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Tuesday, March 14th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 7:30a | Download 1,500+ Episodes of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Where Famous Guests Name the Songs They Can’t Live Without (1942 to the Present)   Introvert, bookworm, homebody… labels I have gladly worn throughout my life. I believe in civic engagement on principle, but there have been many times in the past few months, indeed in life, when I’ve wanted to strand myself on one of those proverbial desert islands, surrounded by my favorite books and records. But surely one needn’t be an introvert to appreciate occasional solitude and time well spent with one’s favorite writing and music? Not in the least. As the BBC’s Desert Island Discs has shown us, many of the most outgoing celebrities, known for their constant presence in the spotlight, have cultivated their own inner castaway. Or at least many have been happy to share what they would listen to and read on a theoretical voyage into solitude. Since 1942, Desert Island Discs has asked its famous guests to name eight recordings (not strictly limited to music), one book, and one luxury item that they couldn’t live without if left alone. One guest, Louis Armstrong, confessed himself married to the city and had such a long and successful career as a trumpet player, bandleader, composer, singer, actor, and all-around personality that it’s hard to imagine he ever had any time to himself. Nevertheless, Armstrong possessed a key quality necessary for peaceful time alone: he was a man who enjoyed his own company. In his 1968 appearance on the show, Armstrong told the show’s creator and longtime host Roy Plomley that one favorite track he couldn’t live without was his own recording of “Blueberry Hill.” His luxury item? His trumpet of course. And book? His own autobiography. Not all the show’s guests have been as intensely self-focused in their answers. Keith Richards, who owes his status, said host Kirsty Young, to a “single-minded dedication to the triumvirate pursuits of sex and drugs and rock and roll,” chose many of his heroes, like Chuck Berry and Etta James. And as a luxury item, he opted not for a musical instrument or an inducement to pleasure, but for a very practical machete. The long-running Desert Island Discs owes its popularity not simply to famous people making lists, however; that premise has served throughout its 75 years as scaffolding for some of the most fascinating and intimate conversations with artists, actors, politicians, and other notables. In Kirsty Young’s 2016 interview with Tom Hanks, the affable actor—whose list included Dean Martin, Dusty Springfield, Talking Heads and a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter—broke down in tears while telling the painful story of his lonely childhood. “What have you done to me?” he said to Young, then told her he was trying to express “the vocabulary of loneliness.” In 2014, Young pronounced artist and 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen—a devotee of Prince, Michael Jackson, and Kate Bush—one of her all time favorite interviewees for his candid, engaging discussion of art as his “salvation.” But of course, no popular entertainment succeeds without its controversies, and Desert Island Discs has had plenty of those moments as well. Sometimes scandalous moments—at least for the show’s host—have popped up in the midst of otherwise excellent interviews. In 2009, Morrissey sat down with Young for an interview that included “plenty of positive statements,” writes NME, including “his relative ease with life.” Yet she was shocked to hear him defend suicide as “honourable… an act of great control.” Whether he meant it or not, true fans of the singer would not have raised an eyebrow. Another exchange hardly out of character for the interviewee occurred during a much less engaging conversation. In 1989, Lady Mosley, aristocratic wife of British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, proclaimed her admiration for Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Host Sue Lawley seemed “stunned,” the BBC notes, and accused Mosley of “rewriting history.” It’s hard to know what else the host expected from a woman The Guardian called “unrepentant” and “Hitler’s angel” upon her death in 2003. Such unpleasant interviews as Mosley’s are few and far between in the massive archive of Desert Island Discs episodes on the BBC’s website, which spans the years 1956-2011, with many more recent episodes on the site as well, like this conversation with Bruce Springsteen. Other notable interviews come from Brian Eno in 1991, Yoko Ono in 2007, Maya Angelou in 1987, and Judi Dench just last year. Want to know their picks? You’ll have to listen to the episodes–all of which you can download–to find out. All of the show’s subjects are accomplished people, but not all of them have been celebrities. The BBC has chosen as one of its most moving interviews a 2016 conversation with David Nott, who has volunteered as a surgeon on battlefields around the world since 1993. Nott’s harrowing stories of over twenty years of warzone trauma will likely have you convinced that among the show’s hundreds of guests, he may be most in need of that island getaway. Given Desert Island Discs’ constraints of eight recordings, one book, and one luxury item, what would you, castaway readers, take with you, and why? Please tell us in the comments below. Related Content: Studs Terkel Interviews Bob Dylan, Shel Silverstein, Maya Angelou & More in New Audio Trove Library of Congress Releases Audio Archive of Interviews with Rock ‘n’ Roll Icons Maurice Sendak’s Emotional Last Interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Animated by Christoph Niemann Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Download 1,500+ Episodes of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Where Famous Guests Name the Songs They Can’t Live Without (1942 to the Present) 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.  |
| 2:23p | See Japanese Musicians Play “Amazing Grace” with 273 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls–Then Learn How They Perform Their Magic
In the arts, technology, or any other realm, Japanese culture encourages taking one’s chosen pursuits to the limits, even when their material comes from other cultures. We have here a particularly notable example in the form of Mandarin Electron, a musical ensemble founded and led since 1999 by pioneer Japanese theremin player Masami Takeuchi. But its members (273 of whom set the theremin-ensemble Guinness World Record with the performance of “Amazing Grace” above) don’t play quite the same touchless, spooky-sounding instrument vintage electronic music fans would recognize; instead, they master the Matryomin, a theremin in the compact form of a traditional Russian Matryoshka doll, conveniently designed “so as to disseminate theremin performance.” The combination isn’t quite as random as it sounds. Back in 2015 we posted about the history of the theremin, which goes back to the work of a Russian inventor named Léon Theremin. When he first developed the instrument in 1919, he called it the Aetherphone, and in the 1920s demonstrated it in Europe and the United States.
In the decades thereafter, Theremin’s strange new musical invention captured imaginations all over the world, and last year Japan celebrated the inventor’s 120th Birthday with a series of events called Theremin 120 — most of them somehow involving Takeuchi. You can learn more about his history with the theremin and its homeland from the video just above.
In a sense, Takeuchi, who moved to Russia to study under Theremin’s relative and pupil Lydia Kavia, has realized the inventor’s original vision for his “instrument of a singing-voice kind.” Freeing its sounds from their mid-2oth-century Western associations — drive-in horror movies, novelty surf-rock — he has overseen their transformation into the elements of an electronic chorus. You can purchase your very own Mandarin Electron-made Matryomin (now on its third-generation model) and start learning to play it with the video just above, but if its potential still escapes you, have a look at Takeuchi and his ensemble’s extensive collection of tour and media appearances. If the sound and sight of hundreds of people all tuning their Matryoshka-doll theremins at once doesn’t intrigue you, nothing could. Related Content: Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls in Japan “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” Played on a 1929 Theremin 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. See Japanese Musicians Play “Amazing Grace” with 273 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls–Then Learn How They Perform Their Magic 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. |
| 6:43p | Sesame Street’s Count Von Count counts Pi to 10,000 Places: A 5 Hour Recording for Pi Day
March 14 is Pi Day. This oddity will keep the celebration going a good part of the day. Follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, and Flipboard and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content Pi in the Sky: The World’s Largest Ephemeral Art Installation over Beautiful San Francisco How Pi Was Nearly Changed to 3.2 … and Copyrighted! 1000 Digits of Pi, Recited by Jane Barbe, Famous Voice of Telephone Company Recordings Infinity Minus Infinity Equals Pi: This Video Proves It
Sesame Street’s Count Von Count counts Pi to 10,000 Places: A 5 Hour Recording for Pi Day 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. |
| 7:31p | How Did Beethoven Compose His 9th Symphony After He Went Completely Deaf?
You don’t need to know anything at all about classical music, nor have any liking for it even, to be deeply moved by that most famous of symphonies, Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th—“perhaps the most iconic work of the Western musical tradition,” writes The Juilliard Journal in an article about its handwritten score. Commissioned in 1817, the sublime work was only completed in 1824. By that time, its composer was completely and totally deaf. At the first performance, Beethoven did not notice that the massive final choral movement had ended, and one of the musicians had to turn him around to acknowledge the audience. This may seem, says researcher Natalya St. Clair in the TED-Ed video above, like some “cruel joke,” but it’s the truth. Beethoven was so deaf that some of the most interesting artifacts he left behind are the so-called “conversation books,” kept from 1818 onward to communicate with visitors who had to write down their questions and replies. How then might it have been possible for the composer to create such enduringly thrilling, rapturous works of aural art? Using the delicate, melancholy “Moonlight Sonata” (which the composer wrote in 1801, when he could still hear), St. Clair attempts to show us how Beethoven used mathematical “patterns hidden beneath the beautiful sounds.” (In the short video below from documentary The Genius of Beethoven, see the onset of Beethoven’s hearing loss in a dramatic reading of his letters.) According to St. Clair’s theory, Beethoven composed by observing “the mathematical relationship between the pitch frequency of different notes,” though he did not write his symphonies in calculus. It’s left rather unclear how the composer’s supposed intuition of mathematics and pitch corresponds with his ability to express such a range of emotions through music.
We can learn more about Beethoven’s deafness and its biological relationship to his compositional style in the short video below with research fellow Edoardo Saccenti and his colleague Age Smilde from the Biosystems Data Analysis Group at Amsterdam’s Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences. By counting the high and low frequencies in Beethoven’s complete string quartets, a task that took Saccenti many weeks, he and his team were able to show how three distinct compositional styles “correspond to stages in the progression of his deafness,” as they write in their paper (which you can download in PDF here).
The progression is unusual. As his condition worsened, Beethoven included fewer and fewer high frequency sounds in his compositions (giving cellists much more to do). By the time we get to 1824-26, “the years of the late string quartets and of complete deafness”—and of the completion of the 9th—the high notes have returned, due in part, Smilde says, to “the balance between an auditory feedback and the inner ear.” Beethoven’s reliance on his “inner ear” made his music “much and much richer.” How? As one violinist in the clip puts it, he was “given more freedom because he was not attached anymore to the physical sound, [he could] just use his imagination.”
For all of the compelling evidence presented here, whether Beethoven’s genius in his painful later years is attributable to his intuition of complex mathematical patterns or to the total free reign of his imaginative inner ear may in fact be undiscoverable. In any case, no amount of rational explanation can explain away our astonishment that the man who wrote the unfailingly powerful, awesomely dynamic “Ode to Joy” finale (conducted above by Leonard Bernstein), couldn’t actually hear any of the music. Related Content: Stream the Complete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls in Japan Leonard Bernstein Conducts Beethoven’s 9th in a Classic 1979 Performance Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Did Beethoven Compose His 9th Symphony After He Went Completely Deaf? 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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