been renewed every six months for more than a decade, and he'd also not been paying income tax and was massively in debt. He smuggled himself back to the USSR, but his wife was, at the last minute, not allowed on to the ship with him. He'd had to make the arrangements in secret, and hadn't even told her of the plans, so the first she knew was when he disappeared. He would later claim that the Soviets had told him she would be sent for two weeks later, but she had no knowledge of any of this. For decades, Lavinia would not even know if her husband was dead or alive. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] When Termen got back to the USSR, he found it had changed beyond recognition. Stalin's reign of terror was now well underway, and not only could he not find a job, most of the people who he'd been in contact with at the top of the Kremlin had been purged. Termen was himself arrested and tortured into signing a false confession to counter-revolutionary activities and membership of fascist organisations. He was sentenced to eight years in a forced labour camp, which in reality was a death sentence -- it was expected that workers there would work themselves to death on starvation rations long before their sentences were up -- but relatively quickly he was transferred to a special prison where people with experience of aeronautical design were working. He was still a prisoner, but in conditions not too far removed from normal civilian life, and allowed to do scientific and technical work with some of the greatest experts in the field -- almost all of whom had also been arrested in one purge or another. One of the pieces of work Termen did was at the direct order of Laventy Beria, Stalin's right-hand man and the architect of most of the terrors of the Stalinist regime. In Spring 1945, while the USA and USSR were still supposed to be allies in World War II, Beria wanted to bug the residence of the US ambassador, and got Termen to design a bug that would get past all the normal screenings. The bug that Termen designed was entirely passive and unpowered -- it did nothing unless a microwave beam of a precise frequency was beamed at it, and only then did it start transmitting. It was placed in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, presented to the ambassador by a troupe of scouts as a gesture of friendship between the two countries. The wood in the eagle's beak was thin enough to let the sound through. It remained there for seven years, through the tenures of four ambassadors, only being unmasked when a British radio operator accidentally tuned to the frequency it was transmitting on and was horrified to hear secret diplomatic conversations. Upon its discovery, the US couldn't figure out how it worked, and eventually shared the information with MI5, who took eighteen months to reverse-engineer Termen's bug and come up with their own, which remained the standard bug in use for about a decade. The CIA's own attempts to reverse-engineer it failed altogether. It was also Termen who came up with that well-known bit of spycraft -- focussing an infra-red beam on a window pane, to use it to pick up the sound of conversations happening in the room behind it. Beria was so pleased with Termen's inventions that he got Termen to start bugging Stalin himself, so Beria would be able to keep track of Stalin's whims. Termen performed such great services for Beria that Beria actually allowed him to go free not long after his sentence was served. Not only that, but Beria nominated Termen for the Stalin Award, Class II, for his espionage work -- and Stalin, not realising that Termen had been bugging *him* as well as foreign powers, actually upgraded that to a Class I, the highest honour the Soviet state gave. While Termen was free, he found himself at a loose end, and ended up volunteering to work for the organisation he had been working for -- which went by many names but became known as the KGB from the 1950s onwards. He tried to persuade the government to let Lavinia, who he hadn't seen in eight years, come over and join him, but they wouldn't even allow him to contact her, and he eventually remarried. Meanwhile, after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested for his crimes, and charged under the same law that he had had Termen convicted under. Beria wasn't as lucky as Termen, though, and was executed. By 1964, Termen had had enough of the KGB, because they wanted him to investigate obvious pseudoscience -- they wanted him to look into aliens, UFOs, ESP... and telepathy. [Excerpt, The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (early version)" "She's already working on my brain"] He quit and went back to civilian life.  He started working in the acoustics lab in Moscow Conservatory, although he had to start at the bottom because everything he'd been doing for more than a quarter of a century was classified. He also wrote a short book on electronic music. In the late sixties an article on him was published in the US -- the first sign any of his old friends had that he'd not  died nearly thirty years earlier. They started corresponding with him, and he became a minor celebrity again, but this was disapproved of by the Soviet government -- electronic music was still considered bourgeois decadence and not suitable for the Soviet Union, and all his instruments were smashed and he was sacked from the conservatory. He continued working in various technical jobs until the 1980s, and still continued inventing refinements of the theremin, although he never had any official support for his work. In the eighties, a writer tried to get him some sort of official recognition -- the Stalin Prize was secret -- and the university at which he was working sent a reply saying, in part, "L.S. Termen took part in research conducted by the department as an ordinary worker and he did not show enough creative activity, nor does he have any achievements on the basis of which he could be recommended for a Government decoration." By this time he was living in shared accommodation with a bunch of other people, one room to himself and using a shared bathroom, kitchen, and so on. After Glasnost he did some interviews and was asked about this, and said "I never wanted to make demands and don't want to now. I phoned the housing department about three months ago and inquired about my turn to have a new flat. The woman told me that my turn would come in five or six years. Not a very reassuring answer if one is ninety-two years old." In 1989 he was finally allowed out of the USSR again, for the first time in fifty-one years, to attend a UNESCO sponsored symposium on electronic music. Among other things, he was given, forty-eight years late, a letter that his old colleague Edgard Varese had sent about his composition Ecuatorial, which had originally been written for theremin. Varese had wanted to revise the work, and had wanted to get modified theremins that could do what he wanted, and had asked the inventor for help, but the letter had been suppressed by the Soviet government. When he got no reply, Varese had switched to using ondes martenot instead. [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] In the 1970s, after the death of his third wife, Termen had started an occasional correspondence with his second wife, Lavinia, the one who had not been able to come with him to the USSR and hadn't known if he was alive for so many decades. She was now a prominent activist in Haiti, having established dance schools in many Caribbean countries, and Termen still held out hope that they could be reunited, even writing her a letter in 1988 proposing remarriage. But sadly, less than a month after Termen's first trip outside the USSR, she died -- officially of a heart attack or food poisoning, but there's a strong suspicion that she was murdered by the military dictatorship for her closeness to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pro-democracy activist who later became President of Haiti. Termen was finally allowed to join the Communist Party in the spring of 1991, just before the USSR finally dissolved -- he'd been forbidden up to that point because of his conviction for counter-revolutionary crimes. He was asked by a Western friend why he'd done that when everyone else was trying to *leave* the Communist Party, and he explained that he'd made a promise to Lenin. In his final years he was researching immortality, going back to the work he had done in his youth, working with biologists, trying to find a way to restore elderly bodies to youthful vigour. But sadly he died in 1993, aged ninety-seven, before he achieved his goal. On one of his last trips outside the USSR, in 1991, he visited the US, and in California he finally got to hear the song that most people associate with his invention, even though it didn't actually feature a theremin: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Back in the 1930s, when he was working with Slonimsky and Varese and Ives and the rest, Termen had set up the Theremin Studio, a sort of experimental arts lab, and in 1931 he had invited the musicologist, composer, and theoretician Joseph Schillinger to become a lecturer there. Schillinger had been one of the first composers to be really interested in the theremin, and had composed a very early piece written specifically for the instrument, the First Airphonic Suite: [Excerpt: Joseph Schillinger, "First Airphonic Suite"] But he was most influential as a theoretician. Schillinger believed that all of the arts were susceptible to rigorous mathematical analysis, and that you could use that analysis to generate new art according to mathematical principles, art that would be perfect. Schillinger planned to work with Termen to try to invent a machine that could compose, perform, and transmit music. The idea was that someone would be able to tune in a radio and listen to a piece of music in real time as it was being algorithmically composed and transmitted. The two men never achieved this, but Schillinger became very, very, respected as someone with a rigorous theory of musical structure -- though reading his magnum opus, the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, is frankly like wading through treacle. I'll read a short excerpt just to give an idea of his thinking: "On the receiving end, phasic stimuli produced by instruments encounter a metamorphic auditory integrator. This integrator represents the auditory apparatus as a whole and is a complex interdependent system. It consists of two receivers (ears), transmitters, auditory nerves, and a transformer, the auditory braincenter.  The response to a stimulus is integrated both quantitatively and selectively. The neuronic energy of response becomes the psychonic energy of auditory image. The response to stimuli and the process of integration are functional operations and, as such, can be described in mathematical terms , i.e., as  synchronization, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. But these integrative processes alone do not constitute the material of orchestration either.  The auditory image, whether resulting from phasic stimuli of an excitor or from selfstimulation of the auditory brain-center, can be described only in Psychological terms, of loudness, pitch, quality, etc. This leads us to the conclusion that the material of orchestration can be defined only as a group of conditions under which an integrated image results from a sonic stimulus subjected to an auditory response.  This constitutes an interdependent tripartite system, in which the existence of one component necessitates the existence of two others. The composer can imagine an integrated sonic form, yet he cannot transmit it to the auditor (unless telepathicaliy) without sonic stimulus and hearing apparatus." That's Schillinger's way of saying that if a composer wants someone to hear the music they've written, the composer needs a musical instrument and the listener needs ears and a brain. This kind of revolutionary insight made Schillinger immensely sought after in the early 1930s, and among his pupils were the swing bandleaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and the songwriter George Gershwin, who turned to Schillinger for advice when he was writing his opera Porgy and Bess: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Here Come De Honey Man"] Another of his pupils was the trombonist and arranger Glenn Miller, who at that time was a session player working in pickup studio bands for people like Red Nichols. Miller spent some time studying with him in the early thirties, and applied those lessons when given the job of putting together arrangements for Ray Noble, his first prominent job. In 1938 Glenn Miller walked into a strip joint to see a nineteen-year-old he'd been told to take a look at. This was another trombonist, Paul Tanner, who was at the time working as a backing musician for the strippers. Miller had recently broken up his first big band, after a complete lack of success, and was looking to put together a new big band, to play arrangements in the style he had worked out while working for Noble. As Tanner later put it "he said, `Well, how soon can you come with me?' I said, `I can come right now.' I told him I was all packed, I had my toothbrush in my pocket and everything. And so I went with him that night, and I stayed with him until he broke the band up in September 1942." The new band spent a few months playing the kind of gigs that an unknown band can get, but they soon had a massive success with a song Miller had originally written as an arranging exercise set for him by Schillinger, a song that started out under the title "Miller's Tune", but soon became known worldwide as "Moonlight Serenade": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Moonlight Serenade"] The Miller band had a lot of lineup changes in the four and a bit years it was together, but other than Miller himself there were only four members who were with that group throughout its career, from the early dates opening for  Freddie Fisher and His Schnickelfritzers right through to its end as the most popular band in America. They were piano player Chummy MacGregor, clarinet player Wilbur Schwartz, tenor sax player Tex Beneke, and Tanner. They played on all of Miller's big hits, like "In the Mood" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Chattanooga Choo-Choo"] But in September 1942, the band broke up as the members entered the armed forces, and Tanner found himself in the Army while Miller was in the Air Force, so while both played in military bands, they weren't playing together, and Miller disappeared over the Channel, presumed dead, in 1944. Tanner became a session trombonist, based in LA, and in 1958 he found himself on a session for a film soundtrack with Dr. Samuel Hoffman. I haven't been able to discover for sure which film this was for, but the only film on which Hoffman has an IMDB credit for that year is that American International Pictures classic, Earth Vs The Spider: [Excerpt: Earth Vs The Spider trailer] Hoffman was a chiropodist, and that was how he made most of his living, but as a teenager in the 1930s he had been a professional violin player under the name Hal Hope. One of the bands he played in was led by a man named Jolly Coburn, who had seen Rudy Vallee's band with their theremin and decided to take it up himself. Hoffman had then also got a theremin, and started his own all-electronic trio, with a Hammond organ player, and with a cello-style fingerboard theremin played by William Schuman, the future Pulitzer Prize winning composer. By the 1940s, Hoffman was a full-time doctor, but he'd retained his Musicians' Union card just in case the odd gig came along, and then in 1945 he received a call from Miklos Rozsa, who was working on the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's new film, Spellbound. Rozsa had tried to get Clara Rockmore, the one true virtuoso on the theremin playing at the time, to play on the soundtrack, but she'd refused -- she didn't do film soundtrack work, because in her experience they only wanted her to play on films about ghosts or aliens, and she thought it damaged the dignity of the instrument. Rozsa turned to the American Federation of Musicians, who as it turned out had precisely one theremin player who could read music and wasn't called Clara Rockmore on their books. So Dr. Samuel Hoffman, chiropodist, suddenly found himself playing on one of the most highly regarded soundtracks of one of the most successful films of the forties: [Excerpt: Miklos Rozsa, "Spellbound"] Rozsa soon asked Hoffman to play on another soundtrack, for the Billy Wilder film The Lost Weekend, another of the great classics of late forties cinema. Both films' soundtracks were nominated for the Oscar, and Spellbound's won, and Hoffman soon found himself in demand as a session player. Hoffman didn't have any of Rockmore's qualms about playing on science fiction and horror films, and anyone with any love of the genre will have heard his playing on genre classics like The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T, The Thing From Another World, It Came From Outer Space, and of course Bernard Hermann's score for The Day The Earth Stood Still: [Excerpt: The Day The Earth Stood Still score] As well as on such less-than-classics as The Devil's Weed, Voodoo Island, The Mad Magician, and of course Billy The Kid Vs Dracula. Hoffman became something of a celebrity, and also recorded several albums of lounge music with a band led by Les Baxter, like the massive hit Music Out Of The Moon, featuring tracks like “Lunar Rhapsody”: [Excerpt: Samuel Hoffman, "Lunar Rhapsody”] [Excerpt: Neil Armstrong] That voice you heard there was Neil Armstrong, on Apollo 11 on its way back from the moon. He took a tape of Hoffman's album with him. But while Hoffman was something of a celebrity in the fifties, the work dried up almost overnight in 1958 when he worked at that session with Paul Tanner. The theremin is a very difficult instrument to play, and while Hoffman was a good player, he wasn't a great one -- he was getting the work because he was the best in a very small pool of players, not because he was objectively the best there could be. Tanner noticed that Hoffman was having quite some difficulty getting the pitching right in the session, and realised that the theremin must be a very difficult instrument to play because it had no markings at all. So he decided to build an instrument that had the same sound, but that was more sensibly controlled than just waving your hands near it. He built his own invention, the electrotheremin, in less than a week, despite never before having had any experience in electrical engineering. He built it using an oscillator, a length of piano wire and a contact switch that could be slid up and down the wire, changing the pitch. Two days after he finished building it, he was in the studio, cutting his own equivalent of Hoffman's forties albums, Music For Heavenly Bodies, including a new exotica version of "Moonlight Serenade", the song that Glenn Miller had written decades earlier as an exercise for Schillinger: [Excerpt: Paul Tanner, "Moonlight Serenade"] Not only could the electrotheremin let the player control the pitch more accurately, but it could also do staccato notes easily -- something that's almost impossible with an actual theremin. And, on top of that, Tanner was cheaper than Hoffman. An instrumentalist hired to play two instruments is paid extra, but not as much extra as paying for another musician to come to the session, and since Tanner was a first-call trombone player who was likely to be at the session *anyway*, you might as well hire him if you want a theremin sound, rather than paying for Hoffman. Tanner was an excellent musician -- he was a professor of music at UCLA as well as being a session player, and he authored one of the standard textbooks on jazz -- and soon he had cornered the market, leaving Hoffman with only the occasional gig. We will actually be seeing Hoffman again, playing on a session for an artist we're going to look at in a couple of months, but in LA in the early sixties, if you wanted a theremin sound, you didn't hire a theremin player, you hired Paul Tanner to play his electrotheremin -- though the instrument was so obscure that many people didn't realise he wasn't actually playing a theremin. Certainly Brian Wilson seems to have thought he was when he hired him for "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] We talked briefly about that track back in the episode on "God Only Knows",   but three days after recording that, Tanner was called back into the studio for another session on which Brian Wilson wanted a theremin sound. This was a song titled "Good, Good, Good Vibrations", and it was inspired by a conversation he'd had with his mother as a child. He'd asked her why dogs bark at some people and not at others, and she'd said that dogs could sense vibrations that people sent out, and some people had bad vibrations and some had good ones. It's possible that this came back to mind as he was planning the Pet Sounds album, which of course ends with the sound of his own dogs barking. It's also possible that he was thinking more generally about ideas like telepathy -- he had been starting to experiment with acid by this point, and was hanging around with a crowd of people who were proto-hippies, and reading up on a lot of the mystical ideas that were shared by those people. As we saw in the last episode, there was a huge crossover between people who were being influenced by drugs, people who were interested in Eastern religion, and people who were interested in what we now might think of as pseudo-science but at the time seemed to have a reasonable amount of validity, things like telepathy and remote viewing. Wilson had also had exposure from an early age to people claiming psychic powers. Jo Ann Marks, the Wilson family's neighbour and the mother of former Beach Boy David Marks, later had something of a minor career as a psychic to the stars (at least according to obituaries posted by her son) and she would often talk about being able to sense "vibrations". The record Wilson started out making in February 1966 with the Wrecking Crew was intended as an R&B single, and was also intended to sound *strange*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] At this stage, the song he was working on was a very straightforward verse-chorus structure, and it was going to be an altogether conventional pop song. The verses -- which actually ended up used in the final single, are dominated by organ and Ray Pohlman's bass: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] These bear a strong resemblance to the verses of "Here Today", on the Pet Sounds album which the Beach Boys were still in the middle of making: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Here Today (instrumental)"] But the chorus had far more of an R&B feel than anything the Beach Boys had done before: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] It did, though, have precedent. The origins of the chorus feel come from "Can I Get a Witness?", a Holland-Dozier-Holland song that had been a hit for Marvin Gaye in 1963: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Can I Get a Witness?"] The Beach Boys had picked up on that, and also on its similarity to the feel of Lonnie Mack's instrumental cover version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee", which, retitled "Memphis", had also been a hit in 1963, and in 1964 they recorded an instrumental which they called "Memphis Beach" while they were recording it but later retitled "Carl's Big Chance", which was credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but was basically just playing the "Can I Get a Witness" riff over twelve-bar blues changes, with Carl doing some surf guitar over the top: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Carl's Big Chance"] The "Can I Get a Witness" feel had quickly become a standard piece of the musical toolkit – you might notice the resemblance between that riff and the “talking 'bout my generation” backing vocals on “My Generation” by the Who, for example. It was also used on "The Boy From New York City", a hit on Red Bird Records by the Ad-Libs: [Excerpt: The Ad-Libs, "The Boy From New York City"] The Beach Boys had definitely been aware of that record -- on their 1965 album Summer Days... And Summer Nights! they recorded an answer song to it, "The Girl From New York City": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Girl From New York City"] And you can see how influenced Brian was by the Ad-Libs record by laying the early instrumental takes of the "Good Vibrations" chorus from this February session under the vocal intro of "The Boy From New York City". It's not a perfect match, but you can definitely hear that there's an influence there: [Excerpt: "The Boy From New York City"/"Good Vibrations"] A few days later, Brian had Carl Wilson overdub some extra bass, got a musician in to do a jaw harp overdub, and they also did a guide vocal, which I've sometimes seen credited to Brian and sometimes Carl, and can hear as both of them depending on what I'm listening for. This guide vocal used a set of placeholder lyrics written by Brian's collaborator Tony Asher, which weren't intended to be a final lyric: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (first version)"] Brian then put the track away for a month, while he continued work on the Pet Sounds album. At this point, as best we can gather, he was thinking of it as something of a failed experiment. In the first of the two autobiographies credited to Brian (one whose authenticity is dubious, as it was largely put together by a ghostwriter and Brian later said he'd never even read it) he talks about how he was actually planning to give the song to Wilson Pickett rather than keep it for the Beach Boys, and one can definitely imagine a Wilson Pickett version of the song as it was at this point. But Brian's friend Danny Hutton, at that time still a minor session singer who had not yet gone on to form the group that would become Three Dog Night, asked Brian if *he* could have the song if Brian wasn't going to use it. And this seems to have spurred Brian into rethinking the whole song. And in doing so he was inspired by his very first ever musical memory. Brian has talked a lot about how the first record he remembers hearing was when he was two years old, at his maternal grandmother's house, where he heard the Glenn Miller version of "Rhapsody in Blue", a three-minute cut-down version of Gershwin's masterpiece, on which Paul Tanner had of course coincidentally played: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] Hearing that music, which Brian's mother also played for him a lot as a child, was one of the most profoundly moving experiences of Brian's young life, and "Rhapsody in Blue" has become one of those touchstone pieces that he returns to again and again. He has recorded studio versions of it twice, in the mid-nineties with Van Dyke Parks: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, "Rhapsody in Blue"] and in 2010 with his solo band, as the intro and outro of an album of Gershwin covers: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Rhapsody in Blue"] You'll also often see clips of him playing "Rhapsody in Blue" when sat at the piano -- it's one of his go-to songs. So he decided he was going to come up with a song that was structured like "Rhapsody in Blue" -- what publicist Derek Taylor would later describe as a "pocket symphony", but "pocket rhapsody" would possibly be a better term for it. It was going to be one continuous song, but in different sections that would have different instrumentation and different feelings to them -- he'd even record them in different studios to get different sounds for them, though he would still often have the musicians run through the whole song in each studio. He would mix and match the sections in the edit. His second attempt to record the whole track, at the start of April, gave a sign of what he was attempting, though he would not end up using any of the material from this session: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-04-09" around 02:34] Nearly a month later, on the fourth of May, he was back in the studio -- this time in Western Studios rather than Gold Star where the previous sessions had been held, with yet another selection of musicians from the Wrecking Crew, plus Tanner, to record another version. This time, part of the session was used for the bridge for the eventual single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-04 Second Chorus and Fade"] On the twenty-fourth of May the Wrecking Crew, with Carl Wilson on Fender bass (while Lyle Ritz continued to play string bass, and Carol Kaye, who didn't end up on the finished record at all, but who was on many of the unused sessions, played Danelectro), had another attempt at the track, this time in Sunset Studios: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 1966-05-24 (Parts 2&3)"] Three days later, another group of musicians, with Carl now switched to rhythm guitar, were back in Western Studios recording this: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-27 Part C" from 2:52] The fade from that session was used in the final track. A few days later they were in the studio again, a smaller group of people with Carl on guitar and Brian on piano, along with Don Randi on electric harpsichord, Bill Pitman on electric bass, Lyle Ritz on string bass and Hal Blaine on drums. This time there seems to have been another inspiration, though I've never heard it mentioned as an influence. In March, a band called The Association, who were friends with the Beach Boys, had released their single "Along Comes Mary", and by June it had become a big hit: [Excerpt: The Association, "Along Comes Mary"] Now the fuzz bass part they were using on the session on the second of June sounds to my ears very, very, like that intro: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (Inspiration) Western 1966-06-02" from 01:47] That session produced the basic track that was used for the choruses on the final single, onto which the electrotheremin was later overdubbed as Tanner wasn't at that session. Some time around this point, someone suggested to Brian that they should use a cello along with the electrotheremin in the choruses, playing triplets on the low notes. Brian has usually said that this was Carl's idea, while Brian's friend Van Dyke Parks has always said that he gave Brian the idea. Both seem quite certain of this, and neither has any reason to lie, so I suspect what might have happened is that Parks gave Brian the initial idea to have a cello on the track, while Carl in the studio suggested having it specifically play triplets. Either way, a cello part by Jesse Erlich was added to those choruses. There were more sessions in June, but everything from those sessions was scrapped. At some point around this time, Mike Love came up with a bass vocal lyric, which he sang along with the bass in the choruses in a group vocal session. On August the twenty-fourth, two months after what one would think at this point was the final instrumental session, a rough edit of the track was pulled together. By this point the chorus had altered quite a bit. It had originally just been eight bars of G-flat, four bars of B-flat, then four more bars of G-flat. But now Brian had decided to rework an idea he had used in "California Girls". In that song, each repetition of the line "I wish they all could be California" starts a tone lower than the one before. Here, after the bass hook line is repeated, everything moves up a step, repeats the line, and then moves up another step: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] But Brian was dissatisfied with this version of the track. The lyrics obviously still needed rewriting, but more than that, there was a section he thought needed totally rerecording -- this bit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] So on the first of September, six and a half months after the first instrumental session for the song, the final one took place. This had Dennis Wilson on organ, Tommy Morgan on harmonicas, Lyle Ritz on string bass, and Hal Blaine and Carl Wilson on percussion, and replaced that with a new, gentler, version: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations (Western 1966-09-01) [New Bridge]"] Well, that was almost the final instrumental session -- they called Paul Tanner in to a vocal overdub session to redo some of the electrotheremin parts, but that was basically it. Now all they had to do was do the final vocals. Oh, and they needed some proper lyrics. By this point Brian was no longer working with Tony Asher. He'd started working with Van Dyke Parks on some songs, but Parks wasn't interested in stepping into a track that had already been worked on so long, so Brian eventually turned to Mike Love, who'd already come up with the bass vocal hook, to write the lyrics. Love wrote them in the car, on the way to the studio, dictating them to his wife as he drove, and they're actually some of his best work. The first verse grounds everything in the sensory, in the earthy. He makes a song originally about *extra* -sensory perception into one about sensory perception -- the first verse covers sight, sound, and smell: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Carl Wilson was chosen to sing the lead vocal, but you'll notice a slight change in timbre on the line "I hear the sound of a" -- that's Brian stepping into double him on the high notes. Listen again: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] For the second verse, Love's lyric moves from the sensory grounding of the first verse to the extrasensory perception that the song has always been about, with the protagonist knowing things about the woman who's the object of the song without directly perceiving them. The record is one of those where I wish I was able to play the whole thing for you, because it's a masterpiece of structure, and of editing, and of dynamics. It's also a record that even now is impossible to replicate properly on stage, though both its writers in their live performances come very close. But while someone in the audience for either the current touring Beach Boys led by Mike Love or for Brian Wilson's solo shows might come away thinking "that sounded just like the record", both have radically different interpretations of it even while sticking close to the original arrangement. The touring Beach Boys' version is all throbbing strangeness, almost garage-rock, emphasising the psychedelia of the track: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live 2014)"] While Brian Wilson's live version is more meditative, emphasising the gentle aspects: [Excerpt Brian Wilson, "Good Vibrations (live at the Roxy)"] But back in 1966, there was definitely no way to reproduce it live with a five-person band. According to Tanner, they actually asked him if he would tour with them, but he refused -- his touring days were over, and also he felt he would look ridiculous, a middle-aged man on stage with a bunch of young rock and roll stars, though apparently they offered to buy him a wig so he wouldn't look so out of place. When he wouldn't tour with them, they asked him where they could get a theremin, and he pointed them in the direction of Robert Moog. Moog -- whose name is spelled M-o-o-g and often mispronounced "moog", had been a teenager in 1949, when he'd seen a schematic for a theremin in an electronic hobbyist magazine, after Samuel Hoffman had brought the instrument back into the limelight. He'd built his own, and started building others to sell to other hobbyists, and had also started branching out into other electronic instruments by the mid-sixties. His small company was the only one still manufacturing actual theremins, but when the Beach Boys came to him and asked him for one, they found it very difficult to control, and asked him if he could do anything simpler. He came up with a ribbon-controlled oscillator, on the same principle as Tanner's electro-theremin, but even simpler to operate, and the Beach Boys bought it and gave it to Mike Love to play on stage. All he had to do was run his finger up and down a metallic ribbon, with the positions of the notes marked on it, and it would come up with a good approximation of the electro-theremin sound. Love played this "woo-woo machine" as he referred to it, on stage for several years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live in Hawaii 8/26/67)"] Moog was at the time starting to build his first synthesisers, and having developed that ribbon-control mechanism he decided to include it in the early models as one of several different methods of controlling the Moog synthesiser, the instrument that became synonymous with the synthesiser in the late sixties and early seventies: [Excerpt: Gershon Kingsley and Leonid Hambro, "Rhapsody in Blue" from Switched-On Gershwin] "Good Vibrations" became the Beach Boys' biggest ever hit -- their third US number one, and their first to make number one in the UK. Brian Wilson had managed, with the help of his collaborators, to make something that combined avant-garde psychedelic music and catchy pop hooks, a truly experimental record that was also a genuine pop classic. To this day, it's often cited as the greatest single of all time. But Brian knew he could do better. He could be even more progressive. He could make an entire album using the same techniques as "Good Vibrations", one where themes could recur, where sections could be edited together and songs could be constructed in the edit. Instead of a pocket symphony, he could make a full-blown teenage symphony to God. All he had to do was to keep looking forward, believe he could achieve his goal, and whatever happened, not lose his nerve and turn back. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Smile Promo" ]

Synopsis When your instrument is nicknamed “the burping bedpost,” it's hard to get respect in refined circles. So it's understandable that the bassoon section of, say, a major London orchestra might indulge in a bit of day-dreaming in which a gang of hot-rodding motorcycling bassoonists blow into town and take over a concert hall. And guess what? That is EXACTLY the scenario of a piece written for Britain's Philharmonia Orchestra by the American composer Michael Daughtery. “Hell's Angels” is a concerto for bassoon quartet that received its premiere in London on today's date in 1999, with Daughtery commenting: “I find the bassoon to be an instrument with great expressive and timbral possibilities, ranging from low and raucous rumbling to plaintive high intensity.” Daugherty often takes inspiration from icons of American pop culture, so it's not surprising that he should choose “Hell's Angels” for inspiration. After all, he writes: “the bassoon is similar in size and shape to the drag pipes found on Harley Davidson motorcycles … When the noise-curbing mufflers are illegally removed from the drag pipes, they create a deafening roar. I have removed the traditional mufflers on the bassoon repertoire in order to compose [my] concerto for bassoon quartet and orchestra. Music Played in Today's Program Michael Daugherty (b. 1954) — Hell's Angels (Oregon Symphony; James DePreist, cond.) Delos 3291 On This Day Births 1834 - German composer, pianist and organist Julius Ruebke, in Hausneindorf, near Quedlinburg; 1878 - Austrian composer Franz Schrecker, in Monaco; 1895 - French-born American composer, painter and mystical philosopher Dane Rudhyar, in Paris; Premieres 1731 - Bach: "St. Mark Passion" (S. 247, now lost) performed in Leipzig at Vespers on Good Friday; 1748 - Handel: oratorio "Alexander Balus" in London at the Covent Garden Theater; The event possibly included the premiere of Handel's "Concerto a due cori" No. 1 as well (Gregorian date: April 3); 1783 - Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 13 and final version of Symphony No. 35 ("Haffner"), at the Vienna Burgtheater, with composer as piano soloist and conductor; An earlier version of the symphony was performed in Salzburg at private concerts arranged by the wealthy Haffner family in the summer of 1782; 1792 - Haydn: Symphony No. 94 ("Surprise"), conducted by the composer, at the Hanover-Square Concert Rooms in London; 1828 - Beethoven: String Quartet in F, Op. 135 (posthumously, and almost one year to the day after the composer's death on March 26, 1827), in Vienna, by the Schuppanzigh Quartet; 1886 - Tchaikovsky: "Manfred" Symphony (after Byron), in Moscow (Julian date: Mar. 11); 1912 - Gliere: Symphony No. 3 ("Ilya Murometz") in Moscow (Julian date: Mar. 10); 1917 - Bloch: "Trois poèmes juifs" (Three Jewish Poems), in Boston, with the composer conducting; 1923 - de Falla: opera "El retrablo de maese Pedro" (Master Peter's Puppet Show) (concert version), in Seville at the Teatro San Fernando; 1935 - Barber: "Music for a Scene from Shelley," by the New York Philharmonic; 1939 - Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 2, by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, Willem Mengelberg conducting and Zoltán Székely as the soloist; A live recording of this premiere performance has been issued on both LP and CD; 1944 - Cowell: "Hymn and Fuguing Tune" No. 2 for strings, in New York on a WEAF radio broadcast featuring Henri Nosco and his Concert Orchestra; The first concert hall performance took place at Town Hall in New York on October 8, 1944, with the Daniel Saidenburg Little Symphony; 1945 - Copland (and 9 other composers): "Variations on a Theme by Eugene Goosens," by the Cincinnati Symphony; 1946 - Marc Blitzstein: "Airbourne Symphony," in New York City; 1962 - Irving Fine: "Symphony 1962" by the Boston Symphony, Charles Munch conducting; 1969 - Gene Gutchë: "Genghis Khan," by American Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting; 1999 - James MacMillan: "Cumnock Fair" for piano and strings, at Cumnock Academy by members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Others 1703 - Antonio Vivaldi becomes a Roman Catholic priest at age 25; 1721 - Handel completes the composition of Act 3 of "Muzio Scevola," as part of a "competition" arranged by the directors of the Royal Academy of Music to settle the rivalry between their three house composers (Filippo Amadei composed Act 1, Giovanni Bononcinni Act 2, and Handel Act 3); Handel was deemed the victor in this "contest" (Gregorian date: April 3); 1729 - J.S. Bach visits Coethen to perform funeral music for his former employer, Prince Leopold; 1743 - London premiere of what is billed as "A New Sacred Oratorio" by Handel(Gregorian date: April 3); This was his "Messiah" which had its first performance in Dublin the previous year; Links and Resources On Michael Daugherty

Synopsis Following the successful premiere of his First Symphony in 1876, the New England composer John Knowles Paine finished a Second, which he gave a German subtitle: “Im Fruehling” or “In Springtime.” In 19th century America, “serious” music meant German music, and “serious” musicians like Paine all studied in Germany. Returning home, Paine became the first native-born American to win acceptance as a symphonic composer, and, accepting a teaching post at Harvard, became that school's first professor of music. On today's date in 1880, when Paine's “Spring” Symphony was premiered at Sanders Theater, the normally staid Bostonians went nuts. One critic who was present, recalled that “ladies waved their handkerchiefs, men shouted in approbation, and the highly respected John S. Dwight, arbiter in Boston of music criticism, stood in his seat frantically opening and shutting his umbrella as an expression of uncontrollable enthusiasm.” Paine's music remained tremendously popular in his own day. In 1883 George Henschel, then the conductor of the Boston Symphony, was sent the following poetic suggestion about his programming: Let no more Wagner themes thy bill enhance And give the native workers just one chance. Don't give that Dvorák symphony a-gain; If you would give us joy, oh give us Paine! Music Played in Today's Program John Knowles Paine (1839 - 1906) — Symphony No. 2 (New York Philharmonic; Zubin Mehta, cond.) New World 350 On This Day Births 1839 - American composer and organist Dudley Buck, in Hartford, Conn.; 1844 - Spanish composer and violinist Pablo de Sarasate, in Pamplona; 1892 - French composer Arthur Honegger, in Le Harve; 1903 - American composer and jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, in Davenport, Iowa; Deaths 1832 - Italian-born composer Muzio Clementi, age 80, in Evesham, England; 1870 - Czech-born composer and pianist Ignaz Moscheles, age 75, in Leipzig; 1910 - German composer Carl Reinecke, age 85, in Leipzig; 1991 - American composer Elie Siegmeister, age 82, in Manhasset, N.Y.; Premieres 1785 - Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 in C, K. 467, at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with the composer as soloist; 1837 - Mercadante: opera "Il Giuramento" (The Oath), in Milan; 1875 - Goldmark: opera "Die Königin von Saba" (The Queen of Sheba), in Vienna at the Court Opera (Hofoper); 1877 - Borodin: Symphony No. 2, in St. Petersburg, by the Russian Musical Society, Eduard Nápravik conducting (Julian date: Feb. 26); 1880 - Paine: Symphony No. 2 ("Spring"), at Sanders Theater in Boston, by the Boston Philharmonic, Bernard Listermann conducting; The following day, the orchestra of the Harvard Musical Association performed the same work downtown at Boston's Musical Hall, with Carl Zerrahn conducting; 1888 - Franck: symphonic poem "Pysché," in Paris; 1912 - Gliere: Symphony No. 3 ("Ilya Murometz") in Moscow (Gregorian date: Mar. 23); 1916 - Granados: "Intermezzo & Epilogue," from "Goyescas," by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting; 1922 - Loeffler: "Irish Fantasies" (Nos. 2, 3 & 5 only) for voice and orchestra, by the Boston Symphony, with Pierre Monteux conducting and tenor John McCormack the soloist; 1932 - Wallingford Riegger: "Dichotomy" for orchestra, in Berlin; 1952 - David Diamond: Quintet for clarinet and strings, at Town Hall in New York City, by clarinetist David Oppenheim, Nathan Gordon and Lillian Fuchs (violins), and Aaron Twerdowsky and Bernard Greenhouse (cellos); 1963 - Henze: opera "Il re cervo" (The Stag King), in Kassel at the Staatstheater; This is the 2nd version of Henze's opera "König Hirsch" which was first staged in an abridged version in Berlin on September 24, 1956; The complete original version of the opera was eventually staged in Stuttgart on May 7, 1985; 1964 - John Harbison: "Sinfonia," in Cambridge, Mass., with violinist Rose Mary Harbison and the Bach Society Orchestra of Harvard, Gregory Biss conducting; 1977 - John Harbison: "Diotima" for orchestra, in Boston, with the Boston Symphony, Joseph Silverstein conducting; Others 1937 - Frank Capra's film "The Lost Horizon" opens at the Four Stars Theater in Los Angeles, featuring a classic film score composed by Dmitri Tiomkin (and conducted by Max Steiner). Links and Resources On John Knowles Paine More on Paine at Harvard

Possibly the most famous organ work ever written, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor is instantly recognizable by its first few notes.  But... are those the notes that Bach wrote?  The answer might surprise you...  In fact, this cornerstone of the organ repertoire has flummoxed so many musicians and music scholars through the generations, it's no wonder that it gets so much attention -- and that's not including the notoriety it began to develop as a piece of stock music for horror films in the silent film era.  It found a wide audience in 1940 when it was featured in Walt Disney's Fantasia, in an orchestral transcription by Leopold Stokowski, and since then, it has enjoyed more mainstream success than most classical pieces ever see.  We dive into the mysteries at the heart of the piece, as we move from thrilling cadence to thrilling cadence, toward the very end of the work, where Alex's favorite moment hits: a surprise ending that would have given the audiences of the 1700's just as much of a delighted shock as it gives us today.  Toccata and Fugue in D minor, performed by Leo van Doeselaar for the Netherlands Bach Society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi0IuyTS_ic Orchestral version by Leopold Stokowski featured in Disney's Fantasia (1940): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4MQ7GzE6HY Article which theorizes that this work (BWV 565) and the Chaconne from Violin Partita no. 2 (BWV 1004) are arrangements of lute pieces:  https://www.jstor.org/stable/30044126 Violin piece featured in this episode as an example of bariolage technique: "Partita no. 3" by J. S. Bach (BWV 1006), performed by Shunske Sato for the Netherlands Bach Society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYT1JUq0k04 An informative (if a little snarky) video essay, aimed at non-musicians: "Why Pipe Organs Sound Scary": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT934eTbmuY

The World Movement *** BUY THE TERROR OF THE DEMONS REPRINT! *** NEW BOOK City of God vs. City of Man Join the Guild and access patron-only shows. Donate to MOC. Paleocrat Patreon. MUSIC: Dvorak, 9th Symphony, 4th Movement Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, conductor. Recorded October 22, 1934 Digital transfer by F. Reeder. Creative Commons […]

Byzantine Scotist PATREON *** BUY THE TERROR OF THE DEMONS REPRINT! *** NEW BOOK City of God vs. City of Man Join the Guild and access patron-only shows. Donate to MOC. Paleocrat Patreon. MUSIC: Dvorak, 9th Symphony, 4th Movement Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, conductor. Recorded October 22, 1934 Digital transfer by F. Reeder. Creative Commons […]

Our Lady of Guadalupe is associated with the Mexican culture, but do Americans have any connection with this incredible miracle? Of this and more we will be discussing during this episode of Reconquista on MOC. Reconquista Network Patreon Music: Dvorak, 9th Symphony, 4th Movement Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, conductor. Recorded October 22, 1934 Digital transfer […]

Sungenis position on Fatima. Book: Fatima Fulfilled but Still Foreboding Sungenis response to Fatima Center Mazza’s critique of Sungenis — Music: Dvorak, 9th Symphony, 4th Movement Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, conductor. Recorded October 22, 1934 Digital transfer by F. Reeder. Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 via Archive.org https://archive.org/details/DVORAKSymphonyNo.9NewWorld-Stokowski-NEWTRANSFER/04.Iv.AllegroConFuoco.mp3 NEW BOOK City of God vs. City […]