08-29: Skyhooks : Ego Is Not A Dirty Word 1975 | Live at Festival Hall Melbourne 1975 - I'm Jimmy Reed 1958 - Louis Couperin / Christophe Rousset 2010 - Kazi Nazrul Islam / Nazrul Sangeet - Archie Campbell 1976

Tagged image here.

1661 – Louis Couperin (French composer, harpsichordist, organist & gambist)
1664 – Edward Coleman  (English tenor & composer)
1738 – Georg Reutter the Elder (Austrian organist, theorbist & composer)
1821 – Horace Coignet (French composer, J.-J. Rouseau's Pygmalion)
1861 – Franz Joseph Glæser (Czech-born Danish composer)
1876 – Félicien-César David (French composer)
1928 – Jean Gabriel Prosper Marie (French composer)
1933 – Georgi Conus (Russian composer)
1935 – Charles Lee Williams (American hymn composer)
1940 – Arthur de Greef (Belgian pianist & composer)
1946 – Milan Harašta (Czech composer)
1947 – Lillian Blauvelt (American operatic lyric soprano)
1972 – Lale Andersen (German popular singer & songwriter)
1976 – Jimmy Reed (American blues singer, songwriter, guitarist & harmonic player)
1976 – Kazi Nazrul Islam (Bengali poet, musician, revolutionary & philosopher)
1982 – Lehman Engel (American composer & conductor for stage, television & film)
1987 – Archie Campbell (American country music comedian, Hee-Haw)
1996 – Tera de Marez Oyens (Dutch composer, pianist & church musician)
2001 – Graeme "Shirley" Strachan (Australian rock singer & songwriter, Skyhooks)
2004 – Hans Vonk (Dutch conductor & pianist)

Let's have a moment of silence for our dearly departed.

Tell you what... we can do better than that. Let's have a full 273 seconds of silence for our dearly departed. I'll wait...

August 29 marks the 59th anniversary of the world premiere by David Tudor, in Woodstock, New York, of John Cage's 4′33″ for any instrument. You've just participated in a recreation of it. You're a real avant-garde musician now. Was anybody there to listen to it? And in case you did not perform the work, at least listen to a brief excerpt of it. I don't normally post mp3s directly on the blog, but this one is too good not to miss: 

4′33″ 

Okay, sure... it's easy to be tongue-in-cheek about it, but keep in mind what Cage said about that first performance:

They missed the point. There's no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn't know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.

It's a good thing to keep in mind around here, as we find ourselves constantly dipping into any and every genre of music imaginable (or at least attempting to - we are somewhat limited by what happens to be available out there at any given moment*). Whenever you hear some ignorant stick-in-the-mud proclaiming "That ain't music!" or "That's just a bunch of noise!" you'll know to tell 'em where to go! To http://yesterdayindeadmusicians.blogspot.com/ of course. Please do. I can really use more traffic, even if it's from ignorant sticks-in-the-mud.

On a related subject, you may notice that I've just added a very eclectic blogroll here. There are at current about 130 blogs on it, and I will probably add more. I have it set up so that it will display only the 25 most recently updated blogs, so the blogroll will be continually changing, and that's kinda how we like it. And by we I mean me. We, by which I mean I, can use the Royal We around here all we want, because around here, we are the king. And it's good to be the king. See you on the other side of that piece of art down there. Piece of art? You mean "the jump?" Yes, we mean the jump, but WE say that the jump is a piece of art. Because if we call it art, then it's art. Who are you to argue with us about it? 

*UPDATE: It is with a beatific gladness that I announce my success at last in locating some raga performances of Nazrul Sangeet, the works of Kazi Nazrul Islam, the official National Poet of Bangladesh, the Sufi Rebel Poet, the fighter against fascism, the champion of the poor, and women's rights, and equality for all peoples...

Nazrul Sangeet

08-13: Massenet Werther Plasson - King Curtis Blues At Montreux - Cage / Tudor Indeterminacy - Dissection Maha Kali

Ordered chronologically. Trouble identifying them? Click here for a somewhat tagged image.

1808 – Henri Hardouin (French composer, organist & choirmaster, Reims Cathedral)
1841 – Bernhard Romberg (German cellist & composer)
1886 – Adolph von Doss (German Jesuit priest & composer)
1908 – Ira D. Sankey (American gospel singer & hymn composer)
1912 – Jules Massenet (French composer)
1916 – Fritz Steinbach (German conductor & composer, Brahms specialist)
1924 – Julián Aguirre (Argentine composer)
1928 – Fernand de La Tombelle (French composer, organist, actor & photographer)
1933 – Paul Hillemacher (French composer & pianist)
1946 – Valery Zhelobinsky (Russian composer & pianist)
1947 – Tobias Norlind (Swedish musicologist, ethnologist & music museum curator)
1953 – Dimitri Arakishvili (Georgian composer & ethnomusicologist)
1954 – Hermann von Waltershausen (German musicologist, composer & conductor)
1970 – Viktor Trambitsky (Belarusian composer)
1971 – King Curtis (American R&B, soul jazz & rock saxophonist)
1982 – Joe Tex American soul & funk singer & songwriter)
1996 – David Tudor (American pianist & experimental composer)
1998 – Nino Ferrer (Italian-born French singer, actor & jazz musician)
2000 – Nazia Hassan (Pakistani pop singer)
2003 – Ed Townsend (American attorney, songwriter & producer)
2006 – Jon Nödtveidt (Swedish black metal singer & guitarist, Dissection)
2011 – Topi Sorsakoski (Finnish popular singer)

Well, yesterday's "launch" sorta wiped me out. I'm gonna try to keep it shorter and sweeter from now on... but don't worry, I'll still be turning you on to interminable symphonies chock-full of sour dissonances.

Google gave me a bit of a surprise when I did an image search on "Henri Hardouin" because it was sure what I meant to type was "Henri Bardouin." So, I got images of a brand of Pastis, the anise-flavored liqueur the French drink on hot summer days. Funny, I was only just learning about this aperitif a few weeks ago from my French friend Steve on Facebook. Pastis is the traditional drink of Provence, in southeastern France, but M. Hardouin played the organ in the north of France, at Reims Cathedral, the traditional site where the kings of France were crowned. The region Reims is in - Champagne-Ardenne - has a traditional libation of its own, doesn't it? I'm thinking that's probably why they held the coronations there.

Ira D. Sankey was a singer, an early figure in Southern gospel music, and a writer of many hymns. He was associated with the Methodist evangelist minister Dwight L. Moody, and the two traveled throughout much of the United States, preaching and singing the gospel. On the evening of October 8th, 1871, they were holding a revival in Chicago when - well, I suppose what happened is that Mrs. O'Leary's cow was so overcome by the spirit, she kicked over a lantern right there in the hay-barn. Sankey and Moody barely escaped the ensuing conflagration with their lives, and watched most of Chicago burn to the ground from a rowboat in Lake Michigan.

Fernand de La Tombelle was one of those sickening people you just wanna slap - a Renaissance man living many decades after the concepts of "specialization" and "division of labor" had become pretty much standard for most of us mere mortals. Not only gifted as an organist and composer, he also did some work in the theater, wrote poetry, worked in the plastic arts, was an amateur astronomer, and, as you can see, also did some photography. That's kind of an interesting picture, isn't it? A photographer is photographing La Tombelle photographing something else. Maybe that something else is another photographer photographing the original photographer who's photographing La Tombelle. Nah... that'd be stupid.

Paul Joseph Guillaume Hillemacher was a composer who wrote more than a dozen operas in collaboration with his brother, Lucien Joseph Edouard Hillemacher. Lucien Joseph Edouard Hillemacher was not a librettist, though - he was also a composer. They wrote the music of their operas together, to librettos by others. The Hillemacher brothers composed these works under the name "P.L. Hillemacher."

I couldn't find an image of Viktor Trambitsky, so I just used one of a Russian edition of the play The Storm (1859) by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. The Storm has been an extremely popular play in most of Eastern Europe, and the subject of many musical and film adaptations. Tchaikovsky wrote a concert overture based on it. And Viktor Trambitsky wrote an opera based on it, which was produced in 1941. It's a bit of a coincidence, since we just remembered Leoš Janáček yesterday. He wrote his own opera based on The Storm in 1921: It was called Katya Kabanova. And now for yesterday's featured poopers:

08-12: Giovanni Gabrieli - Janáček Glagolitic Mass Ančerl - John Cage Meets Sun Ra - Les Paul The New Sound

Ordered chronologically. Trouble identifying them? Click here for a somewhat tagged image.

1588 – Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder (Italian composer, active in England)
1612 – Giovanni Gabrieli (Italian composer & organist)
1633 – Jacopo Peri (Italian composer & singer, wrote 1st operas)
1797 – Ignaz Franz Xaver Kürzinger (German composer & music scholar)
1812 – Jean-Joseph Rodolphe (Alsatian hornist, violinist & composer)
1830 – Franz de Paula Roser (Austrian composer & music director)
1918 – Anna Held (Polish-born American actress & singer)
1928 – Leoš Janáček (Czech composer)
1943 – Georges Martin Witkowski (Algerian-born French conductor & composer)
1982 – Helvi Leiviskä (Finnish composer, writer & teacher)
1984 – Lenny Breau (American jazz guitarist)
1985 – Marcel Mihalovici (Romanian-born French composer)
1985 – Kyu Sakamoto (Japanese singer & actor, "Ue o muite arukō")
1992 – John Cage (American experimental composer)
1994 – Gene Cherico (American jazz bassist)
1997 – Luther Allison (American blues guitarist & singer)
2005 – John Loder (English audio engineer & record producer)
2008 – Christie Allen (English-born Australian pop singer)
2009 – Les Paul (American guitarist, solid-body guitar inventor & studio pioneer)
2010 – Richie Hayward (American rock drummer, Little Feat)

Welcome to my blog. The text at right explains pretty well what it's all about, I think, so let's jump right in, shall we? Before I get to yesterday's most prominent figures, I'll address some of the others.

Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder (father of, you guessed it, Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger) was a composer who settled in London as a teenager in 1562, finding work at the court of Elizabeth I. In addition to writing much sacred music, he was for virtually the remainder of his life the sole composer of madrigals living in England. The same year he died - following the publication by Nicholas Yonge of the collection Musica Transalpina - the madrigal became an overnight sensation in England. Ferrabosco didn't live to see most of the craze, but his prior work had proved to be formative. While in England, Ferrabosco (who was very well-paid for a court musician) made a number of trips to Italy. Some have speculated that his business there was more than just musical - that Betty I was using him to spy on the Papal Court, at a time when England was at war with Roman Catholic countries. The Spying Madrigalist. There's a really awful novel (and an even worse film adaptation) in there somewhere.

Jacopo Peri was the first composer ever to write a work we now think of as an opera. This was Dafne (1597), a pastoral work with libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini. The work is now lost, but an illustration of Peri himself in costume for the role of Apollo in it does survive (see above). Peri also wrote the first opera which does still survive, Euridice (1600). The subject of Eurydice, and her hubby Orpheus, was very popular fodder in early opera; during the 17th century alone, at least 20 such operas were composed. After Peri's work, Giulio Caccini wrote his own Euridice in 1602, to the very same Rinuccini libretto Peri had used. Then Caccini rushed out to get his opera published before Peri's could hit the presses. That certainly wasn't the source of any bad blood. But the most famous of the early Orphean operas was L'Orfeo (1607) by Claudio Monteverdi. This was the first true masterpiece of opera, and we are unanimous in that.

Jean-Joseph Rodolphe helped to popularize the horn (when we say "the horn" we mean what most people call "the French horn") as a solo instrument. He's also thought to be the first hornist, in Paris at least, to use the technique of hand-stopping on the instrument. Horn players, even today, routinely keep their right hand inside the bell of the instrument, to help control pitch. The farther you put your hand in, the sharper the pitch is, so you can put it in a bit if you find you're a bit flat. But if you put your hand all the way in, you can raise the pitch an entire semitone. When Rodolphe used stopping, it was on the natural horn - the valve horn hadn't yet been invented - and so he was using the technique to get notes he couldn't get any other way. Unlike on a valved instrument, a natural brass instrument can play only the notes of the harmonic series, and thus has many gaps in the scale of notes it can play. With stopping you can get all those notes, plus all the notes a semitone higher as well. Hand-stopping on the horn has another effect, aside from raising the pitch: it gives the instrument a nasal, muted timbre. Even after the valve horn had become standard, and there was really no need for players to use full hand-stopping anymore, composers (especially Richard Wagner and all the many who fell under his sway) specified stopped horns purely for their uniquely distant, menacing effect.

Let's see... Anna Held was the common-law wife of Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, of Follies fame. Helvi Leiviskä was a Finnish composer of three symphonies, and other works. I love her old-style upright piano with its set-up of candles! Brilliant idea... at least until someone has one viina too many and sets the Chopin Mazurkas on fire. Lenny Breau was a fingerstyle guitarist who was very influenced by Chet Atkins, and like Chet he could play in just about any style. Kyu Sakamoto was the singer who had a huge international hit with "Ue o muite arukō" in 1963. What, never heard of it? That's because Pye Records in England (and later His Master's Voice, and Capitol in America) released it under a different title. They called it "Sukiyaki." Drummer Richie Hayward left us just last year, leaving Bill Payne as the only founding member of Little Feat still in the band (frontman Lowell George pooped in 1979, and bassist Roy Estrada left Little Feat to play with Captain Beefheart in 1971). And now for our four featured euphonious stiffs...