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By Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B Wagoner

Power and memory combined to produce the Deccan Plateau’s built landscape. Beyond the region’s capital cities, such as Bijapur, Vijayanagara, or Golconda, the culture of smaller, fortified strongholds both on the plains and in the hills provides a fascinating insight into its history. These smaller centers saw very high levels of conflict between 1300 and 1600, especially during the turbulent sixteenth century when gunpowder technology had become widespread in the region. Below is a selection of images of architecture and monuments, examined through a mix of methodologies (history, art history, and archaeology), taken from our new book Power, Memory, and Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600.



• Raichur. Kati Darwaza gateway (as reconstructed c. 1520)

   

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  When an important fort changed hands in the early modern Deccan, victors often gave its gates “face-lifts” to publicize their possession of the site. When Krishna Raya of Vijayanagara seized Raichur from Bijapur, he erased features of this gate that were associated with Bijapur and stamped it with architectural markings of his own dynasty.

• Yadgir Fort, Cannon no. 4 (late 1550s)

   

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  In the mid-16th century the sultanate of Bijapur made notable advances in gunpowder technology, marking in some respects a local “Military Revolution”. This is seen in the crude adaptation of the idea of small swivel cannons to very large guns that were placed on high bastions and could be maneuvered both laterally and vertically.

• Hyderabad: southern portal of the Char Kaman ensemble (1592)

   

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  Though conventionally thought to have been patterned on “Islamic” models of urban design, Hyderabad was actually modeled on the Kakatiya capital of Warangal, indicating that dynasty’s lasting memory. Thus, four portals were positioned around the famous Charminar just as four toranas had been positioned around Warangal’s cultic center, the Svayambhu Shiva temple (see first image).

• Warangal Fort: Panchaliraya temple, assembled by Shitab Khan (16th c.)

   

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  In 1504 Shitab Khan, an upstart local chieftain, seized the city of Warangal from its Bahmani governor and at once associated himself with the memory of the illustrious Kakatiya dynasty, which had ruled from this city two centuries earlier. To this end, he made several architectural interventions, including assembling this temple from reused structural elements dating to Kakatiya rule.

• Bijapur: Inner courtyard of citadel’s gateway

   

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  Like their Vijayanagara rivals to the south, the sultans of Bijapur also revered the memory of the imperial Chalukyas. This is seen in the twenty-four reused Chalukya columns that, in the early 16th century, they inserted in the citadel’s entrance courtyard, their capital’s most prominent site.

• Vijayanagara: two-storeyed hall at the end of Virupaksha bazaar

   

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  To identify themselves with Chalukya glory, rulers of Vijayanagara in the 16th century inserted into this hall’s lower storey finely polished reused Chalukya columns, carved from blue-green schist. By contrast, the hall’s less visible upper storey exhibits columns in the style of Vijayanagara’s own period, crudely carved from nearby granite.

• Kuruvatti. Bracket figure from the Malikarjuna temple, ca. 11th c.

   

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  Just as the memory of Roman imperial splendor inspired Europeans for centuries after the collapse of Rome, the memory of the Deccan’s prestigious Chalukya dynasty (10th-12th c.), preserved by material remains such as this stunning sculpture, inspired actors four or five centuries later to identify their own regimes with Chalukya glory.

• Warangal fort: Remains of the Tughluq congregational mosque

   

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  Architecture and power are interwoven in the remains of this mosque, built in the former capital of the Kakatiya dynasty. Foreground: rubble of the temple of the Kakatiyas’ state deity, Svayambhu Shiva, destroyed in the early 14th century by armies of the Delhi Sultanate. Background: one of the temple’s four majestic gateways (torana) that the conquerors preserved in order to frame the mosque.

Richard M. Eaton is Professor of History at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Phillip B. Wagoner is Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University. They are authors of Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600.

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Oxford University Press is saddened to hear of the passing of Broadway legend Elaine Stritch. We’d like to present a brief extract from Eddie Shapiro’s interview with Elaine Stritch in November/December 2008 in Nothing Like a Dame that illustrates her tremendous life and vitality.

“What’s this all about, again?!” came Elaine Stritch’s unmistakable rattle of a voice, part Rosalind Russell, part dry martini, part cheese grater, on the other end of the phone. I was taken aback. After all, we had spoken the day before and the day before that. On the first call, she had told me that she was swamped but really wanted to get this interview out of the way. “Well,” I had offered, “there’s no great rush. I would rather you do this when you feel relaxed than when you are cramming it in.” “Don’t you worry about my disposition,” came the steely reply. “I’ll worry about my disposition.” She hated me, I thought, until the second call, during which she called me “dear” and apologized twice for her schedule. So now, on call number three, when it seemed we were back at square one, I didn’t know what to say. “Well, it’s the interview for my book, Nothing Like a Dame,” I explained. “You asked me to call today.” “And when did you want to do this,” came the deliberate reply. “Well, you asked me about today.” “Today? I can’t possibly do today.” “That’s fine. It’s just that when you called me on Friday, you said you wanted to get it done this weekend.” “I don’t recall saying that to anyone. Gee, Ed, I hate to leave you hanging like this. How about Thanksgiving?” “Thanksgiving Day?” “Yeah, before dinner. You could come for tea.” “That would be fine.” “But I tell you what, give me a call on Wednesday night after 11:00, just to confirm. And I promise I’ll remember.” And that is how I ended up having tea with irascible, cantankerous, outspoken, and utterly charming Elaine Stritch at The Carlyle Hotel on Thanksgiving Day.

Elaine Stritch was born outside of Detroit in 1925. She came to New York to study under Erwin Piscator at The New School, where her classmates included Marlon Brando and Bea Arthur (with whom she’d compete for a Tony Award sixty years later. And win.). She made her musical debut in Angel in the Wings, singing the absurd “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo (I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo)” before her long run as Ethel Merman’s understudy in Call Me Madam. Since Merman never missed a performance, Stritch never went on, and felt safe simultaneously taking a one-scene part in the hit 1952 revival of Pal Joey a block away. “I was close if they needed me,” she says, “which they never did.” When Call Me Madam went out on national tour, though, Stritch, all of twenty-five, was leading the company. Goldilocks followed, before Noel Coward wrote the role of Mimi Paragon in Sail Away just for Stritch. Mimi, like her inspiration, knew her way around an arched eyebrow and a sarcastic bon mot. Not surprisingly, Stritch was a sensation. It nonetheless took almost a decade for her next Broadway musical, but this one was legendary.

As Joanne in Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company, Stritch bellowed the searing eleven o’clock number, “The Ladies Who Lunch.” To this day, it is considered one of the all-time greatest interpretations of any musical theater song. Hal Prince’s acclaimed 1994 revival of Show Boat was another triumph but the best was still to come. In 2001, under the direction of George C. Wolfe, Stritch premiered Elaine Stritch at Liberty, an autobiographical one-woman show in which Stritch gossiped, confessed, kvetched, cajoled, and reveled in a musical tour of her life and career. For At Liberty, she finally took home a Tony Award, before playing the show for years in New York, London, and on tour. In 2010, she successfully, if improbably, succeeded Angela Lansbury in A Little Night Music.

Of all the women in [Nothing Like a Dame], she was the only one I was scared to meet. The phone calls didn’t assuage my fears, nor did the Carlyle’s waiter who, upon hearing I was there to meet Stritch laughingly said, “Good luck!” But I needn’t have worried. Stritch isn’t mean, she’s just blunt to a degree that’s so unusual it’s occasionally unnerving. As Bebe Neuwirth says of her, “She doesn’t know how to lie, on or offstage.” And she doesn’t suffer fools well. But once she trusts, she’s delightful. And warm enough to have extended an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner.

…

In your show, Elaine Stritch: At Liberty, you said that you didn’t know why you wanted to be an actress. But you did choose to pursue acting over anything else. What gave you the instinct that you’d be any good?

I don’t think it’s an instinct, I don’t think that’s the right word. I don’t have an answer to that today.

Calling?

Those are all two-dollar words. I don’t believe in all of that, “calling” and “career.” I wasn’t thinking about . . . I think if I was really dead-honest, I was . . . everybody else was going away to college and I didn’t want to. I don’t know the reason why that was, either. I thought I’d rather learn by experience all of the subjects they were going to teach me in college. That’s a dumb statement. But I didn’t want to go to college. I wanted to be an actress but I still can’t tell you why. I think I’m . . . I don’t think I’m really a happy camper inside and I think it’s an escape for me. I’ve gotten to like myself a lot better as the years go by, but I’m still not hung up on myself.

You have actually said that it’s really hard for you to play yourself. During Elaine Stritch: At Liberty, you said that a vacation would be putting on a costume and playing someone else.

At the time I was doing Elaine Stritch: At Liberty I wasn’t thinking about philosophizing my position and what I would or wouldn’t like to do. This was a tremendously courageous thing for me to do, but it was good. Just like I read a good play—I read a Tennessee Williams play, an Edward Albee play—I read what I wrote and what John Lahr wrote and I liked it. I thought, “This is a good part for me.” That sounds like a joke but it was a good part for me to play. It was the first time I had an opportunity to put myself on the stage. Because I am a really true-blue actress. When I take on a part I play the part. Of course I bring Elaine Stritch to it, that’s why they hire me. But I am interpreting another, I am inside somebody else’s skin. So, you know, acting is . . . I don’t know what it is. I don’t think it’s given enough credit in the arts. I think it’s a real art form, acting. I don’t know. I don’t think a lot of people have the talent—my kind of talent—to be an actress. But there are a lot of good ones out there. I am always so thrilled when I go to the theater and see a performance. I just think that’s the best. There was a marvelous expression in the Times the other day in the review of Australia. They talked about all of the epic qualities of the movie but they said a very simple thing about Nicole Kidman, who I think is a very good actress. They said: “she gave a performance.” And I thought, “what a wonderful notice.” I hope she appreciates it.

I want to go back to your early days, you came to New York for whatever reason you . . .

For whatever reason. Look, it’s not as complicated as all that. I was not going steady with someone. My beau had already gone to New York to become an actor. He was a writer named James Lee. He wrote [the play] Career and he also wrote for television; he was one of the writers on Roots. So what was I gonna do? I didn’t want to go to college. I wasn’t in love. I mean, I loved Jimmy but I wasn’t interested in getting married. I wish it would stop there. I wanted to become an actress. Why? I don’t know. I think you deal with that better than I deal with it. I’d like to be able to answer it better. But I do think that I wasn’t too hung up on myself and I wanted to be everybody else I could think of.

The reason I used the word “instinct” is because I think sometimes people have a desire or gut feeling that isn’t calculated, but they know that something speaks to them.

Something stirring.

Yeah.

I see what you mean. Yes. And I also wanted out of Michigan. I love Michigan but I didn’t want to spend all my life there, I wanted to see the world. Another answer I’ve given to the question, “why did you want to become an actress” is that I wanted higher ceilings. It’s as good an answer as any. I once played a game at a party and we all had to give the best answer for “why did you become an actor.” Mine was, “to get a good table at 21.” Ho ho ho. I think “higher ceilings” would have won at that party but I hadn’t thought of that yet. [The actor] Marti Stevens gave the best answer ever. Actually, the question was, “why did you go on the stage” and Marti Stevens said, “to get out of the audience.” That’s a great answer.

Once you were in New York and at The New School, how did you get work and audition?

I was going to school.

Yes, but you were cast in Loco pretty quickly after school. Did that seem like a fluke to you or were your peers also getting work easily? Did it feel like a struggle?

I don’t know.

Did you have to work for money?

I waited tables at The New School, but I did it not because I needed the money; I did it for the experience.

The human experience?

Yeah.

Did it work?

Yeah. And I did it to show off to Marlon Brando.

Did that work?

Yeah. I was showing that I wasn’t just this rich girl from Michigan. I could be a waitress, too. You see there’s a little Joan Crawford/Mildred Pierce in all of us! It was all of those things. . . . I am very honest about things like that today. Then I wasn’t.

In what ways are you honest now that you were not then?

Well, I wish I could have laughed and told Marlon Brando that I was trying to influence him. But you don’t do that at seventeen. You wait ’til you’re in your eighties ’til you get that kind of honesty. I think I could do a lot of things today that I couldn’t do then as far as being straight- forward and on the level with people. I figured it out that none of us have anything to hide. There’s nothing about me that I couldn’t tell everybody in the world. There really isn’t. And that’s a good way to be. I love the expression “secrets are dangerous.” I really think they are. “Don’t tell anybody, but . . .” is the most boring line in the world. It really is. If you don’t want them to tell anybody, don’t tell them!

In saying secrets are dangerous, do you mean that the truth frees you?

Absolutely. And I think what has transpired without your knowing it is that you kind of, at last, dig yourself.

…

I need a Judy Garland story.

I’d have to look ’em up, Honey.

For people like me, it’s like sitting at my grandmother’s lap and listening to family legend.

I know, I know. Judy Garland, when she came to the opening night party of Sail Away, I made up my mind not to drink at all at that party. There were a lot of famous people there. Before I knew it I saw Judy leaving the Noel Coward suite, and she was going home. I thought, “My God, I haven’t talked to her, she hasn’t told me how she liked the show, and I really want to hear what she thought more than anyone.” They had those see-through elevators at the Savoy Hotel. I ran out to the hall and she was just on the elevator and it was starting to disappear. And before her head got out of view from me, she went, “Elaine, about your fucking timing . . . ” and then she disappeared. It was absolutely brilliant. She knew what she was doing! Her timing was divine! And music to my ears, of course.

Do you have any stories about working with George Abbott on Call Me Madam?

Oh, he was a marvelous director, a wonderful man and an extraordinary human being. I loved him. He did one great thing once with me. When I came down to get notes before opening night, I had a scotch and soda in a coffee mug. Of course I was making it very believable. ’Cause while he was giving the notes I was blowing on the coffee. I was blowing on the scotch. And all of sudden George Abbott said to me, “Can I have a taste of that Elaine? Is that coffee?” And my voice went up two octaves and I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Could I have a taste?” And I said, “Sure.” I’ll tell you what a great guy he was. He took the coffee mug from me and he blew on it and then he took a sip. And then he handed it back to me and said, “Man that’s good coffee.”

Do you have Richard Rodgers stories?

Oh, I loved him. But he didn’t like me. He was an alcoholic, you know, and alcoholics resent other alcoholics. He paid me a great compliment once, though. He said, “I would give her the lead in a show but I just don’t think she could handle it. Because when she does a number, it is so good that I never think she can do it again.” It’s a great compliment but it isn’t very conducive to working.

It is a back-handed compliment.

Well he was a back-handed kind of fellow. He is a hard person to talk about.

Did you think it was personal?

Oh no, he liked me very much. But I made him nervous because I drank. That would make any director or producer—but the funny thing with him was that he drank twice as much as I did.

Did he recognize that?

No, he didn’t at all.

Both Abbott and Rodgers knew that you were drinking . . .

It never bothered George Abbott because I didn’t drink too much. Well, I probably did drink too much, but I was never drunk on the stage in my life.

Was drinking in the theater more commonplace in general?

Absolutely. Everybody had booze in their dressing room. Nobody does anymore. In London, in the theater you have cocktail parties at intermission. It’s a big deal having a little sherry or a little of this or that. But too many people have abused the privilege in this country. All of our great actors were huge drinkers. Tallulah Bankhead, John Barrymore, Bela Lugosi. So many. Lots and lots of people.

The people you mention famously got seriously drunk. That was never you, though.

No, absolutely not. Maybe a couple of times my timing was off because I had three instead of two drinks, but nothing to write home about.

…

Do you read reviews?

Oh yes, I can’t wait. Terrified to read them and thrilled to death when they are good. I haven’t gotten a lot of bad reviews; I’ve gotten a few in my life but nothing that upset me terribly.

There are a lot of actors who . . .

I can’t believe that they don’t read their reviews.

Do you go to the theater today?

Yeah, I go. But I am not going to see The Little Mermaid if that’s what you mean. I like Jane Krakowski, I think she’s good. And I like Kristin Chenoweth. I’m getting very excited about the opening of Pal Joey because my good friend Stockard Channing is in it. The theater is not what it was. It’s the fabulous invalid. It’s having a tough time because of the economy but it will come back. I worry about Maxwell [her nephew, a twenty-nine-year-old actor who just moved to New York]. Nobody who comes here to get into the theater can get an agent. It takes years. You have to go on those cattle calls. This is a tough racket. It really is a tough racket.

…

If performing hadn’t worked out for you, do you have any notion of what you might have been doing?

Supposition is really boring but I’ll give it a shot: Stay home!!

Is there anyone you’ve never worked with who you wish you had?

If I am supposed to, it’ll happen. I reiterate: supposition to me is a long yawn.

I think the word is “boring.”

[Laughs] OK, whatever you think is fair.

Excerpted from Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater by Eddie Shapiro. Shapiro is a freelance writer and theater journalist whose work has appeared in Out Magazine, Instinct, and Backstage West. He is the author of Queens in the Kingdom: The Ultimate Gay and Lesbian Guide to the Disney Theme Parks.

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By Rhiannon Mathias

My father was a man of exceptional energy. Warm and generous in character, he lived several different kinds of musical lives. First and foremost, of course, as a composer, but also conductor, pianist, public figure, Professor of Music at Bangor University (1970-88) and Artistic Director of the North Wales Music Festival (1972-92). All these different strands amounted to a phenomenal workload, and took up a great deal of time, but he felt that he couldn’t write music 24 hours a day, and that he could give something meaningful to society and move it on. It did mean that he had to be extremely well organized, but I think that he found that all the different aspects of his life helped him to produce the music he wanted to write in the end. Much of his music was composed in our family home in the town of Menai Bridge on the beautiful island of Anglesey, and our house was also ‘mission control’ when he was planning his Music Festival.

His working day usually started at 9 a.m., and he often drove me to school in the mornings in his ‘English red’ (actually, bright orange) Mercedes on his way to the University. I think he quite enjoyed his time at the University. There was not as much paperwork as there is these days, and he enjoyed the lecturing and was very popular with his students. He was affectionately known as ‘Prof’, and my mother, who was head of singing at the Department, was ‘Mrs. M’. His office took up the entire top floor of the music building. I recall a grand piano (model D, of course), bookshelves weighed down with the history of Western music, and an enormous desk bearing scores and papers.

There is a story about him which dates from his time when he was a young lecturer at Bangor in the 1960s. He would begin his lecture, and after about ten minutes would reach for his pipe and light a match while still enthusing about his subject. The students would watch the match burn down, whereupon he would put it out and place it in his jacket pocket. Without breaking his speech, he would reach for another match, light it, and the process would repeat until, by the end of the lecture, he was left with one unlit pipe and a pocket of spent matches. Later, when he became a Professor, he rarely made negative comments about concerts given at the University, but if he was not, how shall I say, fully musically engaged, he would take his glasses off and wipe them with his tie. We all came to realise that this was the ultimate critical comment!

When he got home from the University, my mother would have a delicious meal ready for him. His day was far from over, however. Unless my parents were hosting a dinner party – my mother is an excellent cook – he would go to his studio after supper and compose until the early hours of the morning. These regular, ‘golden’ hours, enabled him to compose nearly 200 published works, including three symphonies, several concertos, chamber music, a great deal of choral music, and a full-scale opera, The Servants. Such a routine seems extraordinary, but it is important to understand that music was an ever-present force for my father. I was aware from a very early age that the creative process was something always present for him — even when he was doing something else — and that it was a force which he could turn in any desired direction or channel at a given time. Hence his ability to compose a wide variety of orchestral, choral, instrumental or chamber music, as well as music for the church and for young people.

I could always tell when a piece was gestating in his mind because he would become intensely thoughtful and preoccupied. When the time was right, he would roughly sketch the piece, trying out a few ideas on one of the two pianos in his studio, and then attend to the detailed work of producing his meticulously tidy manuscripts — always in black ink (this was in the days before Sibelius). The majority of his works were written to commission, and from as far back as I can remember, he usually had to plan two, often three years in advance in order to meet the demand of commissions he wanted to fulfil. He told me that sometimes, after finishing his composition in the early hours, he used to pop into my bedroom when I was very young and find me standing up in my cot, waiting for him to come and say goodnight.

His enormous work commitments meant that we, as a family, rarely went on holiday during the summer. There were, however, regular trips to Whitland in South Wales, my father’s home town, to visit my grandmother Marian, and I recall a wonderful holiday in Greece – impressions of which partly became the inspiration for his Melos for flute, harp, percussion and strings (1977) and Helios for orchestra (1977). In 1982, we went to America where my father embarked on an immensely successful tour of the East coast involving lectures, performances, and workshops in Boston, New York, Athens in Georgia, and San Antonio in Texas. The connection with the States was a lasting one and, after my father’s retirement from Bangor University in 1988, it became usual for him to visit America twice, often three times a year.

At the beginning of 1992, my father was commissioned to write a symphony (his fourth) by the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra. Sadly, the new symphony was not to come to fruition — he passed away in July 1992 — but the true, creative artist has an uncanny ability to transcend mortality. He would have been 80 in November, and it is wonderful that his anniversary is being celebrated this year by a series of concerts, festivals, and new publications. His vibrant character – full of vitality, optimism, and joy – very much lives on in his music.

Rhiannon Mathias is a musicologist, broadcaster, and flautist. She is the author of a book about the music of Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Grace Williams (Ashgate 2012) and lectures on Twentieth-Century Women Composers at Bangor University. She is also a Trustee of the William Mathias Music Centre in north Wales.

William Mathias was born in Whitland, Dyfed. He studied at the University College of Wales, and subsequently at the Royal Academy of Music. From 1970-1988 he was Head of the Music Department at the University College of North Wales, Bangor. Mathias musical language embraced both instrumental and vocal forms with equal success, and he addressed a large and varied audience both in Britain and abroad. He was also known as a conductor and pianist, and gave or directed many premières of his own works. He was made CBE in the 1985 New Year’s Honours. In 1992, the year of his death, Nimbus Records embarked upon a series of recordings of his major works.

Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the United States by Peters Edition.

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By Meghann Wilhoite

American composer and self-proclaimed “bad boy of music” George Antheil was born today 114 years ago in Trenton, New Jersey. His most well-known piece is Ballet mècanique, which was premiered in Paris in 1926; like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, from which Antheil seems to have derived quite a bit of inspiration, the premiere resulted in audience outrage and a riot in the streets. The piece is scored for pianos and a number of percussion instruments, including airplane propellers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Though he died at the age of 58, polymath Antheil managed to accomplish quite a bit in his relatively short life both in and outside the field of music. Here are some highlights:

• His name appears alongside the actress Hedy Lamarr’s on a patent, granted in 1942, for an early type of frequency hopping device, their invention for disrupting the intended course of radio-controlled German torpedoes.
• In 1937 he published a text on endocrinology called Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology. The book includes chapters on “How to read your newspaper” and “The glandular rogue’s gallery”.
• His music was championed by the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, W.B. Yeats, Erik Satie, and Pablo Picasso.
• Under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop, he wrote Death in the Dark, a detective novel edited by T.S. Eliot, the hero of which is based on Pound.
• After spending the majority of the 1920s and 30s in Europe, he settled in Hollywood and wrote dozens of film, television and radio scores, for directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Fritz Lang (and with such titillating titles as “Zombies of Mora Tau” and “Panther Girl of the Kongo”).
• Last, but not least, here is Vincent Price narrating Antheil’s “To a Nightingale” with the composer himself on piano: George Antheil – Two Odes of John Keats – To A Nightingale: Vincent Price, narrator; George Antheil, piano

Meghann Wilhoite is an Associate Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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By Sarah Rahman

The four-, five-, six- stringed instrument that we call a “banjo” today has a fascinating history tracing back to as early as the 1600s, while precursors to the banjo appeared in West Africa long before it was in use in America. Explore these fun facts about the banjo through a journey back in time.

1. The banjo was in use among West African slaves since as early as the 17th century.
2. Recent research in West African music shows more than 60 plucked lute instruments, all of which, to a degree, show some resemblance to the banjo, and so are likely precursors to the banjo.
3. The earliest evidence of plucked lutes comes from Mesopotamia around 6000 years ago.
4. The first definitive description of an early banjo is from a 1687 journal entry by Sir Hans Sloane, an English physician visiting Jamaica, who called this Afro-Caribbean instrument a “strum strump”.
5. The banjo had been referred to in 19 different spellings, from “banza” to “bonjoe” by the early 19th century.


Banjo player, 1894. NYPL Digital Collection. Image ID: 832330

6. The earliest reference to the banjo in North America appeared in John Peter Zenger’s The New-York Weekly Journal in 1736.
7. William Boucher (1822-1899) was the earliest commercial manufacturer of banjos. The Smithsonian Institution has three of his banjos from the years 1845-7. Boucher won several medals for his violins, drums, and banjos in the 1850s.
8. Joel Walker Sweeney (1810-1860) was the first professional banjoist to learn directly from African Americans, and the first clearly documented white banjo player.
9. After the 1850s, the banjo was increasingly used in the United States and England as a genteel parlor instrument for popular music performances.
10. The “Jazz Age” created a new society craze for the four-string version of the banjo. Around the 1940s, the four-string banjo was being replaced by the guitar.

Sarah Rahman is a digital product marketing intern at Oxford University Press. She is currently a rising junior pursuing a degree in English literature at Hamilton College.

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Since joining the Grove Music editorial team, Meghann Wilhoite has been a consistent contributor to the OUPblog. Over the years she has shared her knowledge and insights on topics ranging from football and opera to Monteverdi and Bob Dylan, so we thought it was about time to get to know her a bit better.

Do you play any musical instruments? Which ones?

In order of capability, I play the pipe organ, piano, synths, and guitar. I also sing a bit, but I gave up on my dream of being an opera singer long ago!

Do you specialize in any particular area or genre of music?

As an organist, I mostly play Baroque music (I <3 Bach 5eva), though I recently commissioned an excellent piece from contemporary composer Matthew Hough, which we’ll get to recording as soon as we have the funding. As a pianist, I play lots of different stuff from Classical era onwards. As a synth player and guitarist I play indie rock, mostly stuff I’ve written or stuff I’ve collaborated on.

What artist do you have on repeat at the moment?

My current lifestyle sort of dictates what I listen to right now: I’m either on the subway or blocking out ambient sounds in the office (nothin’ but love for my fellow cube dwellers), which means it’s difficult to listen to stuff where there’s an extreme difference between the loudest and the softest sound. Thus, artists like Interpol, Cocteau Twins (Elizabeth Fraser swoon), and Grimes dominate my playlist; if I had more time in quieter spaces I would also be listening to more avant-garde stuff as well.

What was the last concert/gig you went to?

The last concert I went to was part of the series I help run called Music at First; we were presenting the music of Jerome Kitzke, and it was pretty wild.

How do you listen to most of the music you listen to? On your phone/mp3 player/computer/radio/car radio/CDs?

Phone on the subways, computer (Pandora or Spotify) at work.

Do you find that listening to music helps you concentrate while you work, or do you prefer silence?

Music definitely helps me concentrate while I work, with the exception of creative writing.

Has there been any recent music research or scholarship on a topic that has caught your eye or that you’ve found particularly innovative?

Actually, my most recent scholarship binge has been on historiography, specifically the white-washing of European history (there’s a great Tumblr called MedievalPOC that focuses on the white-washing of European art). I would love to do more research on people of color with regards to the Western music canon (you know, those same hundred or so pieces by the same twenty or so composers that every music history textbook teaches you about).

Who are a few of your favorite music critics / writers?

Anastasia Tsioulcas (NPR, et al.) and Steve Smith (Boston Globe) are two critics/writers whose work I admire. They give an honest take on the music they’re reviewing without getting polemical, and they both promote gender parity within the field.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Associate Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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Ever wondered what goes into scoring film music? Is the music written during filming? Or is it all added after the film is finished? Regular OUPblog contributor Scott Huntington recently spoke with film composer Joe Kraemer about his compositional process, providing an inside look at what it’s like to score music for an independent film.

Scott Huntington: What’s your process of creation like?

Joe Kraemer: Ideally, I see the movie without any temp score, but these days, that is rare. [Director] Chris McQuarrie doesn’t like temp scores, so the two films I’ve done with him (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher) we skipped the temp process and I was able to work with a clean slate, so to speak.

I look at a scene, and based either on the cutting, the dialogue, or the rhythm of the scene, I find the spot where I believe music should come in. Then I roll on down until I think music should go out. I don’t use any hard and fast rules. A lot of it is based on feel.

Once I’ve decided where the music will start, I try and find the right tempo for the music, fast or slow. Next I consider the color of the music, light or dark, major or minor, brassy or strings, and so on. I continue on this path of binary decision-making until I reach a solution. If that solution doesn’t work, I work my way back and try something else, such as a faster tempo, a different color or a different instrumentation. Sometimes, I make decisions that don’t really have a logical explanation, but they just feel right. I like to refer to the scene in “Star Wars” where Ben Kenobi is cut down by Darth Vader, and John Williams scores the sequence with a sweeping version of Princess Leia’s Theme, because that theme has great sweep and scope, and Ben’s theme was more somber. His decision seems nonsensical from a logical point of view, but it’s right-on from an emotional point of view.

Scott Huntington: Have you seen changes in technology impact the way you score movies?

Joe Kraemer: Well, the AVID editing system has opened up the audio side of things for film editors completely. As a result, films are built with really well-edited temp scores right from the get-go. In the old days, a Moviola or a flat-bed had one or two tracks of sound, so the temp score was something that was laid in very bluntly, just to create a feeling or atmosphere, without it needing to be a definitive presentation. Now, the ability to edit the temp score to match the picture in minute detail has resulted in everyone accepting it as the baseline standard for the film. The editor cuts the scene to the temp, the director looks at the cut with the temp, right away the temp is now the point of comparison for the rest of the process. Even if the composer never sees the temp, he or she is competing with it. The composer’s music is evaluated as much for whether it matches the temp as whether it works for the scene in the first place.

What you end up with is the picture-editor making a lot of the decisions about the music before the composer even has a shot at bringing something of himself (or herself) to the table. That isn’t inherently bad, picture editors usually have great taste in music, but as a composer it can feel restrictive. Also, you end up with a lot of films sounding the same, because all the editors fall in love with the same piece of music at the same time. Case in point, for about 10 years after “American Beauty” came out, all I heard in temp scores was Tom Newman’s score for that movie. There are only so many ways one can reinvent piano chords over sustained string beds.

As far as the composing work itself, for me the computer-based paradigm has been a life-saver. From adjusting tempos to catch cuts, to mixing electronic sounds with acoustic sounds, computer-based composing has made it possible for me to make a living as a composer, even when films have had skimpy music budgets, because I can do all of the work myself. I don’t use an assistant; I don’t have a team of ghost-writers. I put all my time and effort into making the score as good as possible myself, within the means at my disposal. Technology makes that possible.

Scott Huntington: Describe the process of writing the music for Favor.

Joe Kraemer: The process starts as soon as the movie is over the first time I see it. I immediately begin thinking about different aspects of the score: what will the instrumentation be? What will the mood be? The tone?

Next comes a period of living with the film. If possible, I get a copy and watch it on repeat for a day or two in my studio while I update my software and do busy work, etc. Once I’ve seen the film a dozen times or so, it’s time to start composing in earnest.

At some point between seeing Favor the first time and getting my own copy to work from, I was swimming in the pool and doodling melodies in my head and I came up with a nice little tune I though would sound pretty on the cello. I made a mental note of it and filed it away in my noggin for some later use.

Some time later, as I sat down to begin writing the cues for Favor, I remembered that melody and found that on a piano, it had a cold sound that contrasted nicely with the beauty of the tune. This seemed to be appropriate for my needs, as I was writing a theme for a character that, rarely seen, hangs over the film like a specter. This contrast of cold and beauty felt right.

Next, I decided I needed some kind of musical “sound effect” to help with certain story elements I wanted the score to reinforce. This was the impetus behind what [director] Paul [Osborne] and I began to call the “Abby Stab”. It’s a sound of a hammer hitting an anvil that has been tweaked with a bunch of plugins. I used it whenever I wanted to audience to think of Abby, to be reminded of her fate, to keep her present in a scene even when she wasn’t there.

After that, it was mostly a task of assembling the music to match what Paul laid out in his temp score. Paul cuts his own films and I know from working with him the past that he is very particular about the way his temp interacts with the editing of the film, so I worked very hard to stay faithful to the way he would crescendo to a cut. That being said, there were major sequences where Paul had no temp score, but I added music because I thought it was an effective spot.

Scott Huntington is a percussionist specializing in marimba. He’s also a writer, reporter and blogger. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son and does Internet marketing for WebpageFX in Harrisburg. Scott strives to play music whenever and wherever possible. Read his previous blog posts and follow him on Twitter at @SMHuntington.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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For many years, scholarship on composer Gustav Mahler’s life and work has relied heavily on Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s diary. However, a recently discovered letter, introduced, translated, and annotated by Morten Solvik and Stephen E. Hefling, and published for the first time in the journal The Musical Quarterly, sheds new light on the private life of the great composer. New revelations about various relationships, including Bauer-Lechner’s romantic involvement with the composer, sketch out his personal character and provide a more nuanced portrait. We spoke with Morten Solvik and Stephen E. Hefling about the impact on Mahler scholarship.

How will the publication of this letter affect the current body of Mahler scholarship?

Natalie Bauer-Lechner is the primary witness to roughly 10 years of Gustav Mahler’s life; biographers and historians have continually relied on her accounts to shed light on Mahler’s works and thoughts, especially during the 1890s. In this letter, three main topics are discussed in ways never before documented in Mahler studies: (1) Mahler’s various romantic involvements before his marriage to Alma Schindler in 1902; (2) the role of Justine Mahler, the composer’s sister, in his personal interactions with these women; and (3) Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s two brief periods of sexual relations with Mahler, at the beginning and at the end of her 12-year relationship.

The implications go beyond the merely biographical, as it reveals the author in a liaison – long-suspected by some scholars – with the object of her recollections. How, then, do we evaluate her writings? How trustworthy is the information they claim to provide? Since Bauer-Lechner has heretofore been considered absolutely reliable, the ramifications of a revision of this stance could have far-reaching consequences.

How was this letter discovered, and what kept it from being published for so long?

The letter had been in private hands until it appeared in the shop of a Viennese rare books dealer and was sold to the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library in the fall of 2012. The authors first became aware of the document in the spring of 2012 when it became known that the owner had attempted (unsuccessfully) to sell the letter through the Dorotheum Auction House in Vienna in May 2011. How the letter ended up in this person’s possession has not (yet) been determined. Its authenticity is firmly established.

Does the publication of this letter vindicate, or just as equally cast into doubt, any previously published writing on Mahler?

This depends on one’s perspective. Some will conclude that Bauer-Lechner’s romantic interludes with the composer precluded any objectivity in her recollections of him and that her accounts must therefore be called into question. Others will point out that Bauer-Lechner’s diaries include much factual information corroborated by many other sources and that there is little reason to doubt the authenticity of her “Mahleriana” as a whole; indeed, her degree of objectivity is all the more remarkable given her emotional involvement. For discretion’s sake she declined to reveal the extent of her intimacy with Mahler in the pages of her diary that she intended to publish. But that Bauer-Lechner manipulated or fabricated information seems a contrived conclusion; that she was unable to avoid a certain partiality or missed certain details should hardly strike us as surprising.

Does the letter pose any new questions for future Mahler scholars?

The most imposing and immediate challenge that emerges from this letter is the need to collate all extant materials that Natalie Bauer-Lechner produced in her lifetime in connection with Gustav Mahler. The present authors are in the midst of precisely this project in an attempt to present the most complete account possible. This will facilitate a better informed evaluation of the value of her narrative, the extent of its objectivity, its shortcomings, and no doubt more information regarding Mahler. In particular, the content of the letter clearly indicates the need to reevaluate Alma Mahler’s claim that at the time of their marriage, Mahler “was extremely puritanical” and “had lived the life of an ascetic.”

Morten Solvik and Stephen E. Hefling are the authors of “Natalie Bauer-Lechner on Mahler and Women: A Newly Discovered Document” in the Musical Quarterly. Morten Solvik is the Center Director of the International Education of Students (IES) Abroad Vienna where he also teaches music history. Stephen E. Hefling is a Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University.

The Musical Quarterly, founded in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, has long been cited as the premier scholarly musical journal in the United States. Over the years it has published the writings of many important composers and musicologists, including Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, Marc Blitzstein, Henry Cowell, and Camille Saint-Saens. The journal focuses on the merging areas in scholarship where much of the challenging new work in the study of music is being produced.

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Compiled by Taylor Coe

Now that summer is finally here – dog-eared paperbacks and sunglasses dusted off and put to good use – it’s also time to figure out what we should be listening to as we loll about in the sun. While the media seem more concerned with which current pop hit will become the unofficial “Song of the Summer” (Pharrell’s “Happy”? Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”?), here at OUP, we have instead zeroed in on songs from summers past. Ranging all the way back to 1957 (for Ella and Louis’s take on Gershwin’s classic “Summertime”) and all the way over to Germany (for Dutch television host Rudi Carrell’s fanciful ode to sommer on the North Sea), we have pulled together a diverse and inspired set of tunes to take along to the beach, or the Pizza Hut, or the New York City streets, or wherever you should find yourself this summer!

“Summertime” – Kenny Chesney
I’ve been to his amazing concerts at MetLife Stadium for the past three years and this song has been my anthem ever since. “And it’s two bare feet on the dashboard / Young love and an old Ford / Cheap shades and a tattoo / And a Yoo-Hoo bottle on the floorboard.”
— Leslie Schaffer, Special Accounts Sales Rep

“Summer in the City” – The Lovin’ Spoonful
Now that I live and work in New York City this song speaks to me. While the summer days are brutal and exhausting, the nights are wonderful. During the day we are tortured by sweltering sidewalks, oven-like subway stations, and loud construction noises, but at night the city cools off and comes alive again. There’s nothing I love more than drinks on a rooftop in the summer. In fact, I think that’s what I’ll do tonight.
— Christie Loew, Assistant Manager Accounts and Merchandising

“Summer of Panic” – Hanoi Janes
“Summer Bonfire” – Great Lakes Myth Society
“Summer Wine” – Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood
“Vacation” – the Go-Gos
The song that’s been my summer anthem since it came out in 2010 is Hanoi Janes’s “Summer of Panic.” The song’s frenetic pace, distorted and muted vocals, and a mix of old school chords with what Pitchfork reviewer Jayson Greene called “swarms of wiggling B-movie lasers” make for a psychotic surf music vibe that can’t be beat. It perfectly captures my love-hate relationship with summer, where I feel such pressure to have fun while it lasts, that it becomes panic-inducing. Its companion piece, Great Lakes Myth Society’s “Summer Bonfire,” might sound less fraught with anxiety, but only because some of the verses trail off, leaving you to supply the missing rhyme that, for instance, turns “electric” into “electric chair.” But for those times when I am able to relax, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s “Summer Wine” is a must listen. Hazlewood plays the role of a cowboy whom Sinatra seduces, drugs, and eventually robs. Nevertheless, the languid tempo, their sultry vocal blend and the brass chorus somehow makes this odd song sound like a hot summer night. I am now considering that as my three favorite summer songs involve nervous breakdowns, capital punishment, and committing felonies, I might need a long summer vacation. There’s always the Go-Gos.
— Anna-Lise Santella, Editor, Grove Music/Oxford Music Online and Music Reference

“Jalapeno Lena” – Rockin’ Sidney
The Summer of ’88 was the first year I didn’t return home from college but stayed in Plattsburgh to live and work the summer away at two part-time jobs. In the morning I prepped at Pizza Hut, “makin’ it great.” That summer must have been around the time Dirty Dancing came out because the jukebox played “Time of My Life” by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes ad nauseum. To break up the nauseum, my fellow prepper, Snooze Warner, and I would play any random, little-known songs we could find in that jukebox. Then one day we stumbled upon “Jalapeno Lena” by Rockin’ Sidney and we thought it was brilliant. Whenever someone played “Time of My Life,” we ran out and played “Jalapeno Lena.” It has a killer zydeco beat that helped us beat the heat of the summer of ’88, a hot summer in Plattsburgh, NY only made hotter by “Jalapeno Lena” and the ovens of Pizza Hut.
— Purdy, Director of Publicity

“See No Evil” – Television
Summer vacations back from college were all about driving up and down the coast of Maine in my dad’s old beat-up convertible, blasting Marquee Moon and Fun House and Unknown Pleasures and Blank Generation on burned CDs. The disc cartridge was in the trunk, so if you wanted to put in something different, you had to pull over and get out. Whenever I hear those records, that’s where I go.
— Owen Keiter, Associate Publicist

“Everybody Loves the Sunshine” – Roy Ayers
“I Get Lifted” – George McCrae
Breezy and light, “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” gets to the core of a lazy day in the sweltering sun. As for “I Get Lifted,” if I had a drop top in the city, this is what I would blast driving in July.
— Stuart Roberts, Editorial Assistant

“Feel Good Inc.” – Gorillaz
One of the hit singles from the cartoon band Gorillaz, this was song of the summer in 2005! According to Wikipedia it is the only song by any one of Damon Albarn’s several bands (including Blur and The Good, the Bad, and the Queen) to hit the Billboard Top 40.
— Jeremy Wang-Iverson, Publicity Manager

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Wann wird’s mal wieder richtig Sommer” – Rudi Carrell
This German Schlager favorite is sung to the tune of “City of New Orleans” and became summer song of the year in 1975. And this video version from Carrell’s TV show isn’t to missed. The lyrics describe a singer nostalgic for heat waves that he used to experience on the North Sea. (!)
— Norm Hirschy, Editor, Music Books

“Coconut Grove” – The Lovin’ Spoonful
“Summertime” – Jason Rebello
“Long Long Summer” – Dizzy Gillespie
There are a few Lovin’ Spoonful songs I could have chosen – “Summer in the City” being an obvious one – but it is “Coconut Grove” that reminds me most of sitting on a beach at sunset. As for George Gershwin’s “Summertime”, there are so many versions that many of them are classics themselves. But when I first heard Jason Rebello’s arrangement from his 1994 album Make it Real, it felt so new and exciting. And then Dizzy Gillespie’s sound is sunshine itself! I could have picked any number of his songs for this playlist, but this is the track that I play when the sun comes out.
— Miriam Higgins, Music Hire Librarian

“Sweet Amarillo” – Old Crow Medicine Show
Not to say that I’m at all over the rollicking Dylan-Old Crow collaboration that is “Wagon Wheel,” this next 40-years-in-the-making tune is equally excellent. According to OCMS frontman Ketch Secor, Dylan’s management company sent the band a cassette with the song fragment along with a set of instructions for how Dylan wanted the song to be completed, and – voilà! – Ketch and company make Americana magic once again!
— Taylor Coe, Marketing Associate, Academic/Trade Books

“Here’s to the Night” – Eve 6
When I was in high school, I spent every summer up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, working at a small summer camp called Forest Footsteps. That camp will always hold a special place in my heart and to this day, I still consider my fellow staff members and the campers as my extended family. On the last night of each week, we had a camp-wide “Boogie” with all the kids where we danced to an assortment of classic oldies and fun summer tunes. The final song was always “Here’s to the Night” by Eve 6 and as soon as the first few notes played, everyone would circle up in the middle of the dance floor and put their arms around one another, singing and swaying together as a group. Even the most introverted kids would find their way into the circle, embraced by their cabin mates. It was a really beautiful way to wrap up the week and that song still brings a tear to my eye, in the best possible way.
— Carrie Napolitano, Marketing Assistant, Academic/Trade Books

“Steal My Sunshine” – Len
Nothing says driving around town with the top down like this song.
— Sarah Hansen, Publicity Assistant

“Sunny Afternoon” – The Kinks
“Lazing on a sunny afternoon . . .” Need I say more?
— Louise Bowler, Senior Marketing Executive, Journals

“Postcards from Italy” – Beirut
My favorite summer song is “Postcards from Italy” by Beirut. It has such a romantic, old-timey feel to it. Even its title oozes summer – when I hear “postcards” and “Italy” I think of sunshine, the Mediterranean sea, and, of course, gelato! It also helps that the opening bars are played on a ukulele – the quintessential summer instrument! Bellisima.
— Mary Teresa Madders, Marketing Assistant, Journals

“Endless Summer” – The Jezabels
“Miami” – Will Smith
“April Come She Will” – Simon and Garfunkel
The summer-ness of The Jezabels’ “Endless Summer” comes down to this: You’re sixteen and the summer holidays are never going to end. You can practically feel the sweat run down your back as you laze on the beach with your holiday romance. And of course there’s “Miami,” the quintessential summer tune by the great Will Smith. Bringing rap to the masses, this accessible classic will have even your nan nodding her head. Or maybe she would prefer the short but sweet Simon and Garfunkel tune “April Come She Will,” which, with a hint of that classic Watership Down soundtrack, offers a bittersweet metaphor of birth, life, and death. Perfect for a pensive summer afternoon.
— Simon Turley, Marketing Assistant, Journals

“Summertime” – Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
This song lulls like a summer afternoon, rocking on the back porch watching the day go slowly, gently by.
— Anna Hernandez-French, Assistant Editor, Journals

Taylor Coe is a Marketing Associate at Oxford University Press.

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We asked our composers a series of questions based around their musical likes and dislikes, influences, challenges, and various other things on the theme of music and their careers. Each month we will bring you answers from an OUP composer, giving you an insight into their music and personalities. Today, we share our interview with composer and cellist Aaron Minsky. Visit his YouTube channel for an insight into the man and his music.

Which of your pieces are you most proud of and holds the most significance for you?

I am most proud of my concerto, The Conqueror. It utilizes the experience of 30 years of cello performing and composing plus a lifetime of study of the great orchestral works. Written during the immensely threatening Hurricane Sandy, it is imbued with drama and power. The piece is loosely based on the life of Genghis Khan and contains Mongolian-type melodies synthesized with rock cello concepts. I am thrilled with the prospect of seeing it performed in major concert halls. I gave the world premiere this spring in New York City with the Staten Island Philharmonic.

Which composer were you most influenced by and which of their pieces has had the most impact on you?

My solo cello works reveal my debt to J. S. Bach. I considered his Cello Suites the ‘Bible’ of cello composing and loved how he utilized the range of the instrument to create self-standing contrapuntal gems. As great as his suites are, I wanted to create new suites with modern musical influences to carry on the tradition. I knew I could never match the loftiness of Bach, but I felt I could fill a gap in the repertoire with new techniques and styles, and do it with an emphasis on joy!

Can you describe the first piece of music you ever wrote?

Most of my early pieces were songs, but my very first composition was in the style of Mozart. I was aware of the great composers even before I became influenced by the music of my generation.

Have the challenges you face as a composer changed over the course of your career?

The biggest challenge is staying relevant. It’s hard to believe that my first publication with OUP dates back to the 1980s. The Cold War was ending, the dollar was strong, and the Soviet Union was in shambles. The popularity of the United States was at a high and American culture was embraced around the world. In this climate, Ten American Cello Etudes was a perfect fit. Then globalization took hold, multiculturalism became the byword, and Ten International Cello Encores reflected this change. Most recently, Pop Goes the Cello proposes a new popular style of cello playing beyond the confines of any particular region.

If you could have been present at the premiere of any one work (other than your own) which would it be?

The most inspiring premiere that ever took place had to have been Beethoven‘s Ninth. A previous OUPblog describes it this way: ‘Back to the audience, facing the orchestra, the composer steadily marked the tempo with his hands. He was not conducting, though — he was deaf. Thus it was that, when the orchestra and chorus finished, he could not hear the applause and cheers of the Vienna audience. When a musician turned him around so he could see the joy on listeners’ faces, Ludwig van Beethoven bowed in gratitude — and wept.’

What is the last piece of music you listened to?

Whatever was on the radio. I tend to surf around and listen to a wide range of music — from the classics to rock to jazz to world music.

What might you have been if you weren’t a composer?

I might have been a rock star. My early influences were bands that combined classical music with rock such as the Beatles. I was also influenced by improvising bands, like the Grateful Dead. While still in high school I became a professional guitarist. Feeling that Hendrix, Clapton, and a few others had done just about all one could with a guitar I saw the cello as open territory. I was ready to plant my flag when, due to changing musical currents, the curtain fell on experimental rock ending my dream. I remember around that time staring at a picture of Fernando Sor (the great guitar etude writer) and thinking, I may never become a rock star but I bet I could preserve my melodies in cello etudes. Thus the composer seed was planted.

What piece of music have you discovered lately?

After my trip to England last year I was inspired to dig into its great symphonic heritage. I listened to the complete symphonies of Vaughan Williams among others. I have particularly enjoyed Vaughan Williams’s London Symphony (in which I hear shades of one of my heroes, George Gershwin).

Is there an instrument you wish you had learned to play and do you have a favourite work for that instrument?

I wish I had studied keyboards earlier. That would have been helpful for my composing. There are so many great pieces. If I had to pick a favorite I’d say Brahms‘ Second Piano Concerto. But I love many instruments including the french horn, the English horn, the bass clarinet, even the contra-bassoon — all of which are featured in my concerto!

Is there a piece of music you wish you had written?

Of course I wish I had written the Dvořák Cello Concerto. But I am glad to have composed the Minsky and am honored to be following in his footsteps.

What would be your desert island play list? (three pieces)

I would do what I usually do when I travel — listen to the music from where I am. Since this island would be surrounded by the ocean I would listen to the music of the sea! First on my list would be La Mer by Debussy, which captures the bluster of the glorious, churning sea. Then I’d pick A Sea Symphony of Vaughan Williams for its depth and powerful exploration of emotions connected with the sea. Finally, I would pick Jimi Hendrix’s 1983 A Merman I Should Turn to Be for its imaginative depiction of life under the sea.

How has your music changed throughout your career?

This is best answered by taking a trip to my website. I have audio clips of myself as young as 13 years old jamming out on guitar in every rock style I could muster. Some of the songs I wrote at age 14 have held up pretty well. You can hear in the tapes I made from age 16, the onset of classical influences. You can also hear the birth of the ‘celtar’. In the tapes from my college years you hear the influence of jazz, world music, and improvisation. We also hear the early days of my career as a classical cellist. From there my move back into rock can be heard with clips of the Von Cello Band. The website pretty much ends with Von Cello but will soon be updated to show how I have moved back toward classical, especially in my compositions … which brings us back to the first question about which piece I am most proud. I hope my concerto will be just the first step in the next chapter of my life: Aaron Minsky — orchestral composer.

American cellist, Aaron Minsky’s compositions are standard repertoire, his music appearing in the curriculums of the ABRSM, the American String Teachers’ Association, and the Australian Music Examinations Board. Aaron has given masterclasses and performances in the United States, England and Ireland, and has an Australian tour planned for later this summer. Also known as Von Cello, Aaron has appeared on radio and television and has performed with a wide range of artists from David Bowie and Tony Bennett to Mstislav Rostropovitch. Aaron’s ‘celtar’ style (which combines cello and guitar technique) has entered both the popular and classical musical worlds. He had a broad musical education, studying with Harvey Shapiro and Channing Robbins of Juilliard, Jonathan Miller of the Boston Symphony, George Saslow, Einar Holm, and David Wells of Manhattan School of Music where he obtained a Master of Music degree. More at Aaron Minsky’s website.

Oxford Sheet Music is distributed in the United States by Peters Edition.

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Image credit: Image courtesy of Aaron Minsky.

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By Kate Farquhar-Thomson

It was down to the trustworthy sat nav that I arrived safe and sound at Hay Festival this year; torrential downpours meant that navigating was tougher than usual and being told where to go, and when, was more than helpful.

Despite the wet and muddy conditions that met me at Hay, and stayed with me throughout the week, the enthusiasm of the crowd never dwindled. Nothing, it seems, keeps a book lover away from their passion to hear, meet, and have their book signed by their favourite author. But let’s not ignore the fact that festival-goers at Hay not only support their favourite authors, they also relish hearing and discovering new ones.

My working holiday centres on our very own creators of text, our very own exponents of knowledge, our very own Oxford authors! Here I will endeavour to distil just some of the events I was privileged to attend in the call of duty!

Peter Atkins was an Oxford Professor of Chemistry and fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford until his retirement in 2007 – many of us, including myself, studied his excellent text-books at ‘A’ level and at university. What Peter Atkins does so well is make science accessible for everyone and none less so than an attentive Hay audience. Peter puts chemistry right at the heart of science. ‘Chemistry has rendered a service to civilization’ Atkins says ‘it contributes to the cultural infrastructure of the world’. And thereon he took us through just nine things we needed to know to ‘get’ chemistry.

Ian Goldin’s event on Is The Planet Full? addressed global issues that are affecting, and will affect, our planet. So, is the planet full? Well, the Telegraph tent for his talk certainly was! Goldin, whose lime green sweater brought a welcome brightness to the stage, is Professor of Globalisation and Development and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford. His words brought clarity and insight: “politics shapes the answer to this question,” said Goldin.

Hay mixes the young with the old and academics with us mere mortals, and what we publishers call the ‘trade’ authors with the more ‘academic’ types. This was demonstrated aptly by Paul Cartledge who right from the start referenced an earlier talk he attended by James Holland. Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at University of Cambridge and James (who is an ex-colleague and friend) is a member of the British Commission for Military History and the Guild of Battlefield Guides but a non-academic. The joy of Hay is that it brings everyone together. Paul Cartledge was speaking about After Thermopylae, a mere 2,500 years ago, but rather a more tricky period to illustrate through props and pictures which Holland so aptly used in his presentation.

OUP had 15 authors at The Hay Festival but the Hay Festival also had other visitors such as Chris Evans whose show was broadcast live from the festival as it was the 500 Words competition announcement and I was lucky enough to be there.

So what does Hay mean to me? It’s a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with heroes in literature and culture, as well as academia. It’s a week of friends, colleagues, and drinking champagne with Stephen Fry whilst discussing tennis with John Bercow – and wearing wellies every day!

Kate Farquhar-Thomson is Head of Publicity at OUP in Oxford.

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Image credits: Stephen Fry, Ian Goldin, and 500 Words competition at the Hay Festival. Photos by Kate Farquhar-Thomson: do not reproduce without permission.

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As Richard Barrios sees it, movie musicals can go one way or the other — some of them end up as cultural touchstones, and others as train wrecks. In his book Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter, Barrios goes behind-the-scenes to uncover the backstories of these fabulous hits and problematic (if not exactly forgettable) flops. In the slideshow below, take a tour through some of the great movie musicals — and some insight into life on set.



• "As Sentimental as Little Women"

   

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  Such was Time’s assessment of the final scene of The Wizard of Oz. For sure, many Ozians have been known to weep when Judy/Dorothy says that last line. Screen still from The Wizard of Oz, Warner Brothers

  Little Women

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Can't Stop the Music

 

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Can’t or won’t? The wonder that is Can’t Stop the Music, with the Village People, Valerie Perrine, Bruce Jenner, Steve Guttenberg, and way too much badly used supporting talent. In an awful way, however, it sort of was the movie music of the ’80s. Film poster for Can't Stop the Music, Associated Film Distribution.

The Sound of Music cast

 

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An informal portrait of the Von Trapp family, in the persons of Kym Karath, Debbie Turner, Angela Cartwright, Duane Chase, Heather Menzies, Nicholas Hammond, Charmian Carr, and proud sort-of-parents Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. Yes, it’s as relentless as it is cheery—and, for many, resistance will be futile. Publicity photo for The Sound of Music, Twentieth Century Fox.

“It’s Gershwin! It’s Glorious!”

 

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So said the ads for Porgy and Bess—even as this stiff and rather stagy shot of Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier reveals the other part of the equation. The tin roof and peeling plaster look way calculated, everything’s spotless, and the camera isn’t willing to get too close. Screen still of Porgy and Bess, Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Hello, Dolly!

 

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Not all of the massive quantity of the marathon “When the Parade Passes By” sequence in Hello, Dolly! lay in its cost. Nor in the number of people, of which only a tiny fraction is seen here. It also came musically, with Barbara Streisand singing (or syncing) what the publicity department calling the “the longest note of any movie musical.” Anybody got a stopwatch? Screen shot from Hello, Dolly!, Twentieth Century Fox.

The Four Stars of Guys and Dolls

 

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On the screen and in the photo studio, the four leads frequently seemed like they had all been compartmentalized in some fashion. Brando seemed a tad offhand, Simmons gorgeous and radiant, Sinatra disjunct, Blaine working it. So they are seen here, and so they are through the film. Screen shot from Guys and Dolls, Samuel Goldwyn Films.

Astaire and Crawford in Dancing Lady

 

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In Dancing Lady, Fred Astaire spends a fair amount of his first film working hard to be a proper partner to Joan Crawford. Here, in “Heigh-Ho the Gang’s All Here,” the strain almost shows. Screen shot from Dancing Lady, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Gene Kelly in Cover Girl

 

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Gene Kelly, as dogged by Gene Kelly, performs the “Alter Ego” sequence in Cover Girl. This is a photographically tricked-up evocation, yet it still shows the scene for what it is—one of the most striking moments in 1940s musical cinema. Screen shot from Cover Girl, Sony Pictures Entertainment.

My Fair Lady

 

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The singularly formal stylization of My Fair Lady on film is adored by some and irksome to others. Here, an on-the-set shot of Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison gives a good representation of many of Fair Lady’s components—the style, the stiffness, the wit, the calculation. Publicity photo from My Fair Lady, Warner Brothers.

Richard Barrios worked in the music and film industries before turning to film history with the award-winning A Song in the Dark and his recent book on the history of movie musicals Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter. He lectures extensively and appears frequently on television and in film and DVD documentaries. Born in the swamps of south Louisiana and a longtime resident of New York City, he now lives in bucolic suburban Philadelphia.

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Related Stories

• Why we watch the Tony Awards
• Songs of the Alaskan Inuit
• What kind of Lena Younger would Diahann Carroll have been?

 

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By Sarah Hansen

Music today is usually categorized by the genre to which it most stylistically relates. A quick scroll through the iTunes genres sections reveals the familiar categories, among them Rock, Pop, R&B/Soul, Country, Classical, and Alternative. Songs or musical compilations today seem to have a readily apparent identity.

For the Inuit people of Alaska, this is not the case. Inuit music is distinguished according to its function rather than style, and most songs serve either a secular, social, or religious purpose. Many religious songs tend to be reserved for traditional ceremonies, while secular songs might be focused on the individual. Secular songs are sung to ease the birth of a child, to locate lost objects, or to cure illnesses.

There are, of course, many sub-categories of songs. For example, the Inuit of St. Lawrence Island, have terms that distinguish between nighttime and daytime singing, while the Inuit of the Northwest region of Alaska categorize songs by whether they are used in games, in stories, for dance, or in traditional ceremonies.

One such traditional ceremony that is still important for Alaskan Inuit culture is the whaling ceremony. All of the stages in the whaling process are celebrated, and there are songs to reinforce the hunting materials, bring forth the whales, and control the weather. Once the captain and crew return with the captured whales, the materials of the animal are distributed at a celebration called Nalukataq, which takes place during the month of June. Nalukataq, literally meaning “to throw and toss up,” refers to the whaler’s skin toss dance, and celebrates the bounty and distribution of Quaq (whale meat) and Muktuk (whale blubber).

To celebrate Nalukataq, communities gather to sing songs, dance, and take part in the traditional whale-toss, in which men and women in the community hold a Nalukataq blanket, generally made from seal or walrus skin, and toss the captains and captains’ wives up into the air. Traditionally, the wives of captains would throw out tools and food whilst being thrown into the air to mimic the distribution of whale meat among members of the community, but the tradition has since evolved to be candy thrown out to children.

As can been seen from Nalukataq, aspects of the original ceremony live on, but traditions have changed with the times. Festivals are often associated with US holidays, such as Independence Day, or with special community events. Although music might not still be used as frequently to help cure illnesses or ease childbirth, it still plays an important role in Alaskan Inuit culture, and will certainly continue to do so.

All information from this post is taken from an article on Alaskan Inuit music from Oxford Music Online.

Sarah Hansen is a Publicity Assistant at Oxford University Press.

Oxford Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its entry on Inuit Music. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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By Ruth Feldstein

In February, fans learned that Diahann Carroll had withdrawn from A Raisin in the Sun. The most recent revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning 1959 drama opened in April, and is now nominated for five Tony awards. Carroll relinquished her role as Lena Younger, the widowed matriarch in an African-American family living on the South Side of Chicago, due to the “demands of the vigorous rehearsal schedule and the subsequent eight-performances-a-week playing schedule,” according to a spokesperson for Raisin. The 78-year-old Carroll’s choice is easy to understand, but it also invites the question — what kind of Lena Younger might Carroll have been? How would an actress long known for her elegance and haute couture wardrobe have shed the trappings of high fashion to take on the part of a working class black mother who wants to use her dead husband’s insurance money to buy a home and improve the life of her family?

Last August, when the news broke that Carroll and Denzel Washington would have lead roles in this version of Raisin—with Carroll as mother to Washington’s Walter Lee Younger—much was made of their combined star power and the iconic Carroll’s return to Broadway for the first time in 30 years (as well as Washington’s age; the 59-year old portrays a much younger man, though the character has “aged” in this version). In some ways, though, it’s hard to know why the producers looked to Carroll in the first place. Carroll is older than most actresses who have played Lena Younger. Even more, ever since a still-teenage Carol Diahann Johnson changed her name to Diahann Carroll and left the home of her middle class parents, she has been known as a “chic chanteuse.” The link between Carroll and glamour became entrenched as her career ascended: when she sang at the Persian Room or the Plaza Hotel in the late 1950s, in her role as a high class and well-dressed model in the Broadway show No Strings in 1962 (for which she earned a Tony award), and when she portrayed a respectable, and well-dressed school teacher who travels to Paris with her white friend in the film Paris Blues in 1964 (alongside costars Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward). But the singer and actress soared to national prominence with Julia, a television series that ran from 1968-1971. Here Carroll was cast as the well-dressed middle class nurse and widowed mother of a young boy (her husband was killed in Vietnam). Julia was one of the first television series in which a black woman had a starring role and was not a maid or domestic. The show was an opportunity for Carroll to gain unprecedented exposure on a number-one ranking series — one that was “slightly controversial” she said, because it integrated the living rooms of white audiences through television, but was not controversial enough to “interfere with the ratings.”

If Julia cemented Carroll’s reputation as a barrier-breaking international celebrity, it also in some senses profoundly limited her career. Indeed, the first time Carroll played against type after Julia, her efforts had mixed results. In 1974, she starred in Claudine. The film was set in Harlem, and Carroll portrayed the 36-year-old single mother of six on welfare who struggles to combine motherhood and romance (with James Earl Jones, as garbage man Rupert Marshall). Claudine was notable for its critique of a welfare system that policed working class black women, and its portrayal of a single black mother who loves and cares for her children even if she also curses and beats her daughter in one scene. More remarkably, for the time, the film showed that a poor black unmarried woman could be sexually active and a good mother. With its largely African American cast and urban landscape, and with a contemporary soundtrack featuring Gladys Knight and the Pips, Claudine stood out as a rare alternative to the more violent and (mostly) male-centered blaxploitation films that were popular in the early 1970s. A critic in the Chicago Defender applauded it as a film that could “uplift” those who had “been ignored on film until now, the ADC mother” (ADC was the acronym for Aid to Dependent Children, and shorthand for welfare in that era). Carroll’s performance as Claudine earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in a leading role—only the fourth time a black woman had ever been nominated in that category.

But fans and critics were divided in their response to Carroll, precisely because the role was such a departure. Some applauded her for being willing and able to take on the role of Claudine. (She inherited the part from actress Diana Sands, ill with cancer in the 1970s but who had starred in the original production of Raisin in 1959, another link between Claudine and Raisin.) A “deglamorized Diahann Carroll is surprisingly effective as a 36-year old city wise and world weary mother who battles welfare department bureaucracy,” wrote one reviewer. Many more came to the opposite conclusion, asserting that Carroll did not have the life experiences to represent working class black women and could not tell their stories with any degree of authenticity. “Even without makeup, she still looks and acts like Julia,” wrote one; Time attacked the star for a “slumming expedition by a woman best known for playing the upwardly mobile Julia on TV.” With her family’s middle class background and her long association with well-dressed and glamorous heroines, Carroll simply could not “presume to speak for all black women.” The Oscar nomination was a significant milestone, but it did not open many doors thereafter; Carroll later said that she felt that her career floundered after Claudine.

Certainly, the question of who gets to tell black women’s stories is no less fraught in 2014 than it was in 1974—as critiques of the film The Help (2011) for hijacking black women’s voices, protests that actress Zoe Saldana is not the right artist to portray singer Nina Simone in a forthcoming biopic, and more recent debates about Beyoncé all begin to suggest. For decades, Diahann Carroll has been at the center of these debates—from her role as a model in an interracial romance in the Broadway play No Strings, to her role as Dominque Deveraux on the nighttime soap opera Dynasty in the 1980s– the “first black bitch on television” as Carroll herself put it. Would Carroll have encountered the same resistance today that she did forty years earlier? Would she have been able to navigate that chasm between her off-stage aura of glamour and an on-stage role of a weary yet strong working class woman who dreams about owning a home more easily in 2014 than she did in 1974? And would media-savvy audiences today, tuned into the ways that any public person is always performing some version of him or herself, have been more open to Carroll and what she could have brought to Lena with her decades of stardom than they were to the former “Julia” when she transformed into the working class Claudine? I respect Carroll’s choice to withdraw from Raisin, and the splendid Latanya Richardson Jackson has infused the part of Lena Younger with a humanity and dignity. But with the Tony awards season underway and with Carroll’s under-rated but sensitive and subversive portrayal of a poor black woman in the film Claudine in mind, I also can’t help but regret what we’ve all missed out on.

Ruth Feldstein is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of How it Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement.

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By Liz Wollman

Awards season bring out everyone’s inner analyst. The moment that nominations are announced, everyone starts trying to figure out what the list of nominees says about the state of whatever medium is being lauded. During the Grammy, Emmy, Academy, and Tony Awards seasons, critics use the nominees to analyze the state of the art, fans align themselves in solidarity behind performers both honored and snubbed, and everyone rushes to hear or see whatever they have missed.

Then, during the awards shows, journalists, bloggers, scholars and fans take to their couches, and break the Internet with rapid-fire opinions about every damn thing on the screen. The next morning, talk centers on who wore what and who said what and who deserved what. People dish in the office and on the phone and on the web. And then, by midweek, no one cares anymore and we’ve all moved on.

While the Tonys (airing this year on Sunday, 8 June at 8 p.m. on CBS) are never watched by as many people as are the Academy Awards, the Emmys, or the Grammys (or even the Country Music Awards, which attracted nearly double the audience of the Tonys in 2013), the same rules apply. This year, Tony talk is particularly fevered because the nominations seem so random. Since late April, journalists, bloggers, and — ahem — scholars have weighed in on what this strange roster says about the sanity of the nominating committee, the implications of the current season for the future of the industry, and, of course, what it means for the State of Commercial Theater in New York.

I’ve seen many of the shows that were nominated this year, along with quite a few that were not, and I can assert — with scholarly authority — that I have absolutely no idea who is going to win anything, or what this year’s nominations say about the State of Commercial Theater in New York or, indeed, on Earth. Don’t believe anyone who claims they do.

Some background: Last year, many nominations went to a relative handful of commercially and critically successful shows like Matilda, Kinky Boots, and Pippin. This year’s list features no clear frontrunners and does not cluster around a handful of top-grossing productions or clear standout performances.

Maybe that is because this year has been comparatively disappointing, at least as far as monster-hit musicals go. The most anticipated spectacles — Rocky, If/Then, and The Bridges of Madison County — failed to connect solidly with critics or audiences. (To be fair, Rocky seems to have connected with people who enjoy watching half-naked guys belt out tunes while punching meat and other half-naked guys. I suppose that counts for something?) As a result, nominations in the Best Musical category went to shows that were reasonably well-received—like Beautiful and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder—if not critically or commercially ecstatic or particularly aesthetically groundbreaking.

As for plays, while one was completely shut out (Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses), most have gotten at least a few nods, if not for best play or revival, then for actress, actor, or supporting roles. The biggest surprise to some is the clutch of nominations that went to the Shakespeare’s Globe all-male Twelfth Night, a big hit this past fall. This is particularly big news to people who presume that (a) Broadway audiences are morons, (b) Tony voters are morons, or (c) Shakespeare was a moron.

The other big surprise was the omission of Denzel Washington and Daniel Radcliffe from the Best Leading Actor in a Play category. This might have more to do with the large number of prominent male roles on offer this year than anything else, though New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley gamely suggested recently that Radcliffe and Washington were passed over because they are so very, very good in their roles. Sure, Ben, whatever.

Here’s the thing: While I am sure Radcliffe and Washington were irked by the oversight — along with the producers of If/Then and Rocky and Bridges of Madison County and the rest of the snubbed — the Tonys don’t matter. At least not in the way that people seem to want them to matter.

The awards themselves say nothing, in the long run, about the State of Commercial Theater in New York or, indeed, on Earth. The awards ceremony is meaningful. The actual winning and losing? Not so much. What makes any awards ceremony important is the care and love people put into it. For better or worse, we Americans are world-famous for our commercial entertainment, and in honoring it, we celebrate ourselves.

Tonys are particularly sweet because they give us a break from endless laments about how the theater is dead or dying, too expensive, too inaccessible. For a few weeks in the late spring, we get to celebrate the very fact that Broadway continues to matter at all, regardless of what kind of season it’s been or who walks away with laurels.

So instead of offering a list of predictions, I will tell you what I am hoping to see and celebrate during the festivities on 8 June 2014:

(1)  Audra McDonald

The ludicrously talented McDonald could become the first performer to win six Tonys for acting. Also, since Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill is being considered as a play and not a musical, McDonald could also become the first person to win a Tony in each of the four acting categories (she’s won in the past for Best Actress in a Musical, Best Featured Actress in a Musical, and Best Featured Actress in a Play). This would be great to see, it’s certainly well deserved, and as an added extra, I bet some lucky contractor will be hired to expand her mantelpiece, yet another way that commercial theater boosting the city’s economy! When Audra wins, everybody wins. And if she doesn’t win this year, you can bet she’ll still perform during the broadcast and be typically thrilling, so no one will suffer overmuch one way or the other.

(2) Kelli O’Hara

Like McDonald, O’Hara has been astounding us for quite a while. I would pay to watch her knit a scarf. She even managed to convince me that The Bridges of Madison County — a loathsome novel made into an even more loathsome movie — actually has a right to exist. But unlike McDonald, O’Hara has yet to take home a Tony, which is absolutely unacceptable. O’Hara has been nominated for Best Actress in Musical five times. If she doesn’t win this time around, I can’t promise I won’t fly into an uncontrollable rage and take out my frustration on some poor, unsuspecting soul, probably Robert James Waller.

(3)  Mark Rylance

Rylance is nominated for Best Actor (Richard III) and Best Actor in a Featured Role (Twelfth Night). Both times he won in the past, he recited verses by the Minnesota poet Louis Jenkins in lieu of a formal acceptance speech. The poems are irreverent and sweet and often hilarious, and so is Rylance. I hope we get to hear another. Again, though, if he doesn’t win this time, we’ll all survive.

(4) Actors Who Got the Shaft

Last year, Alan Cumming (Macbeth) and Scarlett Johansson (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) weren’t nominated, but they showed up for the awards ceremony anyway; so did Bebe Neuwirth and Nathan Lane when they were passed over for their work in The Addams Family in 2010. They joked about their respective slights before graciously reading the nominations and handing out trophies. Their grace and aplomb remind us that theater is as often a collaborative art form that depends on trust and sharing as it is a vicious snake-pit of betrayal and recrimination. I hope that Denzel Washington, Daniel Radcliffe, Ian McKellan, and Patrick Stewart all get invited to hand out hardware, and agree to do so, setting aside any ego for the night. Bonus points if Captain Picard and Gandalf appear in their bowler hats, holding hands.

(5)  Neil Patrick Harris and Hugh Jackman

If these two men took over the world and repopulated it entirely with their love-children, no one would mind. I hope they hold a fabulous throw-down, judged by the equally awesome and beloved Lin-Manuel Miranda.

In sum: this year’s scattershot nominations make predicting winners tough, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Tony ceremony is going to be on the TV, and I’ll be watching (and snarking, and snacking, and tweeting) with a couple million other people. That strikes me as cause enough for celebration.

Liz Wollman is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College in New York City, and author of The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig and Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City.

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Image credits: Poster for Twelfth Night and Richard III from Shakespeare Broadway. Photo of cast of Beautiful by Joan Marcus, via BeautifulonBroadway.com.

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By Melanie Zeck

Perhaps Ernest Hemingway knew best when he claimed that Josephine Baker was the “most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will.” Indeed, Josephine Baker was sensational–as an African American coming of age in the 1920s, she took Paris by storm in La Revue Nègre and relished a career in entertainment that spanned fifty years. On what would be her 108th birthday, Baker’s fans on both sides of the Atlantic still celebrate her legendary charisma.

Born in St. Louis as Freda Josephine McDonald, Josephine’s early years were marked by financial struggles and racial conflict. She managed to escape what promised to be an otherwise dismal future with her innate ability to charm others through singing and dancing. Having taken the surname of her second husband (she had already been married once before at the age of thirteen), Josephine Baker left for New York City. She started out as a chorus girl in Shuffle Along, a vaudeville revue by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, and subsequently starred in Blake’s Chocolate Dandies. Later, she performed at New York’s renowned Plantation Club where she was “discovered” by producer Caroline Dudley and asked to be in La Revue Nègre. As part of Dudley’s assemblage of performers, Baker traveled to Paris in 1925, where she received rave reviews for her opening night performance at Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris. Shortly thereafter, she appeared on stage at the Folies-Bergère wearing only a “skirt” of bananas, a costume for which she became famous and one which left an indelible impression on the audience. After this, she often danced scantily clad, exuding a kind of exoticism that captivated her Parisian public.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Successful live performances led to her foray into film, beginning in 1927 with La Sirène des Tropiques. By 1930, she had dabbled in a career as a singer, having recorded for both Odeon and Columbia Records. Her Columbia recordings included songs such as “J’ai deux amours,” which she would perform at the Casino de Paris, one of the city’s great music halls. The Casino’s impresario, Henri Varna, not only showcased Baker’s talents, but he insisted that she act with the pizzazz and mystique of a superstar. To enhance her image, Baker was given a pet leopard named Chiquita, adorned with a diamond studded collar. The pair delighted (and occasionally shocked) the French public.

In the mid-1930s, she starred in two films, including Zouzou (1934), Princess Tam Tam (1935), neither of which was made readily available to the American public for another fifty-plus years. She also appeared in Moulin Rouge (1939), Fausse Alerte (1945), An Jedem Finger Zehn (1954), and Carosello Del Varietà (1955), but, as she also realized when doing studio recordings, she was only truly in her element on the stage.

After completing Princess Tam Tam, she returned to New York to appear in the Ziegfeld Follies, which featured choreography by George Balanchine, music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and notable performers including Bob Hope. In spite of the Follies’ display of talent, its appearance in New York was subjected to intensely vitriolic reviews. Some of the reviews attacked Baker specifically, by mapping current racial stereotypes and crippling expectations onto her and her performance–expectations which had not affected her career in France in such an irrevocably stark manner.

Although Baker was hurt by the Follies’ flop and the discrimination she faced in her home country, she chose to remain in the United States for the time being. In 1936, she announced her plans to open a night club on East 54th Street called Chez Josephine Baker. Within a year America’s racist climes became too much to bear and Baker returned to France, but France was no longer the utopian escape it once had been. Initial tensions with Germany and the subsequent German occupation ultimately made it very difficult for African-American entertainers to earn a living in France, despite the fact that they had been thriving just a decade earlier.

Baker, who had married a French Jew, Jean Lion, in 1937, soon became involved in the Resistance, eventually working out of Casablanca as an air auxiliary lieutenant. She received the Croix de Guerre in recognition for her services in the Resistance. Those services included carrying classified information, written in invisible ink on her sheet music, to Portugal for transmission to England.

During World War II, she performed for American and British troops and war workers. These appearances put to rest all rumors circulating in the press that she had died, rumors prompted by the fact that she suffered a series of illnesses in the 1940s.

She reemerged in the 1950s as a staunch supporter and champion of human and civil rights. In 1951, she cancelled an appearance at the NAACP meeting in Atlanta because she, as an African American, was refused lodging. In 1959, returned to the stage to raise funds for the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme–LICRA).

Her most demonstrative gesture was to come. Beginning in 1953, Baker adopted the first of twelve children representing different races and ethnicities. She called her brood the “Rainbow Tribe,” and they are featured in Matthew Pratt Guterl’s book Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (Harvard University Press, 2014). They lived in a fifteenth-century castle, “Les Milandes,” which Baker purchased in 1947 but relinquished under extreme financial duress in 1968. Fortunately, her friend and supporter, Princess Grace, offered Baker and her tribe a home in Monaco.

As she aged, Baker found it increasingly challenging to maintain her career on the stage, but she persevered. In fact, on 8 April 1975, she gave a triumphant performance at the Bobino Theatre in Paris, which seemed to foreshadow prosperous days to come. That was not to be.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Four days later, on 12 April 1975, Baker went to sleep and never woke up. Thousands of adoring fans paid their respects, and nearly 2,000 mourners, led by Princess Grace, attended funeral services in Monaco, where Baker was buried.

A woman as sensational as Josephine Baker indubitably lives on–a number of books and articles have been written about Baker’s life, including five autobiographies. Her life and career have also served as inspiration for biographies, novels, films, plays, a musical, a restaurant, and even a tribute featuring a woodwind quintet. In 2007, the Grammy Award-winning woodwind quintet “Imani Winds” released Josephine Baker: A Life of Le Jazz Hot! in celebration of Baker’s centennial. The recording features two original pieces composed by Imani members that depict Baker’s life, including French horn player Jeff Scott’s seven-movement La Belle Sirène Comme le Comédien and flautist Valerie Coleman’s Suite: Portraits of Josephine.

These and other materials about Josephine Baker, including a robust clipping file, can be found at the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR) in Chicago.

Founded at Columbia College Chicago in 1983, The Center for Black Music Research is the only organization of its kind. It exists to illuminate the significant role that black music plays in world culture by serving as a nexus for all who value black music, by promoting scholarly thought and knowledge about black music, and by providing a safe haven for the materials and information that document the black music experience across Africa and the diaspora.

Melanie Zeck is the Managing Editor of the Black Music Research Journal, the peer-reviewed journal of the Center for Black Music Research. She is currently co-authoring a book (OUP, forthcoming) on aspects of black music history with Samuel A. Floyd Jr., CBMR founder and Director Emeritus.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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By Suzanne Ryan

With great sadness, Oxford reports the passing of esteemed music author and critic Malcolm MacDonald, who died on 27 May 2014.

MacDonald was until December 2013 Editor of the modern-music journal Tempo, and reviewed regularly for BBC Music Magazine and the International Record Review. He wrote both under his given name and as Calum MacDonald (to avoid confusion with the composer also named Malcolm MacDonald).

MacDonald contributed enormously to the literature and resources on numerous late-nineteenth and twentieth-century composers, and in the community of musicians and scholars, he was a champion of many. The list of figures is long, and includes the likes of Johannes Brahms, John Foulds, Ronald Stevenson, Alan Bush, Erik Bergman, Dmitri Shostakovich, Bernard Stevens, Luigi Dallapiccola, Antal Doráti, and Edgar Varèse. Among MacDonald’s several contributions to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Grove Opera, his article on English composer and music journalist Havergal Brian was of particular importance, and reflects a substantial body of work elsewhere published on Brian.

As part of his impressively varied list of publications, MacDonald is author of two volumes in the venerable Master Musicians series: the distinguished Brahms (Schirmer 1990, reissued in 2001 from OUP) and the indispensable Schoenberg (the first edition published with Dent in 1976, and the second edition in 2008 with OUP). In his Preface to the First Edition of Schoenberg, we find:

The most a writer may do is to place the music in perspective and give it a human context; from which, perhaps, its human content will emerge more clearly. That is what I have tried to do.

And this is what, at the very least and amidst his myriad achievements, Malcolm MacDonald has indeed done. His work will remain valuable, and his legacy vital, for generations.

Suzanne Ryan is Editor in Chief, Humanities and Executive Editor, Music at Oxford University Press in New York.

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We sat down with James Keller, author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide, and asked him a few questions about his career and his musical interests. We learned, among other things, which trio of composers he would invite over for lunch and what he would have done if he had not been a music writer.

What was the last concert you attended?

It consisted of a single work: Mahler‘s Symphony No. 3, with Bernard Haitink conducting the New York Philharmonic. A concertgoer can pass quite a few seasons without hearing Mahler’s Third, but, curiously, I have encountered it twice this season. I also heard the San Francisco Symphony perform it, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, back in March — a very different interpretation from Haitink’s. It’s the longest of Mahler’s symphonies, running almost an hour and forty minutes. It requires a huge orchestra, a women’s choir, a children’s choir, and a mezzo-soprano soloist, and the conductor needs to impose a clearly delineated vision in order for the piece to come off successfully. You might say that Mahler’s Third is practically the opposite of chamber music, which typically involves a handful of players working out the interpretation through a democratic approach that does not involve a conductor. But you do also encounter a spirit of chamber music in Mahler symphonies, where very often he spotlights a small ensemble of musicians from out of the huge orchestral resources he has assembled on stage. These passages require somewhat different skills compared to the “section playing” that is the backbone of orchestral work. It’s one of the reasons most major orchestras have chamber music incentives for their members to participate in. Apart from the sheer joy and intellectual stimulation of it, playing chamber music together provides an unbeatable exercise in team-building.

Which composer, dead or alive, would you most like to meet?

Just as I love the music of different composers in different ways and for different reasons, I would doubtless like meeting them in person for different reasons. Of course, I would love to meet Johann Sebastian Bach, just to be in the presence of that magnitude of genius — but I would probably find myself completely tongue-tied and thereby waste the occasion. If I were assembling a little luncheon for four and wanted to have a truly enjoyable time rather than just be in awe, I might send out an invitation to Franz Joseph Haydn and the Mendelssohn siblings, Felix and Fanny. These were all cultured, curious, and, I think, kind people whose careers brought them in touch with their art from different angles. I would buy a visitors’ book and ask them each to dash off a little canon for me.

The big-name composer I came closest to intersecting with was Sergei Rachmaninoff. I lived for a decade in the same Manhattan apartment building he did — 505 West End Avenue — but the time was out of joint and he died 40 years before I moved in. An assortment of his family’s home movies are posted on YouTube, and in one of them he’s walking in front of the building and getting into a car. In truth, he’s not one of my favorite composers, but I nonetheless feel quite proprietary about him.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Is there a composer you think is criminally underrated?

Yes, there is, and this very year we happen to be celebrating the tricentenary of his birth. It is Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second surviving son of Johann Sebastian, one of four Bach sons to become notable composers and unquestionably the finest of the bunch. It was perhaps a two-edged sword, being the son of Bach. On one hand, he learned music at the knee of … well, Bach. On the other, he was obviously overshadowed by his father, whose musical legacy C.P.E. worked assiduously to preserve and champion. The bigger issue, though, is that he is the finest representative of a style that proved only fleetingly popular, a transitional style that was rooted in the intellectual contrapuntal methods of the Baroque but strained forward to the Classical esthetic of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, all of whom admired him deeply. In fact, he died in 1788, so only three years before Mozart did. He didn’t display the breadth of Mozart — or of Haydn, who of all the A-list composers is the one he most calls to mind — but within the smaller framework of his art he was superb. His music tends to be hyper-emotive and volatile. It is filled with surprise and can turn on a dime. He’s one of those composers who really depends on his interpreters. Of course, all music benefits from a fine performance, but a Haydn, Mozart, or Brahms can survive a lot of abuse and still shine through. C.P.E. Bach doesn’t really stand a chance without the help of sensitive performers who have taken the time and effort to master what his style is all about. There is no shortage of underrated composers in general. You can encounter quite a few who hit the ball out of the park in a piece or two or three, but who don’t do it consistently throughout their oeuvre. I find that C.P.E. Bach is a relatively consistent figure. You just have to cultivate an appreciation for his particular language, which for many people is not all that familiar. Within that style he is without peer.

What’s your guilty listening pleasure?

I feel no guilt about any music I listen to. People are often surprised to learn that I am a great aficionado of American popular song from the 19th-century through the vaudeville era. So if you want a rousing chorus of “Father’s a Drunkard and Mother is Dead” or “They’re Wearing ’Em Higher in Hawaii,” I’m your man. A few years ago I curated for a historical society in San Francisco a museum show of sheet music that illuminated the history of California from the Gold Rush through the Roaring Twenties, and an offshoot of the show has been touring around the state’s regional museums ever since. I spend a lot of time listening to the National Jukebox, which is an amazing repository of early recordings available to all online through the Library of Congress: my tax dollars at work in a way I really like. I always keep in my car some CDs featuring the late, great Don Walser, the Texas singer-yodeler who was rightly dubbed “The Pavarotti of the Plains.” I am also not guilty about that.

Do you play a musical instrument? Which one? If not, which do you wish you could play?

My principal instrument when I went to conservatory was the oboe. I got pretty good at it. Some of the wind instruments have tended to hold on to remnants of national playing styles, and the oboe is an example of that. I happened to love the French style of oboe playing, so I went to study in Paris with one of the greatest practitioners of the oboe, Maurice Bourgue. It’s one of the instruments that you either play quite well or quite badly; there’s not a huge middle ground. Playing the oboe involves some facial muscles that don’t get much exercise otherwise, so if you don’t keep practicing strenuously you get out of shape very quickly and then it sounds awful. That would be me, at this point.

Of course I play the piano some—not particularly well, but I enjoy it. It’s a useful tool for me, since in my work as a program annotator I often need to read through scores, and the piano is the way to do this. I have a beautiful, ornate, rosewood “parlor grand” piano built in the 1870s by the Weber Piano Company, which was one of the leading builders at the time but shortly after that was eclipsed by Steinway & Sons, which was stronger in technological development. It has a “pre-Steinway” sound, as you might expect. The problem is, I am rather a klutz. That would also get in the way of my excelling on the instrument I would most like to play, which is the organ.

If you weren’t a music writer, what career would you have?

Well, I have actually had a couple of other careers. I was briefly a college professor, teaching music history, and then I worked for a decade on Wall Street, which people find quite surprising — nobody more so than me. I did find it interesting, actually, but when the market crashed in 1987, I took it as a sign that I should head back to doing what I had always enjoyed the most, which was writing about music. I keep my schedule full, since for many years I have been the program annotator of both the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. And I also work “half-time” as critic-at-large on the staff of the Santa Fe New Mexican, which is the oldest continuously published newspaper west of the Mississippi. I write columns and reviews on all sorts of things — music, theatre, visual arts, books, ideas — but it grows particularly intense during the summer months, when our remarkable little city of Santa Fe goes into overdrive with its musical and other cultural offerings.

If I were magically able to pursue another career parallel to what I already do, I would become a wildlife manager specializing in big cats, too many of which are becoming critically endangered. I have spent time up close with quite a few interesting felids in southern and eastern Africa, and I suppose cheetahs might end up my focus. Did you know that the fur in a cheetah’s spots is much softer than the fur that surrounds it? That’s an interesting surprise you discover when you pat a cheetah, which you would not do in the wild unless the animal were anesthetized but which you certainly can do in a cheetah sanctuary, if you are the sort of person who relates well to cats. Where I live, out in the country northwest of Santa Fe, I am in frequent contact with bobcats (Lynx rufus). They sleep on my porch furniture, which I might, too, if I were a bobcat.

James Keller, longtime Program Annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, was awarded the prestigious ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for feature writing about music in Chamber Music magazine, where he has been Contributing Editor for more than a decade. He is the author of Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide.

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Wednesday, 28 May marks the 33rd anniversary of the death of Mary Lou William. Williams was an African-American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and contemporary of both Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, is often overlooked as a key contributor to the jazz movement of the 20th century.

Born in Atlanta, Williams had her first taste of arranged music while attending church in her hometown. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1915 only spiked her interest in music, specifically jazz, as the city was a stop on the Theater Owners Booking association route, a vaudeville circuit for African-American performers.

Williams was first able to truly experiment with her musical talents as the pianist and arranger for the band Andy Kirk’s 12 Cloud’s of Joy. She came to this opportunity through her husband, who was the saxophonist for the band. Williams continued to arrange for the group creating household hits like “Walkin’ and Swingin’,” “Little Joe from Chicago,” and “Roll ‘em” until her departure from the band in 1942.

Williams’s arrangements were not limited to Andy Kirk’s band. Her compositions were featured by jazz greats including, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Lunceford. The New York Philharmonic performed Williams’s Zodiac Suite at Carnegie Hall in 1946. The Suite was composed of twelve arrangements, each labeled for a sign of the zodiac and all inspired by different jazz musicians.

Facing gender barriers in the states that hindered wide-spread success, Williams traveled to Europe in the 1950s. After performing in both London and Paris, Williams’s returned to the Unites States and simultaneously entertained a brief intermission in her musical career to concentrate her efforts on more religious pursuits.

Returning to music in the late 1950s, Williams reentered the scene with more of a devout lens. Throughout the late 1950s and 60s, Williams composed a number of religious arrangements and musical masses including “Hymn in Honor of St. Martin De Porres,” “Mass for Lenten Season,” and most notably “Mass for Peace and Justice” which was later renamed “Mary Lou’s Mass.” This last mass was the musical backdrop to Alvin Ailey’s series of dances presented under the same name and was also performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1975 as the first jazz music performed in this iconic cathedral.

Williams returned to secular composing in the last decade of her life and also worked as an artist-in-residence at Duke University up until her death in 1981.

Grove Music Online has made several articles available freely to the public, including its lengthy entry on the renowned jazz singer Mary Lou Williams. Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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By Perry N. Halkitis

On 25 May 2014 and nearly 30 years after first appearing on the stage, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart will be aired as a film on HBO. This project, which has evolved over the course of the last three decades, documents those first few harrowing years of the AIDS epidemic in New York City. The Normal Heart debuts at a time when much attention is being cast upon the early days of AIDS and the lives of gay men, who survived the physical and emotional onslaught of this disease in a society that often shunned us because we were gay and because we were afflicted with this disease.

Now a generation of gay men, my generation—the AIDS Generation—stands proudly as testament to our individual and collective resilience which has brought us all into middle age. Certainly there have been huge hurdles along the way—too many deaths to enumerate, the havoc that the complications of this disease wreaked on our bodies, the lack of support. Even today, darkness and disrespect lurks in every corner, and no one is immune. For some in our society, identifying what is wrong with us as gay men comes to easily. We are reminded of it daily as right wing zealots fight against marriage equality, as young boys take their lives. Despite these conditions, despite the inaction of our national and local politicians, and despite a large yet ever-shrinking segment of our society that continues to view us as weak and sick, we stand together as a testament to the fortitude of our bodies, minds, and spirits.

The theme of resistance or resilience permeates the words, the thoughts, and the actions of the protagonists in The Normal Heart and many depictions of the AIDS epidemic.

Behavioral and psychological literature has attempted to delineate sources of resilience. Dr. Gail Wagnild posits that social supports in the form of families and communities foster resilience in individuals. I also adhere to this idea. Although the sources of resilience are still debated in the literature, there is general agreement that resilience is a means of maintaining or regaining mental health in response to adversity the ability to respond to and/or cope with stressful situations such as trauma, conditions that characterize the life of the men of the AIDS Generation.

For many of the men of the AIDs Generation, grappling with their sexuality was closely tied to the development of their resilience. In other words, resilience developed in their childhoods as young men grappling with their sexuality as stated by Christopher: “I also think that wrestling with my own sexuality and trying to navigate through that in my teenage years taught me how to just ‘keep pushing’ and to do what needed to be done.” Some, including myself, found support among our families. Even if parents were loving and supportive, this did not ameliorate the burdens experienced being raised in a heteronormative and often-discriminatory world in which men were portrayed as weak, effeminate, and sickly.

As we watch The Normal Heart, we will be reminded of those dark, confusing early days of the epidemic. And while we must celebrate the resilience of a generation of gay men to fight this disease, we must also be reminded of our obligation to create a better world for a new generation of gay men, who despite our social and medical advances, need the love and support of their community of elders as the navigate the course of their lives.

Perry N. Halkitis, PhD, MS, MPH is Professor of Applied Psychology and Public Health (Steinhardt School), and Population Health (Langone School of Medicine), Director of the Center for Health, Identity, Behavior & Prevention Studies, and Associate Dean (Global Institute of Public Health) at New York University. Dr. Halkitis’ program of research examines the intersection between the HIV epidemic, drug abuse, and mental health burden in LGBT populations, and he is well known as one of the nation’s leading experts on substance use and HIV behavioral research. He is the author of The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience. Follow him on Twitter @DrPNHalkitis.

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By Scott Huntington

You’d probably be lying if you said that you didn’t spend at least a moderate amount of time during your childhood banging on various and sundry items that happened to be within reach. If we’re being honest, this particular sort of self-expression doesn’t seem to lessen with age; thankfully, our methods tend to get more sophisticated over time.

However, sometimes it’s fitting to go back to the primal days of beating anything that will make noise. Making your own percussion instruments can be a great way fully to understand sound, timbre, and tone. If you have music students or teach a drumline, having your students build their own drums can be a fantastic learning experience for everyone involved.

Before we get into the specifics about how to perfect your own DIY percussion instruments, let’s get some inspiration from some of the big names in homemade instruments.

Learn from the professionals

Most of us have some experience appropriating household items in our music-making endeavors, but the people behind the show STOMP have turned this pastime into an art form. This unique live show has a 20th anniversary quickly approaching, with tickets for the celebration show in New York City selling fast.

Using everything from trash-can lids to their own bodies, this is as good as it gets when it comes to DIY instruments.

If you’re looking for another great source of inspiration, look no further than Recycled Percussion – a “quintessentially Vegas” experience that boasts of having performed more than 4,000 shows worldwide. Quite a few of the band’s instruments will look quite familiar; they’re no strangers to homemade instruments made from pots, pans, scrap metal and even automobile parts.

Use What’s Around You

Steel drums, or pans, has its roots in Western Africa, and its sound remains intrinsically linked with the spirit of the Caribbean. It really is a singular sound, and even the most basic steel pans – those made of recycled 55-gallon drums – are capable of producing utterly captivating sounds.

Building and tuning your own steelpan is time-intensive, but certainly not impossible, as this video from SmartyPansMusic demonstrates. Even if you don’t have the time or any spare oil drums lying around, there’s a good chance that you can find some suitable materials not far from where you live. Here are some ideas.

PVC Pipes: Whoever it was that first looked at a PVC pipe and said “I can make music with that” was clearly a visionary. PVC pipes are fairly inexpensive, as far as building materials go, and can produce an almost shocking range of sounds.

To get a sense of what’s possible with PVC pipes, check out this wonderful video from a guy who played some recognizable tunes including “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and “Viva la Vida.” The interesting thing about this type of instrument is that the sounds it produces is less about the sound of two objects colliding and more about the manipulation of the air within the pipes. The major variables you’ll be playing with are the lengths and widths of the pipes.

Scrap Metal: If you want to create your own STOMP experience at home, it may be time to “rescue” some scrap metal to create your own percussion instruments. Companies like McElroy Metal have sites in many states throughout the U.S., and offer a variety of materials to choose from, in different sizes and shapes.

Slum Drummers is a group of Kenyan-born musicians who have brilliantly combined scrap-metal instruments with public outreach; their mission is to spread not only a love of music, but also an awareness of cultural issues such as drug use. From humble beginnings in scrap yards, these musicians and their castaway pieces of metal have gone on to inspire audiences across the world.

Buckets: It really is amazing what can be accomplished with some ordinary household items. If you’re working with a somewhat tighter budget, or a trip to a scrap yard simply isn’t in the cards for you, buckets might just be the way to go.

You can experiment with different materials, such as plastic and metal, as well as with different thicknesses. Buckets are some of the simplest and most utilitarian household items at our disposal, but they can produce a wide array of sounds. You’ll also want to try different methods of striking the buckets; traditional drumsticks are great, but you could try differently sized pieces of wood or even metal to really get the perfect tone.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

No matter what materials you end up choosing, some experimentation will be in order before you get the sound you’re looking for. Modern drum kits work the way they do because of resonant heads and strategically placed air holes. Some trial and error is necessary to see what works best for the materials you’ve chosen.

Experimenting with different types of materials can be a really instructive experience for music students. It’s one thing to have a measure of skill as a musician, but quite another to understand precisely how it is that our favorite instruments create their sound. To that end, homemade drums are a great place to start.

Scott Huntington is a percussionist specializing in marimba. He’s also a writer, reporter and blogger. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and son and does Internet marketing for WebpageFX in Harrisburg. Scott strives to play music whenever and wherever possible. Follow him on Twitter at @SMHuntington.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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By Catherine Grant

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, it’s not just plants and animals that are becoming extinct at alarming rates. The world’s languages and cultures are disappearing too, and the pace is even worse: 11% of birds and 18% of mammals are predicted to die out by the end of the century, but a conservative estimate places language extinction at 40% (that’s about 2,800 of the world’s languages). The situation is just as grim for other expressions of culture — songs, stories, performance traditions — particularly those of Indigenous and minority peoples. International recognition of this new global crisis led UNESCO, in 2003, to proclaim a need for “urgent safeguarding” of the world’s intangible cultural heritage, including music.

For those of us not directly affected by this massive cultural extinction, though, it’s easy to be complacent. Take music. For one thing, it can be difficult to imagine how it feels to have the music of our community disappear, especially if we grew up identifying most closely with the Rolling Stones (or Bing Crosby, or the Spice Girls). For another, it’s hard to think of any dire consequences when an obscure (to us) set of Maori fishing songs or Tibetan goat-herding songs are forgotten. So what exactly is lost when a musical tradition dies out? Why should we all care about this global crisis?

For humanity’s sake

Take ca trù, a complex and sophisticated chamber music tradition of north Vietnam, refined over many centuries, but so badly affected by recent decades of war and adverse government policy that in 2009, UNESCO ear-marked it as needing urgent support for its survival. Like all music genres, ca trù expresses what it is to be human. It offers a direct glimpse at the creativity of the human mind, and represents a continuum of intellect and imagination through the generations. As such, its loss, like that of potentially thousands of other threatened genres across the world, would be a loss to the common heritage of humanity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For diversity’s sake

Another reason we should care about the loss of these traditions is that music, in all its forms, contributes to the rich diversity of humankind, and of our planet. Contemporary music genres are almost always nourished by older traditions, which form a point of departure for invention and transformation. And current genres will inform future ones too. This is what UNESCO refers to when it says cultural diversity “widens the range of options open to everyone”. That includes you, me, and Björk (who has drawn in her songs on the music of Syria, Japan, Iran, Bali, and her native Iceland, among various other sources).

For culture’s sake

Just as smoke and fire go hand-in-hand, music is very often intimately linked with other intangible expressions of culture within a community. The loss of musical heritage may therefore mean the loss of the unique story that it carries, or the loss of an associated dance or ceremony.

Particularly for indigenous people and communities, songs can also be unique vehicles for transmitting local culture and history. They encode knowledge of genealogies and mythologies, records of ancestors and clan names, knowledge of the universe and the land, medicinal and culinary knowledge, social norms, taboos, and histories, and cultural skills and practices, among other things. When these songs disappear, much more than the songs themselves is lost.

The loss of such knowledge is not only a loss for the communities concerned, but for the rest of us too. One music researcher has even convincingly argued that since songs represent ways of being in the world, their extinctions could “potentially compromise our ability to adapt to as yet unforeseen changes”. Traditional fishing or food-gathering songs may contain traditional ecological knowledge that could help us deal with contemporary issues challenging the future of the planet, including our own species. Vanishing musical heritage therefore holds consequences for the whole of humanity.

For people’s sake

We have long used music for expression, entertainment, communication, aesthetic pleasure, and to validate social institutions and religious rituals. In most cultures, including to some extent the Western one, music plays an important role in daily life. It helps us express our individual identity, and reaffirms our membership of a community, our sense of being and belonging. Particularly for Indigenous and minority peoples, music can provide a sense of continuity with the past, with cultural traditions and ancestral heritage. According to senior Tiwi woman Lenie Tipiloura, “If all the old songs are lost, then we don’t remember who we are”. Or as the Amazonian Suyá told Tony Seeger, “When we stop singing, we will really be finished”. Keot Ran, teacher and performer of Khmer smot, a kind of Buddhist chanting used to comfort the dying or the bereaved, told me she felt it was vitally important to keep that cultural practice strong simply because it “is who we are and it is attached to what we are doing” – “this is our tradition, our culture, of being Khmer.”

These are not the only reasons to keep music genres strong. Various other arguments invoke tourism, community capacity building, social cohesion, economic growth, positive health and well-being outcomes, and music’s remarkable ability to promote cross-cultural understanding, exchange, co-operation, reconciliation, and peace (this study carried out for UNESCO introduces many of these ideas). What is clear is that consequences of disappearing musics extend well beyond those individuals and communities directly affected.

Music is one of the key links that ties us to one another – within and across communities, to the past, the present, and the future. We are just beginning to realise the possible repercussions of music endangerment across the globe. The challenge now is for us to care enough about what lies outside our own worlds, so that together we may make efforts to recover what is nearly lost.

Catherine Grant is Joy Ingall Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Creative Arts, University of Newcastle (Australia). Her book, Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help, explores ways to keep endangered music genres strong.

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By Warren Burt

We invite you to explore the biography of Australian composer Ros Bandt, as it is presented in Grove Music Online.

(b Geelong, Victoria, 18 Aug 1951). Australian composer, performer, installation and sound artist, instrument inventor, writer, educator, and researcher. Her early education consisted of high school in both Australia and Canada, followed by a BA (1971, Monash University), Dip Ed (1973, Monash), MA (1974, Monash), and PhD (1983, Monash). An interest in experimental music is apparent from her earliest compositions, many of which involve performance in specific places, improvisation, electronics, graphic notation, and the use of self-built and specially built instruments. These include Improvisations in Acoustic Chambers, 1981, and Soft and Fragile: Music in Glass and Clay, 1982. By 1977 an interest in sound installation and sound sculpture had become well established in her work (Winds and Circuits, Surfaces and Cavities), and is an area in which she has continued to the present day, having presented nearly 50 sound installations worldwide.

Bandt has also been involved in creating electro-acoustic works, often in collaboration with broadcasting organizations; work for or with radio forms a significant portion of her output. Many of these works, while using real-world elements, take a more narrative or illustrative approach to their material compared to the abstractionism of much electro-acoustic work. An electro-acoustic work such as Mungo (1992), made of sounds collected in the Lake Mungo region of New South Wales, presents soundscape as illustration; that is, the sounds are presented as important in themselves, rather than as material for formalistic musical development. In other electro-acoustic works, such as Thrausmata: Ancient Greek Fragments, 1997, the concern for narrative, and presenting endangered elements of the soundscape (in this case, disappearing languages) emerge as paramount. Other electro-acoustic works present sounds from specific environmental sites, such as Genesis (1983), for microtonally-tuned zither and pre-recorded speed-changed zither, both recorded in the same large resonant environment, and Stack (2000), made entirely from sounds collected from a large cylindrical tunnel exhaust stack in Melbourne. Of her compositions for instruments, Ocean Bells (1982) uses the Flagong, a glass instrument made by Bandt modelled on Harry Partch’s Cloud Chamber Bowls. The sculpture Aeolian Harps (1987) was a large wind powered string instrument, which was also recorded and those sounds used in a number of other works. Her recent Tragoudia II uses the tarhu, a 12-string spike fiddle (4 strings played, 8 sympathetic) invented by Australian luthier Peter Biffin, as well as pre-recorded sounds recorded in Crete. Tin Rabbit (2009–10) for wind-up rabbits, pre-recorded soundscape, music boxes, and tin suitcase shows a more whimsical side of her installation work. Free Diving (2008) for recorder orchestra and pre-recorded soundscape shows an integration of her interests in environmental sound with that of composing for traditional instruments.

Bandt has been equally active in collaborative work with musicians, dancers, and artists. She has been part of the groups La Romanesca (early music performance), LIME (improvisation), Back to Back Zithers (cross-cultural improvisation and composition), and Carte Blanche (a digital media duo with Brigid Burke), among others. She has also worked on many collaborative projects, such as Hear the Dance, See the Music (1989), a collaborative music-dance-technology performance; The White Room (1992), an installation for Warsaw Autumn, produced with Vineta Lagzdina, Warren Burt, Ernie Althoff, and Alan Lamb; and an ongoing series of collaborations with the German sound artist Johannes S. Sistermanns.

Bandt has written several books, including Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks (Sydney, 2001), the first comprehensive treatment of this kind of work in Australia. With Michelle Duffy and Dolly MacKinnon, she edited the anthology Hearing Places: Interdisciplinary Writings on Sound, Place, Time and Culture (Cambridge, 2007). She is also the director of the Australian Sound Design Project, the first comprehensive website and on-line resource, documenting over 130 Australian sound designers, composers, and sound sculptors. She has received grants from the Australian Research Council, The Australia Council, the Victorian Ministry for the Arts, the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and a number of other organizations. Her work has been broadcast on, and commissioned by ORF Austria, WDR Germany, ABC Australia, and Japanese Radio and TV, among others. Recordings of her work are available on the Move, New Albion, Ars Acustica, Sonic Art Gallery, and Au Courant labels, among others.

Writings

• Sounds In Space: Windchimes and Sound Sculptures (Melbourne, 1985)
• Creative Approaches to Interactive Technology in Sound Art (Geelong, 1990)
• Sound Sculpture, Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks (Sydney, 2001)
• Edited with M. Duffy and D. MacKinnon: Hearing Places: Interdisciplinary Writings on Sound, Place, Time and Culture (Cambridge, 2007) [incl. CD]
• The Australian Sound Design Project

Bibliography

• M. Atherton: ‘Ros Bandt’, Australian Made Australian Played (Sydney, 1990), 90–92
• B. Broadstock: ‘Ros Bandt’, Sound Ideas – Australian Composers born since 1950 (Sydney, 1995), 42–7
• J. Jenkins: ‘Ros Bandt’, 22 Australian Composers (Melbourne, 1988), 9–21
• A. McLennan: ‘A brief topography of Australian Sound Art and experimental broadcasting’, Continuum, viii (1994), 302–18 (electronic arts in Australia issue, ed. N. Zurbrugg)
• R. Coyle: Sound In space (Sydney, 1995), 8–16
• P. Read: ‘Silo Stories’, Haunted Earth (Sydney, 2003), 93–110
• Ros Bandt website

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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By Rex Butler

We invite you to explore the biography of Australian artist Ricky Swallow, as it is presented in Grove Art Online.

(b San Remo, Victoria, 1974). Australian conceptual artist, active also in the USA. Swallow came to prominence only a few years after completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, by winning the prestigious Contempora 5 art prize in 1999. Swallow could be said to have ushered in a wholly new style in Australian art after the appropriation art of the 1980s and 1990s. His first mature work was a hammerhead shark made out of plaid, later followed by such objects as bicycles and telescopes made out of plastic. These were not hyperreal simulacra in the manner of Pop artist George Segal or sculptor Ron Mueck. Rather, in remaking these objects in altered materials, Swallow wanted to open up a whole series of associations around memory and obsolescence. In one of the works for Contempora 5, Model for a Sunken Monument (1999), Swallow made a vastly scaled-up version of the mask Darth Vader wore in the Star Wars movies, fabricated out of sectioned pieces of fibreboard, which produced the effect of a melting or compression or indeed a diffraction, as though the piece were being looked at under water. Swallow also made a series of works that featured death as a subject, including iMan Prototypes (2001), which involved a number of skulls made of coloured plastic that looked like computer casings, and Everything is Nothing (2003), in which a carved wooden skull lies on its side inside an Adidas hood. In 2005, he was selected as Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale, for which he produced Killing Time (2005). In this piece Swallow carved an extraordinary still-life of a table covered with a series of objects (fish, lobster, lemon), seemingly out of a single piece of Jelutong maple, in the manner of the Dutch vanitas painters of the 17th century. Swallow’s artistic lineage would undoubtedly include Jasper Johns, in particular his 1960 casting of two beer cans in bronze. His work could also be compared to contemporary Australian artist Patricia Piccinini and international artist Tom Friedman. Without a doubt, Swallow belongs to a generation of Australian artists who make work outside of any national tradition and without reference to the by-now exhausted critical questions associated with Post-modernism.

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By Erina Duganne

Many hope, even count on, photography to function as an agent of social change. In his 1998 book, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises, communications scholar David Perlmutter argues, however, that while photographs “may stir controversy, accolades, and emotion,” they “achieve absolutely nothing.”

In my current research project, I examine the difficult question of what contribution photography has made to social change through an examination of images documenting events from the Central American civil wars — El Salvador and Nicaragua, more specifically — that circulated in the United States in the 1980s. Rather than measure the influence of these photographs in terms of narrowly conceived causal relationships concerning issues of policy, I argue that to understand what these images did and did not achieve, they need to be situated in terms of their broader social, political, and cultural effects — effects that varied according to the ever shifting relations of their ongoing reproduction and reception. Below are three platforms across which photographs from the wars in Central America circulated and recirculated in the United States in the 1980s.

(1)   In the early 1980s, the US government adopted a dual policy of military support in Central America. In El Salvador, they provided aid against the guerilla forces or FMLN while in Nicaragua they backed the contra war against the Sandinistas. Many Americans learned and formulated opinions about these policies through photographs that circulated in the news media. The cover of the 22 March 1982 issue of Time, for instance, featured a photograph of a gunship flying over El Salvador. Taken by US photojournalist Harry Mattison, the editors at Time used the photograph as part of their cover story questioning the use by the US government of aerial reconnaissance photographs of military installations in Nicaragua to establish a causal link between the leftist insurgents in El Salvador and Communist governments worldwide.

(2)   In addition to these reconnaissance photographs, the Reagan administration also turned to photography in an eight-page State Department white paper entitled Communist Interference in El Salvador, which was released to the American public on 23 February 1981. In this white paper, the US government included two sets of military intelligence photographs of captured weapons, which they believed would help them to further provide the American public with “irrefutable proof” of Communist involvement via Russia and Cuba in Central America, and thereby justify the escalation of US military and economic aid to the supposedly moderate Salvadoran government. The aforementioned article in Time also questioned the validity of the sources used in this document.

(3)   While photography played a prominent role in debates over the existence of a communist threat in Central America, beginning in 1983, a number of artists and photographers — Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, Group Material, Marta Bautis, Mel Rosenthal, among others — put photographs from the Central American conflicts, some of which had circulated directly in the aforementioned contexts and others which had not, to a different use. Rather than employ photographs to perpetuate or even question the accuracy of communist aggression in the region, these artists and photographers instead used the medium to examine the imperialist underpinning of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy in Central America as well as the longstanding geopolitical and historical implications of US involvement there. To this end, they produced the following: the 1983 photography book and exhibition El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, which was edited by Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, and Fae Rubenstein and toured various US cities in 1984 and 1985; Group Material’s 1984 multi-media installation Timeline: A Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, on view at the P.S. Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York, as part of the ad hoc protest organization Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America; and the exhibition The Nicaragua Media Project that toured various US cities in 1984 and 1985. Together these three photography books and art exhibitions provided, what I call, a “living” history for photographs from the Central American civil wars.

In his 1978 essay “Uses of Photography” that was anthologized in his 1980 book About Looking, cultural critic John Berger argues that for photographs to “exist in time,” they need to be placed in the “context of experience, social experience, social memory.” Using Berger’s definition of a “living” history as a model, my research project offers a novel way to think about how, within the contexts of these exhibitions and books, photographs from the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua functioned as dynamic, even affective objects, whose mobility and mutability could empower contemporary viewers to look beyond the so-called communist threat in the region that was perpetuated through the Reagan administration as well as the news media and begin to think more carefully about past histories of US imperialism and global human oppression in Central America.

Erina Duganne is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas State University where she teaches courses in American art, photography, and visual culture. She is the author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (2010) as well as a co-editor and an essayist for Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2007). She has also written about her current research project for the blog In the Darkroom.

Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access — and simultaneously cross-search — an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

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