Podcasts about moscow conservatory

SynopsisToday's date in 1906 marks the birthday of Alexander Naumovich Tsfasman, a Ukrainian composer from pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia who would become an important figure in Soviet jazz. Jazz first came to the Soviet Union in 1922, four years after Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution, and at first was welcomed as the music of the oppressed African-American minority, and therefore considered an expression of the worldwide class struggle. Tsfasman encountered jazz while still a student at the Moscow Conservatory and formed his own jazz band in 1926, the first to be heard on Soviet radio. In the decades that followed, Tsfasman made over 140 records, composed music for films, and gave concerts during WWII for Red Army soldiers.But after 1945, jazz fell out of favor in the USSR. During the Cold War, it came to be seen as a prime export of the decadent bourgeois West and performances were limited. “Today he plays jazz, tomorrow he'll betray his country” was a widespread propaganda slogan in the Stalinist post-war USSR. Only in the 1960s did attitudes change, and we're happy to report Alexander Tsfasman lived to see it before his death in 1971.This music is from his Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra.Music Played in Today's ProgramAlexander Tsfasman (1906-1971): Snowflakes and Polka (excerpts), from Jazz Suite;Zlata Chochieva, piano; BBC Scottish Symphony; Karl-Heinz Steffens, conductor; Naïve V-8448

“As soon as I started playing jazz, I understood it was something for me. I understood that I had to combine the two musics.” These were the words of composer Nikolai Kapustin, born in Ukraine in 1937 and a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, the “two musics” being classical and jazz. From Kapustin's pen came an impeccable fusion of the two genres, with no trace of shallow crossover. Raymond Bisha introduces the programme on a recent recording that includes Kapustin's Second and Sixth Piano Concertos, with soloist Frank Dupree accompanied variously by the SWR Big Band and the SWR Symphony Orchestra.

 He was born and raised on a farm in North Dakota. Even as a young child, he had a deep passion for classical piano music and it was a dream come true when he began his piano studies with Belle Mehus at her music school in Bismarck, North Dakota. Eventually Belle Mehus encouraged him to become one of her ‘junior' teachers and LaWayne discovered his love of, and affinity for, piano teaching. He later also studied with Belle's sister, concert pianist Alma Mehus Studness.As a young adult LaWayne moved to New York City and became a student of Oxana Yablonskaya, a recently arrived Russian emigre who had been on the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory. Those lessons, for which he is forever indebted, proved to be a fascinating opportunity, revealing previously unimagined pianistic sounds and colors, technical prowess, and interpretive finesse.He is currently teaching private piano lessons—which he continues to do from his studio in downtown White Bear Lake, Minnesota. https://www.lawaynelenoauthor.com/http://www.yourlotandparcel.org

Born and raised in Australia, Linda Gilbert has been interested in Russian music since childhood and started learning Russian from books on her own. Then she went to study at the Moscow Conservatory. Linda told SBS Russian about her upcoming concert in Sydney and why she is especially pleased when Russian-speaking people come to the performances. - Линда Гилберт родилась и выросла в Австралии, но с детства интересовалась русской музыкой и начала самостоятельно учить русский язык по книгам. Потом она отправилась учиться в Московской консерватории имени Чайковского. Линда рассказала о предстоящем концерте в Сиднее и о том, почему ей особенно приятно, когда на выступления приходят русскоязычные люди.

GUEST OVERVIEW: Tessa Lena is a strongly opinionated musician, writer, and philosopher living in New York. She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition at the Moscow Conservatory and wanted to be a geneticist. As her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do ethnomusicology research. After being attacked by a sex trafficker in Tibet and successfully fighting him off, Tessa settled in Chicago where she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald (of King Crimson and Foreigner) and drummer Alan Lake (who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave). After a few years in Chicago, Tessa moved to New York and started a new band, TESSA MAKES LOVE, along with occasional collaborations by Ian McDonald. In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. In early 2017, she released an album titled ‘Tessa Fights Robots' - which is also the name of her Substack blog; both the album and the blog are "about being human in the world of technology, big data, and machine-like people." https://www.tessamakeslove.com/ https://tessa.substack.com/ X/Twitter: @TessaMakesLove

Welcome to this episode of Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host, James Navé. I'm thrilled to welcome Maria Masychevia to the microphone. Maria is a globally acclaimed pianist renowned for her victories in some of the world's most prestigious piano competitions, including the M. Long-Jacques Thibaud in Paris, Geneva, and Sendai competitions. Maria's illustrious career includes: Over 500 recitals and orchestral concerts. Gracing the stages of renowned venues like the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Zurich Tonhalle. The Great Hall of the Berliner Philharmonie. Berliner Konzerthaus. Victoria Hall in Geneva.   Maria says her job is to pair the composer's ideas with her ideas for each composition she plays. Maria believes that music unites us without words. She points out that ego can be an asset creatively if you allow it to be about your focus. She says, "I believe in individual initiative. When you embrace yourself, you become generous. Art is a medicine that encourages more generosity." Maria reminds us that in music, the moment of silence is the moment of the present.  At the end of my conversation with Maira, you'll get to hear a mesmerizing performance featuring Maria and her husband, Georgy Gramov, as they play "Rachmaninov-Suite No. 2," a six-minute masterpiece for two pianos. Join me for this enchanting journey into the world of music with Maria Masycheva on Twice 5 Miles Radio. Enjoy the show.

In this episode, I visit Lucerne and have a glass of wine with the outstanding French pianist Lucas Debargue. ⁠https://www.lucasdebargue.com⁠ His career took off when he won a special prize at the Tchaykowsky Competition in 2015. Debargue was then invited to perform solo recitals, concerts and chamber music concerts in concert halls such as the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theater, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, the Theatre des Champs Elysées, the Salle Gaveau, Carnegie Hall in New York, etc. We talked about life after fame, problems at the conservatory and why art should be disruptive. You can follow my project for the REMA Early Music Podcast here: https://www.rema-eemn.net/podcasts/ The sound excerpts from Luca's archive and they are taken with his permission from Youtube. He plays Scarlatti, Tchaykowsky, Jazz improvisation and "Nostalgie" by Milosz Magin. Discover more https://insightreadingenlightenment.carrd.co Write to us if you want to support us insightreading.enlightenment@gmail.com Yours, Darina #insightreadingenlightenment #earlymusicpodcastinsightreadingenlightenment #lucasdebargue #fortepiano #piano #tchaykowsky #beethoven #podcast #earlymusicpodcast #darinaablogina #earlymusic #remaawards --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/insight-reading/message

Andrew Armstrong is a pianist who has performed for audiences all over the world, including performances at Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, London's Wigmore Hall, the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and Warsaw's National Philharmonic. He has performed with conductors including as Peter Oundjian, Itzhak Perlman, Günther Herbig, Stefan Sanderling, Jean-Marie Zeitouni and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, and has appeared in solo recitals and in chamber music concerts with a bunch of Quartets and as a member of the Caramoor Virtuosi, Boston Chamber Music Society, Seattle Chamber Music Society, and the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players.

Sviatoslav Richter (1915–97), who several times played all three wartime sonatas during the 1945-6 concert seasons, gave his first public recital in Odessa in 1934 and was taught by Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory. Having played Prokofiev's Fifth Piano Concerto under the composer's direction, Richter gained a formidable reputation in the USSR and played in the West for the first time in 1960. Subsequent visits were eagerly awaited, however Richter became highly selective in his choice of venue, (always preferring smaller venues) and repertoire and often, as with Visions fugitives, selected a few pieces from a single cycle. Following an extensive tour of the USA in 1970, he chose not to return to that country as Aldeburgh and selected sites in France and Italy became his preferred venues outside Russia. In 1986 Richter gave 91 concerts over a four-month period during a tour by car from Leningrad -Vladivostok - Moscow. In addition to numerous solo concerts, Richter often played alongside friends such as Britten, Kagan, Rostropovich, Fischer-Dieskau, Schreier, Oistrakh, and Fournier.Help support our show by purchasing this album  at:Downloads (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store) Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by Uber and Apple Classical. @CMDHedgecock#ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive#CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans#CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin#CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain#ClassicalMusicLivesOn#Uber#AppleClassical Please consider supporting our show, thank you!Donate (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store) staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.com  This album is broadcast with the permission of Sean Dacy from Rosebrook Media.

DescriptionPeter and the Wolf Op. 67, a "symphonic fairy tale for children", was written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936, as a means of introducing children to the instruments of the orchestra.  Take a minute to get the scoop!Fun FactTypically, prior to a performance of Peter and the Wolf, the instruments are shown to the children in the audience, so that they may become familiar. They learn not only the themes presented in the work but learn to distinguish the sounds of each the instruments.__________________________________________________________________About Steven, HostSteven is a Canadian composer & actor living in Toronto. Through his music, he creates a range of works, with an emphasis on the short-form genre—his muse being to offer the listener both the darker and more satiric shades of human existence. If you're interested, please check out his music website for more. Member of the Canadian League Of Composers.__________________________________________________________________You can FOLLOW ME on Instagram.

When they first met at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1970s, Igor and Vesna Gruppman were both budding violinists absorbed in the world of music. What befell them when they made their way to the western banks of the United States would not only include the opportunities and freedom they were looking for, but also an instrument unlike any they had heard of before.  Igor and Vesna read the Book of Mormon for the first time around the summer of 1980 and were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shortly after Alma 29:9 3 Nephi 17:21-24

Welcome to episode 12 of season one of Resilient Conversations, a podcast by PartnersGlobal that explores different facets of civic space resiliency. In this podcast, PartnersGlobal co-executive director, Roselie Vasquez-Yetter speaks with cellist, Tanya Anisimova, in the fourth in a series of vignettes on the artist collective who collaborated with PartnersGlobal and the International Human Rights Arts Festival.Cellist, composer, arranger Tanya Anisimova is a unique artist whose performances encompass standard repertoire, original compositions, and otherworldly improvisations with her own vocal accompaniment. Tanya has appeared on the stages of Carnegie Hall in NYC, the Great Hall of The Moscow Conservatory in Russia, The National Cathedral and The National Gallery Of Art in Washington, D.C., Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany, and many more. In 2001, Tanya became the only cellist in the world to ever perform and record the Complete Violin Sonatas and Partitas by J.S. Bach. As a composer, her music is regularly performed by leading musicians in the U.S. and in Europe. Currently, Tanya is working on a new project titled Appalachian Dreams. The idea grew out of reflecting on her experiences during twelve years spent in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. PartnersGlobal is a nonprofit based in Washington, DC that advances resilient civic space throughout the world by focusing on authentic partnership, locally-led solutions, inclusive processes, and conflict sensitivity to bring about more peaceful, secure, just, and accountable societies. Partners envisions a world where civil society thrives, change is managed peacefully, rights are protected, and democracy can flourish. Visit our website at www.partnersglobal.org and follow us on social media. Music for this episode is created by Tuesday Night from Pixabay. 

Synopsis It's strange to read the doubts Tchaikovsky expressed in letters about many of his greatest musical works, which he first would dismiss as failures, only to change his mind completely a few weeks later. Take, for example, his ballet The Nutcracker, which had its premiere performance on this day in 1892 at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Tchaikovsky described working on the ballet as a "dread-inspiring, feverish nightmare, so abominable that I don't think I have the strength to put it into words." At the time, Tchaikovsky was MUCH more optimistic about an opera he was writing titled Yolanta—only to abruptly changed his mind, writing "Now I think that the ballet is good and the opera nothing special." This time, Tchaikovsky got it right—although initially the opera DID prove more popular than the ballet. Another—and deliberately nightmarish—Russian composition had its first performance on this same day 70 years later. This was the Symphony No. 13 by Dmitri Shostakovich, subtitled Babi Yar, based on poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This choral symphony was first heard on today's date in 1962 at the Moscow Conservatory, but was quickly banned by the Soviet authorities. Its title poem, Babi Yar, called attention to Soviet indifference to the Holocaust and persistent anti-Semitism in Soviet society. Yevtushenko later softened these lines so the symphony could be performed in the U.S.S.R. Music Played in Today's Program Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) The Nutcracker Ballet, Op. 71 Kirov Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, cond. Philips 462 114 Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Symphony No. 13, Op. 113 (Babi Yar) Nicola Ghiuselev, bass; Choral Arts Society of Washington; National Symphony; Mstislav Rostropovich, cond. Erato 85529

Synopsis On today's date in 1966, the 60th birthday of composer Dimitri Shostakovich was celebrated at the Moscow Conservatory with a gala orchestral concert of his music. Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich gave the premiere performance of Shostakovich's brand-new Second Cello Concerto, and the composer's son, Maxim, conducted his father's youthful Symphony No. 1 from 1926. On the morning of the concert, it was announced that, for his outstanding services in the development of Soviet musical culture, the Central Committee had awarded Shostakovich the title “Hero of Socialist Labor,” along with the Order of Lenin and the gold medal “Hammer and Sickle.” Ironically, earlier that year, Shostakovich had composed a self-deprecating parody piece for voice and piano titled “Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works and a Brief Reflection apropos of This Preface,” whose text included a deadpan recitation of just a small portion of the many honorific titles he had received and the imposing but meaningless official posts with which he had been honored — and now, he found, he had been awarded several more to boot! All that must have seemed grimly comic to Shostakovich, who, some 30th years earlier, had written an opera which had so offended Joseph Stalin that the composer had come perilously close to disappearing without a trace into the Soviet prison system. Music Played in Today's Program Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Symphony No. 1, Op. 10 –St. Petersburg Philharmonic; Yuri Temikanov, cond. (BMG 68844) Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Cello concerto No. 2. Op. 126 –Msistislav Rostropovich, cello; Boston Symphony; Seiji Ozawa, cond. (DG 437 952)

Synopsis Under the old Julian calendar in use in Czarist Russia, on today's date in 1861, the Romantic composer Anton Arensky was born in Novgorod. If you prefer, you can also celebrate Arensky's birthday on July 12 – the same date under the modern Gregorian calendar, but Arensky was such a Romantic that the Old Style date seems, well, more appropriate somehow. Arensky studied with Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov, and admired the music of Tchaikovsky. Arensky taught at the Moscow Conservatory and published two books: a “Manual of Harmony” and “A Handbook of Musical Forms.” His own students included a number of famous Russian composers, including Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Glière. Arensky wrote three operas, two symphonies, concertos, chamber works, and suites for two pianos – but it's his Piano Trio in D minor that gets performed and recorded more often than any of his other works. A victim of tuberculosis, Arensky spent the last years of his life in a Finnish sanatorium. He died young – just 44 years old – in 1906. Music Played in Today's Program Anton Arensky (1861 – 1906) –Piano Trio No. 1 (Rembrandt Trio) Dorian 90146

Synopsis Today we remember the Russian composer Reinhold Glière, who died in Moscow on today's date in 1956. These days Glière is probably best known for the popular “Russian Sailor's Dance” from his ballet “The Red Poppy.” Glière was born in Kiev in 1875, and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he later became professor of composition. That was after the Russian Revolution, and Glière could count among his students Sergei Prokofiev and Nikolai Miaskovsky. With the success of works like “The Red Poppy,” Glière is often cited as the founder of Soviet ballet. Glière also wrote several symphonies, all intensely Russian in color and character. The most famous of these is his Third, subtitled “Ilya Murometz” after a legendary Russian folk hero. Glière was also intrigued by the folk music of the far eastern republics of the then USSR, incorporating folk themes from the Soviet Union's Trans-Caucus and Central Asian peoples into some of his orchestral scores. He was a very prolific composer, but apart from a handful of very popular works, most of Glière's operas, ballets and orchestral works remain largely unfamiliar to most music lovers in the West. Music Played in Today's Program Reinhold Glière (1875 – 1956) –Russian Sailors' Dance, from The Red Poppy (Philadelphia Orchestra; Eugene Ormandy, cond.) BMG 63313 Reinhold Glière (1875 – 1956) –Symphony No. 3 (Ilya Murometz) (London Symphony; Leon Botstein, cond.) Telarc 80609

Tessa Lena is a strongly opinionated musician living in New York. Early on, she became a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition at the Moscow Conservatory. Additionally, she wanted to be a geneticist. Also, as her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do a field study in linguistics and ethnomusicology. Tessa settled in Chicago where she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner. She also worked with drummer Alan Lake, who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave. Later, Tessa moved to New York. There she started a new band, Tessa Makes Love. In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. https://tessafightsrobots.com/  https://expose-news.com/2022/05/08/who-pandemic-treaty-power-a-warning/  https://jamesroguski.substack.com/p/wake-up-and-smell-the-burning-of?s=r  https://www.facebook.com/tessafightsrobots 

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 On today's date in the year 2000, the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen gave the premiere of a new opera entitled “The Handmaid's Tale,” based on the dystopian novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. The book and opera tell of a nightmarish future: following a nuclear disaster in the United States, infertility rates have soared, and a religious sect has staged a military coup, enslaving the few fertile women who remain as breeders, or “handmaids,” for the military and religious commanders of their sect. Says Atwood, "There is nothing new about the society I depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before – more than once, in fact." Despite its grim subject matter, Danish composer Poul Ruders says he saw "huge operatic potential" when he first read the book back in 1992. The original production in Copenhagen was sung in Danish, but Ruders says he conceived the work in English. The opera was staged in that language first in London at the English National Opera, and subsequently, at the opera's American premiere, in St. Paul by The Minnesota Opera, to great critical acclaim. Music Played in Today's Program Poul Ruders (b. 1949) — The Handmaid's Tale (Royal Danish Orchestra; Michael Schonwandt, cond.) DaCapo 9.224165-66 On This Day Births 1844 - Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Gregorian date: Mar. 18); 1870 - Austrian operetta composer Oscar Straus, in Vienna; Deaths 1932 - American composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa, age 77, in Reading, Pa.; 1967 - Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, age 84, in Budapest; Premieres 1791 - Beethoven: "Ritterballett" (Knightly Ballet), in Bonn; 1825 - Beethoven: String Quartet in Eb, Op. 127, in Vienna, the Schuppanzigh Quartet; This premiere was under-rehearsed and poorly performed (the Quartet had only received the music two weeks earlier), and Beethoven arranged for a second performance by a quartet led by violinist Joseph Boehm on March 26, which was better rehearsed and better received; 1831 - Bellini: opera "La Sonnambula" (The Sleepwalker), in Milan at the Teatro Carcano; 1853 - Verdi: opera "La Traviata" (The Lost One), in Venice at the Teatro La Fenice; 1896 - Arthur Foote: Suite in d, by the Boston Symphony, Emil Paur conducting; 1917 - Rachmaninoff: "Etudes-tableaux," Op. 39 (first complete performance of the set of nine), in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), by the composer (Julian date: Feb. 21); 1926 - Hindemith: "Concerto for Orchestra," by the Boston Symphony with Serge Koussevitzky conducting; 1927 - Prokofiev: Quintet for winds and strings, Op. 39, in Moscow; 1933 - Varèse: "Ionisation," in New York City, with Nicholas Slonimsky conducting; 1934 - Piston: "Concerto for Orchestra," in Cambridge, Mass.; 1947 - Miaskovsky: Symphony No. 25, at the Moscow Conservatory by the USSR State Symphony, Alexander Gauk conducting; 1984 - John Harbison: "Ulysses' Raft," by the New Haven Symphony, Murray Sidlin conducting; 2000 - Poul Ruders: opera "The Handmaid's Tale," in Copenhagen, by the Royal Danish Theater, Mark Schönwandt conducting; 2003 - John Harbison: "Requiem," by vocal soloists Christine Brewer, Margaret Lattimore, Paul Groves, and Jonathan Lemalu, with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the Boston Symphony conducted by Bernard Haitink. Links and Resources On Poul Ruders More on "The Handmaid's Tale"

Tessa Lena discusses her foray into writing about The Great Reset via her popular Substack which is also featured on prominent websites such as Mercola.com. She never imagined the dystopian future would come so soon. In an attempt to explain what's going on today, she examines the Great Resets of the past, from Russian serfdom, to the Russian Revolution (Lenin's "Great Reset"), and growing up during the collapse of the Soviet Union. She talks about "disease blackmail" and how she's skeptical on putting much weight on "isms", but the ideology of Davos communism is what the Bolsheviks were using. She talks about rock stars going "Covid Central," what the Algorithm Ghetto might look like, and how we all have an inner technocrat. Tessa doesn't think Davos will get what it wants because it's just too crazy. Watch On BitChute / Brighteon / Rokfin / Rumble / YouTube Geopolitics & Empire · Tessa Lena: Parallels Exist Between Lenin's Great Reset & Schwab's Great Reset #259 *Support Geopolitics & Empire! Become a Member https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.comDonate https://geopoliticsandempire.com/donationsConsult https://geopoliticsandempire.com/consultation **Visit Our Affiliates & Sponsors! Above Phone https://abovephone.com/?above=geopoliticseasyDNS (use code GEOPOLITICS for 15% off!) https://easydns.comEscape The Technocracy course (15% discount using link) https://escapethetechnocracy.com/geopoliticsPassVult https://passvult.comSociatates Civis (CitizenHR, CitizenIT, CitizenPL) https://societates-civis.comWise Wolf Gold https://www.wolfpack.gold/?ref=geopolitics Show Notes We have to Talk about Nazism. How Our Times Do Indeed Echo an Earlier Totalitarian Era https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/compartmentalization-bureaucratization On the Soviet Man and the Groundhog Day https://tessa.substack.com/p/soviet-man The Physical World Is the Only World We Have https://makelanguagegreatagain.com/episodes/physical-world-only-world A Conversation with Steven Newcomb:: Make Language Great Again with Tessa Lena https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm495xQJDfM Websites Substack https://tessa.substack.com Twitter https://twitter.com/TessaMakesLove Tessa Lena https://tessalena.com Tessa Makes Love https://www.tessamakeslove.com Tessa Fights Robots https://tessafightsrobots.com YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/tessamakeslove About Tessa Lena Tessa Lena is a strongly opinionated musician living in New York. She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition at the Moscow Conservatory, and wanted to be a geneticist. As her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do a field study in linguistics and enthomusicology. After being attacked by a sex trafficker in Southern China and successfully fighting him off, Tessa settled in Chicago. In Chicago, she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner, and drummer Alan Lake, who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave. After a few years in Chicago, Tessa moved to New York and started a new band, Tessa Makes Love, along with occasional collaborations by Ian McDonald. In 2013, her music video “Spente Le Stelle” received over a million very useful views on YouTube although the jury is still out on how many people realized that the video was a satire. Alas, the world keeps spinning, and it is still imperfect! In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. In early 2017, she released an album titled ‘Tessa Fights Robots,' you can listen and buy it here.

Episode 14. Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He was the elder brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the Moscow Conservatory. As a pianist, Rubinstein ranks among the great 19th-century keyboard virtuosos. He became most famous for his series of historical recitals—seven enormous, consecutive concerts covering the history of piano music. Rubinstein played on a piano roll device several times which you will hear on this episode.

Synopsis Two famous pieces of chamber music had their premieres on today's date, both at private readings prior to their first public performances. On today's date in 1842, the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann arranged for a trial reading of his new Piano Quintet in E-flat at the Leipzig home of some of his friends. Schumann's wife, Clara, was supposed to be the pianist on that occasion, but she took ill, and Schumann's friend and fellow-composer Felix Mendelssohn stepped in at the last moment for the informal performance, reading the work at sight. After this preliminary reading, Mendelssohn praised the work, but offered some friendly suggestions concerning part of the trio section in the new work's Scherzo movement, which prompted Schumann to write a livelier replacement movement for the work's first public performance. About 100 years later, on today's date in 1949, a cello sonata by the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev received a similar private performance in Moscow, for an invited audience at the House of the Union of Composers. Two of the leading Soviet performers of the day, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter, gave the work its first performance. The following spring, it was again Rostropovich and Richter who gave the Sonata its public debut at the Moscow Conservatory. Music Played in Today's Program Robert Schumann (1810–1856) — Piano Quintet in Eb, Op. 44 (Menahem Pressler, piano; Emerson String Quartet) DG 445 848 Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) — Cello Sonata, Op. 119 (David Finckel, cello; Wu Han, piano) Artist Led 19901

Oksana Tarasova-Kessous received her professional studies degree at The Manhattan School of Music under the guidance of the soloist of The Metropolitan Opera House, harpist Susan Jolles. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) and Master of Music from The Moscow Conservatory under the guidance of Professor Vera Dulova, principal harpist of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater.Oksana has performed as a soloist with The New American Chamber Music Orchestra, The Mannes School of Music Orchestra, The Manhattan School of Music Philharmonic, and The Brooklyn Conservatory Orchestra. Her recital appearances include such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall in New York City, The Bolshoi Hall in Moscow, and The Gracie Mansion, when she was invited by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.She has also performed for former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, Prince Gallitzin, and Dr. Nona. Oksana has played harp in presentations and events such as the Faberge exhibition, the Sony exposition, LifeTime television station, the Gala 2003 event for The Culinary Institute of America, as well as at The Cipriani Club.Oksana is currently a teacher and a tutor for many students. She is also a frequent performer at different concert halls, playing recitals and with various chamber music ensembles.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/quidditasfactor)

Ms. Tessa Lena is a musician who writes a blog about the importance of being human in a world of technology that is fed by big data and empowered by technocracy. She discusses how language has been used to bring civilization to a crossroads.  She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition at the Moscow Conservatory. Additionally, she wanted to be a geneticist. Also, as her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do a field study in linguistics and ethnomusicology. Tessa settled in Chicago where she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner. She also worked with drummer Alan Lake, who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave. Later, Tessa moved to New York. There she started a new band, Tessa Makes Love. In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. https://tessafightsrobots.com/ website https://tessa.substack.com/p/civilization-at-a-crossroads-feelings - Tessa Fights Robots https://www.facebook.com/tessafightsrobots - Like Tessa on Facebook https://twitter.com/TessaMakesLove - Follow Tessa on Twitter

Tessa Lena, a strongly opinionated artist and writer living in New York city discusses regaining our humanity in a time of technology, big data, and machine-like people.  Tessa describes how treacherous the growth and merging of technology will be for humanity. This “agenda” uses humans as a resource. We are a means to an end to serve technology. Our humanity is stripped as we become less free and less able to touch and communicate with each other.  She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition at the Moscow Conservatory. Additionally, she wanted to be a geneticist. As her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do a field study in linguistics and ethnomusicology. Tessa settled in Chicago where she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner. She also worked with drummer Alan Lake, who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave. Later, Tessa moved to New York. There she started a new band, Tessa Makes Love. In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. https://tessafightsrobots.com/ - website [Like Tessa Lena – Facebook]  https://twitter.com/TessaMakesLove   

Significantly influenced by his experience of playing in some of the earliest Soviet jazz bands, Nikolai Kapustin trained as a pianist at the Moscow Conservatory but subsequently devoted himself to composition. His output includes many works for piano, two of which are featured on this new album — the Fourth Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orchestra, along with his Chamber Symphony, Op. 57. Raymond Bisha introduces both the music and the propulsive energy of Frank Dupree who appears variously as piano soloist and conductor throughout the program.

Sergey Rachmaninov was the last, great representative of the Russian Romantic tradition as a composer, but was also a widely and highly celebrated pianist of his time. His piano concertos, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and his preludes famously test pianists' skills. His Symphony No. 2, the tone poem Isle of the Dead, and his Cello Sonata are also notable. The passionate melodies and rich harmonies of his music have been called the perfect accompaniment for love scenes, but in a greater sense they explore a range of emotions with intense and compelling expression.Sergey Vasilyevich Rachmaninov, born in Semyonovo, Russia, on April 1, 1873, came from a music-loving, land-owning family; young Sergey's mother fostered the boy's innate talent by giving him his first piano lessons. After a decline in the family fortunes, the Rachmaninovs moved to St. Petersburg, where Sergey studied with Vladimir Delyansky at the Conservatory. As his star continued to rise, Sergey went to the Moscow Conservatory, where he received a sound musical training: piano lessons from the strict disciplinarian Nikolay Zverev and Alexander Siloti (Rachmaninov's cousin), counterpoint with Taneyev, and harmony with Arensky. During his time at the Conservatory, Rachmaninov boarded with Zverev, whose weekly musical Sundays provided the young musician the valuable opportunity to make important contacts and to hear a wide variety of music.

Symphony No. 15 in A Major, Op. 141 by Dmitri Shostakovich was his last. He completed it in the summer of 1971 while receiving medical treatment in the town of Kurgan, then later at his dacha in Repino. It was his first purely instrumental and non-programmatic symphony since the Tenth. Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102, by Dmitri Shostakovich, was composed in 1957 for his son Maxim's 19th birthday. Maxim premiered the piece during his graduation at the Moscow Conservatory. This piano concerto was intended to be the last piece he wrote for piano. It contains many similar elements to his other composition, Concertino for Two Pianos. They were both written to be accessible for developing young pianists. It is an uncharacteristically cheerful piece, much more so than most of Shostakovich's works. Purchase the music (without talk) at: http://www.classicalsavings.com/store/p1266/Shostakovich%3A_Symphony_No._15_and_Piano_Concerto_No._2.html Your purchase helps to support our show! Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by La Musica International Chamber Music Festival and Uber. @khedgecock #ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive #LaMusicaFestival #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans #CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain #ClassicalMusicLivesOn #Uber Please consider supporting our show, thank you! http://www.classicalsavings.com/donate.html staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.com

This is a 1-track sample from this 27-track album. In celebration of her 30th anniversary of coming to America, Boston based composer Alla Cohen presents a double album of new works for chamber orchestra and chamber ensembles. A graduate of highest honors of the famed Moscow Conservatory, Cohen emigrated to the United States in 1989, first teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music, and for the last 15 years— as a Professor at Berklee College of Music. Her works have been awarded multiple prizes, are raved about in stellar reviews, and have been performed by acclaimed musicians from around the world. Purchase the music (without talk) at: http://www.classicalsavings.com/store/p1232/QUAESTIONES_ET_RESPONSA.html Your purchase helps to support our show! Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by La Musica International Chamber Music Festival and Uber. @khedgecock #ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive #LaMusicaFestival #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans #CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain #ClassicalMusicLivesOn #Uber Please consider supporting our show, thank you! http://www.classicalsavings.com/donate.html staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.com

On Thursday October 29, pianist Camila de Oliveira presented a programme called "When the serious finds the rock "n" roll". She performed a selection from Scriabin’s set of Etudes opus 8 (no's 2,5,8) which was written in 1894, two years after he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. The set of etudes is composed with a very romantic style which demonstrated Scriabin’s devotion to Chopin. This is contrasted with a work by New Zealander composer Jenny McLeod.. Rock Sonata no. 2 was commissioned for Rae de Lisle by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council (now Creative New Zealand) with the assistance of the New Zealand Composers' Foundation (now APRA). The composer has generously authorised Auckland Libraries to podcast this work.

In this episode, Whitney sits down with Kendall Isadore, one of the first friends she made during her college years at Howard University. Together, they talk about Kendall’s powerful trio, The String Queens — a soulful and authentic strings trio that creates stimulating musical experiences that inspire diverse audiences to love, hope, feel, and imagine! Kendall shares the story of how The String Queens came to be; a story that is clearly orchestrated by God and full of right place, right time moments. But a moment that almost didn’t happen. Kendall talks about a brief moment after college where, mad at God for not delivering on his promise to use her sound to inspire people, she stopped playing her violin altogether. But God spoke a word that would change everything.  “Before that year was up, God had a word for me. He said, ‘It’s actually not about you.’” - Kendall Isadore   And with that, she picked her instrument back up. Kendall agreeing to trust God at that moment and saying yes to doing it His way opened up the entire world to her. Leading her to some of the world's greatest stages such as Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.  The duo discusses Kendall’s mission as a Black woman orchestra teacher; an experience neither of them had growing up in music education programs. Kendall then shares that her goal is to give her students a world-class education because that’s what they deserve no matter their background and even if they don’t aspire to become professional musicians.  And in true Howard woman fashion, they end their conversation talking about social justice.  In 2018 Kendall launched a social impact movement called Black Kings/Queens Matter, and with the events of 2020, she knew it was the perfect time to relaunch and inspire Black Kings and Queens.  Kendall is truly making an impact. To listen to more episodes, visit: www.honortogod.com/episodes/  About the Guest: Kendall Isadore is a Washington, DC-based educator, creator of the Black Kings/Queens Matter movement, and one-third of the world-renowned trio The String Queens. Based in Washington, D.C., TSQ members have been featured in famed performance venues across four continents including Carnegie Hall, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Howard Theatre, Royal Festival Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Shanghai Grand Theatre, The Moscow Conservatory, and Blues Alley, to name a few. Recognized by D.C.’s leading news network WUSA9 as “school teachers by day and concert performers by night”, they have been honored as the 2020 Aspire Awardees by Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. They also collaborated with Washington Performing Arts to launch a series of concerts and educational outreach programs with the organization as their 2019-2020 Ensemble-in-Residence for their signature community engagement initiative titled “Mars Arts D.C.”. In late 2019, TSQ premiered their debut album at legendary venue Blues Alley. The album is now available for purchase on the TSQ website and all major digital outlets.  They premiered their second album, “Our Favorite Things”, in late November 2020.  To learn more, visit The String Queens’ website: www.thestringqueens.com Follow The String Queens on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thestringqueens/ Connect with The String Queens on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thestringqueens/ Follow Black Kings Queens Matter on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackkingsqueensmatter/  

On today's episode, Andrew talks to musician and composer Dmitry Sitkovetsky about the concept of genius, a more democratic orchestra, and what he's listening to right now. Sitkovetsky is one of a rare breed of artist whose career successfully manifests itself in many artistic fields. As a violinist, Sitkovetsky has performed with a number of the world’s leading orchestras including the Berlin, New York and Los Angelos Philharmonic Orchestras, Leipzig Gewandhaus, London Philharmonia, London Symphony, NHK, Chicago, Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras. He has performed at a number of high-profile festivals including Salzburg, Lucerne, Edinburgh, Verbier, Istanbul and the Georges Enescu festival as well as being a founding artist of the IMG Tuscan Sun Festival since 2003. He has also built a flourishing career as a conductor. In 1996, he was appointed Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Ulster Orchestra for five years, in 2001, was appointed Conductor Laureate, and from 2002-2005 held the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Russian State Orchestra. In 2003, Sitkovetsky was appointed Music Director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, and in 2006, named Artist-in-Residence of the Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla y Leon (Spain), positions he still holds. In Spain, the position involves orchestral touring, conducting, playing as a soloist and in chamber music as well as giving masterclasses. As a guest conductor, he has worked with the London & Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, BBC, San Francisco, St. Louis, Seattle and Dallas Symphony Orchestras, Santa Cecilia, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris and the St Petersburg Philharmonic. Sitkovetsky was born in Baku/Azerbaijan, but grew up in Moscow where he studied at the Moscow Conservatory and, after his emigration in 1977, at the Juilliard School in New York. Since 1987, he has been living in London with his wife, Susan, and their daughter, Julia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Allegro moderato Scherzo – Allegro molto Elegia – Adagio Finale – Allegro non troppo Anton Arensky was an influential Russian composer, pianist, and professor at the Moscow Conservatory where some of his more notable students included Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Gretchaninov. Arensky was himself taught by Rimsky-Korsakov and mentored by Tchaikovsky from whom he drew much inspiration and subsequently is evident in his works. The D minor piano trio starts the first movement in the tradition of late German Romanticism with a grand sonata form wielding impressive, sweeping melodies underlied by tremulous, destabilising, syncopated accompaniment reminiscent of the Mendelssohn D minor trio’s first movement. The second movement “Scherzo” is a whimsical concoction of good humour and delightful cheer presenting the light-hearted spirit of the dance. The third movement “Eegia” presents an unrelenting sombre mood with muted strings and tender themes to really emphasise the grieving character of music as this trio was dedicated to the memory of Karl Davydov, a renowned Russian cellist and Arensky’s friend. The Finale begins with an explosive theme but soon recalls motifs from the previous movements giving the piano trio a cyclic structure before insistently driving the work to a fantastical end. (Programme notes written by Joseph Chen)

Ransom Wilson has long been recognized internationally as one of the greatest flutists of his generation. Flutist/conductor Ransom Wilson has performed in concert with major orchestras the world over. As a flutist, he has recently launched an ongoing series of solo recordings on the Nimbus label in Europe. As a conductor, he is starting his third season as Music Director of the Redlands Symphony in Southern California, and he continues his positions with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company and Le Train Bleu ensemble. He has led opera performances at the New York City Opera, and was for ten years an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. He has been a guest conductor of the London, Houston, KBS, Kraków, Denver, New Jersey, Hartford, and Berkeley symphonies; the Orchestra of St. Luke’s; the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra; the Hallé Orchestra; and the chamber orchestras of St. Paul and Los Angeles. He has also appeared with the Glimmerglass Opera, Minnesota Opera, and the Opera of La Quinzena Musical in Spain. As an educator, he regularly leads master classes at the Paris Conservatory, Juilliard School, Moscow Conservatory, Cambridge University, and others. A graduate of The Juilliard School, he was an Atlantique Foundation scholar in Paris, where he studied privately with Jean-Pierre Rampal. His recording career, which includes three Grammy Award nominations, began in 1973 with Jean-Pierre Rampal and I Solisti Veneti. Since then he has recorded over 35 albums as flutist and/or conductor. Mr. Wilson is Professor of Flute at the Yale University School of Music, and has performed with The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center since 1991. In this episode we talk about his relationships with Jean-Pierre Rampal, Leonard Bernstein and Julius Baker. He talks about various collaborations, teaching, hobbies, solo career, touring and much more! For more information about Ransom Wilson please visit: https://www.ransomwilson.com © Let's Talk Off The Podium, 2020

Russian pianist Alexander Paley, who calls Lithuania his second home, took his vocation seriously from a young age. Having played the piano since the age of six, he won a national music competition in Moldova just a decade later. After graduating from the Moscow Conservatory (in the classes of Bella Davidovich and Vera Gornostayeva), he can be proud of his first prize at the Leipzig International Bach Competition (1884), the Bosendorfer Prize (1986) and the Grand Prix Young Artist Debut (New York, 1988). While concerting, he has shuffled the world, sharing the stage with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Pops Orchestra, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, and more. The interviewed musician remembers his university days, discusses quarantine, and declares his love for Lithuania.

Episode 1, 2020: Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante Wednesday 27 May 2020 After a disastrous premiere in 1938, Sergei Prokofiev put away his Sinfonia Concertante. It wasn’t until 1947 that it resurfaced, when a 20-year-old cello student, Mstislav Rostropovich, discovered it from the archives and performed it at the Moscow Conservatory. After that performance, Prokofiev worked with the young virtuoso to improve the composition – the rest is history. In this episode of ANAM Radio, cellist James Morley talks to Phil Lambert (our Music Librarian) about how he first discovered Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante and why he decided to perform it as part of ANAM’s 2019 Concerto Competition. James was one of three finalists to perform in the Grand Final of the 2019 Concerto Competition with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in Hobart. The music you will hear is from his Melbourne performance where he performed the piece with Leigh Harrold on piano. James received the Audience Choice Award for this performance. PROKOFIEV Sinfonia Concertante op. 125 James Morley SA cello Leigh Harrold piano To watch the full performance, visit https://youtu.be/LPlZREH-fFU

The Fourth Symphony was a product of the most turbulent time of Tchaikovsky's life - 1877, when he met two women (Nadezhda von Meck, a music-loving widow of a wealthy Russian railroad baron, and Antonina Miliukov, an unnoticed student in one of his large lecture classes at the Moscow Conservatory), who forced him to evaluate himself as he never had before.

Wed., Dec. 5, 6pm, EST:  In honor of beautiful music and its profound effect on our health and on the soul, Mitchell has invited back the beautiful classical, Romantic pianist, Katya Grineva. When a teenager, Katya came to New York in 1989, she had two goals: to study in America and one day, to play in Carnegie Hall. Living most of her adult life in NY, she acquired a reputation as a pianist of exceptional romantic/poetic expression. Commentators agree that Katya achieves her impact at the piano more through subtlety rather than by force. Above all, she values the beauty of tone. She stresses a suppleness and a natural approach to the keyboard. Her interpretation and mastery of the piano can be summed up by the following: ‘ with Katya you sink into the sweet abyss of the music…' Born in Moscow, Ms. Grineva began studying piano at the age of six, attending the Moscow Music School. She went on to the Moscow High School of Music under the aegis of the prestigious Moscow Conservatory. Other awards include: a special award from the New York State Shields in 2003 and, most recently, an award for special achievements from the government of Guam. Katya is often invited as a guest performer on the exclusive “Silver Sea” and “Radisson Seven Seas” cruise lines on which she travels through Europe and South America and the South Pacific. She has since played all over Asia including for Presidents of countries and most often Katya plays charity concerts for charities around the country and the world for the benefit of children.  Katya will be playing at Carnegie Hall for her 18th year on Dec. 27. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/abwmitchellrabin/support

Tessa Lena is a strongly opinionated musician living in New York. She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. Her bio reads like a movie script. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition (entitled ‘In Defense of the Environment) at the Moscow Conservatory, and wanted to be a geneticist. As her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do enthomusicology research. After being attacked by a sex trafficker in Tibet and successfully fighting him off, Tessa settled in Chicago. In Chicago, she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner, and drummer Alan Lake, who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave. After a few years in Chicago, Tessa moved to New York and started a new band, Tessa Makes Love, along with occasional collaborations by Ian McDonald. In 2013, her music video “Spente Le Stelle” received over a million very useful views on YouTube although the jury is still out on how many people realized that the video was a satire making fun of sexual objectification. Alas, the world keeps spinning, and it is still imperfect! In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. In early 2017, she released an album titled ‘Tessa Fights Robots,’ you can listen and buy it here. Since the English language only has so many words, her blog is also called ‘Tessa Fights Robots.’ Both the album and the blog are about being human in the world of technology, big data, and machine-like people.

Tessa Lena is a strongly opinionated musician living in New York. She is a classically trained pianist and singer, born and raised in Moscow. Her bio reads like a movie script. As a teenager, Tessa had the honor of performing her own composition (entitled ‘In Defense of the Environment) at the Moscow Conservatory, and wanted to be a geneticist. As her interests expanded to Tibetan music and language, she headed to Lhasa with a backpack to do enthomusicology research. After being attacked by a sex trafficker in Tibet and successfully fighting him off, Tessa settled in Chicago. In Chicago, she started a band working with her hero Ian McDonald of King Crimson and Foreigner, and drummer Alan Lake, who has played and recorded with Madonna, Brian Ferry, Julian Lennon, Ministry, Brian Wilson and Sam Moore from Sam And Dave. After a few years in Chicago, Tessa moved to New York and started a new band, Tessa Makes Love, along with occasional collaborations by Ian McDonald. In 2013, her music video “Spente Le Stelle” received over a million very useful views on YouTube although the jury is still out on how many people realized that the video was a satire making fun of sexual objectification. Alas, the world keeps spinning, and it is still imperfect! In 2016, Tessa started Coalition for Artistic Dignity and organized a conference in Brooklyn dedicated to artistic dignity, social power and corporate responsibility. In early 2017, she released an album titled ‘Tessa Fights Robots,’ you can listen and buy it here. Since the English language only has so many words, her blog is also called ‘Tessa Fights Robots.’ Both the album and the blog are about being human in the world of technology, big data, and machine-like people.

Born in Moscow, Ms. Grineva began studying piano at the age of six, attending the Moscow Music School. She went on to the Moscow High School of Music under the aegis of the prestigious Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Professor Pavel Messner. It was during her tutelage with Maestro Messner that Katya began giving recitals and experiencing the “special and spontaneous” interaction between artist and audience that would become the hallmark of her performances. In New York, she was awarded a scholarship to immediately enter the Mannes School of Music graduate program, studying with Nina Svetlanova, followed by private coaching with Vladja Mashke, who played a key role in the young pianist's development..Since April 1998 Steinway and Sons has awarded Katya the honorable title of Steinway Artist. Other awards include: a special award from the New York State Shields in 2003 and, most recently, an award for special achievements from the government of Guam.Katya is often invited as a guest performer on the exclusive “Silver Sea” and “Radisson Seven Seas” cruise lines on which she travels through Europe and South America and the South Pacific. She has since played all over Asia including for Presidents of countries. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/abwmitchellrabin/support

I've been looking forward to chatting with Milton Masciadri for quite some time! Milton is Distinguished University Professor of the University of Georgia and is a UNESCO Artist for Peace.  He has been highly involved in the international double bass community for over 30 years. More About Milton: Milton Masciadri is a third generation of double bass player. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he began his studies with his father and by age 17 was Co-principal Bassist with the Porto Alegre Symphony in Brazil. At 19, he was already on the faculty at Brazil’s Federal University. He completed his Master’s and Doctorate Degrees with work under Gary Karr, Julius Levine and Lawrence Wolfe. In addition to being Professor of Double Bass at the University of Georgia Hugh Hodgson School of Music, Masciadri is also coordinator of the Hodgson School's International & Study Abroad Program, and each year he directs the University of Georgia International Double Bass Symposium. In 2009 Dr. Masciadri received the title of Distinguished University Professor of the University of Georgia, the first faculty member in the fine arts to be so honored in 62 years, and he also holds the title of "Accademico" of the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna, Italy – Europe’s oldest musical educational institution. He has been awarded the Brazilian Medal of Honor for Academic Achievements for his musical and educational services to the people of Brazil, is listed in the “International Who's Who in Music”, in 1998 was designated a UNESCO Artist for Peace and in 2011 he received the Knighthood honor of the designation of Cavaglieri di San Marco in Venice. Masciadri has presented master classes at such musical institutions as The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, Paris Conservatoire, Guildhall School of Music in London, Moscow Conservatory, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires National Conservatory, and Milan Conservatorio, among many others. During the summers he teaches at several international music festivals and double bass conventions in the United States, South America and Europe. His solo recordings have been released on the DMR, Sinfonica, ACA & Fondazione labels. As a performer, Dr. Masciadri has performed chamber music and duets with such artists as George Bolet, Robert Mc Duffie, Aldo Parisot, Sidney Harth, Gary Karr, and Francesco Petracchi, in addition to appearing in collaborations around the world with United Nations musical ambassadors. His solo performances have taken place at such internationally renowned concert venues as New York’s Lincoln Center, Venice’s “La Fenice” Opera House, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Castro Alves Opera House in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil), and the Municipal Theater of Sao Paulo. He is a frequent recitalist and soloist with major symphony orchestras in Europe, Asia, North America, Central America and South America. Masciadri's enthusiasm for enlarging the repertoire of the double bass has led him to publish and premiere works of many contemporary American and South American composers, including works commissioned for him by such institutions as UNESCO and Funarte (Brazilian Foundation for the Arts) as well as making contributions of his own with numerous transcriptions and arrangements. Some of Masciadri 2015 performances included performances in Italy, Spain, France, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, China, Russia, Canada, Slovenia, Croatia and the United States. Masciadri performes on a 320 years old Testore double bass, appears in the International Who’s Who in Music and has solo recordings on DMR, ACA, Fondazione & Sinfonica Labels. Links to Check Out: Milton's University of Georgia faculty page Inside Stories: Milton Masciadri Milton Masciadri Honored with Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts Listen to Contrabass Conversations with our free app for iOS, Android, and Kindle! Contrabass Conversations is sponsored by: This episode is brought to you by D’Addario Strings! Check out their Zyex strings, which are synthetic core strings that produce an extremely warm, rich sound. Get the sound and feel of gut strings with more evenness, projection and stability than real gut. The Upton Bass String Instrument Company.  Upton's Karr Model Upton Double Bass represents an evolution of our popular first Karr model, refined and enhanced with further input from Gary Karr.  Since its introduction, the Karr Model with its combination of comfort and tone has gained a loyal following with jazz and roots players. The slim, long “Karr neck” has even become a favorite of crossover electric players. Check out this video of David Murray "auditioning" his Upton Bass! The Bass Violin Shop, which  offers the Southeast's largest inventory of laminate, hybrid and carved double basses. Whether you are in search of the best entry-level laminate, or a fine pedigree instrument, there is always a unique selection ready for you to try. Trade-ins and consignments welcome! Subscribe to the podcast to get these interviews delivered to you automatically!

Elena began playing piano at age five in her native St. Petersburg, Russia, and gave her first public performance at the age of six. She moved to the US with her family in 1974 and settled in New York City where she attended the renowned High School for the Performing Arts, where she graduated with the B'nai B'rith Award for Outstanding Performance in Music, was named “Promising Young Artist” by the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and was even chosen to play the piano for a cameo role in the MGM movie “Fame”. Elena continued her studies at The Juilliard School of Music, where she began at the Pre-College Division and subsequently earned her bachelor and master degrees and was the recipient of the prestigious Petschek Scholarship. Elena's performance credentials are impressive -- she made her first appearance at Lincoln Center in New York as a high school student with the National Music Week Orchestra and performed her recital debut in New York to a sold-out audience in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Elena made her professional orchestral Debut performing for fifteen thousand people on the same bill as Itzhak Perlman with the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra. Her solo recitals, orchestral appearances, and TV and radio performances have taken her across the world including her native Russia, where she performed with leading orchestras there including the Moscow State Symphony, the St. Petersburg Camerata and the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra. In fact, Elena was the first foreigner ever to open the annual "Moscow Stars" Festival in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Elena has played numerous concerts for various charities including Elizabeth Taylor's “Concert for AIDS” in Helsinki, violinist Isaac Stern's seventy-fifth birthday celebration for Ben Gurion University, and Moscow's first Russian Orthodox Sunday School for Children. Because of her diverse background and firm grounding in the cultures of her two home countries, Ms. Klionsky was invited to serve on the Board of Directors of the American-Russian Young Artists Orchestra. Elena Klionsky lives with her family in New York City.

ERIC BRACE & PETER COOPER have a created a body of work that reflects their literate sensibilities as songwriters, a love of harmony and wry humor, and their deep respect for the masters they're lucky enough to play with. When Brace and Cooper play together, it's something special. The pair's last album, 'Master Sessions,' is a tour de force that made its way onto numerous critics' Best of 2010 lists.Their most recent project, 'I Love: Tom T. Hall's Songs of Fox Hollow,' was featured on NPR's All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. It's a tribute to country music's greatest storytelling songwriter and Kentucky native Tom T. Hall. THE RICHTER UZUR DUO are each classical musicians of the highest caliber with successful international solo careers and intensive training from two of the world's most lauded musical institutions: The Moscow Conservatory and The Royal College of Music respectively. Their musical interests and abilities, however, are far from limited to classical music. In their teens and twenties, while developing into classical virtuosi, they cut their teeth in rock bands and delved into folk and world music. The duo's uniqueness is how they combine classical, rock and folk music and themes into truly original new compositions. The duo's latest recording is 'String Theory' and it was named best new release by Classical Guitar Alive in 2010.

  More about Nocturnes Leon Bosch, Sung-Suk Kang "Nocturne" (mp3) from "Virtuoso Double Bass" (Meridian Records) Buy at iTunes Music Store More On This Album   The working relationship between Sung-Suk Kang and the distinguished double bass player Leon Bosch goes back to 1982, when both were students at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK. Sung-Suk accompanied Leon during lessons and at scholarship auditions. 'At the end of our courses of study,' Leon remembers, 'the RNCM principal, Sir John Manduell, invited us to play two pieces together in one of the so-called principal's concerts. These were showcase events in which his ‘prize students’ were afforded a platform to perform in front of an audience of many distinguished invited guests, as well as the public. Sung-Suk and I performed two pieces by the great double bass player Bottesini, the Capriccio di Bravura and Fantasy Sonnambula. 'I'll remember that 1984 concert forever, for Sung-Suk’s magical playing throughout. There was one extended piano tutti in Sonnambula which was particular memorable for its unique delicacy and scintillating effervescence.' Sung-Suk picks up the story. 'After we left the RNCM, Leon and I lost contact with each other for twenty years. Then in the autumn of 2006, all of a sudden I received an SMS message from Leon on my mobile.....out of the blue. I called him back and discovered that at short notice he wanted me to play for him on a CD of pieces by Bottesini. After exchanging a few emails, I agreed.’ So what had inspired Leon to make the move? 'After Sung-Suk and I parted company back in 1984 I always thought of her whenever I played Sonnambula. I often wondered what had happened to her. I have a tape recording of that principal's concert and played it often over the years to reassure myself that it was indeed real and not just a grossly exaggerated and romanticised memory! 'Then when I was scheduled to record my first Bottesini disc, my pianist had to withdraw. After much thought, I resolved to try and find Sung-Suk, since she was the only person I felt I'd really be happy to work with. I put her name into Google and found her referred to on the website of the conductor, Nayden Todorov. With that lead, I traced her to Vienna.’ 'We began to rehearse as soon as I arrived in London!' Sung-Suk recalls. 'There wasn`t enough time to work on each piece in detail.... and we only had one and a half days to record all the repertoire for the CD. 'Playing with Leon wasn`t easy at first - he has a unique way of phrasing and his rubato is never predictable. And of course my ears had to concentrate so much on picking up the thick, deep lower register of the double bass sound. But during the recording sessions everything clicked and became completely natural. 'We tried to create a new atmosphere for each piece and then find the inspiration for a special interpretation at the end of the process. This was always different from what we'd prepared....music-making with Leon is always spontaneous! I love the full sound he makes, all the different colours he creates to express varied emotions in depth.’ As for Nocturne, it allows the piano to anticipate the main theme in the opening section but then gives it no share of the melodic line so expressively introduced and sustained by the double bass. It is, however, the piano which towards the end initiates the change from minor to major harmonies, just before double-bass harmonics magically project the melody into the soprano register. If Bottesini expected to be remembered by future generations he no doubt felt that it would be through his operas and sacred music. In fact, while they are forgotten, his posthumous reputation derives from an instrumental artistry which, though it died with him, survives in the hands of those few bassists who can do his compositions full justice.   Nikolai Lugansky "Nocturne, Op. 55 No. 1" (mp3) from "Chopin: Piano Sonata No. 3, Fantasie-impromptu, Prélude, Nocturne, et al." (Onyx Classics) Buy at iTunes Music Store More On This Album   Nikolai Lugansky's first recording for ONYX. The Daily Telegraph commenting on Lugansky, said 'He can thrill in taxing pianism through his iron will and fingers of steel, but there is an assuaging velvet quality to his tone, a natural feel for lyrical line' Gramophone praised his 'pianism of immense skill, fluency and innate musical quality' Nikolai Lugansky was born in Moscow in 1972. He studied at Moscow Central Music School (under Tatiana Kestner) and then at the Moscow Conservatory, where he was a pupil of Tatiana Nikolayeva, who described him as ‘the next one’ in a line of great Russian pianists. Following Nikolayeva’s untimely death in 1993, Lugansky continued his studies under Sergei Dorensky. A laureate of the International Bach Competition in Leipzig, the Rachmaninov Competition in Moscow and the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Lugansky has a repertoire of over 50 concertos with orchestra as well as a wide range of solo and chamber works. He has worked with many distinguished orchestras and conductors including Christoph Eschenbach, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Valery Gergiev, Neeme Järvi, Raymond Leppard, Yoel Levi, Mikhail Pletnev, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Vladimir Spivakov, Evgeny Svetlanov, Yuri Temirkanov, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Chailly and others. His chamber music partners have included Vadim Repin, Alexander Kniazev, Joshua Bell, Yuri Bashmet, Mischa Maisky, Leonidas Kavakos and Anna Netrebko among others. Lugansky has recorded 23 CDs. His solo recordings on Warner Classics — Chopin Études, Rachmaninov Préludes and Moments musicaux and Chopin Préludes — were each awarded a Diapason d’Or. His PentaTone Classics SACD of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no.1, with the Russian National Orchestra under Kent Nagano, was cited as ‘Editor’s Choice’ in Gramophone. His Prokofiev CD was one of the ‘CDs of the Year’ (2004) featured in The Daily Telegraph. Lugansky’s recordings of the complete piano concertos of Rachmaninov, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo, received Choc du Monde de la Musique, Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik and the 2005 ECHO Klassik Award. His last recording (Chopin’s and Rachmaninov’s cello sonatas) with the cellist Alexander Kniazev won the 2007 ECHO Klassik Award. As well as performing and recording, Lugansky teaches at the Moscow Conservatory as an assistant of Prof. Sergei Dorensky.   Anthony Goldstone "Nocturne in D-Flat Major, Op. 8" (mp3) from "Russian Piano Music, Vol. 4: Sergei Lyapunov" (Divine Art) Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This Album Now almost forgotten in the West, Lyapunov was one of the truly great composers of the Romantic era in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His Sonata is a phenomenal work and his mastery of pianistic composition is also finely demonstrated by the other works on this album masterfully interpreted by Anthony Goldstone. Anyone who loves Chopin or Liszt should get to know this music.   Fuzjko Hemming "Nocturne No. 20 In C-Sharp Minor" (mp3) from "Fuzjko Hemming - Collector's Edition" (Fuzjko Label) Buy at iTunes Music Store Stream from Rhapsody Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This Album Having wowed much of the Eastern Hemisphere for years, classical pianist Fuzjko Hemming is preparing for her introduction to the United States. Having been born into humble circumstances, child of a Japanese mother and Swedish father, she has felt rootless, too Asian in appearance for Sweden, and in Japan constricted by the society's stratified and class-oriented way of life. Then, as she was starting to gain traction as a professional musician, her promising career was cut short. - Fuzjko lost all hearing in her left ear after battling a serious cold. At 16, she already lost her hearing in her right ear due to illness. Completely deaf for 2 years, she eventually had 40% of her hearing restored in her left ear. After living in poverty in Europe for many years before returning to Japan and gaining acclaim for her music - critics hailed her as being "born to play Chopin and Liszt " In 1999, Japan's NHK Television aired a documentary of her life and she released her debut album, La Campanella, which sold more than two million copies, a rare accomplishment for any classical artist She also has won an unprecedented four Classical Album of the Year Awards at the Japan Gold Disc Awards, another extraordinary achievement for any artist, let alone a classical artist She remains the only four-time Gold Disc Award winner. Since that time she has recorded numerous successful albums - invigorating collections of classical interpretations, five of which are being released for the first time in the U.S. on her label Domo Records: Echoes of Eternity, La Campanella, Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1, Nocturnes of Melancholy, Live at Carnegie Hall. On the new album, Fuzjko, the artist performs largely romantic repertoire ranging from Beethoven's "The Tempest" sonata to works by Chopin, Liszt, Scarlatti and Debussy. In each piece, whether performing Chopin's Nocturnes or Liszt's bravura pieces "La Campanella" and "Grand Etudes D'Apres Paganini No. 6", Fuzjko infuses poetry to these timeless compositions, and always in her own eminently attractive style. The warmth of Fuzjko's sound can also be heard in Scarlatti's Sonata K.162 and Debussy's "Claire De Lune". Although much of the repertoire is familiar, Fuzjko also dips into lesser known works like Liszt's transcription of Schumann's "Fruhlinghsnacht", and Chopin's "Trois Nouvelles Etudes No.3, and always played with her celebrated musicality much in evidence. The celebrated virtuoso blends the classicality of her influences such as Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin with the sophisticated approach of her mentors (Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan) to create an emotional delivery of exquisite craftsmanship. She's been known to bring some fans to tears with her moving immersion in her music. With her strikingly unorthodox playing style and intricate ethnic roots, it's evident that Fuzjko's true home is at the piano, where she reveals herself as a true artist of the world.   Carly Comando "Bear" (mp3) from "One Take" (Deep Elm) Buy at iTunes Music Store Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This Album   Chilling. Stirring. Powerful. Contemplative. These are some of the words most frequently used to describe the achingly beautiful piano instrumentals of Carly Comando. Her debut album "One Take" features ten delicately woven songs (including her single "Everday") that are the direct emotional output of her innermost thoughts. "The album means the world to me. It's complete, in-the-moment sincerity translated into moody solo piano music. I used an improv technique, recording in just one take, so I could capture the essence of pure emotion" says Carly. From the rises and falls to the shrinks and swells, these songs will leave an indellible impression on your mind. It's music that stays with you forever. "One Take" was recorded in Carly's home studio in Brooklyn, NY. Mastered by Phil Douglas (Latterman, Small Arms Dealer, Iron Chic). The album includes the "Everyday" which was originally released in December 2006. Deep Elm Records is simultaneously releasing an EP titled "Cordelia" featuring four additional piano instrumentals. Carly also plays keyboards / sings in the band Slingshot Dakota and composes custom works upon request. And yes, that was the name given to her at birth. "This is music that changes lives, opens minds, broadens horizons. Carly is an amazing pianist." - ANA "Beautiful and soothing, she will evoke emotion and ease any scattered mind. A talented composer." - SweetieJo "Emotional and inspiring, it grabs your soul and moves you. Highly recommended." - The Rez