The fulminating textures of Public Enemy's "Welcome to the Terrordome," which influenced Björk's sense of sound (p. 148):
A bit of Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy" (p. 149):
Björk's first solo album, Debut, led off with "Human Behavior" (p. 149), here performed live in 1994:
The atmospheric, captivating "Isobel," from the 1995 album Post (p. 149), in a live performance with the harpist-composer Zeena Parkins, the electronic duo Matmos, an Inuit choir, and orchestra:
Returning to her avant-garde roots, with "Pluto," from the 1997 album Homogenic (p. 153):
And the video for "Hidden Place," the lead song from 2001's Vespertine (p. 153):
A piano demonstration of the opening chord of "Hidden Place," the half-diminished seventh, followed by the beginning of the song:
Here are some photographs from the remainder of my time with Björk: the house in Arembepe where she worked further on the album (p. 151), the drummers of Cortejo Afro (p. 151), and shots of Matthew Barney's float in Carnaval (pp. 151-52). Valgeir Sigurðsson, who engineered Medúlla at his Greenhouse Studios in Iceland, can be seen in the white coat on the right-hand side of the top of the float.
Valgeir took this shot of Björk waving to him from the balcony, with the paparazzi clicking away on her right and a slightly bewildered music critic on her left:
The official site for the singer, songwriter, composer, and visionary Björk is a geysir of lovely graphics and useful information — see especially the "specials" devoted to individual albums. Bad Taste is the leading Icelandic label for both popular and classical music. The Iceland Music Information Centre tells you all about Icelandic composers. The Iceland Review has delightful deadpan news stories. Some headlines that I collected while researching my Björk profile: "Power Outage Ruins Handball Game," "Mysterious Markings Found on Sheep," and "President Unhappy," which had this immortal opening sentence: "President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who is currently in the United States, was unhappy that no one notified him about the commemorative programme on Sunday celebrating the 100 year anniversary of Icelandic home rule and an official state meeting."
A documentary presently available in several parts on YouTube documents the making of the 2004 album Medúlla, the main focus of this chapter. You can see all the principals, including Valgeir Sigurðsson, the Schola Cantorum, Mike Patton, Tanya Tagaq, Dokaka, Rahzel, Mark Bell, and a group of Brazilian drummers, who, in the end, were left off the album. The author can be seen crouching on the floor at 3:10:
When I was speaking to Björk about "Nordic feeling" (pp. 138-39), this is what I saw out of the window of the taxi:
A video of Jón Leifs's orchestral work Hekla (p. 145), with images of the Icelandic volcano from which it takes its name:
The opening of Leifs's Organ Symphony:
En Shao conducting the Iceland Symphony, with Björn Steinar Sólbergsson at the organ; BIS CD-930.
A live performance of "Vökuró" (p. 146), a song by the Icelandic composer Jórunn Viðar, as adapted by Björk for Medúlla:
After enrolling in Iceland's leading music school, Björk became fascinated by the work of Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom she went on to interview in 1996 (p. 147). She remains a strong admirer of the composer, and wrote about him again after his death. Here is the beginning of a flute piece called Glora (p. 147), which Björk wrote and played when she was fifteen:
The genius of the young Schubert blazes forth in "Erlkönig," or "The Erl King," written when he was just eighteen (p. 127):
Sarah Walker, mezzo-soprano, and Graham Johnson, piano; Hyperion CDJ33008.
Schubert made his breakthrough the previous year, setting "Gretchen am Spinnrade," from Goethe's Faust (p. 128). The spinning-wheel of the doomed girl is represented hauntingly in the piano at the outset ("My peace is gone, my heart is heavy"), while a wavelike motif represents her morbid passion at the climax ("I should die from his kisses"):
Marie McLaughlin, soprano, and Graham Johnson, piano; Hyperion CDJ33013.
Compare the darkly surging climax of the first movement of the "Unfinished" Symphony, which makes one think of the nexus of sex and death in Schubert's own life:
Günther Wand conducting the Berlin Philharmonic; RCA 659425.
A setting of Goethe's "Nachtgesang," from the same period as "Gretchen" (p. 128):
Adrian Thompson, tenor, and Graham Johnson, piano; Hyperion CDJ33012.
This handsome lad is said to be the teen-aged Schubert:
The "cuddly" Schubert of later years:
Strange harmonic rumblings in the Fantasie in G Minor, one of Schubert's earliest extant works (p. 129):
Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen, pianos; Sony Classical 68243.
The darkening emotional arc of "Auf der Donau," from idyll to disaster (p. 131):
Stephen Varcoe, baritone, and Graham Johnson, piano; Hyperion CDJ33002.
The Johann Mayrhofer setting "Auflösung," with its final rasp of "Go under, world" (p. 133):
Brigitte Fassbaender, soprano, and Graham Johnson, piano; Hyperion CDJ33011.
The lament figure, as described in Chapter 2, reappears at the beginning of Schubert's extraordinary String Quartet in G Major (p. 135). In this recording, by the great Busch Quartet, you hear the chromatic descent in the cello starting at 0:30 (where the musical example begins), with the quiet "shock" of an F-major chord at 0:35 (third bar):
The Busch Quartet, in a 1938 EMI recording remastered by Andrew Rose and released by Pristine Audio.
"Gute Nacht," from Winterreise (p. 136), whose first stanza could be translated as follows: "I came here as a stranger, / A stranger I go out. / The month of May did favor me / With flowers strewn all about. / The girl she spoke of loving me, / Her mother, of a wedding day; / But now the world is full of gloom, / And snow has hidden the way."
During the last of Esa-Pekka Salonen's seventeen seasons as the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the orchestra set up a commemorative website titled Celebrate Salonen. Many hours of audio and video can be found in the Media section of the site, including footage of Salonen's very first rehearsal with the orchestra, back in 1984 (go to Video and scroll down to One Minute, Maestro). I first interviewed Salonen in 1994, for the New York Times. I also prepared a Salonen discography. An hour-long documentary by Maggy Fellman (first part below, rest available on YouTube) gives a close look at Salonen during his last years in Los Angeles.
Salonen got his start as a conductor while working with fellow young Finnish composers in the collective Ears Open! (pp. 109-110). Here is the ferocious opening of Magnus Lindberg's 1985 piece Kraft, with a conventional orchestra augmented by all manner of junk-metal percussion:
Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony; Finlandia 372 [out of print].
Kaija Saariaho, another member of Ears Open!, also benefited from Salonen's advocacy. This is the opening of Saariaho's 1990 orchestral piece ...à la fumée, with electronically modified alto flute and cello:
Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ondine 804.
Salonen made his L.A. debut in 1984, conducting Witold Lutosławski's Third Symphony. Here are two extracts from this late-twentieth-century masterwork, a fusion of avant-garde and Romantic traditions:
Salonen conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sony 66280.
The section "Augurs of Spring" from Salonen's classic L.A. showpiece, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring:
"Climbing Up the Walls," the most sonically adventurous song on Radiohead's breakthrough 1997 album, OK Computer:
On "Morning Bell," from Amnesiac, an A-minor chord alternates with a C-sharp-minor one. It's another case of Thom Yorke's pivot-tone maneuver (p. 94): here the pivot tone is the note E, which both chords have in common:
Compare another passage from "Morning Bell"—in the version of the song heard on Kid A—with the Tarnhelm motif from Wagner's Ring:
The opening of "Pyramid Song", from Amnesiac, with strings playing glissando harmonics (p. 95):
The entire song live:
Radiohead at their most experimental — "National Anthem," live in 2003:
The composer Paul Lansky, a pioneer of computer music, has written on his website about his connection to the band: his 1973 piece mild und leise is sampled in Radiohead's "Idioteque." Lansky's piece, in turn, is based on the "Tristan chord" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde — the famously ambiguous, free-floating chord that set off a revolution in late-nineteenth-century harmony and prefigured atonality. Here is a progression of samples, from Wagner to Lansky to Radiohead:
Radiohead have a website to which a sporadically updated blog is attached. A memory hole preserves the band's previous Internet incarnations, many of them pointedly cryptic. Almost all of the band's latest album, In Rainbows, can be heard by way of YouTube videos that the band has uploaded. At Ease Web, a Dutch fan's site, assiduously collects Radiohead news and rumors.
When I interviewed Thom Yorke, he talked about his favorite songwriting trick — "pedals, banging away through everything." He meant the practice of letting one chord pivot into the next along a single held tone. "Airbag" (p. 87), the lead song on Radiohead's iconic 1997 album OK Computer, is an example. You'll hear the harmonic bare bones of the opening — F major and A major, the common note being A — followed by the first thirty seconds of the song itself:
A live performance of the entire song, from 1997:
"Everything in Its Right Place," the spellbinding lead song from Kid A, as revived in 2008:
The band's original hit was "Creep" (p. 94), seen here live in 1994:
The song "Just," from Radiohead's second album, The Bends, is built around an octatonic scale of alternating whole and half steps (p. 95). At the climax of the song the scale moves through four octaves:
Every note that Mozart set to paper can be viewed at the site of the Digital Mozart Edition, a collaboration between the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg and the Packard Humanities Institute. In the online version of the New Mozart Edition, you can search for music by genre or Köchel number.
The extremes of Mozart's world go from the obscene canon "Leck mich im Arsch" (p. 71) ...
...to the finale of the "Jupiter" Symphony, which has a curiously similar principal theme:
Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Linn Records 308.
In this recording of the Andante from Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, the "beguiling four-bar melody" to which I refer in the book (p. 73) occurs at 3:54, in the major, and at 9:44, in the minor:
Lara St. John, violin, and Scott St. John, viola, with Colin Jacobsen conducting The Knights; Ancalagon Records [available Oct. 2010].
Here is a passage from the early opera La finta semplice in which the characters Giacinta and Ninetta sing "Perdono," asking for forgiveness (p. 77):
Ann Murray and Eva Lind, with Peter Schreier conducting the Kammerorchester "Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach," from the Philips Complete Mozart Edition.
The passage is remarkably similar, in textual and musical terms, to the great moment in The Marriage of Figaro when the Count asks for the forgiveness of the Countess (pp. 77-78):
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the Count and Kiri te Kanawa as the Countess, with Karl Böhm conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.
"O wie angstlich," Belmonte's tensely lyrical aria from The Abduction from the Seraglio, sung by the great German tenor Fritz Wunderlich in a vintage TV appearance (p. 79):
Here is the complexly layered passage from the Adagio of the late-period String Quintet in D, in which Charles Rosen discerns "four completely different kinds of rhythm" (p. 80):
The Brentano Quartet, with Huang Hsin-Yun, viola; Aeon 747.
In his final year, Mozart completed the Piano Concerto No. 27, with its entrancing Larghetto:
Richard Goode and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; Nonesuch 79608.
The classic "lament" figure — the descending pattern that I discuss in Chapter 2 — reappears in the overture to Mozart's Don Giovanni, immediately after the colossal opening chords (pp. 82-83):
René Jacobs conducting the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra; Harmonia Mundi 901964.66.
Here is the scene of Don Giovanni's demise, in a historic 1954 performance from the Salzburg Festival. Cesare Siepi is the Don, Dezső Ernster is the Commendatore, Otto Edelmann is Leporello, and Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts.
More than a hundred recordings by Enrico Caruso are available at the Internet Archive (Part 1, Part 2). Here is the tenor's pioneering 1902 recording of "Vesti, la giubba" (p. 57):
Here's the almost indecipherable 1889 cylinder recording of Brahms playing his First Hungarian Dance (p. 57):
For reference, here is a modern version, with Iván Fischer conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra:
Jonathan Berger has closely analyzed about the Brahms cylinder and summarized his conclusions here. You can listen here to his MIDI reconstruction of Brahms's playing, in which he has projected the basic data of the recording onto the entire piece.
In 1915, Edison made a promotional film entitled The Voice of the Violin. At the climax, you can see one of the famous Tone Tests, at which audiences were allegedly unable to tell the difference between live performers and machines (p. 58):
Decade after decade, advertisers have claimed parity between live music and the latest technological reproduction. Edison himself can hear "no difference" between his Diamond Disc phonograph and the real thing:
This famous Memorex ad claims that Count Basie can't hear the difference between Ella Fitzgerald live and on tape:
Recordings seemed to change how music was played, whether in the studio or live onstage. Early recordings show more expressive freedom and less conscious technical precision. The great Belgian violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe, in a 1912 recording of Vieuxtemps's Rondino, weaves his way around the tempo given by the piano (p. 63):
When Caruso recorded the famous weeping aria "Una furtiva lagrima" — on three occasions, between 1902 and 1911 — he created a cadenza that was soon "locked in" as the global standard, replicated note for note in the work of hundreds of subsequent tenors (pp. 63-64). This is Caruso's 1904 version, with the cadenza beginning at 4:45:
As the conductor-scholar Will Crutchfield notes, tenors once used this cadenza as an opportunity for personal invention, as in this 1909 recording by Giuseppe Anselmi:
In this chapter, written fresh for the book, I tell a story of pattern recognition, tracing a few simple figures that show up in music across the centuries and across many genres. While I don't believe in the idea of music as a "universal language"—try telling that to a tired mom who is being forced to listen to her teenager's hip-hop, or, for that matter, a teenager who has to sit through his grandmother's Mozart records—there is much common ground in world cultures, recurring strands of musical DNA. Here I focus on two such elemental patterns: the old dance known as the chaconne and a pair of bass lines associated with lament. The path leads from Renaissance madrigals to Led Zeppelin, by way of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach, whose great Chaconne for solo violin is at the heart of the chapter.
Here is an early written-down chacona, Juan Arañés's "Un sarao de la chacona" (p. 23; first edition above):
From Villancicos y Danzas Criollas; Jordi Savall leading Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya; Alia Vox 9834; also available as download.
Here are the bass lines at the top of p. 25:
The bocet, an old Romanian folk lament (p. 26):
Other folk laments, from Hungary, Russia, and Kazakhstan:
The flamenco singer Manuel Torres and the guitarist El Hijo de Salvador perform "Siempre por los rincones" in 1922 (p. 27):
Daniel's lament in the lion's den, from the medieval Play of Daniel (p. 28):
Orlando Consort, Dreams in the Pleasure Garden; DG 457 618-2.
In Johannes Ockeghem's mid-fifteenth-century chanson "Fors seulement" (p. 29), the classic falling figure of lament makes an unmistakable and perhaps influential appearance:
In his Lamento della ninfa (pp. 35-36), Monteverdi made canny use of the device of ostinato, or strict ("obstinate") repetition, turning the four-note lament pattern into a steady ground bass:
Bernarda Fink, mezzo-soprano, with René Jacobs leading the Concerto Vocale; Harmonia Mundi 901736.37. These and other longer excerpts by kind permission of Harmonia Mundi.
The Venetian opera composer Francesco Cavalli, in his 1640 opera Gli amori d'Apollo e di Dafne (p. 36-37), directly copied Monteverdi's lamenting bass. When Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree, Apollo sings a lament for her, in a short aria marked "Lamento" at the outset:
The four-note bass again serves to generate a seductive, almost comforting kind of sadness:
Mario Zeffiri, tenor, with Alberto Zedda conducting the Galician Youth Symphony Orchestra; Naxos 8660187.
Cavalli's next opera, Didone (pp. 37-38), has laments galore. In Hecuba's cry of rage over the destruction of Troy, the ostinato bass now proceeds downward by chromatic steps (consecutive white and black keys on the piano):
Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto, with Emmanuelle Haïm leading Le Concert d'Astrée; Virgin Classics 19044.
The chaconne, having risen from lowly beginnings, achieves its apotheosis at the court of Versailles, where Jean-Baptiste Lully writes such stately dances as the "Chaconne des maures," or "Chaconne of the Moors" (p. 39):
Ballet Music for the Sun King: Kevin Mallon conducting the Arcadia Baroque Ensemble; Naxos 8554003.
In keyboard pieces such as Frescobaldi's Partite sopra ciaccona (p. 40), meanwhile, the dance begins to evolve in a more complex and emotionally darker direction:
In Dido's Lament, the famous closing aria of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (pp. 40-41), the chromatic bass line operates much as it did in Cavalli:
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano, with Nicholas McGegan conducting the Philharmonia Baroque; Harmonia Mundi 907110.
We now enter the world of Johann Sebastian Bach, where "chaconne" and "lament" characteristics are almost fused together. Here is the beginning of Bach's great Ciaccona in D minor, from the Second Partita for solo violin, (pp. 43-44), with a chromatic descent at 1:44:
A descending chromatic line in the major-key middle section of the Ciaccona:
The convulsive turn back to minor:
The above three samples come from Gidon Kremer's recording of the Sonatas and Partitas; ECM 506502.
Andrés Segovia plays the same passage on the guitar, perhaps bringing out a bit of the old "Spanish" flavor of the dance:
You can see the manuscript of the Ciaccona, in Bach's own hand, at Bach Digital, the online site of the Bach archive at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.
In the "Crucifixus" of the B-Minor Mass (pp. 44-46), Bach used the chromatic lamenting bass to represent nothing less than the suffering of Christ on the cross. It appears at the bottom of this portion of the original manuscript:
Here is the "Crucifixus" in its entirety:
Philippe Herreweghe conducting the chorus and orchestra of the Collegium Vocale Gent; Harmonia Mundi 5901614.15.
Beethoven, who once asked his publisher to send him a copy of Bach's "Crucifixus," employed a doleful chromatic bass line in the coda of the first movement of his Ninth Symphony (pp. 46-47):
Osmo Vänskä conducting the Minnesota Orchestra; BIS 1616.
The climactic lamenting passage of the final movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony has four-note and chromatic figures overlapping (p. 47):
Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra; Philips 456580.
György Ligeti (pp. 48-49) talks about the figure of the lament at the New England Conservatory, on March 9, 1993.
In a discussion of Schubert's Quartet in G the following day, he returns to the topic, singing the beginning of Dido's Lament:
The beginning of the Lamento of Ligeti's Horn Trio (p. 49):
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, Marie-Luise Neunecker, French horn, Saschko Gawriloff, violin; Sony Classical 62309.
A chromatic descent in Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" (p. 50):
Willie Brown's "Future Blues" (p. 51):
Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman" and "I'm So Glad":
Robert Johnson's "Walkin' Blues":
Richard Rodgers's "My Funny Valentine," as sung by Sinatra (p. 52):
A montage of descending chromatic bass lines from 1960s pop and rock — "Chim Chim Cher-ee," "Michelle," "Hotel California," and "Ballad of a Thin Man" (pp. 52-53):
Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," from an epic live performance at the LA Forum in 1972 (p. 54):
Many elements of "Dazed and Confused" were taken from a song of the same name written and recorded by Jake Holmes. Jimmy Page and the band have to this date never given Holmes credit, although a pending lawsuit may finally force them to do so. Will Shade, in an article for Perfect Sound Forever, describes Holmes's remarkable career; he not only co-wrote one of the most famous rock songs of the late twentieth century but is also responsible for the commercial jingles "Raise Your Hand If You're Sure," "Be a Pepper," and "Be All That You Can Be."
Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra; EMI 67741
The San Francisco Symphony has an excellent online guide to Beethoven's revolutionary symphony, with Michael Tilson Thomas as host. You can follow the score bar by bar, stopping to hear short commentaries both by the conductor and by members of the orchestra.
When I was in college, I followed what I think of as the "noise passage" from classical to pop (p. 9). I began in the wilds of the post-1945 European avant-garde, listening to works like Stockhausen's Gruppen:
Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and Michael Gielen conducting the WDR Orchestra; Stockhausen Edition No. 5.
Then a friend had me listen to Cecil Taylor:
From 3 Phasis, with Taylor on piano, Jimmy Lyons, alto saxophone; Raphé Malik, trumpet; Ramsey Ameen, violin; Sirone, bass; Ronald Shannon Jackson, drums; New World 80303.
Other friends had me listen to Pere Ubu:
"30 Seconds Over Tokyo," from the Terminal Tower compilation.
A footnote: Jesse Townley, the lead singer of Blatz, has become active in Berkeley politics, and presently serves as the commissioner of the Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board.
The beginning of the finale of Mozart's "Paris" Symphony, for which Mozart expected and received punctuating applause from the audience (p. 11):
Trevor Pinnock conducting the English Concert; DG 471666.
Duke Ellington and his band disrupt Liszt in the 1934 movie Murder at the Vanities (p. 16):
Here you can listen to brief excerpts of some of the works discussed in Listen To This, in a format that works on iPads, iPhones, and other devices that don't use flash. (The regular guide is here.) There are also embedded videos, images, and links to archives, stories, and sound files elsewhere on the Internet. Many of the sound samples on these pages are permitted under an ASCAP Internet broadcast license. Special thanks to various publishers and record labels who gave me permission to use their material. Go here for a sound-enhanced glossary and here for an iTunes playlist.
Widely played, not quite universally loved, charged with hidden passions, Johannes Brahms stands as a symbol of how much we lose when we turn composers into marble statues. There are museums dedicated to him in Hamburg, his birthplace; in Mürzzuschlag, Austria, where he wrote the Fourth Symphony; in Pörtschach, where he wrote the Second; and in Gmunden, another favorite holiday spot. The Brahms Institut in Lübeck has the most extensive online archive, including pictures, letters, concert programs, and first and early editions of Brahms's entire published output. A major presentation of digitized manuscripts is planned for the fall of 2010. Yet few latter-day composers are trickier or more elusive when it comes to the question of musical meaning. I chose to end this book with Brahms because I have always responded to his work with an intensity that I have never fully understood. When I listen to music purely for pleasure, with no assignments pending, I often turn to this master of the double-edged chord.
The beginning of the Second Symphony, with its rumble of "black wings" in the trombones:
Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Telarc 80522.
The beginning of the vocal quartet "Why Is Light Given to One Who Is in Misery?":
Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts the entire first movement of the Second, in a remarkable 1945 performance (the "springtime" motif enters at 4:26 of the second part):
The house where Brahms was born, in the Gängeviertel, which, by the time this photograph was taken, had become a slum:
From the Andante of the First Piano Sonata:
Sviatoslav Richter, piano; Philips 438477 (out of print).
Schubert's "Der Leiermann," for comparison:
The opening of the First Piano Concerto, with its intimations of Robert Schumann's plunge into the icy waters of the Rhine:
Clifford Curzon, piano, with Georg Szell conducting the London Symphony; Decca 417641.
A demonstration of the opening chord at the piano:
Here's a youthful account of the entire first movement, with Kirill Gerstein at the piano and Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. After the initial colossal D, you can hear the successive notes of the "lamento" motif at 0:47 (C-sharp), 1:09 (C-natural), 1:13 (B-natural), 1:16 (B-flat, briefly), and 1:17 (A).
The opening movements of A German Requiem, "Blessed Are They That Mourn" and "All Flesh Is As Grass," with Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Swedish Radio Chorus at the Vienna Musikverein (on DVD):
Klemperer conducts the opening of the First Symphony:
Brahms in Gypsy mode — the finale of the Piano Quartet in G Minor:
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the violist turned vocal oracle, whom I describe in this chapter as "the most remarkable singer I ever heard," died in July 2006. I was one of many people who were devastated by her death; Sidney Chen, at his blog The Standing Room, gathered a long list of memorials. Charles Michener profiled her for The New Yorker in 2004. On this blog I prepared a discography.
The official website of the monumentally elusive Bob Dylan contains lyrics for close to five hundred songs, sound samples for more than fifty albums, a gallery of photos, and a smattering of videos. The leading source of Dylan-related news is Karl Erik Andersen's site Expecting Rain. BobLinks has set lists for some fifteen hundred shows since 1995. How Long Has It Been... tells you the last time Dylan played a given song. And so on—hundreds, if not thousands, of other Dylan sites exist.
A poster for Dylan's first high-profile New York show, in November 1961:
Internet holdings on the topic of Cage are fairly vast. Laura Kuhn, the executive director of the John Cage Trust, maintains a lively blog; the picture above, of a Cage pocket calendar, was taken at the Trust's archive at Bard College, in New York. The site JohnCage.info has a comprehensive database. The Electronic Poetry Center in Buffalo has a good collection of Cage links. The musicologist James Pritchett has placed online his writings on Cage. UbuWeb has various sound files, including the complete 1988-89 Norton Lectures. In 2009 I wrote about my visit to the Anarchy of Silence exhibition in Barcelona.
The pianist David Tudor gave the première of 4'33" at the Maverick Concert Hall in 1952. Here is film of him performing the piece:
A delightful video assembled from various YouTube performances of 4'33":
Here is an excerpt from Cage's pioneering 1939 piece Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for variable-speed turntables, cymbal, and piano:
With Cage, Xenia Cage, Doris Dennison, and Margaret Jansen; from the 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage, Town Hall, New York, May 15, 1948; Wergo 286 247.
David Greilsammer plays Sonata V from Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes—a prime example of the composer’s eerily beautiful writing for prepared piano:
Here Greilsammer demonstrates the preparation of the piano:
After encountering radical new European styles on a trip in 1949, Cage began to work with more violent, disorderly sounds. Inspired by the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, he constructed his own tape collage, Williams Mix, made up of some six hundred tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching. You can listen to it at the German site Medien Art Netz, along with Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in its entirety. In the third movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra, Cage uses the I Ching to decide which element from an array of sixty-four sounds should come next. Some of the sounds are, in fact, silences:
Stephen Drury, prepared piano, with the Callithumpian Consort of New England Conservatory; Mode 57.
In the later 1950s and into the 1960s, Cage helped to create the new discipline or anti-discipline of performance art, an outgrowth of his legendary "happening" at Black Mountain College in 1952. One essential piece of Cagean footage is the composer’s magnificently surreal appearance on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, from 1960. Unfortunately, no footage has yet surfaced of Cage’s earlier stint on the Italian game show Lascia o Raddopia?
There's an extraodinary DVD of Cage's Variations VII, performed in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory; you can see an excerpt here.
Cage makes music from cacti and plant materials:
Laura Kuhn writes on her blog about Lecture on the Weather, one of Cage's most mesmerizing later pieces, and in some ways the most politically pointed work of his career. You can hear his explanatory remarks here, together with still photographs of a 2007 Bard installation.
Cage's meditative Ryoanji, in a version for voice and percussion, with Liz Tonne and Tim Feeney:
Cage talks about music, sound, and silence, with reference to the noise from Sixth Avenue below his window:
I visited Marlboro Music, Rudolf Serkin's fabled chamber-music retreat in Vermont, three times in the summer of 2008, and wrote about the experience for The New Yorker the following year. Above and below are pictures of the Marlboro grounds — formerly a dairy farm, currently a small liberal-arts college:
The coffee shop, hub of social activity (pp. 246-48):
This short video gives the flavor of the place:
Rudolf Serkin and Adolf Busch, Marlboro's co-founders (pp. 250-52), perform the Andante moderato from Schubert's Fantasy in C:
Recorded in Small Queen's Hall, London, May 6, 1931. From the set Franz Schubert: Chamber Music, on the greatly missed Andante label.
Serkin plays the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata Opus 111:
Haydn in the dining hall :
The infamous scheduling board — all these rehearsals took place on a single weekend:
Mitsuko Uchida, Soovin Kim, and David Soyer perform the Andante of Schubert's Piano Trio in E-flat (pp. 257-58):
Recorded live at Marlboro on July 13, 2008. By kind permission of the artists and Marlboro Music.
David Soyer's music stand inspired an epic prank (p. 260):
Another prank: someone photoshopped Uchida's Peggy Guggenheim sunglasses onto pictures of everyone on campus:
Uchida practices the Choral Fantasy in the concert hall (pp. 262-63)
The cemetery in Guilford where Serkin and Busch are buried (p. 264):
Serkin's grave is marked by the first flat stone on the left; Busch is to the right, beneath the bush:
Marian Anderson sings "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 (pp. 239-40):
More footage of the event can be found here. A recording of the entire event can be found in the online resources of the National Archives:
As the following juxtaposition suggests, Martin Luther King, Jr. almost certainly thought back to Marian Anderson when he gave his momentous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 (p. 240):
Anderson sings "Deep River":
Her chilling version of Schubert's "Der Doppelgänger":
Nina Simone sings "Strange Fruit" (p. 244):
Compare "Der Doppelgänger," in its original key:
Ian Bostridge, tenor, and Antonio Pappano, piano; EMI 42639.
And the four-note bass line of Monteverdi's Lamento della ninfa:
Bernarda Fink, mezzo-soprano, with René Jacobs leading the Concerto Vocale; Harmonia Mundi 901736.37.
Two more photographs of the Lincoln Memorial event, from the Library of Congress:
Hassan Ralph Williams, the longtime leader of the Shabazz band (pp. 226-28), standing amidst his charges at the Memorial Day Parade in Nutley, New Jersey:
A recent video of the Shabazz band in action:
The site for the Music for All Foundation has much useful information about the never-ending struggle to maintain music education in American public and private schools. The California Music Project has archived a copy of Music for All's alarming 2004 report, "Sound of Silence," on the drastic decline of music education in California (p. 230).
The remarkable Community MusicWorks organization in Rhode Island, which is the focus of the latter part of the chapter, has a well-stocked website. Among other things, you can read Sebastian Ruth's essay "Music and Social Justice." Maxine Green, a major inspiration for Ruth's conception of Community MusicWorks, has a website here. Here's a video about the organization and its core ensemble, the Providence String Quartet:
The members of the Providence Quartet outside their storefront headquarters:
The final minutes of a 2004 recording of the Brahms Piano Quintet by the Providence Quartet and Jonathan Biss (pp. 235-36):
The St. Lawrence Quartet, a group that passionately avoids classical-music business-as-usual, has a well-stocked website, with news items, a touring schedule, and soundclips.
The quartet as I first heard them, on Nov. 17, 1992, playing Alban Berg's String Quartet Opus 3 in the Young Concert Artists series at the 92nd St. Y (p. 205; review here):
A short documentary of the quartet's Chamber Music Seminar at Stanford University:
The present-day version of the quartet — two players have departed since I wrote about the group in 2002 — plays the scherzo of Dvořák's Quartet Opus 106:
And here is the beginning of the Adagio from the same work, in the St. Lawrence's ArtistShare recording:
