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Wednesday, March 8th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | When East Meets West: Hear What Happened When Ravi Shankar & Philip Glass Composed Music Together 
There were the Beats, with their interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. Then the Beatles and Rolling Stones mined Eastern music and traditions for their psychedelic head trips, and turned a lot of people on to the sitar and the Nehru jacket. But in many significant East meets West moments, the emphasis skewed heavily toward Western artists. These cultural moments created some truly inspired rock and roll and writing, but not much in the way of a genuine congress of artists of equal recognition. Though we might expect to find something like this in the Collaborations box set, credited to Ravi Shankar and George Harrison, what we get instead are four discs of mostly Shankar compositions and classical Indian interpretations, which Harrison produced and played on as a guest artist. These albums refreshingly reverse the usual dynamic: “The music here,” writes the Beatles Bible, “is far from Western pop musicians dabbling with sitars in the 1960s.” But for a truly collaborative work, we should look elsewhere, and we’ll perhaps find few finer examples than Shankar’s work with Philip Glass. The two giants of their respective musical worlds first met in Paris in 1965, but it was only 25 years later that they decided to work together on an album. You can hear the result, Passages, at the top of the post and in the Spotify playlist just above. Although it took over two decades for Glass and Shankar to record together, their collaboration began even “before The Beatles had met Ravi,” remembered Glass in a lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy. “This music would’ve been very exotic, at that time… in the ‘60s, this was the first time this kind of music had been heard. At least in the West.” In his mid-twenties at the time, Glass was hired to transcribe Shankar’s score for the cult film Chappaqua. He began to combine what he had been learning in his master’s program at Juilliard “with the work I had been doing with Ravi Shankar. Almost immediately I began doing that.” And so audiences heard Shankar’s influence on Western minimalism before they heard it in pop music. “It was through Shankar’s music,” NPR notes, “that the American composer came to realize that music could be constructed with rhythm as its very foundation…. That realization became a cornerstone of Glass’ own work.” Since his first meeting with Glass, Shankar influenced and collaborated with many other Western musicians in his long and varied career, inspiring John Coltrane and other jazz greats and releasing three albums with violinist Yehudi Menuhin, each called West Meets East, in 1967, 1968, and 1976. Passages is a sharing of both musical vocabularies and compositional methods: Shankar and Glass each composed themes that the other arranged. “There is a great deal of technical data involved here,” writes Jim Brenholts at Allmusic. “Both of these artists have long taken intellectual approaches to music.” Theory aside, “the music is brilliant,” whether we understand its virtuosity or not, though it trends largely in a symphonic direction. Those interested in a more beat-oriented but also brilliant “East meets West” collaboration would do well to check out table player Zakir Hussain and bassist Bill Laswell’s project Tabla Beat Science, which, Allmusic writes, fuses the “rich and time-honored tradition of the tabla” with “contemporary electronica studio wizardry.” And, of course, don’t miss Hussain’s work with guitarist extraordinaire John McLaughlin. Related Content: Ravi Shankar Gives George Harrison a Sitar Lesson … and Other Vintage Footage Watch “Geometry of Circles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Animation Scored by Philip Glass (1979) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness When East Meets West: Hear What Happened When Ravi Shankar & Philip Glass Composed Music Together is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 4:59p | Women Have Always Worked: A New Online Course Premieres Today
It’s been said that the greatest achievement in American history in the 20th century is the progress that was made – although the journey continues – toward woman’s equality, what with women’s right to vote codified in the 19th amendment (1920), women’s reproductive rights affirmed by the Supreme Court over a half century later (1973), and every advance in between and since. Our national government has done what it can to recognize that progress, and to remind us whence we came. The National Park Service, for example, tells us that when our country started:
What if there were an opportunity to study this struggle and the progress we have made in great depth – in an online course from Columbia University and the New-York Historical Society featuring its star women’s historian, Alice Kessler-Harris, now emerita, and a lineup of guest voices from all around the country interviewed under her leadership to provide their expertise on matters of progress and equality? And what if there were a new Center for the Study of Women’s History launching at the same time, even on the same day – March 8, 2017 – to provide a more permanent place for examining and understanding how to make this progress even more expansive?
Women Have Always Worked, a 20-week online class, premieres its first 10 weeks today – free on the edX platform. The offering (enroll here) is unique in the history of education. The course introduces the first collaboration between a university and a historical society to present knowledge to the world – with extended video-recorded conversations and artifact and document discussions with renowned scholars and authors including Baruch’s Carol Berkin; Deborah Gray White from Rutgers; Iowa’s Linda Kerber; Carroll Smith Rosenberg from Michigan; Thavolia Glymph from Duke; St. John’s Lara Vapnek; Blanche Wiesen Cook from CUNY; Louise Bernikow; Harvard’s Nancy Cott; Elaine Tyler May at the University of Minnesota; NYU’s Linda Gordon; the great New York writer Vivian Gornick; and more. The course page lists some of the questions covered: • How women’s participation in, exclusion from, and impact on American economic, political, and social life have altered American history. The second part of the course will launch in June, in association with the annual meeting of the Berkshire Women’s History Conference at Hofstra University – the largest meeting of women’s historians anywhere. The MOOC is inspired by Kessler-Harris’s book, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview, first published by the Feminist Press in 1981 and coming out in a newly updated edition also in 2017 from the University of Illinois, publisher of Kessler-Harris’s landmark Gendering Labor History (2007). The original book brings forth a million gems of knowledge and analysis in text and images; the online course brings forward video and audio and documents and artifacts such as few media can accomplish. Intelligent Television had the opportunity to produce many of the video interviews, conversations, and testimonials. The struggle of women at work is the struggle of all who seek a better and more just world. The course is a little miracle alight within it. Peter B. Kaufman runs Intelligent Television (www.intelligenttelevision.com) and twice served as Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Columbia.
Related Content: Odd Vintage Postcards Document the Propaganda Against Women’s Rights 100 Years Ago Download Images From Rad American Women A-Z: A New Picture Book on the History of Feminism The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922) 1200 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Women Have Always Worked: A New Online Course Premieres Today is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:41p | Alfred Hitchcock Meditates on Suspense & Dark Humor in a New Animated Video
Back in 1957, while shooting a film tentatively called From Amongst The Dead (it would later be titled Vertigo), Alfred Hitchcock sat down for an interview with Colin Edwards, from Pacifica Radio. The conversation touched on many good themes–how suspense works in his films, the role of dark humor and beyond. A half century later, Blank on Blank has revived and animated that conversation, thankfully bringing it back to life. You can find many more Blank on Blank reanimations of vintage interviews in our archive, including talks with Patti Smith, Nina Simone, Charles Bukowski, David Foster Wallace and much more. Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here. Related Content: Alfred Hitchcock Reveals The Secret Sauce for Creating Suspense 16 Free Hitchcock Movies Online Alfred Hitchcock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuffin’ Alfred Hitchcock’s 7-Minute Master Class on Film Editing Alfred Hitchcock Meditates on Suspense & Dark Humor in a New Animated Video is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 7:30p | Hear the Earliest Known Piece of Polyphonic Music: This Composition, Dating Back to 900 AD, Changed Western Music
Like digging for fossils or panning for gold, the research process can be a tedious affair. But for any researcher, long days of searching and reading will eventually result in discovery. These are the moments scholars cherish. It’s the chance discovery, however rare, that makes the long hours and bleary late nights worthwhile. And some finds can change an entire field. Such was the discovery of St. John’s College PhD student Giovanni Varelli, who, in 2014, found what is now believed to be, writes Cambridge University, “the earliest known practical example of polyphonic music,” that is, music consisting of two or more melodic lines working together simultaneously. You can hear the short composition—written in praise of the patron saint of Germany, Saint Boniface—performed above by St. John’s undergraduates Quintin Beer and John Clapham. Prior to Varelli’s discovery of this piece of music, the earliest polyphonic music was thought to date to the year 1000, from a collection called The Winchester Troper. Varelli’s discovery may date to 100 years earlier, around the year 900, and was found at the end of a manuscript of the Life of Bishop Maternianus of Reims. One reason musicologists had so far overlooked the piece, Varelli says, is that “we are not seeing what we expected.”
Varelli’s specialization in early music notation also provided him with the training needed to recognize the piece, which was written using “an early form of notation that predates the invention of the stave” (see the piece below). According to British Library curator Nicolas Bell, “when this manuscript was first catalogued in the eighteenth century, nobody was able to understand these unusual symbols.” Varelli’s discovery shows a deviation from “the convention laid out in treatises at the time” and points toward the development of a musical technique that “defined most European music up until the 20th century.”  Varelli gives us a sense of how important this discovery is to scholars of early music: “the rules being applied here laid the foundations for those that developed and governed the majority of western music history for the next thousand years. This discovery shows how they were evolving, and how they existed in a constant state of transformation, around the year 900.” So there you have it. If you’re stuck in the doldrums of a research project, waiting for the wind to pick up, don’t despair. The next rare artifact, treatise, or manuscript may be waiting for someone with exactly your specialized insights to decipher its secrets. Related Content: Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Oldest Playable Instrument—Get Played Again Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear the Earliest Known Piece of Polyphonic Music: This Composition, Dating Back to 900 AD, Changed Western Music is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 8:30p | Leonard Bernstein Introduces 7-Year-Old Yo-Yo Ma: Watch the Youngster Perform for John F. Kennedy (1962) 
Asked to think of a virtuoso cellist, many of us immediately imagine Yo-Yo Ma, not just because of his considerable skill but also because of the sheer length of his residency in popular culture. Though only 61 years old, barely middle-aged by classical musician standards, he’s been famous for well over half a century, starting with his entry into the prestigious child-prodigies-who-perform-for-American-p The event, a benefit concert called “The American Pageant of the Arts,” happened on November 29, 1962. Its other guests, a who’s-who of the Cold War cultural scene, included Marian Anderson, Van Cliburn, Robert Frost, Fredric March, Benny Goodman, and Bob Newhart. As master of ceremonies, Leonard Bernstein introduced the evening’s wee entertainers. “Yo-Yo came to our attention through the great master Pablo Casals, who had recently heard him play the cello. Yo-Yo is, as you may have guessed, Chinese, and has lived up to now in France — a highly international type.” The same could be said of his sister Yeou-Cheng, who accompanies him on the piano in a performance of Jean-Baptiste Bréval’s Concertino No. 3 in A Major. Three years later, the still extremely young but much more famous Ma would write a letter to the conductor:
Not only did Bernstein remember him, he also, by presenting him as a vision of humanity’s artistic future, ensured that everyone else at The American Pageant of the Arts would as well. “Now here’s a cultural image for you to ponder as you listen,” he said just before letting Yo-Yo and Yeou-Cheng take it away. “A seven-year-old Chinese cellist playing old French music for his new American compatriots.” Did Ma recall those words of decades and decades ago when he formed the Silk Road Ensemble, subject of the recent documentary The Music of Strangers, which brought into the fold musicians from Syria, Mongolia, Japan, Armenia, Galicia, and elsewhere, all to share, mix, and reinterpret the music of one another’s homelands? Now there‘s a cultural image for you. Related Content: Yo-Yo Ma & the Goat Rodeo Sessions Collaborations: Spike Jonze, Yo-Yo Ma, and Lil Buck Leonard Bernstein’s Masterful Lectures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Recorded at Harvard in 1973) Leonard Bernstein Demystifies the Rock Revolution for Curious (if Square) Grown-Ups in 1967 Leonard Bernstein’s First “Young People’s Concert” at Carnegie Hall Asks, “What Does Music Mean?” Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Leonard Bernstein Introduces 7-Year-Old Yo-Yo Ma: Watch the Youngster Perform for John F. Kennedy (1962) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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