On Brahms and Tchaikovsky’s shared birthday anniversary, here’s a gold mine of material relating to the complicated relationship between the two artists, who didn’t much care for one another’s music, but rather enjoyed one another’s company.
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Brahms and Tchaikovsky A Musical Rivalry
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Princeton Pioneers Digital Music Podcast
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60 years ago, Princeton University engineers noticed members of the music department, staring agog at a recently-installed computer. It wasn’t long before a not-so-unlikely alliance was formed that helped to change history.
The story of New Jersey’s role in the creation of digital music is the subject of a new podcast. “Composers & Computers” will span six decades in five installments and include interviews with 20 people. Their commentary will be punctuated by vintage computer and electronic music clips.
Princeton music faculty shared an analog synthesizer with Columbia University in the 1950s. In 1962, composers entered Princeton’s new Computer Center in the Engineering Quadrangle, and were soon engaged in trying to figure out how to harness the new IBM 7090 to make music. Then they worked to improve that music.
Some of the most complex works ever written drove numerous technological innovations, and vice versa. Princeton composers and computer engineers worked together to program some of the earliest music composition software, invented a device to hear the music they were creating, synthesized some of the earliest computer-generated speech for use in music, and more.
The story has a distinctly New Jersey flavor, illuminating the work of engineers at RCA in Princeton in the 1950s and Bell Labs in Murray Hill in the 1960s.
The podcast will tackle the science of sound in a refreshing and accessible way. The series promises to be full of human drama, as participants in the project became great friends in their shared quest to coax sound out of a previously-silent, room-sized machine.
The podcast will be available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, as well as the Princeton Engineering website, https://engineering.princeton.edu/series/composers-computers-podcast. The first two episodes will drop today, and one episode will run each week for the next three weeks.
Here’s a link to the series’ introduction:
Introducing “Composers & Computers,” a new podcast about digital music
Episode 1:
Episode 2:
PHOTO (left to right): Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center personnel Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky, Pril Smiley, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, and Alice Shields, circa 1970
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Star Wars Radio Talk with Captain Phil
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After reading yesterday’s panegyric and screed about the rise and fall of Skywalker, Phil Merkel invited me on to his radio show, Captain Phil’s Planet, to continue in that vein this afternoon, beginning around 3:40 EDT.
There will be about a half-hour of jawboning about Jawas and tunes from Tatooine, as Cap and I travel back to our collective youth, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far way, to reminisce about what it was like to see “Star Wars” in the theater in 1977.
Tune in to WUSB, the radio station of Stony Brook University, at wusb.fm. To hear the stream, click on the silver WUSB player button at the upper left-hand side of the page.
See you there, dorks!
PHOTO: To give you an idea of what you’re in for, these guys were way cooler than us
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Cinco de Mayo Music Margaritas and More
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Cinco de Mayo. A day to celebrate Mexico’s victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, with most excellent margaritas. And of course music. ¡Disfruta!
“Sones de Mariachi” by Blas Galindo
“Xochipilli” by Carlos Chávez, composed for MoMA to showcase pre-Columbian Aztec instruments
Segovia plays “Sonata Mexicana” by Manuel Ponce
“The Night of the Mayas” by Silvestre Revueltas
An encore by Revueltas, “Ocho por radio”
“Huapango” by José Pablo Moncayo
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Star Wars Day: Remembering the 1977 Magic
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“Star Wars” opened on May 25, 1977. Yet today is celebrated as “Star Wars Day.” Why? Because of a stupid pun: May the Fourth be with you.
I can get behind that.
The young will never truly understand what it was like to experience “Star Wars” in a theater for the first time back then. Standing in enormous lines. Not being able to get in. An absorbed audience without cell phones. No vacuous tabloid entertainment “news” prior to the feature. 45 years ago, before the lights went down and the trailers started, you had the conversation of your family or friends.
Then the 20th Century Fox Fanfare. The peculiar text “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” The brash appearance of the film’s title – STAR WARS – receding into space. The opening crawl. The enormity of the first star destroyer. The richly-imagined creatures and lived-in locations. The jump to light speed. The grappling hook swing across a yawning chasm. The light saber duel. The extraterrestrial dogfights and dizzying race to destroy the Death Star. And of course, the exhilarating, exuberant, totally transporting music.
In 1977, not only was “Star Wars” sensorially thrilling, but the overall experience resonated. It was clearly-told, cleanly-executed, and deeply satisfying, and viewers left the theater glowing.
Whether or not it was intended to be so, the film was a brilliant piece of postmodernism. Everything about it was fresh, yet comfortingly familiar, with elements of the western, the swashbuckler, the war movie, the matinee serial, the samurai chanbara, and whatever else George Lucas may have picked up from film school and a lifetime of going to the movies.
Likewise, John Williams’ score was like an ice cream soda, with dollops assimilated from English and Russian classics of the western canon, topped by a schlag of Austro-German Romanticism.
“Star Wars” mania swelled like an overstuffed Shmoo to dominate pop culture. But in 1977 it was all brand-new, and the merchandizing had to scramble to catch up. At first, there was the novelization and the Marvel comics and some t-shirts, and that was about it. Kenner, the toy company, was caught totally off-guard and unable to meet the demand for action figures in time for Christmas. Anybody else remember the Early Bird Certificate Package? At Christmas 1978, they were still struggling to keep up.
For better or worse, “Star Wars” changed movies and merchandizing, and the relationship between the two, forever.
Alas, in 2022, the magic has long since faded. There’s little nutritional value in the devouring of one’s own tail (or tale) and, decades later, the franchise, like an enormous ouroboros, has lost most of its vitality.
Furthermore, you can’t even see the original movie anymore, or rather the theatrical cut, thanks to years of Lucas’ digital retrofitting. Here’s hoping that someday Disney allocates some of its profits to removing the “overpainting,” as it were, so that the film can again be experienced as it was originally shown.
Lucas has been steadfast in insisting that his revisions comprise a definitive version, yet he continued to tinker right up until the time it left his hands. He even went so far as to claim that the source material was so degraded by then that such a restoration would be impossible.
Yet the theatrical cuts were selected by the Library of Congress National Film Registry for preservation as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” Lucas tried to offer his retooled versions in place of the originals, and the library said no thanks. So the theatrical cuts are out there, folks. I just hope somebody’s taking care of them.
Long live “Star Wars” (the original), and may Disney do everything in its power to restore the 1977-83 trilogy to its original brilliance. At this stage in the decline of the franchise, I would venture to guess, it would generate more revenue than to produce another substandard movie. Then, to promote the reissue on home video, why not rerelease the original trilogy in theaters? There would be three generations of “Star Wars” fans lining up to see it.
Don’t let J.J. Abrams get you down. The Force is still strong with this one.
Happy Star Wars Day!
A face-melting side-by-side comparison (still not comprehensive) of Lucas’ alterations to “Star Wars”
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