Podcasts about well tempered clavier

Episode: 2579 Music and Mathematics.  Today, UH Math Professor Krešo Josić talks about music and mathematics.

Lots of research has tried to break down how music toys with the emotions of any audience, but have you ever thought about how music makes the musicians playing it feel? A group of researchers from Italy recently noticed this gap in the science and decided to answer it. They found that when violinists play more emotional pieces, their bow movements are rougher. Nicola di Stefano, the cognitive scientist who led the study, thinks that this effect might come from musicians reacting strongly to the emotions in the pieces they play. He suggests that psychological pressure is the root cause. Professional violinist Curtis Macomber, though, doesn't see these results echoed in reality. He thinks of emotion as an overwhelmingly positive tool in his arsenal, something that makes his playing better, rather than worse. While Nicola and his team found that emotions can hamper a violinist, Curt actually looks forward to encountering them. Listen in as we dive into how playing emotional pieces affects musicians. Music: • Bach - Prelude and Fugue in C minor - BWV 847 - The Well-Tempered Clavier, No. 2 - Arranged for Strings [Gregor Quendel | Free Music Archive] • Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik / Serenade No. 13 - KV 525.mp3 [Gregor Quendel | Free Music Archive] • György Kurtág - Kafka Fragmente op. 24 [Divertimento Ensemble]

We explore repertoire from major and minor keys, highlighting how young artists express the character and nuance that each represent. We hear a teen cellist perform a bright and sunny work with ties to both the Baroque and Romantic eras, a young violinist brings a dark and stormy Beethoven Sonata, and a 17-year-old pianist performs a major fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This Day in Legal History: Max Headroom IncidentOn November 22, 1987, a bizarre and illegal hijacking of television signals in Chicago made history as the "Max Headroom incident." During an evening broadcast of the news on WGN-TV, the signal was interrupted by a person wearing a rubber Max Headroom mask—a character from a popular British-American sci-fi show. The intruder, who spoke in distorted audio while a buzzing background noise played, reappeared later during a broadcast of "Doctor Who" on PBS affiliate WTTW. In the second interruption, the masked figure performed erratic gestures, spouted nonsensical phrases, and referenced TV culture, all culminating in a crude act involving a flyswatter and exposed buttocks. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), tasked with regulating airwaves, launched an immediate investigation, as signal hijacking violates federal laws prohibiting unauthorized use of broadcast frequencies. Despite efforts by the FCC and law enforcement, the perpetrators were never identified, adding an air of mystery to the event. The technical feat required to override broadcast signals in 1987 suggested that the culprits had considerable expertise and access to specialized equipment.This incident was one of the most notorious cases of broadcast signal intrusion, highlighting vulnerabilities in television networks at the time. It also sparked debates about cybersecurity, freedom of expression, and the emerging role of "hacktivism" in digital media. No further incidents of this type occurred on such a scale in the United States, likely due to improvements in broadcast security and stricter regulatory oversight. President-elect Donald Trump announced his nomination of former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as Attorney General following Matt Gaetz's withdrawal. Bondi, a longstanding Trump ally, has been a vocal supporter of his claims that the Justice Department's investigations into him were politically biased. If confirmed, Bondi would oversee major aspects of the DOJ, including defending controversial policies and managing federal grants.Trump praised Bondi for her toughness and alignment with his "America First" agenda. Bondi previously served on Trump's legal defense team during his first impeachment trial and has taken high-profile legal stances, including challenging the Affordable Care Act as Florida's Attorney General. However, her tenure has also been marked by controversies, such as accepting a Trump Foundation donation while considering action against Trump University, though no wrongdoing was found.Bondi's nomination comes as Trump plans significant changes to the Justice Department, including possible leadership shifts, and amid ongoing federal indictments against him. Bondi has publicly supported Trump's claims of voter fraud and pledged to investigate alleged “deep state” actors. Her background includes working on drug policy and opioid abuse commissions during Trump's first term and involvement with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.Matt Gaetz, initially chosen for the role, stepped down citing the distraction caused by controversies, including a closed sex trafficking investigation and a House Ethics probe. Trump's choice of Bondi highlights his intent to reshape the DOJ's focus while surrounding himself with trusted allies.Trump Picks Pam Bondi for Attorney General After Gaetz Exit (1)Trump picks Pam Bondi for US Attorney General after Gaetz withdraws | ReutersPresident-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with identifying and repealing federal regulations they consider overly burdensome or invalid. The panel plans to focus on rules that they argue were enacted by unaccountable bureaucracies, guided by recent Supreme Court decisions that curtail agency rulemaking powers. DOGE also aims to propose mass layoffs and identify unauthorized federal spending, with a goal of completing its work by July 4, 2026.Repealing federal rules, however, is a complex and lengthy process governed by the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires detailed justifications, public comment periods, and compliance with legal standards. While Trump could issue executive orders halting enforcement of certain rules, agencies must still follow formal procedures for repealing them. Lawsuits are likely to challenge attempts to eliminate regulations, especially by opponents who claim improper justification or procedural violations.Musk and Ramaswamy's efforts will leverage recent Supreme Court rulings limiting agencies' ability to address major economic or societal issues without explicit Congressional authorization. Despite this, many regulations have firm legal backing, making their repeal difficult. Legal experts predict a wave of lawsuits and mixed outcomes, given the partisan makeup of federal courts. DOGE's recommendations signal Trump's broader agenda to significantly curtail the administrative powers of federal agencies.How Trump's Musk-led efficiency panel could slash federal agency rules | ReutersThe European Commission has closed its four-year antitrust investigation into Apple's rules for e-book and audiobook app developers following the withdrawal of the original complaint. The complainant, who remains unnamed, opted to drop the case, prompting regulators to end the probe. The closure does not indicate that Apple's conduct was found to comply with EU competition laws. EU regulators emphasized their ongoing commitment to monitoring tech industry practices, including Apple's, under the Digital Markets Act and broader competition regulations. The case's conclusion reflects the challenges in sustaining antitrust investigations without active complainants, though scrutiny of Apple's business practices in Europe is expected to persist.EU regulators scrap probe into Apple's e-book rules after complaint was withdrawn | ReutersSenate Democrats have agreed to a deal with Republicans to advance votes on President Joe Biden's district court nominees while abandoning four appellate court picks. The agreement allows the Senate to confirm several district court judges quickly, despite GOP stalling tactics aimed at delaying Biden's judicial appointments before Republicans assume control of the White House and Senate in January. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's spokesperson highlighted that the trade-off prioritized advancing more district court nominees over the blocked circuit picks.The deal derails the nominations of Adeel Mangi, Ryan Park, Karla Campbell, and Julia Lipez for appellate court seats. Mangi, who would have been the first Muslim federal appellate judge, faced opposition from some Democrats over allegations linking him to antisemitic and anti-police groups. Park's nomination was also at risk due to lack of Republican support. Meanwhile, the Senate pushed forward on cloture votes for several district court nominees, including Spark Sooknanan, Brian Murphy, Anne Hwang, Cynthia Valenzuela Dixon, and Catherine Henry. Votes on their confirmations will occur after Thanksgiving. Other nominees, such as Sharad Desai for Arizona and several others approved by the Judiciary Committee, also advanced. The agreement leaves critical appellate seats open, including those on the Third and First Circuits, aiding President-elect Donald Trump's agenda to influence the federal judiciary. Some judges considering semi-retirement may now delay their decisions, further impacting the judicial landscape.Biden Circuit Picks Derailed by Senate Deal on Trial Judges (2)This week's closing theme is by Johann Sebastian Bach.Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period, widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in Western music history. Born into a family of musicians in Eisenach, he displayed prodigious talent from a young age, mastering the organ, harpsichord, and violin. Throughout his career, Bach held prestigious positions as a court musician, music director, and cantor, most notably serving as the Thomaskantor in Leipzig, where he composed many of his most enduring works. His output includes cantatas, concertos, masses, and instrumental pieces, showcasing an unparalleled command of counterpoint, harmony, and structure. Despite limited recognition during his lifetime, Bach's music profoundly influenced later composers, earning him the title "Father of Music."This week's closing music is Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G minor, BWV 861, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I. This collection of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys was revolutionary, both as a demonstration of the possibilities of the then-novel well-tempered tuning system and as a masterclass in compositional technique. The G minor prelude opens with a flowing, somber melody that builds in complexity, evoking introspection and elegance. The fugue that follows is a testament to Bach's genius for counterpoint, weaving together a single thematic idea into an intricate tapestry of musical voices.The Prelude and Fugue in G minor exemplifies Bach's ability to transform simple ideas into profound statements, inviting listeners into a world of meticulous craftsmanship and emotional depth. It's a fitting choice to close the week, blending timeless artistry with intellectual rigor.Without further ado, Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G minor, enjoy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

An austere fugue subject here begins with a strange leap. To play this four-note opening on a keyboard is to outline a symmetrical structure, reminding us of the bare pillar that holds up the structure. Adorned on the structure are two faster, florid themes which enter later in this long piece.  But our moment today is its ending -- a deceptive ending leads to a brief coda, but when it happens, its harmony strikes us with a surprising dissonance, feeling almost like the resolute major tonic triad that it wants to become. But a pesky A natural, the sixth scale degree, dashes this to pieces.    Bertrand Cuiller plays the C# minor fugue (with prelude) for the Netherlands Bach Society

On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan (and a very special guest) introduce the course "The History of Classical Music:Pythagoras through Beethoven". From the time that Pythagoras developed the science of music in Ancient Greece, it took over two millennia for the greatest minds in science, philosophy, politics, and religion to discover the proper tuning of a chromatic scale. From that moment, music has been able to express the fullest range of human experience and formulate in sound elements of the human experience that cannot be articulated in words. In “The History of Classical Music,” concert pianist and Hillsdale College Distinguished Fellow Hyperion Knight explains how music has developed and what distinguishes the greatest musical achievements through the life of Beethoven. Join this course, whether you are a music novice or an aficionado of the classical style, to learn what makes music great. From the time that Pythagoras discovered the mathematical ratios of harmonic scales, it took the greatest minds over two thousand years to tune the major and minor keys. Pope Gregory I, Charlemagne, Sir Isaac Newton, and lesser-known figures like Guido of Arezzo all contributed to the advancement of the science of music building to the crescendo of Baroque operas. Significant pieces discussed include Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan (and a very special guest) introduce the course "The History of Classical Music:Pythagoras through Beethoven". From the time that Pythagoras developed the science of music in Ancient Greece, it took over two millennia for the greatest minds in science, philosophy, politics, and religion to discover the proper tuning of a chromatic scale. From that moment, music has been able to express the fullest range of human experience and formulate in sound elements of the human experience that cannot be articulated in words. In “The History of Classical Music,” concert pianist and Hillsdale College Distinguished Fellow Hyperion Knight explains how music has developed and what distinguishes the greatest musical achievements through the life of Beethoven. Join this course, whether you are a music novice or an aficionado of the classical style, to learn what makes music great. From the time that Pythagoras discovered the mathematical ratios of harmonic scales, it took the greatest minds over two thousand years to tune the major and minor keys. Pope Gregory I, Charlemagne, Sir Isaac Newton, and lesser-known figures like Guido of Arezzo all contributed to the advancement of the science of music building to the crescendo of Baroque operas. Significant pieces discussed include Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

American classical pianist and educator Christopher O'Riley has spent his career gleefully ignoring musical boundaries and playing whatever turned him on. In addition to playing Beethoven, Busoni, Ravel, Scriabin, and Liszt, he's also arranged music by Nick Drake, Nirvana, Elliot Smith, and Radiohead; he leads masterclasses covering nearly every aspect of piano playing and repertoire from 1600 to 2020. Christopher O'Riley's latest album is of J.S. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, done in a distinctly personal, even idiosyncratic style. He presents his years-long study of the Preludes & Fugues by Bach and a recent arrangement of a classic popular song, in-studio. Set list: 1. Bach: Prelude & Fugue #1 in C major, BWV 846 2. Bach: Prelude & Fugue #4 in C# minor, BWV 849 3."Over the Rainbow"

The famous C minor fugue near the beginning of the Well-Tempered Clavier expresses the emotions of sadness, loneliness, and melancholy, according to harpsichordist Masato Suzuki. Suzuki provides a sensitive performance with attention to articulate detail in the fugue subject. This, naturally, leads Christian and Alex into a comparison with race cars.  But, more straightforwardly, this fugue is part of the large journey that is the whole two books of preludes and fugues. The first prelude is a walk in the garden; its fugue is a hopeful step forward. But the following prelude in C minor is intrepid and fearless, boldly marching out the door. So, this fugue is when we finally run onto the road, with all of the uneasiness this entails. Explore with us how these first four parts of the WTC work together, what a countersubject (or even a second countersubject) is, and how this fugue embodies the very word root of "fugue" (to fly, flee).    Fugue in C minor as played by Masato Suzuki for the Netherlands Bach Society Playlist with the entire Well-Tempered Clavier

In May 2024, pianist Christopher O'Riley was in Portland for a concert with his good friend, cellist Matt Haimovitz. All Classical Radio's Program Director, John Pitman, invited Christopher for an interview in the Roger O. Doyle Performance Studio, the day before their concert. Keep reading on the All Classical Arts Blog: https://www.allclassical.org/pitman-review-christopher-oriley/

Jay begins this episode with Paul Hindemith, who in 1921 combined his interest in ragtime with his love of Bach. There is also a minuet by Ravel, glancing back at Haydn. There is a song by Zemlinsky, setting Langston Hughes. There are wonders and curiosities in this episode—which, by the way, has a sponsor: Michael Lohafer, who, as Jay says, is “a particular authority on Mozart.” Mr. Lohafer says, “My sponsorship is on behalf of all attentive listeners to Music for a While who enjoy the well-considered selections that always delight the ear.” Bach, Fugue in C minor from “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book 1 Hindemith, “Ragtime (Well-Tempered)” Ravel, “Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn” Schumann, “Faschingsschwank aus Wien” Zemlinsky, “Afrikanischer Tanz” from “Symphonische Gesänge” Liszt, “Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa” from “Années de pèlerinage, deuxième année: Italie” Vasks, Dolcissimo from “The Book” Prokofiev, Sonata No. 7, Precipitato Martinů, Fantasia for String Quartet, Oboe, Theremin, and Piano Gounod, “Ah! lève-toi, soleil!” from “Roméo et Juliette” Tchaikovsky-Pletnev, Pas de deux from “The Nutcracker”

The annual Rosalyn Tureck Memorial Concert features Interlochen Arts Academy students performing Bach's music in honor of the late scholar and pianist. This recital takes place because Interlochen is home to the Rosalyn Tureck Bach Research Institute. Tureck was an important scholar of Bach's music in the 20th century, and everyone from Glenn Gould to William F. Buckley to Sharon Isbin sought her opinions. In 2022, Interlochen became the home of the Tureck Bach Research Institute, which includes Rosalyn Tureck's essays, books, writings and recordings. Another part of the Tureck Bach Research Institute is this annual recital in her honor featuring the music of Bach. IPR met two of the pianists who will be playing Bach's music on this recital and got a preview in Studio A. Kené Obiaya is a senior from Chicago, IL. He performed the Prelude and Fugue in D major Book 1 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Viviane Kim is a senior from Port Jefferson, NY. She performed Bach's Partita in C Minor (BWV 826). Kim is also this year's recipient of the Rosalyn Tureck scholarship, which is awarded to a female Interlochen Arts Academy piano student.

To mark Bach's 339th birthday, historical recordings of the Brandenburg Concerto 3 and the B Minor Prelude and Fugue from the Well Tempered Clavier. 

#36 In today's episode (in depth seminar-series) we continue our journey through the Well Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach, looking this time at the Preludes. With particular focus on the 1st Book, I will introduce the main features of the Prelude as a musical form, investigating how Bach used it to generate a wide variety of styles and techniques.Previous episodes in the same series:#25 J.S.Bach, WTClavier: Introduction, Relevance, Cosmology#13 Music and Architecture: the Bach Example‎Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I - Sviatoslav Richter, piano - Apple MusicBach: Well-Tempered Clavier Book I - S. Richter, piano | SpotifySupport Where is the Music Podcast: Patreon My Piano Courses:Counterpoint FundamentalsFollow Alberto L. Ferro:MUSICBLOGYOUTUBEINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKSPOTIFYWhere is the Music Podcast is on:SPOTIFYAPPLEYOUTUBE TUNEINRSS FEEDMentioned in this episode:Patreon

SynopsisBach's Well-Tempered Clavier is a collection of 48 preludes and fugues for solo keyboard in two sets, each covering all 24 major and minor keys. This music has become a bible for pianists, as well as a challenge for subsequent composers to try to imitate. In the early 1990s, American composer and pianist Henry Martin tossed his hat into the ring with the completion of his first set of 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano, and soon after published a second set of 24.On today's date in 1992, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., pianist Sara Davis Buechner performed three of Martin's Preludes and Fugues for broadcast on NPR and later made recordings of all of Martin's “48.”One enthusiastic reviewer of those recordings, Michael Barone, host of American Public Media's Pipedreams organ program, wrote of Martin's music, “We get shades of Debussy's impressionism, the vibrant jazzy riffs of Art Tatum, the spacey harmonies of John Coltrane, and the sophisticated improvisations of Bill Evans … but Martin's own individual genius shines brightly.”Barone's enthusiasm resulted in his commissioning Martin to compose another set of 24 preludes and fugues — this time for organ! We think Bach would have approved.Music Played in Today's ProgramHenry Martin (b. 1950): Prelude & Fugue No. 1; (Ken Cowan, organ) Pipedreams 1004

Lords: * Jason * https://jmac.org/ * https://masto.nyc/@jmac * Nathan * Mommy's Best Games Everywhere Topics: * When I paint my nails I don't paint my thumbnails. This is because I see my thumbnails all day long but I don't see my other fingernails nearly as often, and so every time I do I'm like "Whoa!!!!" * Jukebox griefing * Nintendo farmed out the development of Donkey Kong to an outside dev team, because they didn't have an in-house video game team yet. Donkey Kong was that team's first game. Their second game was Zaxxon. * Hypothetical explanations for the paradox * https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bZmUoKct.png * Thinking about RGB color programming for games, then wondering about how the color actually happens on monitors. * Bach drew a loopy doodle at the top of the cover of his original manuscript of "The Well Tempered Clavier". It looks like he was just warming up his pen-hand, but scholars have been arguing for years that it contains secret codes about how to well-temper a clavier Microtopics: * Interactive Fiction Land. * Panoptikum Budapest. * Bumpy Grumpy's emotional arc. * Frantic Frank. * Men and male-presenting persons with painted nails. * Painting just one fingernail dark green and wondering whether that's a hankie code thing. * What's going on with my thumbs? * Your non-thumb fingernails. * Painting your nails and repeatedly rediscovering them. * Looking like an android. (But in a cool way.) * Forehead loaves. * Starting to pay attention to where your fingers are. * Why not to wear a magnetic nose stud. * Being old enough to remember when you had to walk up to the jukebox to queue up Beat It by Michael Jackson ten times in a row. * Getting into a jukebox griefing war with someone you've never met. * Walking up to the jukebox and typing in the binary code of the WAV file you want to play. * Binary data played back at audio rates. * The math describing Mario's jump arc. * Making the first racing video game and thinking "well that's racing games sorted." * Satoru Iwata's understanding of Mario's last name. * Mario: a weird little dude. * Drill Dozer. * How to run a video game business when games are sold on cassette tape for six pounds which is way too heavy for a video game. * Platformers where you go off the edge of the screen and end up on another screen and each screen has a name. * Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument. * Earth is purposefully isolated. (Planetarium hypothesis.) * They are here undetected vs. they are here unacknowledged. * Arguing about a sexy robot. * Ironically Sexy Robots * The Fudd Paradox, by Ray Bradbury. * People who just want to toss salad and don't want to know about your weird slang. * Gender-expansive anthropomorphic rabbits. * Blank verse vs. free verse. * Burning Monkey Solitaire. * What your cat sees when he's swatting at Kratos. * How blue is blue? * Watching old episodes of Bob Ross and you can't follow along any more because they don't make Mummy Brown anymore. * The Opaque See-Through TV. * Seeing a see-through TV at CES and asking the guy at the booth what use case is of a see-through TV and he's like "to look cool at CES." * Ribbed monitors. * The secret textures of the Nintendo 3DS. * All kinds of words that you don't know how to pronounce. * The Moogseum. * Bach's looping doodle. * The structure of the J.S. Bach speedrunning community. * A community obsessing over minutia and never worrying about whether it's true or important because it's just some bullshit you made up and agreed to care about. * Hungry music theorists who need human connection. * Sponsoring AGDQ with your clavier etudes. * Black MIDI. * Using up all the claviers in the world during your clavier speedrunning event. * The Fetaverse. * Making an arcade cabinet.

#25 Introduction, historical relevance and cosmology in Bach's music and the Well-Tempered Clavier.(Fugue in C# Major BWV 848, WTC Book I)With today's Episode I am inaugurating the first of possibly many Series of episodes united by a musical thread. The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach is a work of art unique in its kind and a remarkable musical achievement. By looking at one of the Fugues from the first Book (the Well-Tempered Clavier is in two books) I will investigate Bach's creative style and how his music can be heard as a geometric model of the universe. Divine Harmonies: Bach's Metaphysics of Music:Bach's Tonal Cosmology and composing procedures, Robert Levine:Fugue in C# major, BWV 848 from Book I Support Where is the Music Podcast: PATREONFollow Alberto L. Ferro:MUSICBLOGYOUTUBEINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKSPOTIFYWhere is the Music Podcast is on:SPOTIFYAPPLEYOUTUBE TUNEINRSS FEEDMentioned in this episode:Patreon

Tom Service explores J. S. Bach's extraordinary Well Tempered Clavier, a series of 48 preludes and fugues for keyboard in all 24 major and minor keys. It's widely regarded as a towering achievement and a cornerstone of western art music. The 19th century German conductor and pianist, Hans von Bülow famously described it as “The Old Testament of Music” and generations of musicians and scholars have spoken of its monumental stature in the history and development of music. From the first, C major prelude with its lean and simple series of arpeggios, taking listeners on an exquisite harmonic journey, through to darker and more complex moments, with plenty of playfulness and joy along the way, the Well Tempered Clavier is an astonishing feat of imagination. These two books of preludes and fugues are a treasure trove, where Bach combines contrapuntal wizardry with his extraordinary gift for expressing human emotion. With help from American pianist, Jeremy Denk, Tom Service lifts the lid on the Well Tempered Clavier to discover its secrets. Producer: Jonathan Hallewell

The Miscreants devise a way to escape the dragon's clutches.Help us keep the lights on and upgrade our equipment!:https://www.patreon.com/AbstractAdventureshttps://www.humblebundle.com/?partner=abstractadventureshttps://www.heroforge.com/tap/?ref=abstractadventuresFind us anywhere and check out our other projects:  https://beacons.ai/abstractadventuresPaddler is played by: Jason Cassidy → https://www.instagram.com/dungeoneeringwithjason/Acheron is played by: Brent Markee → https://www.instagram.com/brent_markee/Dust is played by: Hannah Davies → https://www.instagram.com/bananedavies/Roe is played by: Remick → https://beacons.ai/RemoftheRealm

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is one of the most well-known composers today. Bach wrote many pieces that are famous in today's mainstream, including the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Cello Suites. Bach worked at the St Thomas's Church in Leipzig from 1723 until his death; during his time there Bach wrote a cantata for every Sunday service for the liturgical year. One of these cantatas, “Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott” (A mighty Fortress is Our God), was written for the service on Reformation Day. How does the date of the service and the text being sung relate to Bach's music? Join Maryam to find out.

In this episode we concern ourselves with the inner workings of the fugue. The fugue of the D major set from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier makes for an excellent study. It is made of a pliable, connectible subject which Bach treats as two small motives. These lend themselves to layering, overlapping, and echoing of all kinds.  The atomic building block of this fugue subject gives it all at once simplicity, harmonic ambiguity, rhythmic ambiguity, and momentum.  Prelude and fugue no. 5 in D major BWV 874 - Schornsheim

Bach the composer, Bach the educator, Bach the church music director, Bach the scholar, Bach the instrument inventor... Johann Sebastian Bach was so many things. In this episode, we focus on Bach the innovator of keyboard technique -- specifically, a style of playing which facilitated the complexities of the music he put on the page.  Familiar with the great keyboard composers of the past, Bach built upon standard clavier technique and developed his own, which his son and his first biographer both recorded after his death.  This little compilation of information on how Bach played, down to the specifics of how the fingers bent and exactly what time each finger arrived at and left each note, is a real gem.  It might even be more precious to Bach performers than some of his manuscripts themselves -- because it can crack the code of how to actually play the music (or at least, to play it well). Indeed, many players of Bach nowadays owe a lot to this description of Bach's keyboard technique, not because they have necessarily read it themselves, but because all of the best music teachers have passed on its secrets over the years. Fugue no. 23 in B major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2, performed by Christine Schornsheim for the Netherlands Bach Society

Come along when we explore the harmonic journey of Bach's Prelude no. 2 in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Since there are very few markings other than the notes, pianists different choices create different interpretations of the same music. With pianist Henrik Kilhamn. Video: https://youtu.be/6sQHahneCGQ

In today's episode, we get to picture ourselves in a dreamy landscape on a sunny afternoon courtesy of Annibale Carracci and the National Gallery of Art in DC. Annibale was a painter in Bologna, Italy from the 1580s to early 1600s and one of his big innovations was making landscapes like this a thing in Italian art.  We'll also find out how Annibale is connected to celebrity artist Lavinia Fontana who we met in a previous episode and what happened to the poor guy when he took on a project with the client from hell!  SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW) “A Long Look” opening and closing themes are by Ron Gelinas: “Ascension” https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo and “Easy” https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs Episode music: “Classical Piano and Cello” by Danielyan Ashot Makichevich. https://pixabay.com/music/modern-classical-classical-piano-and-cello-short-version-112721 “The Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 846-869 - Fugue No. 21 in B-flat major, BWV 866” by Johann Sebastian Bach. Performed by Kimiko Ishizaka. https://musopen.org/music/performer/kimiko-ishizaka/composer/johann-sebastian-bach/ Artwork information https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41673.html Carracci information “The Lives of Annibale & Agostino Carracci,” by Giovanni Pietro Bellori. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968. "Annibale Carracci Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. 2023. TheArtStory.org Content compiled and written by Libby Festorazzi Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Antony Todd Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/carracci-annibale/ First published on 27 Mar 2020. Updated and modified regularly [Accessed 04 May 2023] Comments or questions are welcome at alonglookpodcast.com

Today we talk about clever twists, whether in music or in stories, and how these twists can be delightful in their subversion of our expectations -- when done well.  In this less-than-famous little prelude from the famous compilation The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach uses deceptive cadences to add flavor to the music without sacrificing the form, in such a way that the music feels inevitable. Prelude No. 15 from WTC Book 2, performed on harpsichord by Christine Schornsheim for the Netherlands Bach Society Thanks as always to Netherlands Bach Society for the use of their excellent recordings as our musical examples! Excerpt from Mozart's Symphony no. 40 in G minor, mvt.4, from Das Orchester Tsumugi, Fukuoka, Japan; public domain recording (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0)  

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

Now, Tom welcomes Angela Hewitt to the program. The British-Canadian artist is an extraordinary classical pianist who has been praised particularly for her interpretations of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Here's Ms. Hewitt performing music from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. Angela Hewitt joined us Thursday on Zoom from Ottowa. Because our conversation is recorded, we can't take any questions or comments today. Angela Hewitt will be appearing in a concert on the Candlelight Concert Series tomorrow night in the Smith Theatre at Howard Community College. Her program begins at 7:30. It will include music of Scarlatti, Bach and Brahms. For more information and ticketing, click here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen in to this Kura Tūturu | Real Gold track to hear from music librarian Marilyn Portman on a very special first printed edition of a musical score recently donated to Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. Das wohltemperirte Clavier, oder, Präludien und Fugen durch alle Töne. By J.S. Bach, Book I is perhaps Bach's best-loved keyboard work. Known in English as "the 48" or the "Well-Tempered Clavier", it was composed and used as a valuable teaching tool for students. Learn more about this first printed edition : http://heritageetal.blogspot.com/2023/01/bachs-well-tempered-clavier-first.html Digital copy available here: https://kura.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/digital/collection/rarebooks/id/12770/rec/1 Music courtesy of International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP). Creative Commons License. https://imslp.org/wiki/Prelude_and_Fugue_in_E-flat_minor,_BWV_853_(No 8 Bach,_Johann_Sebastian) https://imslp.org/wiki/Prelude_and_Fugue_in_E_major,_BWV_854_(No. 9 Bach,_Johann_Sebastian) Performed by Peter Bradley-Fulgoni. Recorded September 2016 in St. Paul's Hall, Huddersfield University

András Schiff is one of the greatest J.S. Bach interpreters of our time and his dedication to Bach's oeuvre has been extensively recorded on ECM's New Series, receiving wide acclaim with his interpretation of the Goldberg Variations (2001) and the Six Partitas (2007), before taking on both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (2012). The New York Times: “Mr. Schiff is, in Bach, a phenomenon. He doesn't so much perform it as emit, breathe it.” Here Schiff returns to Bach, this time on the clavichord, and presents a special selection, spanning the Capriccio in B-flat major, Bach's Two- and Three-Part Inventions as well as the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Four Duets and Ricercar à 3 from Musikalisches Opfer.Track Listing:1 Capriccio sopra la lontananza de il fratro dilettissimo BWV 992 - I. Arioso2 II.3 III. Adagissimo4 IV.5 V. Aria di Postiglione. Adagio poco6 VI. Fugue all'imitatione della cornetta di postiglione.7 Inventions BWV 772-786 - No. 1 in C major8 No. 2 in c minor9 No. 3 in D major10 No. 4 in d minor11 No. 5 in E-flat major12 No. 6 in E major13 No. 7 in e minor14 No. 8 in F major15 No. 9 in f minor16 No. 10 in G major17 No. 11 in g minor18 No. 12 in A-flat major19 No. 13 in a minor20 No. 14 in B-flat major21 No. 15 in b minor22 No. 1 in e minor23 Four Duets BWV 802-805 - No. 2 in F major24 No. 3 in G major25 No. 4 in a minor26 Das Musikalische Opfer BWV 1079 - Ricercar a 327 Sinfonias BWV 787-801 - No. 1 in C major28 No. 2 in c minor29 No. 3 in D major30 No. 4 in d minor31 No. 5 in E-flat major32 No. 6 in E major33 No. 7 in e minor34 No. 8 in F major35 No. 9 in f minor36 No. 10 in G major37 No. 11 in g minor38 No. 12 in A major39 No. 13 in a minor40 No. 14 in B-flat major41 No. 15 in b minor42 Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue BWV 903 - I. Fantasia43 II. Fuguech, this time on the clavichord, and presents a special selection, spanning the Capriccio in B-flat major, Bach's Two- and Three-Part Inventions as well as the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Four Duets and Ricercar à 3 from Musikalisches Opfer.Help support our show by purchasing this album  at:Downloads (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store) Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by Uber. @CMDHedgecock#ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive#LaMusicaFestival #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans#CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin#CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain#ClassicalMusicLivesOn#Uber Please consider supporting our show, thank you!Donate (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store) staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.com This album is broadcasted with the permission of Crossover Media Music Promotion (Zachary Swanson and Amanda Bloom).

Episode: 2579 Music and Mathematics.  Today, UH Math Professor Krešo Josić talks about music and mathematics.

Our guest is Jeremy Denk, one of America's foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has recently appeared with ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In addition to phenomenal technique, Denk brings a deep knowledge of music history and composition to his performances – and to his writings on music, including his memoir, “Every Good Boy Does Fine”.  On February 15, 2022, Jeremy Denk talked with Steven Winn about his love of classical music – and performed parts of Bach's Fugue in B minor from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – in a conversation recorded in the San Francisco home of music legend Linda Ronstadt.

This week on The Sound Kitchen you'll hear the answer to the question about RFI English correspondent Victor Moturi. There's “On This Day”, the bonus question and the “Listeners Corner”, Ollia Horton's “Happy Moment”, and “Music from Erwan”. All that, and the new quiz question, too, so click on the “Audio” arrow above and enjoy!  Hello everyone! Welcome to The Sound Kitchen weekly podcast, published every Saturday – here on our website, or wherever you get your podcasts. You'll hear the winner's names announced and the week's quiz question, along with all the other ingredients you've grown accustomed to: your letters and essays, “On This Day”, quirky facts and news, interviews, and great music … so be sure and listen every week. Erwan and I are busy cooking up special shows with your musical requests, so get them in! Send your musical requests to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr  Tell us why you like the piece of music, too – it makes it more interesting for us all! Be sure you check out our wonderful podcasts! In addition to the breaking news articles on our site, with in-depth analysis of current affairs in France and across the globe, we have several podcasts which will leave you hungry for more. There's Paris Perspective, Africa Calling, Spotlight on France, and of course, The Sound Kitchen. We have an award-winning bilingual series – an old-time radio show, with actors (!) to help you learn French, called Les voisins du 12 bis. And there is the excellent International Report, too. As you see, sound is still quite present in the RFI English service.  Keep checking our website for updates on the latest from our staff of journalists. You never know what we'll surprise you with! To listen to our podcasts from your PC, go to our website; you'll see “Podcasts” on the upper left-hand side of the page. You can either listen directly or subscribe and receive them directly on your mobile phone. To listen to our podcasts from your mobile phone, slide through the tabs just under the lead article (the first tab is “Headline News”) until you see “Podcasts”, and choose your show.  Teachers, take note!  I save postcards and stamps from all over the world to send to you for your students. If you would like stamps and postcards for your students, just write and let me know. The address is english.service@rfi.fr  If you would like to donate stamps and postcards, feel free! Our address is listed below.  Another idea for your students: Br. Gerald Muller, my beloved music teacher from St Edward's University in Austin, Texas, has been writing books for young adults in his retirement – and they are free! There is a volume of biographies of painters and musicians called Gentle Giants, and an excellent biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., too. They are also a good way to help you improve your English - that's how I worked on my French, reading books which were meant for young readers – and I guarantee you, it's a good method for improving your language skills. To get Br. Gerald's free books, click here. Independent RFI English Clubs: Be sure to always include Audrey Iattoni (audrey.iattoni@rfi.fr) from our Listener Relations department in all your RFI Club correspondence. Remember to copy me (thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr) when you write to her so that I know what is going on, too. N.B.: You do not need to send her your quiz answers! Email overload! And don't forget, there is a Facebook page just for you, the independent RFI English Clubs. Only members of RFI English Clubs can belong to this group page, so when you apply to join, be sure you include the name of your RFI Club and your membership number. Everyone can look at it, but only members of the group can post on it. If you haven't yet asked to join the group, and you are a member of an independent, officially recognized RFI English club, go to the Facebook link above, and fill out the questionnaire !!!!! (if you do not answer the questions, I click “decline”). There's a Facebook page for members of the general RFI Listeners Club too. Just click on the link and fill out the questionnaire, and you can connect with your fellow Club members around the world. Be sure you include your RFI Listeners Club membership number (most of them begin with an A, followed by a number) in the questionnaire, or I will have to click “Decline”, which I don't like to do! This week's quiz: On 29 October, I asked you a question about a journalism prize received by one of our correspondents for his report on Laura Angela Bagnetto's podcast Africa Calling. The Open Forum on Agriculture Biotechnology 2022 awarded second prize to Victor Moturi for his story on genetically modified cotton in Kenya.  My question to you was: where will Victor Moturi go for the next round in the competition? The answer is: Nigeria. Although originally it was Mozambique. Depending on when you read the article – which we updated when the event venue was changed - you could have correctly answered Mozambique, or later on, Nigeria.  No idea why they changed the country, but anyway, that's that. I accepted both answers. Victor Moturi's report is competing with 16 other reports from across the continent at the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa. Go, Victor! We're all rooting for you! In addition to the quiz question, there was the bonus question: “What was the bravest thing you did as a child?” – a question suggested by Karuna Kanta Pal from West Bengal, India. The winners are: RFI Listeners Club member Radhakrishna Pillai from Kerala State, India, who is also this week's bonus question winner. The other winners are Saleem Akhtar Chadhar, the president of the RFI Seven Stars Radio Listeners Club in District Chiniot, Pakistan; Raihan Ali, who's a member of the Nilshagor RFI Fan Club in Nilphamari, Bangladesh, and two RFI English listeners: Bushra Nawaz from Muzaffargarh, Pakistan, and Milliam Murigi from Nairobi, Kenya. Congratulations winners! Here's the music you heard on this week's program: “Aquellos Ojos Verdes” by Adolfo Utrera and Nilo Menéndez, played by Bolivar “Pollo” Ortiz;  Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C minor, BWV 847, from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, by Johann Sebastian Bach, performed by András Schiff; “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov; “The Cakewalk” from Children's Corner by Claude Debussy, performed by the composer; “Happy” by Pharrell Williams, and “Chango”, a traditional Cuban Santaria chant performed by the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional de Cuba, with Felipe Alfonso and Lazaro Ros. Do you have a musical request? Send it to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr  This week's question ... you must listen to the show to participate. After you've listened to the show, re-read our article “France reboots coal-fired power plant to boost winter electricity supplies” to help you with the answer. You have until 9 January 2023 to enter this week's quiz; the winners will be announced on the 14 January podcast. When you enter, be sure you send your postal address with your answer, and if you have one, your RFI Listeners Club membership number. Send your answers to: english.service@rfi.fr or Susan Owensby RFI – The Sound Kitchen 80, rue Camille Desmoulins 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux France or By text … You can also send your quiz answers to The Sound Kitchen mobile phone. Dial your country's international access code, or “ + ”, then  33 6 31 12 96 82. Don't forget to include your mailing address in your text – and if you have one, your RFI Listeners Club membership number. To find out how you can win a special Sound Kitchen prize, click here. To find out how you can become a member of the RFI Listeners Club, or form your own official RFI Club, click here.  

How much more famous can music be than that one Prelude in C? The Prelude BWV 846, the first prelude in the Well-Tempered Clavier, is heard everywhere, but why? How? What purpose could such a piece have served in Bach's day? We discuss two early, shorter versions of the prelude, and one erroneous version with an inauthentic bar (the 'Schwenke measure' - be on the look out if your copy has 36 bars and not 35!) Answering, "How has this prelude influenced musicians even today?" we explore modern versions by John K. Stone, Elaine Comparone, my challenge to Brad Mehldau, and invert this prelude (and a few others) note for note to hear the 'photo negative'.  Links: 'Jesu Joy' in a Japanese Forest (Cell Phone Ad) John K. Stone's 'Fantasy on a Bach Prelude' Elaine Comparone's version of the same prelude   As always: Thank you for listening! Support us: https://www.patreon.com/wtfbach https://www.paypal.me/wtfbach https://venmo.com/wtfbach https://cash.app/$wtfbach   Got suggestions? Complaints? Confusions? Want to sponsor an episode? Write us: bach (at) wtfbach (dot) com

Season 1, Episode 25 includes: The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling, underscored with The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach; The Anxious Leaf by Henry Ward Beecher, underscored with Polacca brillante "L'hilarite" composed by Carl Maria von Weber, played by Alexander Paley on piano; The Story of Johnny Appleseed by Jessie McKeon, Where Go the Boats? by Robert Louis Stevenson; Blue Boat Home, lyrics by Peter Mayer, tune "Hyrfrydol" attributed to Prichard; and The Wonderful World by William Brightly Ranse. Raggedy Auntie Reads Theme and Closing Song written, performed, and recorded by Jessie McKeon. ** Engage with Raggedy Auntie: linktr.ee/raggedyauntie **

Johann Sebastian Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier: Prelude and Fugue No. 4 Jeno Jando, piano More info about today's track: Naxos 8.553796-97 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

Paul Wittington and Ruth Barton review Bullet Train, Thirteen Lives and Maisie. Poet Paula Meehan tells us about For The Hungry Ghosts at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. World-renowned organist and harpsichordist, Malcolm Proud, will perform Bach's Well Tempered Clavier as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival

Johann Sebastian Bach - The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1: Prelude and Fugue No. 1 Jeno Jando, piano More info about today's track: Naxos 8.553796-97 Courtesy of Naxos of America, Inc. Subscribe You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed. Purchase this recording Amazon

Tell No Tales Episode 3, Part of the Family Leo visits a spirit who found a new family in the afterlife, and breaks some ground in the processContent Warnings: Discussion of death, grief, and homophobiaTranscript: https://tellnotalespod.carrd.co/#episode03dntjWritten and produced by Leanne Egan. In this episode you heard the voices of Leanne Egan as Leo Quinn and Phil Thompson as Riley Matkins.Intro and outro music by LumehillThe conveniently public domain music that Leo chose to listen to today was Bach's Goldberg Variations, variation nine, Bach's The Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude in Fugue No. 1, and Schubert's Fantasie in C MajorSound effects from Epidemic SoundArt by Ana BalaciFind more info on our website https://tellnotalespod.carrd.co or at tellnotalespod on Tumblr or Twitter

"The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." - Glenn Gould One of the greatest classical pianists of the 20th century, Glenn Gould, shocked the world at age thirty-one when he announced his permanent retirement from public performance. Denouncing the concert hall as a relative of the Roman Colosseum and audiences as a "force of evil", for the sake of his artistic integrity and personal sanity he committed the rest of his musical life to recording in the studio. Gould's brilliant and sometimes provocative performances of classical masterworks are well known, especially his unequaled recordings of Bach. But he was also a prolific, articulate, and no less provocative critic. In essays like "The Prospects of Recording", he laid out his philosophy of performance, of the relation between technology and music. He described his own experimentation with unconventional recording techniques, and made bold and often accurate predictions about how recording technology would change how the average person would relate to music. And he outright rejected many of the stagnant conventions of contemporary classical performance. In this episode, Thomas discusses Gould's fascinating (and often entertaining) views on music and technology, and plays a number of his recordings. If you've never heard Gould play, you're missing out. If you have, you'll find this episode all the more interesting.  Pieces played in this episode (all performed by Glenn Gould): J. S. Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I: Prelude and Fugue no. 3 in C-sharp major, Fugue no. 20 in A major, Prelude no. 21 in B-flat major Bach, Two- and Three-Part Inventions: Invention no. 12 in A major, Sinfonia no. 5 in E-flat major, Sinfonia no. 9 in F minor Brahms, Intermezzo No. 2 in A major, op. 118 Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, IV. Allegro, piano transcription by Franz Liszt Thomas Mirus's 2011 essay "Glenn Gould in the Studio" https://thomasmirus.com/2013/05/20/glenn-gould-in-the-studio This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

J.S. Bach's famous Well-Tempered Klavier, Book 2A MUST for anyone serious about the keyboard.Brilliantly performed by Trevor Pinnock on the Harpsichord.Purchase the music (without talk) at:Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 (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 Please consider supporting our show, thank you!http://www.classicalsavings.com/donate.html staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.com This album is broadcasted with the permission of Katy Solomon from Morahana Arts and Media.

Steinway Artist Andrew Rangell discusses the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His latest — of many — Bach releases is The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II on the Steinway & Sons label.

Our guest is Jeremy Denk, one of America's foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has recently appeared with ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In addition to phenomenal technique, Denk brings a deep knowledge of music history and composition to his performances – and to his writings on music, including his memoir, “Every Good Boy Does Fine”.  On February 15, 2022, Jeremy Denk talked with Steven Winn about his love of classical music – and performed parts of Bach's Fugue in B minor from “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – in a conversation recorded in the San Francisco home of music legend Linda Ronstadt.

"Bach's music is for many people, as it is for me, daunting. I must be wrong there, because he must have wanted his music to be played...without all this awe and respect. Bach has proven that in the time between him and us, there is little or nothing better than his work." The paraphrased words of the harpsichordist for this recording show us how Bach doesn't need to be overly serious and pompous.   In this delightful fugue, the theme evokes the overly prim and proper gestures of aristocrats meeting one another, and perhaps pokes fun at it. Uncomplicated beauty shines through, and this recording shows that just because it's a perfect composition does not mean we should take it too seriously. We talk through what it means to preserve the "Bach-ness" of the fugue -- letting Bach be Bach.    Fugue in D major played by Guillermo Brachetta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpop0EPey0   Alex's Jesu Meine Freude performance details from the ending announcements

Musician and conductor, Rachel Iba discusses organ pieces by Bach. This talk was given at the first performance of Cameron Carpenter at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Pieces discussed: BACH Fantasia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 537 BACH Prelude and Fugue I in C Major from Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 870 BACH Prelude and Fugue XII in F Major from Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, BWV 880 BACH Fantasia on “Komm, Heiliger Geist,” BWV 651 BACH Chorale Prelude “O Mensch, bewein' dein' Sünde groß,” BWV 622 BACH Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major, “St. Anne,” BWV 552 BACH Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 See this year's Upbeat Live schedule at: laphil.com/ubl. Join us in person for our 2021/22 season! Get tickets: laphil.com/calendar.

Why We Should Expose Our Kids To Classical Music https://ourtownlive.net #herbw79Bach begins his epic journey through all the keys in C major for the first Prelude and Fugue. He then moves to C minor for the second then chromatically upwards to C sharp major for the fourth and C sharp minor for the fifth and so on. The importance of these works cannot be overstated. They not only offer every aspiring pianist the opportunity to immerse themselves in the world and style of Bach but also to develop their polyphonic technique in playing fugues of three and four voices. One key consideration Tovey makes in his editorial notes to the ABRSM collection is that “Bach writes very accurately what is to be played but, he leaves the performer free as to how it is played.” Taking the time to understand the time in which these works were composed is also crucial regarding any decision in how they are played. Ensuring the clarity of Bach's part-writing is paramount as is being able to mark the climatic moments in each piece. Bach could not have known how the piano of today would sound and this needs thought when approaching these works.There are many subtle differences in how these pieces would sound between these instruments, but what can be agreed is the ingenuity and skill with which Bach composed these works regardless of the instrument on which they are performed. In a way, it is all the more remarkable, as the compositions are perfectly convincing on modern instruments and do not detract from the genius of the work.

Why We Should Expose Our Kids To Classical Music https://ourtownlive.net #herbw79The Well-Tempered Clavier (Das Wohltemperierte Klavier), BWV 846–893, is a collection of solo keyboard music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. He first gave the title to a book of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys, dated 1722, composed "for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study." Bach later compiled a second book of the same kind, dated 1742, but titled it only "Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues." The two works are now usually considered to make up a single work, The Well-Tempered Clavier, and are referred to respectively as Books I and II

This is an interview with Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck. I loved our conversation during the summer of 2020. See some of the topics covered below and stay tuned for the next episode which will feature his arrangement of the ninth contrapunctus from The Art of Fugue. It was great to speak to a non-classical musician so eager about classical music and so involved with Bach.  -- Sleepify (Silent album by Vulfpeck)   Vulfpeck Arranges the ninth contrapunctus from The Art of Fugue: Version 1: https://youtu.be/YcxQdRIY11o Version 2: https://youtu.be/vJfiOuDdetg   Fugue State (song by Vulfpeck)   Musicians/Bands mentioned (Alphabetically): Bach, The Beatles, Beethoven, Naftule Brandwein, Cream, ELO, Glenn Gould, Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Liszt, Louis Marchand, Reinhold Mack, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Nirvana, Oscar Peterson, Queen,  Bernard Purdy, Albert Schweitzer, Nate Smith, Steely Dan, Dave Tarras, Michael Winograd,   Jack's non-musical influences (Alphabetically): Caldwell Esselstyn, Larry David, Dean Ornish   Other things mentioned (Chronologically): A Musical Offering, Silberman Pianofortes, Encore Records (Ann Arbor), The Blind Pig (Ann Arbor), Alan Watts, S.J. Perleman The Ill Mannered Clavichord, The Well Tempered Clavier,    -- Follow Evan on Instagram for interactive content: www.instagram.com/WTFBach Support us: https://www.patreon.com/wtfbach https://www.paypal.me/wtfbach https://venmo.com/wtfbach https://cash.app/$wtfbach   Suggestions? Want to sponsor an episode? Write us: bach@wtfbach.com

Dolores and Bernard reconnect with their pasts; Maeve makes a bold proposition to Hector; Teddy finds enlightenment, at a price. We're going through Westworld, scene by scene, in this re-watch podcast covering season one episode nine – The Well-Tempered Clavier. Subscribe here! Like the show? Please consider supporting us on Patreon at http://patreon.com/talkingrecklesspodcast

Ryan & guest Justin (@J_Hagennn) are back to re-watch Season 1 Episode 9: "The Well-Tempered Clavier" to see what they still love!Give it a listen and then hit us up on Twitter @WestWorldRyan to tell us what you think, plus you can rate us on iTunes if you're really cool.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/HBOBOIZSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  Wow, this show is just getting bonkers. We have so much to talk about this week so buckle in. Everything the show has been setting up is paying off right now. If this was Game of Thrones, we wouldn’t know half the stuff this episode confirms. Lets break it down, Maeve is recruiting her army …