Podcast appearances and mentions of Paris Opera

In a new audio documentary, discover the behind the scenes moments of the ballet “Red Carpet” by Hofesh Shechter, conceived specifically for the Palais Garnier stage and the Paris Opera Ballet dancers.The new creation of the globally-renowned choreographer brings together thirteen dancers for a unique performance, accompanied by a live band in an evolving mise-en-scène evoking a dark cabaret atmosphere Ever committed to contemporary creation and dance, CHANEL imagined thirteen stage costumes inspired by the world of evening-wear for the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, continuing to strengthen the ties forged between the House and this institution since 2018, of which CHANEL is Grand Patron.The first performances of “Red Carpet” take place at the Palais Garnier in Paris from June 10th to July 14th 2025, before touring the USA in October 2025.Conversation led by Alix Van Pée. Listen to the podcast now at chanel.com(00:00) Introduction (01:06) Hofesh Shechter presents his dance piece and the questions it raises (5:50) Meeting and working with dancers from the Paris Opera (7:38) Hofesh Shechter's relationship with fashion and his collaboration with CHANEL (17:15) The role of music and its influences (21:51) Mixing art forms (23:12) Hofesh Shechter's vision of dance

Sound the klaxon - it's a national treasure alert!This week we are honoured to be joined by internationally celebrated Mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly.Dame Sarah has had an incredible career to date with standout performances including Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne , multiple roles at the Met, the Royal Opera House, La Scala, Paris Opera and, of course Admiral Nelson in full naval regalia at the Last Night of the Proms.Dame Sarah's 24/25 season includes playing Auntie in WNO's new production of Peter Grimes and Dido in Dido and Aeneas at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.We are hugely grateful to Dan Hartland at the Cheltenham Festival for setting up this chat - Sarah will be performing Brahms' Alto Rhapsody at the festival on 5 July (ticket link below)With such a stellar career and a vast list of honours to her name, Dame Sarah remains incredibly warm and down-to-earth. We chat about controlling performance anxiety, how to avoid being pigeon holed, dealing with colds, auditioning, the power of positive thinking and how to wear a fatsuit…Enjoy! To buy tickets for Dame Sarah's performance at the Cheltenham festival on Saturday 5 July click here; https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.org/events/berlioz-te-deumYou can find us on the socials here;Instagram @threeinabarpodTiktok @threeinabarpodThree In A Bar on YoutubeAnything you'd like to share with us? Any guests you'd love to hear or anything you'd like us to do better? Drop us a line at hello@threeinabar.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniele Rustioni is a major presence at leading opera houses and symphony halls. In 2022, the International Opera Awards named him “Best Conductor.” His opera repertoire numbers over 70 works spanning over centuries and ranging from Italian to French, German to Russian, and more. This coming season he concludes his eight-year tenure as music director of Opéra National de Lyon.   He was principal guest conductor of the Bavarian State Opera until October 2023.Daniele has led performances at the nearly all of the most important international opera houses and festivals, including Aix-en-Provence Festival, BBC Proms, Berlin State Opera, Dutch National Opera, Paris Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Salzburg Festival, Teatro Real, Zurich Opera House and the Teatro alla Scala. In Italy, his homeland, he has also conducted at Opera di Roma, Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (Florence), Teatro La Fenice (Venice), Rossini Opera Festival (Pesaro) and Teatro San Carlo (Naples).He was recently named principal guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, and as we spoke, he was preparing his debut concerts with the New York Philharmonic.  

Koki Nakano is a composer and a pianist, born in 1988 in Fukuoka, Japan. After graduating Music High School at Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, he enrolled at the composition department of Tokyo University of the Arts. He has performed recitals at the Louvre and the Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris), Cadogan Hall (London), Lincoln Center (New York). He released his first album Lift in 2016, in collaboration with French cellist Vincent Segal under the Paris-based label Nø Førmat!. ​In 2019, Koki took part in a research workshop at the Reborn Art Festival in the landscapes of Ishinomaki‘s bay. Accompanied by renowned visual artist Kohei Nawa, famous choreographer Damien Jalet, and few dancers, they explore different points of fusion between the human body and the landscape. ​His second album Pre-choreographed is released in April 2020. Koki mixed his classical pieces with electronic sounds and he developed this relationship between dance and music. In 2021, Koki composed the original music for Damien Jalet's piece ‘Brise-lames' and performed it live at Palais Garnier for Paris Opera's opening gala. His third album, Oceanic Feeling is released in 2022 as well as four musical videos gathering choreographers and dancers Tess Voelker and Nicolas Huchard, Marion Motin, Mourad Bouayad. ​Koki Nakano's new album Ululō is released in October 2024, in collaboration with singers Yaël Naim, Wayne Snow and Jordy.

Jala is joined by Doug Lief (Nostalgium Arcanum) and Alex Krieger to discuss the 1925 silent film classic, The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney. This episode is a companion to Doug's episode about the same movie where he and his guest give the rundown beat and beat, check it out here (https://nostalgiumarcanum.fireside.fm/109)! Mentioned during the episode: * Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1925_film)) * André Castaigne's Phantom artwork (https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2019/11/28/andre-castaignes-phantom-of-the-opera/) * Version differences 1925 vs 1929, the unmasking scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM0NTRM5R80) * Reddit post on the differences between the 1925 and 1929 cuts (https://www.reddit.com/r/horror/comments/12xpbgc/the_phantom_of_the_opera_1925_vs_the_phantom_of/) * “Man's Hatred Has Made Me So”: Freakification and the Shifting Gaze in The Phantom of the Opera (https://openjournals.bsu.edu/dlr/article/download/2665/1587/4311#:~:text=Although%20many%20versions%20of%20the,capitalizes%20on%20the%20shift%20of) * The Phantom of the Opera: A Silent Era Masterpiece (https://theasc.com/articles/phantom-of-the-opera) Related episodes: * Episode 14: The Phantom of the Opera and Phantom by Susan Kay (Books) (https://www.jalachan.place/14) - Jala is joined by Alex Krieger and Slade to discuss both Gaston Leroux's classic 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera as well as_ Phantom_ by Susan Kay, a novel exploring Erik's past before he dominated the Paris Opera. * A Glass Darkly Episode 1: Our Story (https://www.jalachan.place/b-02) - In this inaugural episode of A Glass Darkly, Jala reads an original Phantom of the Opera vignette setting the stage for a potential new project. She wrote this piece in May 2023. All episodes of A Glass Darkly may be found as member perks on our Ko-Fi (https://ko-fi.com/fireheartmedia). Check out the Swag Shop (https://www.teepublic.com/user/fireheartmedia) to share your love with the world! Support this show via Ko-fi! Just like Patreon, there are subscription tiers (with bonus content!) in addition to the ability to drop us a one-time donation. Every little bit helps us put out better quality content and keep the lights on, and gets a shout out in a future episode. Check out ko-fi.com/fireheartmedia (https://ko-fi.com/fireheartmedia) for the details! Don't forget to rate & review us on your podcasting platform of choice~ Jala Prendes Bluesky - @jalachan (https://bsky.app/profile/jalachan.bsky.social), Bluesky - @fireheartmedia (https://bsky.app/profile/fireheartmedia.bsky.social) Twitter (https://twitter.com/jalachan) Instagram (https://instagram.com/jalachan) The Level (https://thelevelpodcast.com/hosts/jala) Doug Lief Nostalgium Arcanum (https://nostalgiumarcanum.fireside.fm/) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/265036650022926/) Twitter (https://x.com/nostalgiumpod?s=21&t=0NN10biK6Jch6W8f4sEW8Q) BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/nostalgiumpod.bsky.social) Threads (https://www.threads.net/@_nostalgium_arcanum_) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/_nostalgium_arcanum_/) Alex Krieger BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/picklefactory.org) Special Guests: Alex Krieger and Doug Lief.

《高雄熱》Podcast頻道，每週帶來最新高雄新聞、在地故事與深度訪談，讓你深入了解這座城市的熱情與魅力。現在就打開你的Podcast平台或YouTube搜尋高雄熱，和我們一起感受高雄的熱情與魅力吧！ https://fstry.pse.is/6d4qcu —— 以上為 Firstory Podcast 廣告 —— 寶可孟的巴黎住宿之旅，終於來到「最終回」啦！今天要分享的這個飯店「希爾頓巴黎歌劇院酒店Hilton Paris Opera Hotel」，位於交通位置非常便利的聖拉札爾車站旁邊，不論要去巴黎的哪一區玩都很方便，因此我選定這間飯店入住。如果你本身有希爾頓的金卡會籍，還可買無早餐的訂房方案，一樣也有免費雙人早餐可享用，非常划算！到底希爾頓巴黎歌劇院酒店內裝、飯店人員的服務態度如何呢？還有早餐跟Lounge的使用心得如何？我都要在這一集節目中親身分享，趕快來收聽吧。 來寶可孟YouTube頻道上收聽節目：https://pokem.me/PokemYTPodcast -- 希爾頓榮譽客會Hilton Honors會籍文字介紹：https://pokem.me/HiltonHonorINTRO 希爾頓酒店集團與SLH集團建立合作關係介紹：https://pokem.me/3XW799f 凡爾賽特里亞農宮．華爾道夫酒店開箱文01：https://pokem.me/HiltonWAParis01 凡爾賽特里亞農宮．華爾道夫酒店開箱文02：https://pokem.me/HiltonWAParis02 希爾頓巴黎歌劇院酒店Hilton Paris Opera Hotel開箱文：https://pokem.me/3Mm8C1A 羅馬卡瓦列利華爾道夫酒店．2025年預訂房間心得分享：https://pokem.me/HiltonWARome01 希爾頓與SLH集團聯手文字解析：https://pokem.me/3XW799f -- 寶可孟的巴黎旅遊第一集分享：https://pokem.me/4csUyyH 寶可孟的巴黎旅遊第二集分享：https://pokem.me/4eXTJQi 寶可孟的巴黎旅遊第三集分享：https://pokem.me/3Y2Yxh5 寶可孟的巴黎旅遊第四集分享：https://pokem.me/3Lv0dbE 寶可孟的巴黎旅遊第五集分享：https://pokem.me/4cftdPJ 寶可孟的巴黎旅遊第六集分享：https://pokem.me/472HJt4 -- 小額贊助支持本節目： https://open.firstory.me/user/ckdpsqfmxifcf0862q6efk1qa 留言告訴我你對這一集的想法： https://open.firstory.me/user/ckdpsqfmxifcf0862q6efk1qa/comments Powered by Firstory Hosting

This week on the podcast is part two of our interview with renowned lyric tenor, Matthew Polenzani. He performs regularly with the Metropolitan Opera and appears in opera houses around the world such as the Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, and Teatro Real in Madrid. Matthew is continuously in demand for concert engagements with the world's most influential conductors, and with premiere ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and the Munich Philharmonic.​Join us for this mini-master class in career development for any aspiring musician! https://matthewpolenzani.com/

Today we release part one of our interview with renowned lyric tenor, Matthew Polenzani. He performs regularly with the Metropolitan Opera and appears in opera houses around the world such as the Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, and Teatro Real in Madrid.  Matthew is continuously in demand for concert engagements with the world's most influential conductors, and with premiere ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and the Munich Philharmonic.Join us for this mini-master class in career development for any aspiring musician!  https://matthewpolenzani.com/

This week, Stauney introduces us to the infamous and iconic Julie d'Aubigny. Also known as Mademoiselle Maupin, she was a remarkable figure in 17th-century France, celebrated for her exceptional talent as an opera singer and her prowess as a duelist. Stauney and Sadie discuss her young start to defying societal norms, mastering fencing, winning high-profile duels, and dressing in pants, and then dive deeply into her personal life, featuring daring romantic escapades, multiple affairs, and even joining a convent to rescue a lover (in which arson and faking death might have also been involved). Despite the chaos surrounding her, d'Aubigny achieved immense success on the stage of the Paris Opera, where her powerful contralto voice captivated audiences. Her legacy remains a testament to her fearless independence and extraordinary artistic abilities! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Francesca Zambello is an internationally recognised director of opera and theatre. She is the Artistic Director of The Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center; a role she has occupied since 2012.  In 2022 she retired from a celebrated role as the General Director of The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., having been appointed in 2010. Francesca has also served as the Artistic Advisor to the San Francisco Opera from 2005–2011 and as the Artistic Director of the Skylight Theatre from 1987–1992. She has since staged new productions at major theatres, festivals and opera houses in Asia, Australia, South America, Europe and the USA. Collaborating with outstanding artists and designers and promoting emerging talent, she takes a special interest in new music theatre works, innovative productions, and in producing theatre and opera for wider audiences. Francesca Zambello has been awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for her contribution to French culture and the Russian Federation's medal for Service to Culture. Other honours for her work include three Olivier Awards from the London Society of Theatres and two Evening Standard Awards. The French Grand Prix des Critiques was awarded to her twice for her work at the Paris Opera. She has received the Medallion Society Award from the San Francisco Opera recognizing 30 years of work for the company. For Opera Australia, Francesca Zambello directed the 2012 Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour production of La Traviata, as well as The Love for Three Oranges in 2016, and West Side Story on Sydney Harbour in 2019, for which she received the Helpmann Award for best direction of a musical. Ms. Zambello has also served as an adjunct professor at Yale University. An American who grew up in Europe, she speaks French, Italian, German, and Russian. She began her career as an Assistant Director to the late Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Francesca Zambello lives in New York with her wife, Faith Gay, a founding partner of Selendy & Gay and son, Jackson. www.francescazambello.com The STAGES podcast is available to access and subscribe from Spotify and Apple podcasts. Or from wherever you access your favourite podcasts. A conversation with creatives about craft and career. Follow socials on instagram (stagespodcast) and facebook (Stages).www.stagespodcast.com.au

For our bonus episode this season, we're catching up with the Australian Ballet's Artistic Director David Hallberg. Last season, David and I spoke about his life growing up in South Dakota, being bullied, training at the Paris Opera, becoming principal at American Ballet Theatre, and being the first American to be invited to dance with the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. We talked about climbing back from his epic injury, his head space at that time, before taking over the Artistic Directorship of the Australian Ballet right in the middle of Covid. A year later we talk about what it's been like to be artistic director now that theatres are open and audiences are back, about what kind of as dancers he selects for the company, how he decides who will be promoted, the Australian Ballet's 60th anniversary, and life in Australia.If you'd like to read more about David's life, find our full conversation in the show notes, or you can read his autobiography called A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back. For Australian Ballet updates you can find them on Instagram at @ausballet and to continue to follow David's adventures, you'll find him on Instagram at @davidhallbergofficialDavid and I recorded remotely, with David dialling in from Melbourne, the land of the Kulin people, with recording and production on the land of the Awabakal and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, to all of whom to which we pay our greatest respects. Production dream team ✨Hosted by @byclaudialawsonProduced by @fjordreviewAdditional Production @clinttopicSound & Editing @outputmediaStudios @brightsidesydney@sawtoothstudios

In this episode, we celebrate the holidays with a stroll past the Opera Garnier. Bright department store windows, glittering performances, and even cinema lights: the Grands Boulevards has it all. This is where the Lumiere Brothers introduced film to Paris audiences, and where Nadar ran his 19th-century photography studio. As always, for more info, links, and photos, check out my website! Thanks as always to Bremner Fletcher for technical expertise, and general know-how. The Improbable Walks theme music is performed by David Symons, New Orleans accordionist extraordinaire. 

Madelaine Brockway came out of nowhere and went viral for her $59 million wedding that broke the Internet. The car dealership heiress that no one had ever heard of flew all her guests privately to Paris, had a pre-wedding get together at the Chanel Store, did her rehearsal dinner at the Paris Opera house, treated folks to an overnight stay at the Palace of Versailles, and hosted a private Maroon 5 concert at the reception. But now that her lavish nuptials are in the limelight it has emerged that the groom, Jacoc LaGrone, is facing prison time for shooting at a police officer. What gives? Why throw such a gonzo bananas wedding when you know the groom might be locked away? What kind of attention are they trying to command? And what exactly does $59 million get you in the wedding market these days? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

DescriptionHave you heard of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, one of the first classical composers of African heritage to attain widespread acclaim in European music? Take a minute to get the scoop!Fun FactIn early 1776, the financially troubled Paris Opéra considered Chevalier de Saint-Georges as its new director. Despite his merit as the creator of the first disciplined French orchestra, opposition led to Antoine Dauvergne being appointed instead. It is likely this was fuelled by racial bias.__________________________________________________________________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.

For his next film, "Finalement" ("Finally"), French director Claude Lelouch places his characters at the heart of a fashion show. The collection in question belongs to Parisian couturier Stéphane Rolland, who reveals his haute couture 2023/2024 winter offering on the grand staircase of the Paris Opera. The event pays homage to opera icon Maria Callas, and recreates the star's “grande nuit de l'Opéra” that took place there in 1958. Lelouch's actors, who perform in the midst of a live, real-world fashion show, only have one chance to get it right.

SynopsisJust about any time is a good time to be in Paris, but chances are, given your druthers, you wouldn't have chosen to be there in 1942. The city was occupied by German troops, and World War II had several more dismal years to grind on.But if you were in Paris on today's date in 1942, you could have visited the Paris Opera for the premiere of a new ballet by the French composer Francis Poulenc called “Les Animaux modeles” or “The Model Animals,” with a scenario based on animal fables by the French writer La Fontaine.Some 20 years earlier, in happier times, Poulenc had made his name with another one-act ballet. That 1924 work was titled “Les biches” or “The Does” and was written for the Ballets Russes of Monte Carlo. That work's scenario described the flirtations and seductions of some bright young things at a house party in the country. “Everything was simple and carefree, sunshine and good humor,” as Poulenc himself put it.Not surprisingly, Poulenc's 1942 ballet was a darker, often grimmer affair, expressing perhaps the quiet desperation of the German occupation, mingled with a fervent hope for better days to come.Music Played in Today's ProgramFrancis Poulenc (1899 – 1963) Les animaux modeles French National Orchestra; Charles Dutoit, conductor. London 452 937

Synopsis In the Guiness Book of Music Facts and Feats, the record for "Most Prolific Composer" goes to Georg Philip Telemann, who died on today's date in 1767 at the age of 86. And longevity gave an edge to productivity: Telemann outlived his prolific contemporary, J.S. Bach, by 21 years, and outlived Handel by 12. But even considering the extra years he lived, Telemann's output is staggering. Of Bach's cantatas, some 200 or so survive, but Telemann's number 1400. He also wrote 125 orchestral suites, 125 concertos, 130 trios, 145 pieces for solo keyboard, and about 50 operas. Most composers (if they are lucky), publish one autobiography; Telemann published three, and commented in one of them, "How is it possible for me to remember everything I wrote for violin and winds?" Sometimes, in addition to composing original music, Telemann was also asked to perform it: "A few days before I play a violin concerto," he wrote, "I always locked myself away, fiddle in hand, shirt-sleeves rolled up, with something strong to calm the nerves, and practice." Fortunately, Telemann seemed to find musical inspiration everywhere, including from the pop and folk music of his day. As he put it, "One would scarcely believe what wonderful ideas pipers and fiddlers have when they improvise while dancers pause for breath. An observer could easily gather enough ideas from them in eight days to last a lifetime!" Music Played in Today's Program Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 - 1767) Violin Concerto in A (The Frog) Pavlo Beznosiuk, violin; New London Consort; Philip Pickett, conductor. London 455 621 On This Day Births 1860 - French composer Gustave Charpentier, in Dieuze, Lorraine; 1935 - Austrian composer Kurt Schwertsik, in Vienna; Deaths 1767 - German composer Georg Philipp Telemann, age 86, in Hamburg; 1822 - German composer, critic and popular Romantic author Ernst Theodor Amadeus ("E.T.A.") Hoffmann, age 46, in Berlin; Premieres 1840 - For the 400th anniversary of the Gutenberg Printing Press, Mendelssohn presents his Symphony No. 2, "Lobegesang" (Song of Praise) at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig; 1850 - R. Schumann: opera "Genoveva," in Leipzig at the Stadttheater; 1910 - Stravinsky: ballet, "The Firebird," at the Paris Opera, with Gabriel Pierné conducting; 1923 - de Falla: one-act opera "El retablo de maese Pedro" (Master Peter's Puppet Show), first staged performance in Paris at the home of the Princesse de Polignac; This opera was premiered in a concert performance in Seville on March 23, 1923; 1940 - William Grant Still: choral ballad "And They Lynched Him on a Tree," at New York's Lewisohn Stadium by the Schola Cantorum and Wen Talbert Negro Choir with the New York Philharmonic, Arthur Rodzinksi conducting; 1954 - Leroy Anderson: "Sandpaper Baller" at a Decca recording session in New York City, with the composer conducting; Three different grades of sandpaper rubbed together were used to make the vaudeville-style "soft shoe" dancing sound effects for this classic recording; 1955 - Grofé: "Hudson Valley" Suite, in Washington, D.C., by the National Symphony conducted by André Kostelanetz; 1991 - James MacMillan: "Tuireadh" (Lament) for clarinet and string quartet, by James Campbell and the Allegri Quartet at St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall (Orkney Islands). Links and Resources On Telemann

Hello Everyone! I am so excited for this episode as we are speaking with the very kind and humble Chloë who has had contract after contract offered to her. You may think she's very lucky but it's all down to her hard work!. Her go with the flow attitude and strong will, I'm convinced has been the catalyst to her success in this industry! We resonated a lot talking about Russia and Mariinsky and how hard it was for her to leave when covid happened finding new ground now In Amsterdam sharing a dressing room with legend and former school mate of mine Olga Smirnova. Let's meet Chloë! Follow on Social media @balletwithisabella Instagram | Youtube | Facebook www.balletwithisabella.com Elite Classes and Courses from Beg - Pro! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/a-dancers-mindset/message

In this episode, Esther Abrami welcomes Victoria Dauberville, a French professional ballet dancer and content creator who trained in classical dance at the National School of the Paris Opera and the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris. Esther Abrami discusses with her the difficulties that ballet dancers face when it comes to self-image, how to be confident in a competitive artistic field, and how to stop identifying oneself with others. This episode is in French. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Synopsis On today's date in 1865, the hottest ticket in Paris was for the premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer's long-awaited grand opera L'Africaine, or The African Maid, at the Paris Opera. And when I say “long-awaited,” I mean long-awaited! Meyerbeer had begun work on “L'Africaine” some 25 years earlier. It had become a standing joke in the French press to rib Meyerbeer about the “imminent” completion of his opera. There were many reasons for the delay. Meyerbeer was a slow-worker, a perfectionist; he was sidelined by ill-health; he was waiting for better singers, more sympathetic management at the Opera, etc. etc. Opera fans back then must have given up hope Meyerbeer would ever finish L'Africaine, but – surprise! – he did and the work was slotted for production at the Paris Opera. At that point, ironically, Meyerbeer died, and his widow entrusted another composer to supervise the rehearsals for its 1865 premiere. Meyerbeer's operas were the 19th century equivalent of the sweeping costume epic movies of Cecil B. DeMille. In L'Africaine, the hero is the explorer Vasco da Gama, and one of the opera's more spectacular stage effects involved a Portuguese ship running aground on an exotic reef and being taken over by a swarm of natives. Music Played in Today's Program Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791 – 1864) O paradis, from L'Africaine Ben Heppner, tenor; London Symphony; Myung-Whun Chung, conductor. DG 471 372

Hannah O'Neill's recent appointment to étoile status at the Paris Opera Ballet generated headlines around the world, partly because it's so rare for foreigners to achieve it. The 30-year-old New Zealander has propelled up the ranks of the prestigious company since joining the corps de ballet in 2011. In-keeping with tradition, the appointment was made - without warning - after a recent performance of Opera Garnier. Hannah tells Susie Ferguson her story, which began with her early years in Tokyo, starting out in ballet at the age of three, encouraged by her mum.

Our new weekly collection of the happiest stories in the world. This week, how a computer data centre could heat pools around the globe, Paris Opera appoints its first black star ballet dancer, and a robotic elephant helping to improve animal rights in India. Presented by Andrew Peach. Music produced by Iona Hampson.

Synopsis A new opera by Jules Massenet had its premiere at the Paris Opera on today's date in 1894. It was titled Thais and was based on a rather spicy novel of the same name by the popular French author of the day, Anatole France. The novel and the opera are based on an old seventh-century manuscript, which mentions a fabulously beautiful Egyptian courtesan named Thais who converted to Christianity and spent the rest of her life meditating in seclusion on matters spiritual. In Massenet's opera, the conversion from strip-tease artiste to nun is depicted by an instrumental interlude, the famous Meditation from Thais, which has become a favorite showpiece for solo violinists. To add a dash of the piquant to the tale, in both the novel by Anatole France and in the opera by Massenet, the young monk who diligently convinces Thais to change her wicked ways suddenly falls madly in love with her himself, and just as diligently tries to persuade her to add just one more name—his—to her list of satisfied customers. As they used to say in ancient Egypt: "Ooh-la-la!" Music Played in Today's Program Jules Massenet (1842 - 1912) Meditation, fr Thaïs Nigel Kennedy, violin; English Chamber Orchestra EMI 57330

New Zealand dancer Hannah O'Neill was recently named a star - étoile - at the exclusive Paris Opera Ballet - the world's oldest ballet company. The promotion was announced without warning after a recent performance of Opera Garnier.  O'Neill spoke to Jane Patterson.

We descend into the depths of the Paris Opera for the 1986 musical phenomenon The Phantom of the Opera – one of the most successful & beloved musicals of all time, which centers around a troubling story about abuse, lust, and the power of music. We talk about: – Is the Phantom (or "Erik" as he's known in the original novel) a serpent or a savior? – What is the relationship between Christine and the Phantom? An abusive mentor relationship, a forbidden love, an artistic partnership or a classic Gothic obsession? – How did power and patriarchy operate in the Victorian world of the Paris Opera – and in the 1980s world of rock musicals?   You'll hear: – Michael Crawford, Sarah Brightman and the cast of the 1988 Broadway Cast Recording.   Continue the conversation with Peter (@pgeinvan) and Nathan (@nathan_lerud) on Twitter, and follow the Gospel of Musical Theatre on Instagram or Twitter @gospelofmt.

For our bonus episode this season, we're catching up with the Australian Ballet's Artistic Director David Hallberg. Last season, David and I spoke about his life growing up in South Dakota, being bullied, training at the Paris Opera, becoming principal at American Ballet Theatre, and being the first American to be invited to dance with the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. We talked about climbing back from his epic injury, his head space at that time, before taking over the Artistic Directorship of the Australian Ballet right in the middle of Covid. A year later we talk about what it's been like to be artistic director now that theatres are open and audiences are back, about what kind of as dancers he selects for the company, how he decides who will be promoted, the Australian Ballet's 60th anniversary, and life in Australia.If you'd like to read more about David's life, find our full conversation in the show notes, or you can read his autobiography called A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back. For Australian Ballet updates you can find them on Instagram at @ausballet and to continue to follow David's adventures, you'll find him on Instagram at @davidhallbergofficialDavid and I recorded remotely, with David dialling in from Melbourne, the land of the Kulin people, with recording and production on the land of the Awabakal and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, to all of whom to which we pay our greatest respects.

Synopsis Today's date in 1910 marks the birthday in Paris of a French composer you perhaps have never heard of, but Elsa Barraine is well-deserving of your attention. Barraine's father was a cellist at the Paris Opera, and as a teen Elsa attended the Paris Conservatory, studying composition with Paul Dukas. Olivier Messiaen was her classmate and remained a life-long friend. Barraine won several prizes for her compositions, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1929 when she was just 19.She worked at the French National Radio from 1936 to 1940. During World War II, Barraine was heavily involved in the French Resistance, and from 1944 to 1947 was the Recording Director of the French record label Le Chant du Monde. In 1953 she joined the faculty at the Paris Conservatoire, where she taught until 1972, the year the French Ministry of Culture named her Director of Music. She died in 1999. Elsa Barraine's catalog of works includes a variety of vocal and instrumental works, an opera, ballets, and two symphonies, but her music is seldom performed today. We're sampling one of her chamber works, a piece for French horn and piano entitled Crépuscules, or Twilights. Music Played in Today's Program Elsa Barraine (1910-1999): Crépuscules Lin Foulk Baird, fh; Martha Fischer, p. Centaur CRC-3857

In this episode, opera singer Marisa Lenhardt looks into the history and legacy of one of opera's most audacious singers, who counterbalanced her stage time with sword fighting.A sword-fighting bisexual opera singer who set fire to a convent to get her lover out? [yawn] But she could SING. King Louis XIV and Paris Opera thought so, and the first non-Soprano role in French opera was written for her. Her about her exploits, her sword fights, her royal pardons and, far more interestingly, her vocal journey.For more about Odd Salon visit oddsalon.com Join us as a Member or on PatreonFollow us Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Synopsis On today's date in 1885, the Paris Opera gave the first performance of “Le Cid,” the 11th opera written by the French composer Jules Massenet. “Le Cid” is set in medieval Spain and tells the story of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, a legendary hero who defended his country against the Moors. The same story inspired a 1961 movie titled “El Cid,” starring—who else?—Charlton Heston. But back in 1890, the New Orleans Opera introduced Massenet's opera to American audiences and reached New York City in 1897, serving as a vocal showcase for turn-of-the-century superstars of the early Metropolitan Opera. Enrico Caruso made a famous recording of the opera's most famous excerpt—Rodrigo's Act III aria, “O souverain, o juge, o pere,” which translates as “Oh Lord, Oh Judge, Oh Father.” Unlikely as it may seem, this aria inspired a pop hit in 1981, when composer and performance artist Laurie Anderson translated its opening line as “O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad.” As a credit to the French composer, Laurie Anderson‘s “O Superman” is even subtitled For Massenet. Trained as a classical violinist with the Chicago Youth Symphony, Laurie Anderson soon shifted to a variety of electronically-altered fiddles, and one of her albums is titled, appropriately, Life on a String. Music Played in Today's Program Jules Massenet (1842-1912) O souverain, o juge, o pere, from Le Cid Ben Heppner, tenor; Munich Radio Orchestra; Roberto Abbado, conductor. RCA/BMG 62504

Jala is joined by Alex and Slade to discuss both Gaston Leroux's classic 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera as well as Phantom by Susan Kay, a novel exploring Erik's past before he dominated the Paris Opera. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/175/175-h/175-h.htm) Phantom by Susan Kay (https://www.mediafire.com/file/52v6iv7e0ngio13/Phantom_by_Susan_Kay.pdf/file) Support this show via Ko-fi! Just like Patreon, there are subscription tiers (with bonus content!) in addition to the ability to drop us a one-time donation. Every little bit helps us put out better quality content and keep the lights on, and gets a shout out in a future episode. Check out ko-fi.com/fireheartmedia (https://ko-fi.com/fireheartmedia) for the details! Don't forget to rate & review us on your podcasting platform of choice~ Jala Prendes - @jalachan (https://twitter.com/jalachan) The Level (https://thelevelpodcast.com/hosts/jala) Alex Krieger - @Picklefactory (https://twitter.com/picklefactory) Slade Eide-Ettaro - @Saeide87 (https://twitter.com/Saeide87) DeviantArt (https://www.deviantart.com/slingblade87) Special Guests: Alex Krieger and Slade Eide-Ettaro.

For our bonus episode this season, we're catching up with the Australian Ballet's Artistic Director David Hallberg. Last season, David and I spoke about his life growing up in South Dakota, being bullied, training at the Paris Opera, becoming principal at American Ballet Theatre, and being the first American to be invited to dance with the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. We talked about climbing back from his epic injury, his head space at that time, before taking over the Artistic Directorship of the Australian Ballet right in the middle of Covid. A year later we talk about what it's been like to be artistic director now that theatres are open and audiences are back, about what kind of as dancers he selects for the company, how he decides who will be promoted, the Australian Ballet's 60th anniversary, and life in Australia.If you'd like to read more about David's life, find our full conversation in the show notes, or you can read his autobiography called A Body of Work: Dancing to the Edge and Back. For Australian Ballet updates you can find them on Instagram at @ausballet and to continue to follow David's adventures, you'll find him on Instagram at @davidhallbergofficialDavid and I recorded remotely, with David dialling in from Melbourne, the land of the Kulin people, with recording and production on the land of the Awabakal and Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, to all of whom to which we pay our greatest respects.This is the final episode for Season 2 of Talking Pointes. We can not thank our guests enough for sharing their stories, their lives, and their vulnerabilities. To our sponsors, Bloch, Fjord Review, and Energetiks, thank you for all of your support, discount codes are available in the episodes, or see my Instragram for details at @byclaudialawson. To our beautiful audience, thank you. A fun and exciting Season 3 of Talking Pointes will be back next year, in the meantime please feel free to get in contact with suggestions or guests for next year.We're delighted that David Hallberg's episode of Talking Pointes is sponsored by Energetiks. Energetiks are a sustainable, Australian Made brand that specialise in creating world class dancewear for the stars of tomorrow. Perform and feel your best at every stage of your dance journey in Energetiks' premium, high performance fabrics. See their entire range online at energetiks.com.au, and for all Talking Pointes listeners there's a 20% discount on all Energetiks products—listen in for the code!Hosted by @byclaudialawsonProduced by @fjordreviewAdditional Production @clinttopicSound & Editing @outputmediaStudios @brightsidesydney@sawtoothstudios 

Alceste, ou Le triomphe d'Alcide is a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts by Jean-Baptiste Lully. The French-language libretto is by Philippe Quinault, after Euripides' Alcestis. It was first performed on 19 January 1674 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal by the Paris Opera.Purchase the music (without talk) at:Lully: Alceste (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store)Your purchase helps to support our show! Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by La Musica International Chamber Music Festival and Uber. @CMDHedgecock#ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive#LaMusicaFestival #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans#CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin#CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain#ClassicalMusicLivesOn#Uber Please consider supporting our show, thank you!Donate (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store) staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.com

In the mid 19th century, the way to make yourself famous in France as a composer was to write operas. From Cherubini, to Meyerbeer, to Bizet, to Berlioz, to Gounod, to Massenet, to Offenbach, to Saint Saens, to foreign composers who wrote specifically for the Paris Opera like Rossini, Verdi and others, if you wanted to be somebody, especially as a French composer, you wrote operas, and you wrote a lot of them. But one composer in France bucked the trend, and her name was Louise Farrenc. Farrenc never wrote an opera - instead she focused on chamber music, works for solo piano, and three symphonies that were in a firmly Germanic style. Writing in a style that was not en vogue in her home country, along with the obvious gender imbalances of the time, meant that you might expect that Farrenc was completely ignored during her life. But that's not the case. She had a highly successful career as a pianist, a pedagogue, and yes, as a composer too. But after her death, her music was largely forgotten. Bu in the last 15-20 years there has been a concerted effort at bringing Farrenc's music back to life, part of a larger movement to rediscover the work of composers who were unfairly maligned or treated during their lifetimes and after. One of Farrenc's greatest works, and the one we're going to be talking about today, is her 3rd symphony in G Minor. On the surface this is a piece in the mid-to-late German Romantic symphonic tradition, with lots of echoes of Mendelssohn and Schumann, but there's a lot more to it than that. So today on this Patreon sponsored episode, we'll discuss how Farrenc's music fit into French musical life, how a symphony was a still expected to sound in 1847, and of course, this dramatic and powerful symphony that is only now beginning to find its rightful place on stage. Join us!

Amadis or Amadis de Gaule (Amadis of Gaul) is a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts by Jean-Baptiste Lully to a libretto by Philippe Quinault based on Nicolas Herberay des Essarts' adaptation of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo's Amadis de Gaula. It was premiered by the Paris Opera at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal sometime from January 15 to 18, 1684. There was a later production at Versailles without scenery or machines in 1685.Purchase the music (without talk) at:Lully: Amadis de Gaule (classicalsavings.com)Your purchase helps to support our show! Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by La Musica International Chamber Music Festival and Uber. @CMDHedgecock#ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive#LaMusicaFestival #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans#CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin#CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain#ClassicalMusicLivesOn#Uber 

In Julie d'Aubigny's short life she enjoyed affairs with men and women, joined (and destroyed) a convent, performed in the Paris Opera, defeated men in duels and got away with it. It's a Just The Gist classic from 2020 chock-full of gender dynamics, snuff boxes and periods. We'll be back with new stories and special guest hosts next week. We give you Just The Gist, but if you want more, there's this: A comprehensive written account of the life of La Maupin with good footnotes that help provide context https://www.eldacur.com/~brons/Maupin/LaMaupin.html  An even more comprehensive article https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/maupin-daubigny-c-1670-1707  For those who prefer listicles to big slabs of text, here's one https://www.factinate.com/people/facts-julie-daubigny/  An author called Kelly Gardiner wrote a novel inspired by La Maupin called "Goddess" - you can buy the paperback here https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780732298883/goddess/ or track down the ebook version.  See Julie: The Musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/julie-the-musical Our original episode about Julie d'Aubigny was published in June 2020 - scroll down in your feed to find it If you liked this episode, check out our episodes with other kick-arse women including Amelia Earhart, Nancy Wake & Nellie BlySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

为你读英语美文 · 第470期 主播：Nina Zhan (娇娇) 人生就像一本厚重的小说，一首悠扬的歌曲。我用歌声来叙述一个故事，用故事来演绎一首歌曲。大家好，我是Nina娇娇，今年我初中毕业了，三年的初中时光让我长大也长高了。爱唱歌的我在节目中，从儿童自编歌曲《睡得像只小兔》一直唱到了意大利咏叹调 “Sebben Crudele”。塞本·克鲁德勒（Sebben Crudele）的歌剧主题是关于忠贞战胜背叛的爱情故事，它将我们引向另一个传世佳作《歌剧魅影》，一个由爱情战胜悲剧的故事。《歌剧魅影》自1986年以来，至今已经在全世界20多个国家上演。Think of Me是这部音乐剧中的经典名曲之一。今天我要为大家送上《歌剧魅影》中的这首咏叹调以及歌曲背后的故事。在节目的最后你可以和我一起来唱这首名曲，感受这部浪漫的传世佳作。The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux is a Gothic mystery novel first published in 1910. The novel follows a phantom who haunts the Paris Opera and the mysterious incidents attributed to this figure.《歌剧魅影》（The Phantom of The Opera）是一部哥特式神秘小说，小说自1910年连续出版。这部小说讲述了一个“幽灵”在巴黎歌剧院出没以及发生的一系列神秘事件。The story begins with an auction, in which a music box brings the old Raoul back to the past:故事一开始是一场拍卖会，其中一只八音盒使年迈的拉乌尔回到了过去：Carlotta is an opera singer in the bustling metropolis of Paris, France. One day, a mysterious phantom suddenly appears in the theater. The phantom threatens Carlotta to give up her role of singing in the opera Faust and give the role to a woman named Christine.在繁华的大都市法国巴黎，卡洛塔是一名歌剧演员。剧院之中忽然出现了一个神秘的幽灵，幽灵威胁卡洛塔必须放弃她在歌剧《浮士德》中演唱的角色，并将这个角色让给一位名为Christine的女子扮演。The phantom's real body is a masked man who has been lurking in the theater. An accident ruined his appearance and made him terrifying and ferocious. Thus, he has no choice but to wear a mask and hide in the cemetery.幽灵的真身是一直以来潜伏在剧院中的一名头戴面具的男子，一场意外令他的容貌尽毁，变得恐怖狰狞，无奈之下只好戴上面具，躲藏在墓地里。One day, Christine's song attracted his attention, and he found that he had deeply fallen in love with this beautiful woman, so he decided to appear and kidnap Christine. At first, Christine was afraid of the phantom. However, as time went on, Christine gradually found that this terrible phantom had a gentle and kind side. The phantom begins to teach her to sing, and threatened Carlotta through terror to let the theater give the leading role to Christine.一天，克里斯汀的歌声吸引了他的注意，并且他发现自己已经深深地爱上了这位美丽的女子，于是他决定现身将克里斯汀挟持。起初，克里斯汀十分害怕这位诡异的男子，然而，随着时间的推移，克里斯汀渐渐发现，这恐怖的幽灵有着温柔善良的一面，幽灵开始教她声乐，并通过恐怖的手段威胁卡洛塔让剧院使用克里斯汀出演主角。But, when the phantom finds out that Christine and Raoul are in love, he is angry and tries to stop them. After a performance, he drags Christine into his hidden lair while Raoul chases him. The phantom then captures Raoul and threatens Christine that she can either live with the Phantom or let Raoul live or be free but let Raoul die. Christine bravely faces the terrible choice put forward by the phantom. She tells the phantom that he is not alone, and the phantom, overcome with emotion, lets them go. As Raoul and Christine leave, the Phantom sings softly to the music box in despair, and the music box begins to rotate magically... Upon hearing the sound of people coming for him, he flees, leaving only his white mask behind.但当幽灵发现克里斯汀和拉乌尔相爱时，他试图阻止这一切，他在演出后挟持了克里斯汀，拉乌尔紧紧追赶到地下湖，幽灵同时擒获了拉乌尔，并威胁克里斯汀，如果愿意和他一起生活，拉乌尔将得到自由，不然拉乌尔就将死去。克里斯汀勇敢地面对幽灵提出的可怕选择。她告诉幽灵，她不会放弃拉乌尔的，克里斯汀勇敢面对了幽灵提出的可怕选择。幽灵终于绝望了，他放他俩离去，自己却柔声地对着八音盒唱起了歌，八音盒开始神奇地转动起来......，最后当人们追来时，他已经消失，只在座位上留下了一个白色的面具。Due to the twists and turns of the plot, it is full of strange and terrifying colors, the phantom of the opera has attracted a large number of readers, and has derived some films and drama works adapted from the original. The novel has been adapted into several formats. 《歌剧魅影》（The Phantom of the Opera）因情节曲折、充满离奇和恐怖的色彩，因此吸引了大批读者，并相继衍生出一些根据原作改编的电影和戏剧作品。The phantom of the opera was premiered in 1986 and won seven Tony Awards in 1988. It is one of the most successful musicals in history. In 2004, director Joel Schumacher won three Oscars and three Golden Globe nominations for the adaptation of this musical.《歌剧魅影》（The Phantom of the Opera）于1986年首演，1988年获得七项托尼奖，是史上最成功的音乐剧之一。2004年，乔尔·舒马赫（导演）将这部音乐剧改编成电影获得了三项奥斯卡奖和三项金球奖提名。China's early film "Midnight Song" is also based on this novel.我国的早期影片《夜半歌声》也是根据这部小说拍摄的。Think of Me 这首歌曲是著名音乐剧《歌剧魅影》中的一首咏叹调，由该歌剧的女主角演唱。这首歌的旋律令人心动！在节目的最后为大家送上这首歌，愿生命美丽，犹如炫动的五线谱。我是Nina 娇娇，这里是Read English For You 为你读英语美文节目。在我的歌声中向你们说再见！Think of Me (Phantom of the Opera)（女生部）翻译：Nina Zhan　Think of me,想着我think of me fondly,深情地想着我when we've said goodbye.当我们已互道再会Remember me, once in a while -请偶尔想起我please promise me you'll try.请答应我你会去尝试When you find ,that once again,当你再次发现you long to take your heart back and be free -请将你的心带回来让它自由if you ever find a moment,若你有片刻闲暇spare a thought for me...分一些思念给我We've never said our love was evergreen,我们曾说过我们的爱如松柏常青or as unchanging as the sea 如沧海般恒永不变but if you can still remember,但若你还依稀记得stop and think of me...请驻足片刻想一想我Think of all the things we've shared and seen 想想所有那些,我们彼此分享目睹过的事don't think about the things which might have been...莫去想事情可能的变化Think of me,想着我think of me waking,想着醒着的我silent and resigned.沉默且温驯Imagine me,想像我-trying too hard to put you from my mind.极力想将你自心中抹去Recall those days,回想那些日子look back on all those times,回想那些时光think of the things we'll never do 想想那些我们未曾经过往的事there will never be a day, when I won't think of you...我没有一天不想你Flowers fade, the fruits of summer fade花朵会凋谢，夏日果实会枯萎They have their seasons, so do we花朵有季节性，我们亦是如此But please promise me，That sometimes但请答应我，偶尔-you will think Me!你会想起我！主播介绍Nina Zhan (娇娇)：14岁，获2021年和2022 年“美国芝加哥音乐协会年度声乐大赛”百老汇歌剧唱及美声唱金奖。后期制作：Jingjing公众号：为你读英语美文文章，音乐，图片非商业用途，版权归作者或版权方所有我们生活在世界各地，从事不同职业，为你读我们喜欢的美文。

Synopsis In the 19th century, the German spa town of Baden-Baden was the place to be in the summer. Wealthy international tourists could bathe in artesian wells by day, and by night, gamble at the casino or attend performances at a splendid theater modeled on the Paris Opera. That theater opened on today's date in 1862 with the premiere of a new comic opera by the French composer Hector Berlioz, based closely on Shakespeare's comedy ‘Much Ado About Nothing', and titled “Beatrice and Benedict” after the witty pair of lovers in the play. The composer himself conducted. “A great success,” Berlioz wrote the next day. “…applauded from beginning to end. I was recalled to the stage I don't know how many times.” Despite the success, Berlioz confessed, “My infernal neuralgia was so bad that I mounted the podium …without feeling the slightest emotion. This bizarre indifference meant I conducted better than usual!” Despite making light of his increasing illness, possibly Crohn's Disease, this opera proved to be his last work, and Berlioz had only a few more years to live. His biographer David Cairns writes: "Listening to the score's exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched by sadness, one would never guess that its composer was in pain when he wrote it and impatient for death.” Music Played in Today's Program Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) –”Beatrice and Benedict” Overture (Boston Symphony; Charles Munch, cond.) RCA Victor Gold Seal 61400

Donald Macleod begins three weeks focused on French composers, in honour of this month's ‘Tour de France' cycle race. "I have followed the theatre since the age of twelve", so said Rameau to a young composer who wrote to him for advice. It's an intriguing insight into a man who didn't produce his first opera until the age of fifty. Quite why it took him that long isn't clear. Up to that point he had been a church musician, following in his father's footsteps, holding a succession of posts mainly in the South of France. He also taught and established himself as a theoretician of some note. A brief, early sojourn in Paris, a mecca for any theatrical hopeful, ended abruptly when he was still in his twenties. It wasn't until he returned to Paris in 1723 that Rameau was able to start writing music for theatrical entertainments, at first for the popular Fairs, and then finally in 1733 for the Paris Opera. In the midst of constant cultural rows over the merits of French and Italian operatic style, Rameau flourished as a theatre composer. At one point he was so successful the management of the Paris Opera decreed no more than two of his works should be mounted per season, to allow other composers to get a look in! He completed his final opera, a masterpiece, Les Boréades in 1763, the year before he died at the age of eighty. Across the week Donald Macleod focuses on this remarkable period in Rameau's life, from the first of his theatrical works to his last. Music Featured: Naïs (Overture) Naïs (Prologue: Lancez, lancez la foudre) Achante et Céphise (Act: excerpt) Un horizon serein (Les Boréades) La poule (Suite in G minor) Hippolyte et Aricie (Act 3: Quels biens!) Hippolyte et Aricie (Act 4, Sc 1 to 3) Dardanus (Overture) Castor et Pollux (Act 2: excerpt) Castor et Pollux (Act 4, Sc 3) Dardanus (Act 1, Sc 1: Cesse, cruel Amour, de regner sur mon âme) Dardanus (Act 2, Sc 3) Dardanus (Act 4, Sc 1) Les fetes d'Hébé (excerpt) Les surprises d'amour (Ouverture) Les surprises d'amour (Act 1, Sc 6: The Abduction of Adonis) Hippolyte et Aricie (Act 1, Sc 1: Temple sacre, séjour tranquille) Platée (Act 1, Sc 5 and 6: excerpt) Platée (Act 2, Sc 2 to 4) Le Temple de la Gloire (Act 3, Finale) Les indes galantes (excerpt) Zaïs (Act 4, Sc 3 to 4) Anacréon (Sc 6) Pygmalion (Sc 3) Pygmalion (Sc 4) Les fêtes de Polymnie (Prologue, Sc 3) Zoroastre (Act 3: excerpt) Achanté et Céphise (Act 3: excerpt) Achanté et Céphise (Act 3: excerpt) Les Boréades (Act 2: excerpt) Les Boréades (Act 4: Entrée de Polymnie) Presented by Donald Macleod Produced by Johannah Smith For full track listings, including artist and recording details, and to listen to the pieces featured in full (for 30 days after broadcast) head to the series page for Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0018qjv And you can delve into the A-Z of all the composers we've featured on Composer of the Week here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3cjHdZlXwL7W41XGB77X3S0/composers-a-to-z

https://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/39https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1986_musical)https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-water-tank-beneath-palais-garnier-paris-francehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdGhGX6z8BA&ab_channel=HistoryMattershttps://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k283653v.image.langFRhttps://standardebooks.org/ebooks/gaston-leroux/the-phantom-of-the-opera/alexander-teixeira-de-mattoshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Communehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Lerouxhttp://blog.feinviolins.com/2012/05/phantoms-inspiration-chaos-in-paris.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_GarnierHi everybody and welcome back to another episode of nightmare now the show where we put fright at the forefront and face our fears forever. This is episode nine and I'm not showing any signs of stopping, slowing down, losing sleep, sure but stopping never. Holy hell what a week it's been, working backwards I had a lovely triple mothers day, with meal and flowers and the whole shebang, So big shout out to all the moms out there this one goes out to all of you, most people have a mother or at least know one so tell them you love em! Further back  we celebrated my future brother in law's college graduation so that was awesome, man those commencement speakers don't know when to shut up! Start a podcast like the rest of us, and for the love of god work on your mic technique! I have never been more sensitive to mouth sounds and lip smacks in my whole life than I have the last few months. I guess that comes with the territory of  editing yourself talking for a few hours a week, I still don't know if I'll ever get over hearing how my voice reverberates differently in the world than in my own skull but we've got plenty of time to figure it out, Either way big ups to all my homies graduating these few weeks. We're all proud of you. I guess. Ok turning back the clock a little further, we get to my lovely family trip to New York City, to see The Phantom of the Opera,  Which incidentally starts just like this podcast does, an explosive jump back through time.  There's only so many ways I can apply pyrotechnics in an audio medium like this so I'll begrudgingly say that they did it better. Just this once. Wait till you see how many explosions I'll have when I start doing live shows. Naturally, all this driving and sitting and being present with my family on both sides was not conducive to doing a whole lot of research and development on my reclusive horror comedy podcast, I really should have made QR stickers for NYC, I was thinking to myself wouldn't it be f**king awesome if this broadway show was based on a real deformed man with a melodious voice murdering people in a theater? I did some research and it isn't. Well it was a good try. Andrew Lloyd Webber's phantom of the opera, which came out in 1986 was not in fact based on any kind of true story whatsoever. It was based on a book, a French mystery novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. By Gaston LEroux. The book however, BAHHHHH BUMMM BUMMM BUMMM BUMMM BAHHHHH was in fact based on a true story. I wish I could just throw the clip in there. But I gotta remix it just a lil bit so I don't get executed by Broadway lawyers. Gotta love the Wahwah. That's right there really was a tragedy resulting in death and grievous injury in an old timey opera theater. Please remain in your seats everyone, it was only an accident, an accident huahuaahauhauha! I'm inclined to sympathize with the phantom because his name is Erik and he grew up as the weird kid but my fiance says he's creepy when he writes a horny play and murders several people to get close to an actress. How does she think we met? So If you're unfamiliar with the Phantom of the Opera, go see it if you ever get the chance, I can't get over how awesome the show was and how great it is to see a little bit of live theater again. But the spoiler free plot is that a man, twisted by deformity from birth, lives in a lake under an opera theater, collects a protection racket from the owners and works a side gig as a music tutor. Really a community man. He eventually falls in love with a chorus girl and pulls some strings, well, more pulls some nooses to make sure she's the star of the opera they're putting on, beyond that you get into some major spoilers but I think that's all the info you need to enjoy this episode. Obviously the phans with a ph might get a little more out of it but oh well, it's stuck in my head. Ask anyone I work with. So what did happen to inspire this story?  Let's start from the author, Gaston leroux. No idea if I'm saying that right, I never took any French in school. I think my high school French teacher actually got fired because she brought a nalgene full of vodka every day. I really don't know if that's true but  I remember hearing it and laughing at the time. At this point I don't f**king blame her. I don't know how teachers deal with high schoolers without a literal liter of vodka. Anyway, Gaston leroux had a shotgun blast career, originally studying law, graduating as a lawyer and then immediately receiving a massive inheritance of a few million francs in 1889 and subsequently gambling and spending it away lavishly until 1890. Holy s**t that must have been a hell of a year. So after his year long project X debacle he decided he didn't want to be a lawyer and became a journalist and theater critic. This'll come up later. obviously. He also covered the Russian revolution in 1905 which is a whole can of worms. We'll get into some crazy Russian history eventually but not in today's episode. After that he retired from journalism and settled into a comfy life of writing detective fiction. He was basically the french analog to arthur conan doyle and sherlock holmes.  In 1907  he published his seminal work, and I had to double check that that word didn't mean relating to semen, and that it more meant the artist's most important and influential work, but apparently it's both. Go figure. Maybe my best episode and my seminal work will literally just be about cum, we'll see. So his seminal work though, was the phantom of the opera based on current, at the time, events and also his investigative journalism on the palais garnier (Pal-eye garn-e-ay) which from now on in the show will be referred to as the paris opera house because I don't speak french. People say it's a romantic language, but Americans sound awful speaking french. According to my listener info, france and india are tied for my number #2 countries so I don't know if it's a couple of french folks tuning in or 1 dedicated listener that's listened to every single episode so far, but either way that's awesome and another reason I decided to do this episode. Thanks for listening, wherever you are! Sorry for putting your shoutout directly after the semen talk but that's just how the dice roll ami! Anyway Gaston wrote his novel after he was inspired by the events of May 20th 1896, at the Paris Opera house. Wherein a performance was taking place. I got all this information from French newspaper articles from may 21st and 22nd 1896, the day after the event, run through google translate a few different ways. That's right baby we getting contemporary sources. To my French listener, if you have a better translation of the archived article, found in the show notes, hit me up and I can run corrections next week. Picture if you will the end of the first act of an opera, helle, which I'm not familiar with, a woman singing an impossibly high, extended note, her heaving breasts barely contained in her corset, adorned with a viking hat and braids,  the note ends and the audience rises to clap and applaud. All is going well, as the show has the last few nights and then there is a flash from above and a horrible rending noise of snapping steel cable. Screams cut through the applause and with a crash it seemed like the ceiling was coming down into the crowd. A whole new meaning to bringing down the house!What exactly happened though? SUPPOSEDLY, if you believe The quote OFFICIAL NARRITIVE, electrical cables wrapped around the steel cables became stripped, heated up and melted from the current. This caused a cascading collapse of several of the counterweights holding up the SEVEN f**kING TON CHANDELIER. That's like dropping a T REX on someone. My chandelier is like 10 pounds. Luckily that's literally what the counterweights were for. Each section was a set of discs weighing seven hundred and ninety two pounds. People rejoiced quickly that they just got hit and bruised by pieces of drywall and stuff but it was soon discovered, unfortunately, seven hundred and ninety two pounds is a lot of f**king weight to drop on somebody. So even though only one of these counterweights fell, instead of the whole chandelier like in the novel, the nearly eight hundred  pounds slammed through the ceiling and the fifth floor and fell directly on seats eleven through thirteen on the fourth floor mezzanine. Although people were initially relieved that there wasn't any major injuries, just contusions and shock, they eventually were proven wrong when people combed through the rubble on the fourth floor and found a 12 year old girl covered with blood, crying for her mother who was trapped. Rescuers set to work clearing the rubble from the fourth floor where the counterweight had come down. Much to their horror they found the mutilated body of a madame chomette, the young girl's mother. Her skull and right side of her body had been completely crushed under the weight of the falling iron and she had died almost instantly. Man that's f**king sad. Someone in the next seat over had been struck by a live wire and been electrocuted unconscious but survived. The young girl survived but was left without a mother and presumably severe psychological trauma and ptsd, one of the wrought iron discs continued through the fourth floor down to the third and hit another woman's leg. It just clipped her but a weight that size still ripped all the flesh down to the bone in her lower leg. Ugh. Pretty much everyone else escaped with concussions or contusions and the psychological trauma inherent in all that carnage. An electrical short circuit caused by the snapping cables flailing around caused a fire to break out on the roof but firemen were able to get up there fairly quickly before any devastating structural damage was done.Now we gotta take a second to go back to Leroux's investigative journalism. He uncovered that underneath the paris opera house was a set of prison cells used to imprison objectors to the Paris Commune, which as far as I can tell was a sort of socialist takeover of paris that lasted two or three months, they were losing wars at the border, the armies were spread thin, so a volunteer national guard was left to defend Paris, and much to their chagrin they weren't really getting jack s**t for it. The parisian government at the time, when war cooled down at the border didn't want these uppity national militia hanging around bellyaching so they asked them politely to turn their guns in. This kind of thing usually only goes one way unless you're Australia in the 1990s so of course fighting breaks out and the national guard takes over the city, forcing the old government to flee. This left the national guard and parisans to elect a new left wing government while the old government and ruling class kinda regrouped in versailles. They weren't exactly thrilled with the shenanigans in paris and were gonna march in and kill the revolutionaries. Seeing that trying to hold paris with a tiny outgunned force wasn't really a winning proposition, the commune marched on versaille hoping to pick up peasant support on the way over. There wasn't that much. They got their a*s kicked and ran back to Paris. Then the actual french army went and marched on paris and pretty much wiped the revolutionaries out because they really hadn't gotten farther than the planning stages of a new government and couldn't agree on anything. I found a nice little mini doc on that I'll link in the notes.  Anyway the short lived commune of paris locked dissenters and undesirables in cells beneath the opera, just twenty or thirty years before the disaster with the chandelier's counterweights. Almost an exact timeline for one of those prisoners to escape and haunt the theater from a young age, lining up almost exactly with the novel and the play's timeline of events. Now everything up to this point is one hundred percent true history. After this things start to become hazy. This next section is actually true as well though now that I think about it. So when the dude designing and constructing the paris opera house, garnier, broke ground on the place in 1862 water bubbled up from beneath. Keep in mind that in the novel and play the Phantom's lair lies on the shore of an underground lake beneath the opera house. The level of groundwater in the foundation was overwhelming even with contemporary pumps running 24/7 in the hollowed out foundation; they couldn't keep the water out. In fact they had to redesign the whole f**king thing! The whole foundation needed to rebuilt to accommodate a massive new concrete cistern to divert the water. A cistern that still exists to this very day. I'll throw some pictures of it in the show notes for the curious. A series of catacombs and tunnels that nobody knows quite the whole plan for. Conveniently, the plans for the tunnels underneath were lost, or were they stolen? Cue it again jamie! There is a legend that persists to this day that the whole structure was built above an underground lake. It's starting to add up isn't it? Lose yourself to the music of the night and accept that the phantom of the opera could very easily be a real historical figure. That's not necessarily the claim I'm making but it all lines up, the timelines, the setting, the events, and even a plucky investigative crime journalist slash theater critic to tie the whole thing together.  I'm sitting here with my playbill from the show and 17th century newspaper clippings up on a cork board like I'm looking for pepe silva. Of course though, we're lacking a motive, Or are we? I found this primary source from 1846 which included a number of lectures on the societal treatment of people with deformities and birth defects from 1846, and if those words aren't the current accepted nomenclature, let me know I'm not trying to offend anybody here. Anyway here's the quote: “the deformed have been regarded as loathsome in body, and depraved in mind; they have often isolated themselves from their fellow creatures; persecution of them has ever been sanctioned by the Mosaic ceremonial, which admitted the unblemished alone to the dignity of priesthood… still is the deformed man exposed to the derision of the heartless, and is shut out from the world simply because nature has played some freak by which he differs from his fellow mortals.” Regarded as freaks and subhumans, someone who was, say, locked up, forced to wear a mask and take up residence in an underground lake, hearing nothing but the peals of the opera above him for years, subsiding on I don't even know, hot dogs, pretzels and popcorn? Watching from the shadows, learning the intricacies of theater rigging, music and performance? I'm just saying it isn't the most unrealistic story ever told. We've gone now past the point of no return, and with any luck, the phantom of the opera is truly there. Inside your mind. I had a lot of fun putting this one together, I hope you enjoyed it, as always I hope your thrilled to be here like everyone in the playbill I got. It truly means a lot to me that you take the time to check out my show and I only hope that I make it worth your time. If you've got a topic you want me to check out or any other feedback you can reach me at nightmarenow.com that's got all the social media links, I should hopefully have my facebook page up by next week but for now you can get me on instagram, twitter or by email, and all that is available on the website. Lastly, all I ask of you, is that you think of me fondly, and maybe voice that in a review or rating somewhere, it helps out a lot! As always I'd wish you all sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be the music of the night--mares now! Catch ya next week! 

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" ]

Book Vs. Movie “Musicals in March” The 1911 Novel The Phantom of the Opera Vs the 2004 Joel Schumacher FilmThe Margos close out “Musicals in March” with one of the most popular musicals of all time--The Phantom of the Opera. Originally created in 1911 by French journalist and bon vivant Gaston Leroux, the story is based on stories about the Paris Opera in the 1800s which include hauntings aplenty. His creation is about Phantom Erik (!) who is an “Opera Ghost” madly in love with soprano Christine. The complicated tale of Christine, the “Angel of Music,” her childhood friend Raoul, a performance of Faust, and flooding in the basement of the Palais Garnier involves love, intrigue, some objectification, and imprisonment. The 1925 movie starring Lon Chaney just barely scratched the surface so we turn to the unofficial King of Musicals--Andrew Lloyd Weber who along with lyricist Charles Hart created one of the most successful productions in Broadway and West End history. The 2004 film was directed by the late Joel Schumacher. It's lush, gorgeous, and filled with talented actors. So, between the original story and the 2014 musical adaptation--which did we prefer? In this ep the Margos discuss:The author Gaston LerouxParis in the early 20th Century The differences between the novella and musicalThe cast includes Gerard Butler (The Phantom,) Emmy Rossum (Christine,) Patrick Wilson (Raoul,) Minnie Driver (Carlotta,) Simon Callow (Gilles,) and Victor McGuire (Ubaldo.) Clips used:Opening scene of the movieThe Phantom of the Opera (the 2004 trailer)“I Remember Stranger…”“Why So Silent”“All I Ask of You”Carlotta singsMusic by Andrew Lloyd WeberBook Vs. Movie is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you will love Frolic.Media/podcasts. Join our Patreon page to help support the show! https://www.patreon.com/bookversusmovie Book Vs. Movie podcast https://www.facebook.com/bookversusmovie/Twitter @bookversusmovie www.bookversusmovie.comEmail us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo D. @BrooklynFitChik www.brooklynfitchick.com brooklynfitchick@gmail.comMargo P. @ShesNachoMama https://coloniabook.weebly.com/ Our logo was designed by Madeleine Gainey/Studio 39 Marketing Follow on Instagram @Studio39Marketing & @musicalmadeleine

Book Vs. Movie “Musicals in March” The 1911 Novel The Phantom of the Opera Vs the 2004 Joel Schumacher FilmThe Margos close out “Musicals in March” with one of the most popular musicals of all time--The Phantom of the Opera. Originally created in 1911 by French journalist and bon vivant Gaston Leroux, the story is based on stories about the Paris Opera in the 1800s which include hauntings aplenty. His creation is about Phantom Erik (!) who is an “Opera Ghost” madly in love with soprano Christine. The complicated tale of Christine, the “Angel of Music,” her childhood friend Raoul, a performance of Faust, and flooding in the basement of the Palais Garnier involves love, intrigue, some objectification, and imprisonment. The 1925 movie starring Lon Chaney just barely scratched the surface so we turn to the unofficial King of Musicals--Andrew Lloyd Weber who along with lyricist Charles Hart created one of the most successful productions in Broadway and West End history. The 2004 film was directed by the late Joel Schumacher. It's lush, gorgeous, and filled with talented actors. So, between the original story and the 2014 musical adaptation--which did we prefer? In this ep the Margos discuss:The author Gaston LerouxParis in the early 20th Century The differences between the novella and musicalThe cast includes Gerard Butler (The Phantom,) Emmy Rossum (Christine,) Patrick Wilson (Raoul,) Minnie Driver (Carlotta,) Simon Callow (Gilles,) and Victor McGuire (Ubaldo.) Clips used:Opening scene of the movieThe Phantom of the Opera (the 2004 trailer)“I Remember Stranger…”“Why So Silent”“All I Ask of You”Carlotta singsMusic by Andrew Lloyd WeberBook Vs. Movie is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Find more podcasts you will love Frolic.Media/podcasts. Join our Patreon page to help support the show! https://www.patreon.com/bookversusmovie Book Vs. Movie podcast https://www.facebook.com/bookversusmovie/Twitter @bookversusmovie www.bookversusmovie.comEmail us at bookversusmoviepodcast@gmail.com Margo D. @BrooklynFitChik www.brooklynfitchick.com brooklynfitchick@gmail.comMargo P. @ShesNachoMama https://coloniabook.weebly.com/ Our logo was designed by Madeleine Gainey/Studio 39 Marketing Follow on Instagram @Studio39Marketing & @musicalmadeleine

Join us as we head to Paris, France to talk with the General Director of the Paris Opera, Alexander Neef, who was our very first guest (but at a different opera house), about making career changes DURING the pandemic, what measures were taken to keep his opera house open during the height of the pandemic, streaming platforms and cultivating new, young talent for the future. https://www.operadeparis.fr/en/lopera-de-paris/alexander-neef www.screamingdivas.com  

Conductor Kwamé Ryan is the final guest for Season 2 of the podcast. Mr. Ryan's international career includes holding the position of General Musical Director of Freiburg Opera, Musical and Artistic Director of the National Orchestra of Bordeaux and Musical Director of the National Youth Orchestra of France. As a guest conductor, he has worked with the Paris Opera, Belgian National Opera, English National Opera and many more. In 2011, he was inducted as an officer in the Order of Arts and Letters, one of France's highest honors. Kwamé and Denis discuss education, language, interpretation, serving the composer and the personal nature of his most recent project, The Time of Our Singing. His musical journey is a unique and inspiring one. We'll be back in 2022 with Season 3!Kwamé Ryan:Website: www.kwameryan.comPodcast: 8 Minute IdeaDenis:Website: www.denislambertonline.comInstagram: @denis_e_lambertPodcast:Website: www.thevoraciousstudent.comInstagram: @thevoraciousstudentFacebook: /thevoraciousstudent

“All the themes are very contemporary. I think what moves this story is the search for instantaneous celebrity. That's what the girls are all about, Roxie and Velma. They want to be famous. Of course everything that you cited, corruption, crimes, the press focusing on sensational stories–it's all there. And I think that's why the public relates so much to it.”Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot's opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He's currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.· www.pauloszot.com· chicagothemusical.com· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3 · www.creativeprocess.info

Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot's opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He's currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.· www.pauloszot.com· chicagothemusical.com· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3 · www.creativeprocess.info

“All the themes are very contemporary. I think what moves this story is the search for instantaneous celebrity. That's what the girls are all about, Roxie and Velma. They want to be famous. Of course everything that you cited, corruption, crimes, the press focusing on sensational stories–it's all there. And I think that's why the public relates so much to it.”Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot's opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He's currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.· www.pauloszot.com· chicagothemusical.com· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3 · www.creativeprocess.info

Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot's opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He's currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.· www.pauloszot.com· chicagothemusical.com· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3 · www.creativeprocess.info

“All the themes are very contemporary. I think what moves this story is the search for instantaneous celebrity. That's what the girls are all about, Roxie and Velma. They want to be famous. Of course everything that you cited, corruption, crimes, the press focusing on sensational stories–it's all there. And I think that's why the public relates so much to it.”Paulo Szot won the Tony as Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his Broadway debut at Emile de Becque in the 2008 Tony-winning revival of South Pacific. This performance also netted him Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Theatre World awards. Szot's opera credits include performances at the Metropolitan, Scala di Milano, Paris Opera, Carnegie Hall, and others. He's currently starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, the longest-running American musical in Broadway history.· www.pauloszot.com· chicagothemusical.com· chicagothemusical.com/cast/#cast-gallery-3 · www.creativeprocess.info

Tara interviews Valerie Gabail, an amazing classical French singer and teacher. Valerie shares her musical journey from child to adult, with giving us a glimpse into what it was like to have a vocal injury and how she moved through it into recovery and beyond.   Valerie was influenced to love music as a child through her father, who brought so many styles of music into their home.   In high school, Valerie had a jazz group music teacher who encouraged her to keep training because “she had a voice.”  She performed classically through the years in a lot of places and some of her favorites were the Paris Opera and Taormina in Sicily. One gentleman, Howard Crook took Valerie under his wings and was one of her early voice teachers that really helped her in many ways of encouragement. “I want to be as important for other people—encouragement, supporting them…” Valerie, while performing, in her early 30's injured her voice through a number of things going on in her singing. She sang way too much, had stage fright, was sick sometimes, had to travel often, didn't give herself time to recover and it affected her voice. They found nodules on her voice and she was losing her range. She didn't need an operation but had so many avenues of her singing that needed addressing because they weren't healthy. Valerie reassessed her technique, her psychological approach to singing, and more. She utilized different specialists to address her posture, her jaw, her tongue and other physical aspects. She also worked through some of her speech itself—including the pitch of where she spoke. She also worked with a teacher who introduced her to the the Swedish/Italian school of music. Here is the method and its main features and history: https://vocalwisdom.com/swedishitalian-school/   The teacher she works with is David Jones https://www.voiceteacher.com/biography.html     “Being aware of the anatomy and how the instrument functions is so important.”   Valerie gives some great tips to keep your voice from getting injured: Good technique/good teacher is so important. Daily lifestyle of your vocal health. Psychological aspect of being happy in your career.   One of the bigger issues that Valerie sees in her students is this: They dissociate the spoken mode from the singing mode. “Singing opera is crying in pitch.” By Stanislavski   Here are some tips for long term singing from Valerie: Having a good teacher and carrying on with the technique Have a healthy lifestyle Knowing yourself and surrounding yourself with those who support you Being in the process of your singing and being okay with not always being consumed by the end game—being in the “NOW” moment     Her website is: https://www.valeriegabail.com     You can follow THE ENGAGING VOICE on the platform you listen on and you can share the episode on social media.  (Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart radio, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music Audible and PlayerFM too!! ) If you would take a moment, please go to Apple Podcasts or Amazon Audible to rate/review this podcast: Amazon Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Engaging-Voice-Podcast/B08K5661QR Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-engaging-voice/id1448497465     You can find me: @tarabrueskemusic on IG and TaraBrueskeMusic on Facebook!