Fifty years ago in January 1962, British popular music crept toward the brink of success.  Notably, the coming months would see Britain’s Decca Records release the UK’s first international rock hit Telstar created by the quirky iconoclast Joe Meek with his studio band the Tornados.  That recording declared Meek’s infatuation with the first telecommunications satellite and proved that London’s recording industry had the potential to compete in the United States.  The Tornados also backed Liverpudlian Billy Fury, but Americans seemed less than enthusiastic about the singer’s recordings made with Decca artist-and-repertoire manager Mike Smith.

Far, far below the popular radar, the Beatles struggled to break out of their Liverpool-Hamburg rut.  Their new manager had promised to get them a recording contract and had succeeded in procuring an audition at Decca such that on New Year’s Eve 1961, friend and roadie Neil Aspinall drove the Liverpool quartet of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best to London through a winter storm.  After the long, tortuous, and somewhat dangerous journey on two-lane highways, they checked into the Royal Hotel on Woburn Place near Tavistock Square where for 27 shillings they could claim a bed and a breakfast, not to mention a launching pad from which to join London’s New Year’s Eve festivities.  Located near the University of London, others their age would have been celebrating that night, and the Beatles knew how to party.  Why should this New Year’s Eve be any different?  They were in London!  The twenty-one year-old Lennon would have led the charge.

Much to the consternation of their perpetually punctual manager on the first morning of 1962, the Beatles arrived late at Decca’s studios in West Hampstead.  A peeved and anxious Brian Epstein waited for them at the studio, worried that they might have met with misadventure on their trip the previous day.  He wanted equipment set up and musicians professionally ready when Decca’s Mike Smith gave the signal to start the 10:00 AM audition.  However on this day (which was not yet an official holiday), the recording manager similarly suffered the ill effects of the previous evening and he too rolled into the 165 Broadhurst Gardens facilities late.  Looking over Smith’s shoulder, Tony Meehan—the former drummer of Britain’s most popular guitar group the Shadows—wandered around the facilities in his capacity as a fledgling artist-and-repertoire manager.  To put the polish on the situation, the recording engineer would have informed Smith that the Beatles’ equipment presented problems for a clean recording.  Smith would have to tell them to use the studio’s amplifiers.  What a bother.

The Beatles eventually commenced what the industry generally described as an “artist test” and worked through a list of fifteen songs chosen largely by their manager.  Ultimately, Epstein hoped to impress Decca with the band’s versatility by including numbers such as “Besame Mucho” (which Tony Meehan would soon produce for ex-Shadows confederate Jet Harris), “The Sheik of Araby,” and “Three Cool Cats.”  Significantly, they also included three McCartney and Lennon originals: “Hello Little Girl,” “Like Dreamers Do,” and “Love of the Loved.”  The decision to include these songs would prove critically important for their future.

The Decca recordings suggest that the Beatles fell short of their best efforts, perhaps a consequence of partying in Trafalgar Square the previous night, but also of performing in a sterile studio setting.  The band had proved itself by capturing the attention of dancers, strippers, sailors, thugs, gangsters, and assorted drunks.  Three or four people lurking behind the glass window of a studio could hardly have been inspiring.  With Brian Epstein disgruntled with their performance, Tony Meehan snickering at the innocence of their music, and Mike Smith dismissing their equipment, Messrs. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Best probably chafed at what they perceived to be class condescension.  Pete Best remembers a frustrated Lennon savagely ripping into Epstein with a religious slur when the manager made a musical suggestion, after which the entire proceedings froze for a few awkward moments.  Nevertheless, from the beginning, Smith had listened attentively as the band worked through the audition and he seemed positive about their chances at the end of the session.

Smith had scheduled a London band—Brian Poole and the Tremeloes—to arrive to set up for an afternoon audition, terminating a Beatles’ session that had started late.  He promised to get back soon to Epstein about a decision.  They would wait through the month of January only to learn that a recording contract would not be forthcoming.  Legend has either Mike Smith or Dick Rowe, his superior at Decca, explaining to Brian Epstein that guitar groups would soon be passé, an argument that the Tornado’s hit Telstar (which featured an electronic keyboard, the Clavioline) would have supported.  Similarly later that same year, the Beatles themselves would record a single that downplayed their guitar sound and featured a harmonica accompaniment to their vocal harmonies, but not with Decca.  Unlike the Tornados, the Beatles would not achieve international success in 1962; however, the next month would see a remarkable chain of events that would open a window of opportunity.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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Fifty years ago in December 1961, Brian Epstein made a leap of faith that he could change his life and the lives of four young musicians.  He could not foresee that he would change Western civilization.  A few weeks earlier, the Liverpool businessman had heard the din of the Beatles in a claustrophobic former vegetable cellar and had seized upon the idea of transforming the band into something the world could embrace.  He seems to have had few second thoughts about his decision, even as he allowed that he might fail.

His objectives posed challenges, the most significant of which included identity and image.  During the Beatles’ time in Hamburg, they had adopted the leather-jacket look of American rocker Gene Vincent and a stage presence that conveyed the casual charm of hoods on holiday.  During sets of randomly chosen songs, they spiced their stage banter with profanity, flirted with women, left cigarettes burning on the edges of their amplifiers, gnawed on sandwiches, and emptied bottles of Coca Cola into their thirsty mouths.

But a catharsis had already begun in the form of the European “pilzen kopf” hairstyle that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison had adopted from German students, and in this detail the ever fashion-conscious Epstein may have seen an opening for a broader transformation.  He would exploit their willingness to experiment in a metamorphosis from leather-clad punks to latent mods adapting European clothing trends to a rock-and-roll culture.  Within two years, they would be wearing replications of Pierre Cardin’s modernist collarless jackets.

But other obstacles protruded into Epstein’s path.

Not only did the Beatles represent an exotic piece of adolescent thuggery, they were arguably located in the armpit of Britain.  Liverpool and the banks of the Mersey River had once been a thriving international port—the birthplace of the Titanic and the prestigious White Star Line that had built her.  But Germany’s Luftwaffe had not been kind during the Second World War and, in the postwar years when jet aircraft began traversing the Atlantic Ocean, unemployment crept over the city like mold.  The empty docks and the ethnically charged neighborhoods surrounding them had become dramatic settings for gritty British television plays about the working class, poverty, and crime.  If Epstein and his potential charges were to court success, they needed to escape Merseyside.

Thus, on a quiet Sunday morning in early December 1961, with the doors to his record shop closed, Brian Epstein met the Beatles to proffer his services as a manager and stylistic exorcist.  He would have explained their situation as he understood it: they were playing the same Liverpool clubs and dance halls over and over with occasional trips to Hamburg for little pay and even less of a future.  The band had fallen into a deep rut from which he offered the possibility of escape.  He promised better pay and a broader audience; but, more importantly, he shared with them a mutual vision of a recording contract that would bring them to the attention of Britain, if not the world.  In return, he had demands.

Their previous manager Allan Williams had warned him away from the band, but Epstein represented an elegant, polite, and persistent force of nature, an anomaly in Britain’s often-seedy entertainment industry.  If they took him as their manager, they would have (a) to clean up their stage presentation (e.g., no more private or obscene jokes on stage and no more smoking, eating or drinking on stage), (b) to play preplanned organized sets (i.e., no more rehearsing songs during a performance), (c) to carefully control their stage time, (d) to arrive in a timely fashion for engagements, and (e) to exchange their leather jackets for tailored suits.  The preternaturally punctual Epstein would provide them with their weekly schedules, typed and annotated with instructions on how best to please their employers and audiences.  He took a percentage of their income, but he immediately set to converting aspiration to realization.

The band signed a contract with Epstein sometime around Friday 15 December 1961, two days after Mike Smith from Decca Records had heard the Beatles at the Cavern Club.  Epstein had worked his contacts at London’s leading record companies to bring a representative to Liverpool to hear his diamonds in the rough.  Treading in the manager’s footsteps, Smith descended the stairs into the belly of the Cavern where he experienced the band in its natural habitat.  The thunder of guitars and drums ricocheted off the arched ceilings and danced the crowded room of bobbing heads.  Smith could sense the possibilities, even if he failed to recognize Epstein’s vision.  The performance impressed him and, when he returned to London, he booked the band for a New Year’s Day audition in Decca’s West Hampstead studios.  The band had crested the first peak on a rollercoaster they would ride for the next year.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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The transformation of the Beatles from four musicians with humble roots into British cultural icons (second only to Shakespeare in some minds) began in Liverpool, even if a recent decision by the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office may attempt to shape how we remember those roots in the future. Ironically, that decision comes shortly before a relevant anniversary in Beatles history.

Fifty years ago in 1961, Mathew Street on an early November midday would have presented a less than picture-postcard impression of Liverpool; but Brian Epstein had ventured forth on a mission, and he had brought his assistant, Alistair Taylor, as company. Temperatures in the low fifties and an ever-present threat of Irish Sea rain slowed the decay of the vegetable hubris dropped by workers from trucks, and the angle of the sun prevented much light illuminating what rotted underfoot. Nevertheless, the street would have seemed bucolic in comparison to the dragon’s roar and the stench of cigarette smoke, disinfectant, urine, and body odor that permeated clothing below the pavement where subterranean arches ran with the condensed sweat and breath of a great, unwashed wall of adolescent sexuality. With special permission to pass the Cavern Club’s bouncer and the line of aspiring dancers, Epstein descended the stairs like Dante, with Taylor acting as a reluctant Virgil, or perhaps they more closely resembled Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Epstein’s record store—perhaps the most successful in this northern port city—had recently been selling numerous copies of the 45 rpm single, “My Bonnie” by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers. Locals knew the Beat Brothers to be the Beatles and, despite Cavern Club advertisements that declared the band as “Direct from Hamburg,” Liverpudlian blood flowed in their veins. Taylor recognized them as regulars in the store and Epstein had somehow learned that the band whose records he sold sometimes played a lunch-hour session at this dank outpost of rock ‘n’ roll. Although pop and rock were not to his taste, the educated and fastidiously sartorial record-store owner recognized the importance of this music, if not for its energy, then for the number of units it moved through his inventory.

He also could not have missed the parallels between himself and the most famous manager of British pop singers of the era: Larry Parnes. Music papers like the New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Disc carried articles on and interviews with Parnes who sometimes made newsreel appearances where he introduced his “stable” of handsome boy singers. Like Epstein, Parnes was Jewish and from a merchant family; but from his time in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Epstein probably also knew that Parnes, like himself, was a homosexual, and to be a homosexual in Britain at the time was to be illegal. More importantly, Parnes offered an example of how to be officially accepted and successful in a society that routinely discriminated against people based on their class and ethnicity, let alone on their gender and sexual orientation.

The Beatles knew that Epstein had entered their lair when DJ Bob Wooler announced the NEMS manager’s presence; but the band seemed to have paid no heed to the businessmen who—after watching a set of humor, smoke, leather, hair, audience interaction, and powerful music—made their way to the stage. George Harrison reportedly saw them first and greeted the man in the exquisite dark suit with a very polite, but inquiring, “What brings Mr. Epstein here?” Indeed.

Taylor remembers Epstein—enthused by the energy and presence of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Best—deciding almost immediately that he wanted to manage the Beatles. Over the next weeks, the band would agree to a contract with the record-store owner who, in return, would begin his challenging quest to have this band of northern scruffs signed to a recording company.

Later, as regional popularity evolved into Beatlemania, the story of how Brian Epstein “discovered” the Beatles in the Cavern Club made that establishment famous throughout not only Britain, but also the world. Although the club closed and reopened several times, fans continued to make the pilgrimage to the site of Beatledom’s naissance. Even when the City of Liverpool demolished the site and filled in the Cavern’s arches with rubble, fans returned to pay homage to John Lennon on the night of his assassination. Thus, when developers reopened the site of Mr. Epstein’s excellent lunchtime adventure and renovated its arches, the Cavern Club relocated back to this sacred ground from its ersatz location across the street. The memory would not die; but then many want to shape our memory of history.

When the Hard Rock Café received permission to trademark the identity “Cavern Club” in February 2000, they did so to sell “clothing, namely T-shirts, sweatshirts, polo shirts, sport shirts, jackets, hats, caps, bolo ties, belts, and sun visors,” as well as to operate a “restaurant, bar and prepared take-out food services.” Unsurprisingly, their website and stores feature Beatles-themed haberdashery as they attempt to capture part of the Beatles nostalgia market associated with a number of looming significant anniversaries. Hard Rock Café International, Inc. (owned today by the Seminole Indian Tribe of Florida) has avidly collected rock memorabilia, including material related to the Beatles and the original Cavern Club. Now, they apparently want to collect the identity of the place where George Harrison greeted his future.

Cavern City Tours, a company founded by Liverpudlian schoolteachers in 1984 to celebrate local Beatles history, have been the custodians of England’s Cavern Club since 1991 and petitioned the American court to cancel Hard Rock Café’s registration. They asserted that they have long marketed the club in the United States as part of their tour packages celebrating the Beatles in Merseyside and that the Hard Rock Café’s claim to be the Cavern Club constituted fraud. Indeed, Cavern City Tours maintain that their Cavern Club is THE Cavern Club and that they represent but the most recent of a succession of custodians of the institution.

However, Judge Albert Zervas’ opinion for the Appeal Board sided with the Hard Rock Café by agreeing that Cavern City Tours had failed to prove that its Cavern Club uniquely associated with the “particular personality or ‘persona’” of the Cavern Club. He curiously writes, “We find it implausible that any entity that operates The Cavern Club as a musical entertainment establishment under The Cavern Club name in the same location automatically has The Cavern as its identity.” Consequently, despite a likely appeal, another corporation seems poised to gobble up a piece of Beatles history and to create American imitations of an original in an attempt to provide fans with more convenient places to go than where Brian Epstein first went fifty years ago today.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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Memories of your summer holiday may be fading, but the latest update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography seeks to rekindle the summer—or at least summers past—with one of the new additions from its latest update, published today. For forty years Reginald Dixon (1904-1985) played the Wurlitzer at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, turning a former cinema organist into a recording star, known worldwide for his signature tune, ‘I do like to be beside the seaside.’ Here Dixon’s biographer, Sue Arthur, describes the man who became ‘Mr Blackpool’, and the interwar resort he helped to make a national attraction.

Reginald Dixon ©BBC

Blackpool 1930. In the Victorian splendour of the Tower Ballroom, a young cinema organist Reginald Dixon was beginning his broadcasting career at the keyboard of a state-of-the-art Wurlitzer organ. Blackpool Tower, then Britain’s tallest building designed by the local architects James Maxwell and Charles Tuke, had opened to great acclaim in 1894. Under its 519 feet of steel and wrought iron stood a range of entertainment venues, including a circus, an aquarium and a ballroom. Whilst preserving its flamboyant interiors, the tower’s directors were keen to move with the times and meet the demands of the millions who visited Blackpool each year. The American Wurlitzer organ was the first to be installed in a ballroom in Britain, and Dixon was charged with making the new organ as popular as live bands for dancing. For him it was an opportunity to escape the cinema, where talking pictures were rapidly replacing silent films, and where demand for musicians was declining rapidly. Indeed, Blackpool had converted all of its cinemas to sound by early 1930, ahead of the national trend—a sign of the resort’s commitment to providing the latest and best in entertainment for the growing waves of holidaymakers.

Given a year to make the Wurlitzer a crowd pleaser, Dixon exceeded all expectations. From the 1930s, broadcasts of the Tower Wurlitzer were relayed nationwide, while Dixon shared the ballroom’s stage with the most popular dance bands of the time. Jack Hylton and Geraldo were among the musicians who regularly visited Blackpool, and their radio popularity ensured packed theatres and ballrooms wherever they appeared. Other celebrity performers included the Lancastrians George Formby and Gracie Fields, who guaranteed a twice nightly sell-out show in the busy summer season. For Whitsun 1934, Fields was in the resort to make the Basil Dean film ‘Sing As We Go’, scripted by J.B. Priestley. The film captures the frenetic energy of Blackpool at holiday time and includes footage of Fields in the Tower’s ballroom packed with dancers and spectators. The need to make the Wurlitzer heard at the back of this dense crowd led Dixon to develop his own distinctive ‘bouncy’ style which transmitted the beat of the music effectively. This ‘Blackpool style’ of playing proved popular with radio audiences and made Dixon a celebrity for whom ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ (composed in 1909) became a fitting signature tune.

To millions of British listeners Reginald Dixon was ‘Mr Blackpool’. And yet in many ways this dapper, quietly spoken Yorkshireman was at odds with Blackpool’s famously bold and brash image. The resort was unquestionably racy and risqué. Newspaper headlines from the 1930s were as likely to feature Harold Davidson, the scandalous rector of Stiffkey in a barrel on the Golden Mile—or efforts by composer Lawrence Wright to bring high-brow art to low-brow Blackpool (while making women faint with his exhibition of Epstein’s nude statue of Adam)—as they were stories of family man Reginald Dixon. Blackpool, of course, was all this and more. Noted for ‘fresh air and fun,’ its ability to entertain the masses became legendary. And whether this meant opening the Tower Buildings at 4am to feed arrivals off the first trains of the day; extending the summer season by covering the promenade with illuminations; or investing in the country’s only ballroom Wurlitzer, then Blackpool did what it took to retain its crown as Britain’s most popular resort.

As well as Reginald Dixon, the latest update of the Oxford DNB includes the story of James Maxwell and Charles Tuke, architects of Blackpool Tower on which construction work began 120 years ago this month. Maxwell and Tuke appear in a set of new biographies of modern British architects, from the late Victorian to the late-twentieth century.

Sue Arthur is a doctoral student at Leeds Metropolitan University, studying the entertainment history of Blackpool in the 1930s. A Blackpool resident, she is a trustee director of Blackpool Grand theatre.

“This program of original compositions and improvisations explores the frontier between the ordinary and the sacred in music, a place where nothing is as you expect it to be. The voice becomes a trumpet and beacon, the cello becomes a harp and a lute, and the piano becomes a resonating chapel of vibrations and oscillations.”

Curious what exactly that means? Here’s just a taste of what you could expect:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Among the many hats he wears, Pedro de Alcantara is the author of Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound, an excerpt from which is featured below.

Actor, Receptor, Witness

We all play three roles in every moment of our lives. As actors we move, speak, push and pull, make decisions, and otherwise engage in any number of activities animated by our goals and desires. As receptors we use our senses to listen, smell, touch, get pushed and pulled, and react emotionally to other people. As witnesses we observe everything going on around us, analyzing, synthesizing, describing, explaining, and understanding the world in which we live.

It’s nearly impossible ever to stop being an actor. Even when asleep you’re an actor of sorts, snoring and leaning your body against your lover’s. It’s also impossible to stop being a receptor. Biology makes sure that our senses permanently receive information, from the external world and from our own inner selves. Your witness function requires that you be conscious, but some people would argue that while asleep you still witness a great many things. Proof of it is that upon waking up you can describe one or more dreams in detail.

The three roles are a permanent fixture of your life, but a completely harmonious interplay of all three is difficult to obtain. An actor can be so vigorous as to overwhelm the receptor. Some receptors are insensitive, others sensitive to the point of paranoia—which is no better. A witness may be handicapped by judgment and emotion, or even a simple lack of vocabulary: How to bear witness if you don’t know how to articulate what you see and hear?

Your actor does any one thing. The action has consequences and effects that reverberate all around you. Your receptor senses these effects, and your witness analyzes the information your receptor has gathered. Then you act again, perhaps in a slightly different manner because of what your receptor and witness told you. The cycle of action, reception plus witness, and new action never stops, and the passage from one to the other can be lightning fast. Often the three happen at the same time.

It’s not possible to receive every last bit of information from every last action. Sensory overload is actually dangerous, so we all have means of diminishing the sensitivity of our receptor functions. The difficulty lies in keeping your receptor alert and adaptable, neither sluggish nor thin-skinned.

The ideal witness has no feelings, expresses no preferences, and passes no judgment. The witness says, “I’m using a MacBook Pro laptop computer as I type.” The receptor says, “I love my computer.” Your witness’s capacity to observe neutrally is essential, since it’ll moderate your receptor and guide your actor, helping you make fewer mistaken judgments. If your witness function doesn’t guide you dispassionately and help you pick the right guy out of the lineup, then you risk sending an innocent man to the electric chair.

A good actor balances “doing” and “allowing” within the same gesture. Playing with a yo-yo illustrates the point. The actor actively throws the yo-yo; then the actor backs off and allows the yo-yo to go down and up again; then the actor becomes a little more active again and refreshes the yo-yo’s oscillations with a pull on the string, timing the pull according to the information gathered by the receptor. If the actor “did” incessantly, the yo-yo’s oscillations would soon come to a halt.

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Forty-five years ago, the Beatles disbanded, not in a legal sense, but in the practical aspect of being a band that played live before audiences.  On 29 August 1966, they played their last live concert before an audience in Candlestick Park, San Francisco and, on the plane back to Britain, George Harrison turned to a reporter and sighed, “That’s it.  I’m not a Beatle anymore.”

In September 1966, each of the Beatles went their separate ways.  George Harrison departed for India to study sitar and Indian music with Ravi Shankar, spending part of his time floating on a houseboat on Kashmir’s Dal Lake.  Paul McCartney became a cultural sponge, attending events by artists as different as Luciano Berio at London’s Wigmore Hall and bands like Brian Auger and the Trinity in clubs before embarking on a tour of the Loire Valley (in disguise) and a safari in Kenya.  Ringo Starr concentrated on his family in London.  And symbolically, on 6 September, John Lennon cut his hair, adopted National Health Service wire-rimmed specs, and four days later began a trip to Germany and Spain to play the role of Musketeer Gripweed in Richard Lester’s film, How I Won the War.

In previous years, the time after the summer tours helped to rejuvenate their minds and prepare them for the next Christmas single and album releases.  In the fall of 1966, they had a different option.  Notably, their recording contract with EMI expired leaving them under no legal obligation to release anything by the end of November.  After the rancor of the summer’s tours and the positive responses they received for Revolver, they would take the time to work on their next project.  The question then arose for the Beatles: What was next?  How could they top Revolver?

Some in the press, upon learning that the band would not be taking any more concert dates and that Brian Epstein had not yet negotiated a new recording contract, predicted that the Beatles were spent and would soon disband.  In some ways, they were right: the band that had rocked ballparks and football stadiums no longer existed.  In their place, a collective took over the responsibility of reimagining the role of two guitars, bass, and drums in an environment where electronic sounds, Indian music, and orchestral instruments shared the audioscape.

The world was changing.  The summer’s experiences of being hounded by reporters about Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” comments, guarded by Japanese police from right-wing militants angry about the band’s influence on youth, abused by Filipino police for ignoring Imelda Marcos, and taunted by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States had convinced the band that they could no longer continue as they were.  Like children emancipated from their parents’ homes, they set out to redefine themselves as something other than the two-dimensional giggling mop tops of the cartoon series.

The world’s dramatic social and political changes in the postwar years had led in 1966 to the rise of reactionary conservative forces that found almost everything from the hydrogen bomb to birth control threatening.  But perhaps most challenging of all was the maturing mass of baby boomers, the oldest of whom were about to turn 21 and, thus, potentially gain increased political rights.  Their sheer numbers meant that their experiments with drugs and music brought what would have been counter-cultural into mainstream media and social discourse.  Perhaps without knowing it, the Beatles had been on the front lines of this culture war (thus their experiences on tour) and, even though they no longer wanted to tour, they still very much wanted to be part of this cultural debate, to shed their “fab four” image, and to experiment.

In September 1966, the individual Beatles commenced to molding new individual identities and to exploring individual musical interests.  In Spain, John Lennon would write “Strawberry Fields Forever,” one of his most imaginative songs and a reimagining of his childhood and personal identity.  George Harrison would return from India with improved sitar technique and the self-confidence to record without his band mates.  And Paul McCartney would have an epiphany on the plane back from Africa about how the Beatles could reimagine themselves as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an imaginary group with none of the legal and social complications of reality.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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Image: Island Records

Following the funeral, the British radio waves are full of Amy Winehouse music. Those of us who learned as teenagers about great women blues and soul singers from listening to the voices of Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith, had no such contemporary singers of our own “Beatles” generation, white or black. The emergence of great new talents in this genre was something remarkable.

So then appeared the doomed but special Amy Winehouse. One could listen, but there was little to do to help. Her fall seemed just as inevitable as that of my brilliant high school contemporary, Brian Jones. Critics say she will be remembered for only a few songs–but of course that is true of many of the greatest talents we remember, especially those who die young. Her very best known song (Rehab) raised one very cruel issue, and the album “Back to Black” will be remembered as acutely self-prophetic.

Her voice was one in a generation, her talent immense–just listen to “Valerie”. So long Amy, we’ll still be listening!

As Colgate University’s Cooley Professor of Peace Studies, Nigel Young held the first endorsed Peace Studies Chair in North America. He was also a co-founder of the UK’s first Peace Studies Department at the University of Bradford (1973) and has authored, co-authored, and edited many works in the field.  He is Editor in Chief of The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace.

By Toril Moi

Like other Norwegians I am in shock at the terrible events in Oslo and at Utøya on 22 July. My heart goes out to the victims and their families.

I was not in Norway when the horror happened. On 22 July, I was giving a talk about Ibsen’s 1873 play Emperor and Galilean at the National Theatre in London. I only learned about  the bombing in Oslo and the massacre at Utøya later that night. When I discovered that the terrorist in Norway saw himself as a crusader against  Muslims, I realized that Emperor and Galilean is more dreadfully relevant than ever, for it is about the horrors — persecution, torture, murder, crazed search for martyrdom, wars — produced by religious fanaticism, by people hell-bent on being right, on forcing others to submit to their will, but who have no capacity to love.

In London last week I also saw Tosca. When the heroine finds herself blackmailed by Scarpia, the ruthless chief of police, she sings one of the most touching arias in the history of opera: “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” – I lived for art, I lived for love — an aria in which she wonders how it can be that she, who has never hurt a soul, now is caught in the brutal web of  ruthless power. Puccini’s opera shows that people who live for art and love may find themselves destroyed by people who live for power. There is no happy end for Tosca. Yet  she was right to live for art, and for love. As one of the young survivors of Utøya said to CNN: “If one man can show so much hatred, then think of how much love we can all show together.” That response effectively undermines the terrorists’ agenda. It will take a long time for Norway to recover from the horrors of 22 July 2011. But in a response like that one, we glimpse a possibility: maybe, one day, something new, something that, like art, requires love and imagination to come into existence, can be built in the ruins of terror.

Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, and Professor of English, and Theater Studies at Duke University where she is also Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature. Moi is most recently the author of Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy and Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman.

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By Gordon Thompson

To many adolescents fifty years ago, the future seemed bleak: the “King” had become preoccupied with refurbished Italian schmaltz while the world drew closer to Armageddon.  But hope buzzed in the heart of an ungrounded amplifier in a West German high school.

Goodwill had floundered between the recently elected American president, John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Union’s premier, Nikita Khrushchev over the Soviet blockade of Berlin and America’s support of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.  As a backdrop to those deliberations, Elvis, fresh out of the army and back from Germany, had apparently abandoned rock and roll to sing “Surrender”—a modernization of the Neapolitan ballad “Torna a Surriento”—at the top of popular music charts on both sides of the Atlantic.  Still, new beginnings can percolate in unlikely forms and in unusual places.

In Hamburg, the stolid bandleader and recording manager Bert Kaempfert saw an opportunity to make some quick money before rock and roll completely died of disinterest.  The city’s notorious St. Pauli district hosted a thriving scene populated largely by young British musicians doing reasonable imitations of America’s celebrated musical decadence.  As his vehicle, he hit upon a former London television persona in exile that had risen to the top of the local pop hierarchy, that played guitar better than almost everyone else in Hamburg, and whose German pronunciation Kaempfert could tolerate.

Bert Kaempfert

For Tony Sheridan, Hamburg’s St. Pauli District proved the perfect place to live the rock-and-roll life he had embraced.  Late-night bars, strip clubs, prostitution, organized crime, drugs, alcohol, all seemed to roil beneath the roughly paved streets attracting sailors and students, businessmen and bands.  Like moths to a flame, the young and innocent, as well as those old enough to know better, wandered (and staggered) in its streets.  Among its most recent immigrants, the Beatles seemed to try harder than most, pushed by ambition and fear of failure.  For sheer energy, Sheridan probably suggested the Liverpudlians as one option for his accompaniment at a recording session Kaempfert was arranging.

Kaempfert had in mind what Elvis and others were doing: updating older material.  Ray Charles had revived Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” the previous year and had done a version of “My Bonnie” in 1959.  German audiences often did not entirely understand the English lyrics, especially the American colloquialisms that pervaded rock-and-roll recordings by people like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.  Choosing songs like “My Bonnie” and “Ain’t She Sweet” provided texts with which German audiences might already be familiar.  Sheridan would record “My Bonnie.”

Long hours, amphetamines, and existentialist students had transformed the Beatles.  With a repertoire built from bar requests, current hits, and personal American favorites (as well as their own first compositions), the Beatles had become avid devotees of rock and pop, developing a style that drew increasingly larger audiences.  The heart of the Beatles’ growing success lay in their ability to adapt to their diverse audiences.  Hamburg in particular had tested and pushed them to their physical, mental, and musical limits, putting the musical and social structure of the band in crisis.  They had only arrived the previous September and had been sent home in December ignominy; but they learned quickly.

Gradually over the spring of 1961, bassist Stu Sutcliffe had withdrawn from the Beatles and returned to art, winning admission to study in Hamburg with Eduardo Paolozzi and gaining the opportunity to continue living with his girlfriend, Astrid Kirchherr.  In his place, McCartney had reluctantly taken over the responsibilities of providing the melodic bottom of the ensemble, a role he would apply to maximum effect as he discovered how much the bass line contributed to harmonic direction.  To get there, however, the musician first converted a guitar into a bass (cutting bass strings from a piano to satisfy the required physics), then borrowed and played Sutcliffe’s bass, and, after returning to Hamburg, purchased what would become his iconic Hofner “violin” bass.  The instrument’s unusual symmetrical shape and thin neck proved perfect for the left-handed guitarist.

When they arrived at the Friedrich-Ebert-Gymnasium on 23 June 1961 to play in the high school’s impressive auditorium, they encountered an environment dramatically different from the Top Ten Club.  The room’s natural reverberation would have surprised the band at first after playing in the acoustically dry clubs and dancehalls of Liverpool and Hamburg and whetted their appetite to play similar venues in the future.  But most of all, the thrill of recording pushed the adrenaline through their veins.

“My Bonnie” gained modest recognition in Germany; but for the Beatles the disk represented their official entry into the recording industry.  Polydor released the disk, which included “The Saints (When the Saints Go Marching In)” on the B-side, as Tony Sheridan and the Beat Boys.  Although “The Beatles” had served them well as a name playing on the Reeperbahn, the name sounded too close to a German slang term for “penises” to serve as an appropriate name for the staid parent company of Polydor, Deutsche Grammophone.

The disk would open unexpected doors for the Beatles.  They would also record “Ain’t She Sweet” (with Lennon singing) and “Cry for a Shadow” (an instrumental credited to Lennon and Harrison); but when a customer entered Brian Epstein’s store later that year asking for a copy of “My Bonnie,” their world would begin to change.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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By Kevin Whitehead

Music journalist Bill Wyman wrote an article for Slate recently that has resonated with me, pondering an age when vast quantities of music have become instantly available to anyone with an internet connection.  Every year my wish list of elusive rarities gets shorter and shorter. Research is getting a lot easier, for the historically-minded; so has just poking around, for curious listeners.

A couple of decades ago, delving into an unfamiliar musical genre could be daunting: you might have to assemble a small record collection just to get started, and sometimes you found out the hard way that a few consensus classics weren’t to your taste. But now in what I’ve called our “post-album era,” we—or at least I—often think of recorded pieces as free-standing entities rather than as one part of the greater LP or CD they first appeared on. (Ask anyone who downloads individual tracks online.) You don’t have to invest so much anymore.

Actually, novice listeners can hear an awful lot of music without investing anything but time, now that so much jazz is also available as streaming audio on the web. Working backwards in time: there are temporary postings of post-1960 avant-garde rarities at Destination Out,  and tons of ’50s and ’60s Blue Note classics on YouTube; jazz-on-line.com has a broad selection of classic swing and bebop, and a smattering of country blues. The Library of Congress’s newly activated National Jukebox has a quirky selection of hundreds of sides from the 1920s, including some rare ragtime and early jazz and blues sides.

Spirituals and comic novelties that helped fuel emerging jazz are among the late 19th/early 20th century treasures and forgotten oddities at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s amazing Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.  It’s a perfect place to lose a few hours browsing (and a reminder that the music of any era is amazingly diverse).

For educational time-whittling, I’ve long been fond of redhotjazz.com, as an astounding resource (and obvious labor of love). Lately the site appears to be falling into disrepair; the search function is no longer operating, though most of the music is still available for streaming. You can still find what’s there using Google, with “site:redhotjazz.com” as a search parameter. Or you can use the links below to tune into some compelling early jazz performances, including a few relatively obscure items I discovered at the site myself.

Immersing yourself in early jazz, as it slowly emerges from ragtime and other influences, makes one rethink the question, what’s the first jazz record? Usually cited is the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s “Livery Stable Blues” and its flipside “Dixie Jass Band One Step” from early 1917.  But you can hear glimmers of emerging jazz even before that, as on a couple of 1916 recordings of clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman’s “Down Home Rag,” including one by the composer himself.  (The other is by vaudeville’s Versatile 4, where Charlie Johnson’s hot drumming has to be heard to be believed.) Not quite jazz yet, but leaning there, is bandleader James Reese Europe’s 1913 orchestral version of the same tune. (Scroll down the page for the titles; they play in Real Player.)

If you want to hear boogie-woogie emerging on record long before it became a late-’30s craze, hear Jimmy Blythe’s 1924 “Chicago Stomp.”  From the same year also comes the first of Duke Ellington’s many train songs, “Choo-Choo (Got to Hurry Home),” recorded just weeks after Billy Murray’s vocal version, on tap at the Library of Congress site.

The great early blues women are on the Red Hot Jazz Archive too, like Ma Rainey doing “Bessemer Bound Blues” (1925), with wah-wah brass mocking her every moan.  The overlooked early jazz pianist Lovie Austin and her Blues Serenaders kick it on the instrumental “Traveling Blues” (1924), for trio with cornetist Tommy Ladnier and clarinetist Jimmy O’Bryant. More common but also noteworthy: Bessie Smith sparring with cornetist Louis Armstrong on “St. Louis Blues” and the rife-with-subtext “I Ain’t Goin’ to Play No Second Fiddle” (“’cause I’m used to playing lead”).  Armstrong’s Hot 5 and Hot 7 classics are there, too; check out the Hot 5’s “I’m Not Rough,” where vocalist Armstrong and guitarist Lonnie Johnson drop into a chorus of pure country blues, and there’s an ear-fooling ending that mimics a skipping record.

The site bills itself as “A History of Jazz Before 1930,” but there are a few later sides. So you can trace pianist Mary Lou Williams’s development from her first 1927 session with Jeanette James and Her Synco Jazzers (hear her solo on “Midnight Stomp”)  through her mid-’30s sides with Andy Kirk’s Kansas City band—including “Walkin’ and Swingin’” (1936), from which Thelonious Monk cribbed the opening of his “Rhythm-a-ning.”

And don’t miss Joe Venuti’s funny, early foray into jazz multi-instrumentalism, “Vibraphonia (Number Two)” from 1933.  Venuti starts on bass and then switches to his usual violin; Jimmy Dorsey plays alto saxophone, clarinet and a surprisingly credible cornet—making him one of those rare players who doubles on reeds and brass, like Ira Sullivan and Joe McPhee much later.

Okay, you get the idea—there’s a lot there: Armstrong’s first 1923 recordings with King Oliver and a 1925 session where Sidney Bechet’s soprano saxophone threatens to upstage Louis’s cornet, on “Cake Walking Babies from Home”; more early Duke Ellington and even earlier Paul Whiteman (derided by many jazz fans, but his “Chicago” is awfully hip for 1922);  New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton solo or with his ingeniously orchestrated Red Hot Peppers, lyrical cornet player Bix Beiderbecke and Bix with Frank Trumbauer….

Here are links to the bands and musicians pages to get you started.  Warning: once you start browsing you may get hooked. It happened to me.

Kevin Whitehead is the longtime jazz critic for National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” and has written about jazz for many publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Down Beat, and the Village Voice. He is most recently the author of Why Jazz? A Concise Guide. Listen to his interview on The Oxford Comment.

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Looking for something good to put on your iPod for the next four years?  When Louis Masur stopped by, I learned that in addition to being able to summarize the entire Civil War in less than 100 pages (see: The Civil War: A Concise History), he also happens to be a huge music buff, having written his previous book on some guy called The Boss. I asked if he wouldn’t mind making us something special for the big 1-5-0 and he kindly obliged. Enjoy!     –Michelle R.

Louis Masur’s Civil War Playlist

1.) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band.

The gold standard of Civil War themed rock songs. Released in 1969, it tells the story of Virgil Caine, a Confederate soldier, and laments the lost cause of the South. “He was just eighteen/ proud and brave/ but a Yankee laid him in his grave.”

2.) Swan, Swan H, REM.

Hailing from Athens, Georgia, REM sings “marching feet, Johnny Reb, what’s the price of heroes.” The band also issued an album titled Fables of the Reconstruction (1985).

3.)  Yankee Bayonet, The Decemberists.

“But oh did you see all the dead of Manassas,” using the Southern term for Bull Run. The song aches with the lament of one killed in war.

4.) Rebel Waltz, The Clash.

The great English punk band sings about an army of rebels: “we knew the war could not be won.” The rebels need not necessarily be Confederates, but it is hard to listen and not think the Civil War.

5.) Billy Don’t Be a Hero, Paper Lace.

This antiwar song appeared in 1974. The band performed the song wearing Union uniforms. A woman is narrating: “Billy, don’t be a hero! Don’t be a fool with your life!”

6.) The Land of Glory, Poco.

The last song on Poco’s 1981 theme album Blue and Gray, with each song about patriotism, love, and loss.

7.) Decatur, Sufjan Stevens.

Stevens’s album Illinois included this song that states “Stephen A. Douglas was a great debater/ But Abraham Lincoln was a great Emancipator.”

8.) Youngstown, Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen’s searing song about the decline of the steel industry in Pennsylvania makes reference to “the cannon balls that helped the union win the war.”

9.)  Graceland, Paul Simon.

Travelling to Elvis’ shrine means, in this song, making a pilgrimage “down the highway/through the cradle of the Civil War.”

10.) I’m Afraid to Go Home, Brian Hyland.

“Sherman’s been to my town, burned it all to the ground” sings Hyland, who was a pop sensation in the early 1960s.

11.) Gettysburg, The Brandos.

The lead song of their first album in 1987, the Brandos offer a rocking meditation on the battle of Gettysburg: “I watched men die blue and gray.”

12.) The Battle of Hampton Roads, Titus Andronicus.

An allusion to the Merrimack and the Monitor, “two great ships will pull back in their ports,” told over fourteen minutes of hard rocking intensity.

13.) Daylight Again, Crosby, Still, Nash.

The title song of an album released in 1982, CSN sing “I think about a hundred years ago/How my father’s bled.”

14.) God Bless Robert E. Lee, Johnny Cash.

Many country songs and ballads discuss the Civil War. Johnny Cash sings of Lee’s decision to surrender and decides “for all those lives that were saved/I gotta say God Bless Robert E. Lee.”

15.) Abraham, Martin, and John, Dion.

Written by Dick Holler in 1968, and also recorded by Marvin Gaye, the song laments the deaths of Lincoln, King, and Kennedy: “Has anybody here, seen my old friend Abraham/ Can you tell me where he’s gone?/He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, they die young/But I just looked around and he’s gone.”

16.) Abraham Lincoln, Clutch.

This song about Lincoln’s assassination appears on the 2009 album Strange Cousins from the West and opens “Oh Abraham Lincoln carried across the street/The assassin, the coward shot him in the head.”

17.) Talkin World War III Blues, Bob Dylan.

On The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan which appeared in 1963, he ends this song by declaring “Half of the people can be part right all of the time/Some of the people can be all right part of the time/But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time/I think Abraham Lincoln said that/I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours/I said that.”

18.) With God on Our Side, Bob Dylan.

With The Times They Are a Changin’, released in 1964, Dylan cemented his reputation as a powerful protest singer, though he always denied the label. This anti-war song includes “the Civil War too/was soon laid away.”

Louis P. Masur is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in American Institutions and Values at Trinity College and former editor of Reviews in American History. His most recent book is The Civil War: A Concise History.

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Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz has consistently ranked among the bestselling books on jazz since its publication in 1997.  Gioia has now updated and expanded on this work in a second edition and below he answers questions about the new version of his book and the state of jazz today.

What are the biggest changes happening in jazz world?

When I was teenager and first learning how to play jazz, most musicians of my generation believed that technology would radically change the future of the music.  They turned out to be correct—but not in the ways they had anticipated.

They had been thinking about innovative electric keyboards, synthesizers, wild new guitars and other expensive toys that would change the sound of jazz.  In fact, the instruments of jazz have changed very little in recent decades.  But all the other kinds of technologies have been transformed dramatically.

Technology has changed everything that’s taking place surrounding the music.  Not just how it is played, but even more how it is produced, disseminated, marketed, sold and heard.  Few jazz musicians are prepared for these changes—which present both opportunities and risks.  You can know your horn inside and out, but will find your career prospects severely limited if you don’t understand and address this new state of affairs.

What distinguishes your jazz history from other books on the subject?

I’ve aimed to write something that is more than a dry textbook, but tells the story of the music in a vivid, thought-provoking way.  I don’t hide my enthusiasm for jazz—I know that many readers see this as a key characteristic of my writing.  I am deeply committed to the subjects I write about, and readers can sense that.  By the same token, I try to be much more than a fan.  I take seriously the social ramifications and economic realities of jazz.  I aim to be hard-hitting but also scrupulously honest and fair-minded.  Above all, I try to communicate why this music is worth studying, worth hearing.

How much has changed in your new edition of The History of Jazz?

The most obvious changes relate to my coverage of the last 15 years.  I’ve been able to add material on musicians and issues that have come to the fore during this period. Dozens of artist who weren’t included in the last edition are now dealt with, such as Jason Moran, Diana Krall, Brad Mehldau, James Carter, Matthew Shipp, Nora Jones, The Bad Plus, Jamie Cullum, Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer and many others.   I address a host of pressing issues, such as the institutionalization of jazz via organizations such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and the infiltration of jazz into the academic world.  I also devote considerable attention to the remarkable globalization of jazz and the shifting styles of recent years.

In addition, I went back to the earlier sections of the original book, and updated them based on new information and my own on-going research.  I literally went through the 1997 version of the book sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.  I reevaluated all of my earlier judgments, added new material as relevant, and made lots of improvements, small and large, to the original text.  I also updated and expanded the recommended listening guide—which I know, from emails and letters, is one of the most frequently consulted parts of the work.

Ted Gioia is a musician, author, and leading jazz critic and expert on American music. The first edition of his The History of Jazz was selected as one of the twenty best books of the year in The Washington Post, and was chosen as a notable book of the year in The New York Times. He is also the author of Delta Blues, West Coast Jazz, Work Songs and The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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By Suzanne Ryan, Music Editor

We bid a sad farewell to one of our most dear authors and friends, Bruce Haynes.

An Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal and McGill University, Bruce was a pioneer and champion of historical performance practice with numerous solo and ensemble recordings to his credit. He was a founding member of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, alongside his wife and musical partner, Susie Napper to whom we humbly offer our most sincere condolences.

As part of his long list of publications, Bruce authored two books with Oxford, The Eloquent Oboe: A History of the Hautboy from 1640-1760 (2001) and The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music (2007) which received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Media Award, and he was a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music.

Beloved and respected throughout the early music community, Bruce’s efforts and insights as both performer and scholar brought historical performance practice alive, and his legacy will enrich the ears and hearts of musicians and audiences for years to come. It was an honor, a privilege, and a joy to work with Bruce and to be witness to his grace, warmth, and generosity. Bruce passed from our midst on May 17^th, but his spirit will never leave our hearts.

By Gordon Thompson

Fifty years ago, on Monday 22 May 1961, London’s constabulary attempted to terminate a British musical tradition.  For as long as most of them could remember, musicians had gathered Monday afternoons on the short stretch of pavement between Rupert Street and Great Windmill Street in Soho to collect their pay from previous engagements and to pick up work for the coming week.  A local merchant had probably complained about the disparate crowd blocking the street, so the police made an ultimately futile show of disbursing the peace and harmony.  But Archer Street served a purpose beyond paychecks and contracts: here musicians gathered to network and to share stories about gigs, owners, patrons, and, of course, other musicians.

Soho had been home to musicians for centuries with even Mozart briefly residing in a house in what is now Frith Street in 1765.  A few blocks and centuries away in Old Compton Street, British rock and roll would find a shrine in the 2i’s coffee bar.  Archer Street in the early sixties resembled many other small back lanes in Soho, with the stage doors from the Apollo and Lyric Theatres—not to mention the notorious Windmill Theatre (with its history of staged nude tableaus)—emptying into the narrow and dimly lit alley.  But Archer also featured the Red Lion public house where Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had first presented the outline of the Communist Manifesto and where musicians like Ray Davies would join their first professional bands.

A year after the failed crackdown on loitering musicians, Archer Street was still the place for a young bassist to come looking for work.  John Baldwin knew from his father (Joe Baldwin, a band arranger) where he might find the most prominent electric bassist of the era, Jet Harris.  That meeting behind the Windmill Theatre set in motion a chain of events that would change Baldwin’s life, if not British popular music.

Harris and drummer Tony Meehan had been members of the Shadows, Britain’s most successful instrumental group and the designated accompaniment for Britain’s Elvis, Cliff Richard.  Harris in particular—with his lean frame and angular features—had become an icon of British rock in the late fifties and the early sixties, especially with his imported American Fender Precision Bass.  Anyone who played the electric bass in Britain in this era had to measure himself or herself (and there would be budding female bassists such as Megan Davies) against Jet Harris.

Modern ears often fail to understand the iconoclastic impact of the electric guitar and bass in the late fifties and early sixties.  The sonic presence, the attack, and, most of all, the sheer coolness of that twang resonated with hormonal intensity in adolescent minds.  Allan Weighell, who played for Britain’s first pop star Tommy Steele, had taken up the electric bass to replace the low (but clean) thumping of the acoustic bass.  But Jet Harris’s eager embrace of the Fender P-bass made it a cultural weapon and placed the sound at the front of the band instead of the back.

With his edgy image, Harris, of course, also had his problems, notably with alcohol, as did many working musicians of the era.  Notably, only a few months before the Bobbies had tried to clear Archer Street, Harris had fallen off the Cavern Club’s stage in Liverpool.  Even the normally politic Paul McCartney reportedly aped this sad moment in Harris’s career, stumbling around the Cavern’s tiny platform as though in a stupor.  By 1962, both Harris and drummer Meehan had left the Shadows for solo careers.

Baldwin remembers finding Harris on Archer Street and, perhaps hearing that Harris had begun playing guitar, took the opportunity to ask his idol if he needed a bass player.  Guitar solos of the era, as epitomized by the Shadows’ Hank Marvin, were often simple but catchy melodies, devoid of the pyrotechnics that would come to dominate rock in the coming years.  Harris had begun dabbling with a style of playing and timbre that emphasized the bass in solos, leaving a potential musical opening at bottom of the audio mix.  Although better known, Vic Flick’s guitar theme for James Bond owes much to the twangy bass line that Harris promoted in 1962 with tunes like “Besame Mucho” and “Main Title Theme from ‘Man with the Golden Arm’.”

Over the coming weeks, impressed with what he heard, Baldwin’s idol soon drafted the sixteen-year-old musician to help promote the former Shadows duo’s first release, “Diamonds.”  In 1963, having just turned seventeen, Baldwin now found himself earning in impressive £30 a week and touring with Jet Harris and Tony Meehan as their single climbed to the top of British charts.  In the coming months, they would score further hits with “Scarlett O’Hara” and “Applejack.”

During the sixties, Baldwin would become a soloist in his own right, a session musician, a music director, and a producer, changing his name to reflect his transformation into a professional.  As John Paul Jones, he would see his own star rise with Led Zeppelin, even as Harris’s career dissolved.  Nevertheless, Jet Harris, who died on 18 March 2011 at the age of 71, laid a foundation upon which others built.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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Listen to a clip from Crown Imperial: [See post to listen to audio]
Record Label – Naxos | Orchestra – English Northern Philharmonia | Conductor – Paul Daniel

Sir William Walton was one of the most important British composers of his generation, and Crown Imperial distils the essence of British regal ceremonial in music.  The orchestral score, published by Oxford University Press, was originally written for performance immediately before the Coronation Service of Prince William’s great-grandparents George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey on 12 May 1937, when a specially configured Coronation Orchestra was conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, performing the work at the entrance of the Dowager Queen Mary. A recording had been made prior to that date, but was not issued until after the Coronation.

The new march became immediately popular, and OUP issued arrangements for piano, organ, small orchestra with piano, and military band, as well as various versions of the original full orchestration. Crown Imperial is now one of the most popular and best-loved classical music works by a twentieth-century British composer, and is regularly performed and recorded worldwide.

The performance direction at the head of the score is Allegro real, and after the title comes a quotation from William Dunbar: ‘In beawtie beryng the crone imperiall’. Both immediately confirm the work’s purpose as an arresting occasional piece for a great and royal ceremonial event.

Martial swagger, a memorable central melody, and the striking use of the organ all contribute to Crown Imperial’s grand effect.  The abridgement of the score used at the Royal Wedding makes some changes to the original orchestration and memorably introduces six fanfare trumpets and snare drum in the closing bars.

The orchestral material for this abridgement of Crown Imperial will be available on hire from OUP during the summer of 2011.

By Michelle Rafferty

How real is the HBO series Treme? Here John Swenson reflects on what it was like watching the first season as a resident of New Orleans (he has yet to comment on the second, which premiered last night), as well as what the culture of the city means to its people.

As a writer for OffBeat Swenson has written about the musicians returning to NOLA after Katrina, and in his forthcoming book New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans he talks about their crusade to save the endangered city. Swenson himself suggested the song in the video “Dogs Chase Cats” from Andy J. Forest’s NOtown Story (2010).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Birth of Madame White Snake

Click here to view the embedded video.

(c) Boston Opera, BostonOperaChannel

Watch Madame White Snake “…the final step…”

Want more of The Oxford Comment? Subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes!
You can also look back at past episodes on the archive page.

Featured in this Episode:

Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case and this tumblr (featuring some of the best personification we’ve seen in ages!)

And, see 7-year-old Matt in a tree! Those locks!

“So well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.” -The New York Times on The Metropolis Case

and

Book club members  Michelle Lipinski, Grace Labatt, Michelle Rafferty and Justyna Zajac.

To accompany this podcast, we also present the following excerpt from the The Metropolis Case:

Through Its Street Names, the City Is a Mystic Cosmos

NEW YORK CITY, 1960. Anna Prus stepped out of her apartment building onto Seventy-fourth Street, where she paused to glance back at Central Park, which looked opaque and grainy like an old newsreel. It had been snowing for days, but a sallow, expectant glow emanating from the crenellated perimeter of the park told her the storm was nearing an end. While she did not relish the idea of negotiating a trip downtown, the transformation of the city into a tundra, with squalls of powder and amorphous mounds where there had once been cars, mailboxes, and shrubs, struck her as the perfect accompaniment to the magic, improbable turn the day had taken, now that she was about to make her Isolde debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

Though Anna was not an unknown, she had to this point in her career been relegated to smaller houses and (except for some minor roles) hired by the Met as an alternate to the type of leading soprano she had always wanted to be. But as sometimes happened with singers her age—Anna was forty—her voice, after six years at the conservatory and over fifteen more of training, auditioning, and performing, had at last blossomed, giving her reason to believe that she had found her calling in the Wagnerian repertory. Which is not to say her future had been unfurled like a red carpet; if anything, her reputation as a dependable but hardly breathtaking talent still preceded her, and for this current production, she had been brought in only to “cover” the Isolde and so had expected—as she had always done in the past—to spend her nights in the wings, anxiously hoping and not hoping (because she was not one to wish ill health or misfortune on anyone) that she would finally get her chance.

This time her luck was better; from the start, the lead struggled with the role and after much gossip and speculation had finally canceled, which meant Anna was going on tonight and possibly for the entire run if she could deliver the type of performance the Met general manager, Rudolf Bing (having made a point of attending one of her cover rehearsals in the event of just this contingency), expected of her. Anna buried her scarf-wrapped chin deep into the neck of her fur coat and wrapped her arms around her bag, which held a carefully folded dress, shoes, and jewelry for the opening-night party scheduled for after the show. She walked forward into the wind, nimbly tracing a line through a group of men digging out with picks and shovels, and forced herself to review a mental list of exactly what she needed to attend to—wig, costume, makeup, voice—and whom she needed to see at the theater—Mr. Bing, the maestro, the director, the Tristan—before her seven o’clock curtain.

Excerpted from The Metropolis Case: A Novel. Copyright @ 2010 by Matthew Gallaway.  Reprinted by Permission of Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

By Michelle Rafferty

What made Louis Armstrong embarrassed? Why was Cab Calloway on Sesame Street? To learn a little more about these two legends check out the podcast below with BBC Producer Alyn Shipton and the talented interviewer Annie Shipton (yes, that would be Alyn’s daughter).

Happy JAM (Jazz Appreciation Month)!


More Sesame Street…Cab teaches us how to jump AND jive:

Click here to view the embedded video.

By Gordon Thompson

Even in the storm’s dawning, both fans and defamers alike recognized magic in the Beatles’ ability to collaborate and to adapt in pursuit of a shared vision, and at the heart of this quest lay the desire to make great recordings.  In the beginning of their career with EMI, their willingness to subvert their individual identities to a common cause (and the joy with which they did so) contributed to their success.  In the end, the enterprise collapsed when the principals—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, George Martin and the community of engineers, arrangers, and session musicians who assisted them—ceased genuinely listening to each other and collaborating.

At the core of the adventure, Lennon and McCartney’s heterodyne songwriting process (a complex and very social interchange) generated the raw materials; but the band flourished through collective creativity.  At every stage from inspiration and development, to the routining of a groove and the arrangement, to the capturing and mastering of the recording, and even to the spin on its release and the shape of its reception, a community of individuals defined the identity the music.  Thus, every Beatles recording possesses a history in which songwriting, musicianship, production, and marketing play a role.  The recordings stand as archeological artifacts, our primary evidence of the existential truth of the Beatles epic, and supplement a rich collection of interviews about the dramatis personae that contribute to the ebb and flow of the narrative.

Like many other British (and American) performers in the mid-sixties, the Beatles created material and performances as a social unit and depended on their production team to realize their ideas as recordings.  When the northerners worked together on material, they mutually contributed ideas and modified them, intuitively reacting to changing musical tastes and sensing that their survival depended on their ability to function as a team.  Just as their families had survived the war and postwar years through communal sharing, the Beatles generated their music in a process that featured mutual contributions to the familial good.

Perhaps ironically, the triumph of the British music and recording industries in general, and of the Beatles specifically, led to an increased Americanization that deemphasized the very collaborative processes that contributed to that success.  Indeed, demise crept up on the Beatles as they simultaneously and individually began to self-produce and lose their ability to work as a team, collapsing the network that had sustained them.

In 1968, the introduction of American eight-track recording equipment into London studios meant that one or two individuals could record all of the parts asynchronously.  For example, when Lennon and McCartney recorded “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in April of 1969, they joked about replacing Ringo Starr and George Harrison at their session.  Eight (and soon sixteen) tracks allowed for greater control over the balance and sound of individual tracks; but it also eliminated the kinds of interpersonal inspiration that had characterized British music up to that time.

By the winter of 1970, the glory was gone and the Beatles were no longer a functional enterprise; but the outside world only guessed at the situation.  Apple explained that the Beatles had taken extended breaks in the past and that the current situation was no different.  But Paul McCartney had purchased a Studer four-track recording deck for his home studio and had set a course that would allow him total independence from the band that had defined and now denied him.  He recorded all of the parts—the vocals, guitars, keyboards, and drums—with assistance from his wife Linda Eastman—and now possessed a DIY album, some of whose attraction lay in its very primitiveness.

He had been on the outs with the other three members of the band over the management of Apple (the others voted for Allen Klein while McCartney wanted Linda’s father Lee Eastman) and, more importantly, musically.  Now he felt he could do without them.  In 1968, Starr had temporarily quit the band in a pique of anger at McCartney while recording “Back in the USSR.”  A few months later, George Harrison would similarly walk away from their film/recording sessions, annoyed with the bass player’s insistence on dominating the music direction.  Later that year, Lennon would announce to the others his intention to leave the band.  But on 10 April 1970, Don Short in the Daily Mirror scooped the rest of the London papers with access to a McCartney press release meant to promote his eponymous first album.  The world learned officially of the end of the songwriting team and that the Beatles enterprise had ceased.  McCartney described the situation as the “start of a new career.”

They had indelibly stamped the sixties even as the decade had transformed them from lusty teenage poseurs into adult professionals with families.  They would seek the musical company of others and have their individual triumphs; but the four of them would never again meet together in the studio and be the Beatles.  Many have pondered the question, “Why did the Beatles break up?”  Perhaps a better question might be, “Why didn’t they break up sooner?”

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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By Gordon Thompson

Forty-five years ago, at the beginning of April 1966, on the almost anniversary of a London dentist surreptitiously spiking his and George Harrison’s coffees with Lysergic acid diethylamide, John Lennon visited Barry Miles’ Indica Books and picked up a copy of Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  In its pseudo-mystical prose, Lennon found partial inspiration for one of the most audacious recordings the Beatles would ever attempt.

As winter waned into spring, the Beatles had reason to believe in their invincibility.  Over the past three years, they had seen their films triumph in the summer markets, their albums and singles consistently dominate the charts, and the press cling to their every utterance.  Change charged the air and they sensed that they surfed its crest.  After returning from the 1965 US summer tour, Lennon increased his experimentation with LSD, largely for its visual effects.  Since childhood, he had been fond of Lewis Carroll’s surrealism and now, with the hallucinogen coursing through his brain, he sought out the exotic.  The cult of LSD made astounding claims about what could be accomplished by “liberated” minds, especially through the destruction of the ego, which they justified with terminology appropriated from Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism.  Of all the era’s experiences, Lennon would regret this pursuit the most.

Britain had long held a fascination with Asia, rationalizing imperial aspirations by projecting dark desires on the blank screen of its ignorance.  But with the postwar rise in Indian and Pakistani immigration and the accessibility of the world through an expansion of international air travel, some British musicians (e.g., Davy Graham, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds) came into direct contact with non-Western traditions and incorporated elements of these musics into their recordings.  George Harrison in particular had become infatuated with India and had infected Lennon with an appreciation of its music.  When the Beatles gathered with producer George Martin to make initial plans for their next album, Lennon premiered an India-tinged paean to non-existence.  Outlining a major triad and pivoting the melody against a single chord, he imitated the modality of Indian classical music.  To emphasize this source of inspiration, they would later add the drone of a tambura to the mix.

But London occupied the center of the western universe in 1966 and Paul McCartney encountered a different musical reality, that of the avant garde and the mix of live and electronic sounds he heard in the music of composers such as Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen.  After three years of having George Martin cut and splice Beatles tapes to create composite recordings, McCartney knew the basics, which in the sixties involved little more than a grease pencil (to mark edit points), a pair of brass scissors (to avoid a magnetic click), and adhesive tape.  Some of the core techniques of musique concrète (the electronic manipulation of recorded acoustic sounds) included playing the recordings at different speeds and directions, as well as creating loops of particular sounds.  McCartney quickly mastered this simple technology and shared it with his mates.

When Geoff Emerick arrived on 6 April for his first day as their balance engineer, he did so not in their beloved Studio Two (someone had already scheduled that space).  Instead, the Beatles began recording Revolver—which many consider the band’s most important album—in the more intimate confines of EMI’s Studio Three.  Another new member of the production crew also watched and listened as the band worked through Lennon’s as yet unnamed one-chord wonder.  The new tape operator, Phil McDonald, fulfilling one of his responsibilities, annotated this particular experiment as “Mark I.”

Long before rappers sampled other people’s recordings, the Beatles selected five bits of sound to complement their reworking of “Mark I.”  One loop featured the sound of a man laughing, which, when sped up, sounded like gulls.  Another captured an orchestra playing a B^b chord, while another carried the sound of a sped-up mandolin.  Two more loops contained sitar music, which, when reversed and doubled in speed, produced an unearthly music.  Finally, McCartney would dub a guitar solo onto the master tape as it spooled backwards, producing a sound no guitarist could duplicate in live performance.

As often would be the case, when Lennon superimposed the lyrics over this sonic amalgam, he felt dissatisfied with the sound of his voice: the quality did not match the recording’s aesthetic.  To his rescue came EMI stalwart Ken Townsend.  By patching Lennon’s microphone through an amplifier and speaker arrangement designed to give electronic organs a greater room presence, Townsend transported the vocals for the last verse into another universe.

In many ways, the Beatles and their production crew were temporarily abandoning their attachment to the traditional rock ‘n’ roll ensemble and Lennon even suggested as much in an interview with Christopher Hutchins that month in the New Musical Express.  They would selectively pursue this direction over the next few years, with “Tomorrow Never Knows” (a Ringo Starr gem of a phrase) as their point of departure.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

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Featured in this Episode:

Lauren Skypes with Gordon Thompson, Professor of Music at Skidmore College and author of Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out. You can read Thompson’s OUPblog column here.

*     *     *     *     *

Michelle visits the Strand Book Store in New York City and speaks with John McMillian*, author of Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America,

and Jesse Kornbluth, founder of HeadButler.com.

*     *     *     *     *

The Ben Daniels Band

*Read an additional Q&A with John McMillian here.

]]> http://blog.oup.com/2011/04/oxford-comment-8/feed/ 0 0:00:01 Visit us at blog.oup.com The Oxford Comment asks: are we living in the anti-60s? Bieber vs. Beatles! Hipsters vs. Hippies! Let the showdown begin... *Featured, History, Media, Music, UK, US OUPblog clean no http://blog.oup.com/2011/03/lennon/ http://blog.oup.com/2011/03/lennon/#comments Fri, 04 Mar 2011 07:31:32 +0000 Kirsty cleave  cleave http://blog.oup.com/?p=14314 By Gordon Thompson Forty-five years ago, in the spring of 1966, as swinging London and its colorful denizens attracted the attention of Time, the publishers of an American teen magazine found part of a recent interview with John Lennon to be of particular interest. A rapid disintegration ensued of the complex identity that the Beatles management, the media, the fans, and even the musicians themselves had constructed, setting in motion a number of dark forces.]]> Tweet

By Gordon Thompson

Forty-five years ago, in the spring of 1966, as swinging London and its colorful denizens attracted the attention of Time, the publishers of an American teen magazine found part of a recent interview with John Lennon to be of particular interest.  A rapid disintegration ensued of the complex identity that the Beatles management, the media, the fans, and even the musicians themselves had constructed, setting in motion a number of dark forces.

After a short promotional tour in late 1965 (about which the British media complained they lacked access to the fab four), the Beatles took time to refresh and to re-imagine their repertoire.  Lennon, for his part, retreated to the lethargy of his home in suburban Weybridge, Surrey until journalist and friend Maureen Cleave interrupted his reverie.  Cleave interviewed each of the Beatles for a series of profiles in London’s The Evening Standard and the loquacious Lennon ruminated extensively on a variety of topics ranging from “lunch” to religion.  For most of the conversation, the Beatle laments his increasingly meaningless possessions (e.g., a gorilla suit), even as he exhibits them, and predicts that he would not live much longer in his neighborhood of stockbrokers, business executives, and private estates.  Musically, he reveled in Indian music, playing a disk for the interviewer until he disappointedly realized that she had little interest in or tolerance of the art: “You’re not listening, are you?  It’s amazing this—so cool.”

He moved on from that topic, ruminating about books he had been reading.  In the profile, Cleave describes Lennon’s well-stocked library, his interest in history (notably Queen Boadicea and the Celts), and, in particular, the history of religion.  His reading about the variety of humankind’s beliefs in the sacred led him to an understanding of how ideas had come and gone over time.  Notably, he sensed that Christianity, like other religions, had contributed good ideas, but that something else would eventually replace it too.  To that end, Lennon asserted, “Christianity will go…  It will vanish and shrink.”  As his proof, he added that currently the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”  Moreover, in reflection, he noted that even rock ‘n’ roll would disappear.

His comments hardly surprised his friends.  In the wake of the Second World War, their generation had openly questioned the received wisdom of the existence of a supreme deity, even as they sometimes embraced exotic alternatives.  Attendance at British churches had dropped precipitously in the postwar years and, by the sixties, these institutions fought a losing ideological battle with sports events and the cinema.  For the Beatles, their student conversations in Liverpool and debates with their existentialist college friends in Hamburg had shaped a humanist worldview.  Teenage fans in North America, particularly in the Southern United States, commonly held a rather more innocent and insular view of religion.

Marketers and the Beatles management had long played on audience naiveté and the Beatles had been part of the game.  From the very beginning of his relationship with the band, manager Brian Epstein had sought to shape their image through clothing and media appearances.  The films A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had portrayed the Beatles as madcap comedians romping in a world where flirting substituted for sex and only aberrant religion posed problems.  And if these film depictions of the band eschewed depth, the Beatles cartoon series that had debuted on 25 September 1965 confirmed these one-dimensional depictions.  Thus, with the band a blank slate, every fan could project his or her own interpretation of who the Beatles were and could fantasize about the band playing at their high-school dance or visiting birthday parties.  Anything was possible.

Almost from the beginning of Beatlemania, politicians had tapped the Beatles’ polysemic image for their own benefit, parading the band through towns and displaying them on balconies.  Religious leaders were similarly not above referencing the fab four in an attempt to attract parishioners.  The Beatles themselves were aware and complicit in the farce, protecting their private lives and restraining themselves in press conferences.  Better to act the fool than to tell an interviewer what you really thought.  Cleave let some of that mask slip to reveal a thoughtful Lennon who questioned the value of his privileged existence and the divinity of Jesus.

When the teen magazine Datebook published excerpts of the interview later that summer on the eve of the Beatles US tour, it displayed the passage “I don’t know what will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity” as one of several quotes on the cover and as the title of the article inside.  Soon, two radio stations in America’s south saw the marketing possibilities of the statement and banned Beatles recordings before moving on to displays that offered theatrical possibilities.  Initially, the tempest that swirled around Lennon’s comments had the intended effect of focusing attention on the self-righteous conservatives who burnt Beatles records in scenes reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s book fires.  More seriously, members of the Ku Klux Klan picketed performances and threatened violence, sending manager Brian Epstein into a frenzy and the Beatles into disbelief.  Lennon gave the impression of a deer in the headlights at a Chicago press conference on 11 August as he tried to satisfy a press corps that smelled blood, saying, “I still don’t know quite what I’ve done.”

Years later, the worst would come to pass when a deranged gunman assassinated Lennon, in part over how Datebook had sensationalized the musician’s comments about religion.  As in other recent examples, those who sought to benefit by twisting shallow interpretations of reality to stir hatred in minds of the gullible probably felt little culpability.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

By Kathryn Kalinak

This year’s Oscar Best Original Score nominations are as notable for who didn’t get nominated as for who did: no Carter Burwell for True Grit, no Clint Mansell for Black Swan, no Danny Elfman (and what a return to form) for Alice in Wonderland. There’s not much of a horse race this year.

The Social Network

This is a first nomination for Trent Reznor of the rock band Nine Inch Nails and Atticus Ross who collaborated with him. Reznor and Ross have created a soundscape that blurs the line between music and sound effects.  There is a wonderful use of piano here, as if someone were sitting down and hesitantly picking out a tune note by note, combined with mechanistic, noise-like accompaniment.  It’s as if the score exists in the interface between the human and the machine world, between music and noise.

Nine Inch Nails is usually described as industrial rock but the band as well as this score owe a huge debt to “noise music,” a movement which began in the 1920s in Dadaist and Futurist approaches to music and is characterized by extreme distortion, electronically produced music, the incorporation of sound effects, and scored “noise.” Edgar Varese and John Cage come out of this movement and The Social Network is certainly not the first film score to bear its traces.  George Antheil’s Entr-acte in 1927 is scored for piano and airplane propellers.

Ironically, this score qualified for Oscar nomination because of Hans Zimmer’s protest of the The Dark Knight’s disqualification score due to two composers being credited.  The Academy reversed its position on sole authorship in 2008 thus opening the way for Reznor and Ross.  They are the front-runners and it looks like their race to lose.

Inception

This is Hans Zimmer’s ninth nomination, having won only once before back in 1994 with The Lion King.  Gosh knows he’s due.  He’s composed some incredibly memorable film scores, Gladiator in 1999, The Dark Knight in 2008, Sherlock Holmes in 2009.   But he should have won last year.  Inception is vintage Zimmer—rock guitar with lush symphonic scoring, driving rhythms, and a reliance upon motivic writing.  This is not a score of extended melodies but of smaller germs of musical ideas worked and reworked throughout the score.  One of these is the distinctive rhythm derived from the Edith Piaf song which in the narrative functions to awaken the characters from an induced dream state, and in the score, in permuted form, functions as a cue for altered reality.  But for me, the score lacks the fresh approach, eclectic charm, instrumental whimsy, and outside-the-envelope charge of the Sherlock Holmes score.  Still there’s no one better at scoring cerebral action films than Zimmer and the way music colludes with the film in its representation of dream vs. reality is fascinating.   Zimmer, I’m afraid, is going to be an also-ran this year. 

How to Train Your Dragon

John Powell, who began his career with Hans Zimmer, has worked on several DreamWorks productions, and has scored a number of films across a variety of genres, finally has his moment.  Zimmer has said that Powell is the better composer of the two and here’s where Powell puts paid to that claim.  The most impressive score in terms of sheer mastery of the forces of the symphony orchestra.  The writing for brass here is thrilling and although I’m not quite sure what a Celtic undertone is doing in a film filled with Vikings, the use of warpipes, an Irish version of bagpipes, sure gives the score some zing.  Great use of percussion (and here you can almost feel Zimmer’s influence in the driving rhythms).  When the dragon flies, this score soars right along with it.  The dark horse in this race.

The King’s Speech

Alexandre Desplat has long been doing wonderful work including and especially last year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.  He scored three films this year alone, has four Oscar nominations, and is certainly due.  Music’s job in The King’s Speech is to make us care about these people and their problems—a royal stutter after all, is not an earth-shattering dilemma—and Desplat succeeds on this score.  He affectingly juxtaposes the intimacy of the piano to evoke the family and home life that Bertie must give up to be king with the grandiosity and gravity of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony when King George steps into his new public role and delivers his wartime speech. If The King’s Speech wins, it would be an upset victory and if you’ve already marked your at-home ballot in the big award categories for The Social Network, consider changing it!

One quibble:  if you’re looking to add some gravitas to the scene, to alert and assure the audience that this is AN IMPORTANT SCENE, Beethoven works just fine.  But if you were looking to add gravitas to an English king’s wartime speech about the German enemy, would you pick a composer steeped in German Romanticism?  Were there no English composers that could fit the bill?

127 Hours

If A. R. Rahman was hoping to up the ante on the gruesomeness of this film’s key sequence (and you all know what it is), he certainly succeeded.  But by and large this is a score that recedes into the background, sometimes otherworldly and eerie (one cue features ethereal voices), sometimes sensual, and often infused with the hard-driving rhythms of rock.  The storm sequence, both visually and musically, is a highlight.

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What Will Win: Reznor and Ross’s The Social Network. I think Academy voters are going to be all over themselves to show how cool and hip and young they are by giving Reznor and Ross the edge.  Desplat could come from behind and nose them out at the finish line but I think Reznor and Ross are going home with the statuette.

What Should Win: Carter Burwell for True Grit

Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College. Her extensive writing on film music includes numerous articles and several books, the most recent of which is Film Music: A Very Short Introduction. She is our correspondent for all things film + music, and is a recurring guest on WNYC’s Soundcheck.

By Michelle Rafferty

I’d argue our Black Swan “fever” peaked at Jim Carey’s SNL performance, but we might see a resurgence this weekend at the Oscars. In anticipation I contacted Roland John Wiley, author of Tchaikovsky and Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, for his thoughts on his subject’s recent omnipresence. Turns out, Tchaikovsky hasn’t always been taken seriously in the academic community. Here, Wiley explains the trappings of music snobbery – and why Tchaikovsky’s popularity among the “muggles” is no reason to discount his brilliance. Oh, and, he dishes on the original Swan Lake ballerina. (Dra-ma!)

An even more recent take on Tchaikovsky - Jim Carrey dances "Black Swan" on Saturday Night Live (c) NBC

Me: How do members of the academic community (like yourself) feel about Tchaikovsky’s resonance in popular culture?

Wiley: I may be different from most ‘members of the academic community.’ Not only does Tchaikovsky’s music speak to me, I also find the conceptual and technical aspects of it operating at a very high level. He was a very fine composer, an assessment that my academic colleagues increasingly acknowledge. Were we to go back 40-50 years, especially in light of the fashion then for early music and the influence of German musicologists who emigrated to this country after World War II (without which our musicology would be much the poorer), we would find a distinctive aloofness about Tchaikovsky in academic circles, which I sensed myself as a graduate student.

Me: Is his popularity with the general public what makes him taken less seriously in academia (sort of the way an indie band loses credibility when it becomes popular)?

Wiley: In a word, yes. But this is changing with the flourishing of popular studies in academia, which are having the effect of implying that so-called serious music is elitist.

Me: And are we (the general public) misusing or misconceiving his work in any way? For example, is a film like Black Swan blasphemous to a true Tchaikovsky fan, like yourself? And what does the academy say?

Wiley: I sense no misconception in the public acceptance of Tchaikovsky, but the need for fairness in distinguishing a truthful aversion to his music from a purely snobbish one. The misconception is that it’s correct to persist in the latter. I don’t think academia as a corporate entity has an opinion about Black Swan. To me it seems, like any other artwork, the product of its creators’ fantasy, and as such owes nothing to the mundane truth.

Me: Black Swan is all about the behind the scenes rivalries. What about the original Swan Lake? Is it true that there were “creative differences” between the original Odette and Tchaikovsky?

Wiley: There were rank and rivalry differences between the first Odette, who was junior, and the company’s leading ballerina, who took the part only at the third or fourth performance. We’re not sure what happened – possibly a scandal involving the leading ballerina or moneyed influence associated with the junior dancer – but when the senior ballerina came to the role, she went to St. Petersburg and asked the balletmaster Marius Petipa to compose a pas for her exclusive use in ‘Swan’. He did, but to music of Ludwig Minkus. Tchaikovsky would not countenance such an interpolation, and re-wrote the variation keeping to Minkus’s rhythms.

Me: Asking for her own pas—was this a pure diva move?

Wiley: For senior dancers in the imperial theatres it was not unusual—perhaps more so for the dancer requesting it than for the dancer receiving it from the balletmaster when a work was in revival.

Me: Bringing things back to Black Swan, would you say it accurately depicts the ballerina psyche?

Wiley: Ballerinas are not exempt from psychological distress, but the ones I have met  are surprisingly down-to-earth and level-headed.  On stage, they are counting out their combinations and trying to keep their center of  gravity with aplomb.

Me: I heard Tchaikovsky rushed to finish Swan Lake. Is his story the equivalent of those novelists who became famous for the novel they wrote in three weeks to make a quick buck, while their “real” works stand relatively forgotten? Arguably, he is most widely recognized for Swan Lake – would he be ok with that?

Wiley: Tchaikovsky composed quickly and completed ‘Swan’ ten months before the first performance. He wasn’t in a rush, though theatre editors may have been, getting the work revised in time. As to the situation you describe – Rachmaninov’s famous ‘Prelude in C-sharp minor‘ comes to mind – insanely popular, associated with his name instantly and more than any other, to the exclusion of more sophisticated and arguably better works.

With Tchaikovsky it’s a mix. Something like the 1812 Overture he thew together in a few days and it is still a signature piece. ‘The Nutcracker’ he struggled with, taking months more than he planned, and yet its famous numbers are instantly recognizable. He composed ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ in 40 days amidst ongoing distractions – a feat of enormous concentration. ‘Swan’ is between these in composition time, and probably as recognizable as parts of ‘The Nutcracker’. With so many famous pieces, Tchaikovsky is no one-trick pony. Whatever, he was always OK with success.