The sound of suspense: Hitchcock and Herrmann [playlist]

Listen to Bernard Herrmann’s eight scores for the films of Alfred Hitchcock. You’ll hear, in music, a mirror of how the duo’s personal relationship evolved, from its joyous start in late 1954 to its bitter end in 1966.

At the recording session for their first collaboration, The Trouble with Harry (1955), Hitchcock chuckled with delight. Herrmann had translated Harry’s darkly comic tone into music. His new friend “Benny” also captured in the score the director himself—his anxieties, his wit, his romantic fantasies. So much so that in 1968, when Herrmann crafted a concert suite from Harry, he titled it “A Portrait of Hitch.”

Their second pairing shows how quickly Herrmann joined Hitchcock’s inner circle. In 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Benny didn’t just write the score. He appears onscreen as himself, conducting the London Symphony in the film’s most famous set-piece: an attempted assassination in the Albert Hall. Herrmann’s main title “Prelude” is barely two minutes long; but it contains the seeds of all the main themes he’ll develop in the score. The “Prelude” also foreshadows the Albert Hall sequence with its concert-hall grandeur.

The Wrong Man (1956) may be their most surprising collaboration. To tell the true story of a jazz musician’s wrongful arrest, and the tragic impact it has on his family, Hitchcock used a more realistic visual style, and filmed in the story’s actual locations. For its “Prelude,” Herrmann delivers a surprise of his own: a lively samba tune that seems far removed from his usual style. But its sunny first measures are repeatedly answered—arrested?—by an ominous phrase for woodwinds that hints at the darkness to come.

Director and composer were at their best when depicting romantic obsession, and 1958’s Vertigo may be the summit of both artists’ careers. The psychological disorientation felt by James Stewart’s protagonist is conveyed by Herrmann’s famous “Prelude,” with its relentlessly repeating figures and orchestral swells. Hitchcock tailored the movie’s edit and its sound design to accommodate the music, most famously in Vertigo’s emotional climax. As Robert Burks’s camera glides 360 degrees around Scottie Ferguson (Stewart) and Judy Barton (Kim Novak), there is no dialogue—only Herrmann’s passionate “Scene d’amour.” As Hitchcock told his composer, “We’ll just have the camera and you.”

1959’s North by Northwest gave Herrmann his best opportunity to blend thrills with humor (he regretted that he was never asked to score comedies). Like Vertigo, the main titles of North by Northwest are a miniature movie in themselves, as designer Saul Bass’ perpendicular lines streak across Manhattan skyscrapers and bustling commuters.

Someone at MGM suggested that since the movie begins in New York City, the main title music should be “Gershwinesque.” What Herrmann did instead reflects his lifelong gift for thinking outside the box. His “Prelude” is based on the rhythm of a Spanish fandango—because, as the composer observed, the movie isn’t about New York: it’s about the “crazy dance that was going to happen now between Cary Grant and the world.”

When Grant’s man-on-the run meets a sexy blonde (Eva Marie Saint) on a train, the actors have just a few minutes to establish that this relationship is more than a casual one-night stand. Herrmann’s shimmering “Conversation Piece” is among his finest love themes, and convinces us in seconds that this couple is destined to share train berths for years to come.

If not for Herrmann, Psycho might survive today only in massively shortened form. After viewing a rough cut without music, Hitchcock decided that he had failed in his biggest gamble: a self-financed, low-budget shocker, targeted at young moviegoers hungry for edgy content. Hitch mused about cutting it down and putting it on his TV series. Herrmann watched the cut and saw what the director didn’t. He transformed the film with his all-strings score, “a black-and-white sound” to complement the black-and-white photography. His nerve-shredding “Prelude” was composed with one goal in mind—to tell moviegoers that, despite Psycho’s leisurely first scenes, “something terrible is going to happen.”

Hitchcock made only one request of his composer: no music for the murder scenes. Herrmann felt differently, leading to the ultimate validation of his film career. When Hitchcock heard the shrieking strings his composer unleashed for Marion and Arbogast’s killings, he admitted he had been wrong.

By the time Herrmann completed Marnie (1964), the onscreen tension was matched by a growing division between director and composer. Herrmann’s abrasiveness, and movie studios’ appetite for pop/rock soundtracks, were two of the factors that drove a wedge in what had been the closest of partnerships. Finally, on Torn Curtain (1966), Herrmann dared to write what he thought was best for the film—a brutal, dissonant score—even though it was the opposite of what Hitchcock had asked for. (Hitch wanted music that was “light” and with a “beat.”) Minutes after hearing Herrmann’s “Prelude,” their partnership and friendship came to an ugly end. The composer was fired, his score rejected.

Some of that music reached movie screens in 2019, when Quentin Tarantino featured two Torn Curtain cues in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Nearly all of the scores represented here have surfaced in other media, re-used in Best Picture winners (The Artist), music videos (Lady Gaga’s Born This Way), TV (The Simpsons, Wednesday), plus commercials, pop songs and ringtones.

It’s easy to understand why. Herrmann remains unmatched in writing music that evokes timeless emotions—fear, love, hate, dread. And just as the gorgeous nightmares of Hitchcock’s cinema remain universal, the music of Bernard Herrmann is the fitting soundtrack of our own, anxious times.

^{Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash.}

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Nine reasons I love John Williams [playlist]

I wrote a biography of John Williams, essentially, because I have loved his music since I was nine years old. A lot of children fall in love with Williams’ music, because it’s an irresistible and very tuneful pillar of the movies we all grew up with, whether it was the original Star Wars or Indiana Jones trilogy, E.T., Jurassic Park, or Harry Potter. His scores sang these stories in perfect harmony with the visuals and often provided their deepest emotions, and his themes were as integral to the characters as the actors who portrayed them. But Williams’ music is not childish or simple, and I loved it more powerfully as I got older and learned to appreciate the stunning level of craft and art in his popular family movie music and expanding my tastes to his darker, more complex scores for grown-up films. His music continues to break my heart, and I love that feeling.

My book is, in part, a covert love letter to Williams and a sermon to the unconverted or the half-aware about why you, too, should love his music. I’ve created this playlist as a companion, a bit of church music to go along with my 640-page homily. Here are nine (among hundreds) musical reasons why I love John Williams.

1. “Summon the Heroes”

We’ll start with a non-film piece. Among his many staggering cultural contributions, Williams has composed themes for four separate Olympic Games, beginning with his all-timer “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. “Summon the Heroes” was commissioned for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and it’s a fabulous demonstration of how Williams can write catchy, punchy music for a celebration or pageant like no one else. He is an heir to the likes of John Philip Sousa, and between his Olympics music and his perch at the Boston Pops for many years, he justly earned the appraisal of director Oliver Stone as having come “to stand for the American culture.”

2. “The Asteroid Field” (from The Empire Strikes Back)

One of the reasons I fell for Williams’ music as a kid was because his scores were a perfect marriage of classical music—all the grandeur and scale and tradition of the classical orchestra—and pop music, with their catchy earworm themes and often a verse-chorus-verse structure. This action cue from The Empire Strikes Back—a score that many consider his very best—is a perfect example of this hybrid quality. It’s also a miraculous example of how Williams could accompany an action scene, hitting lots of visual cues in perfect synchronization, while simultaneously composing a piece of tuneful music that makes perfect sense as pure music. In that skill, to my mind, he has no equals.

3. Theme from Born on the Fourth of July

Williams is definitely most famous for scoring Star Wars and the films of Steven Spielberg, but in the late 1980s and early ’90s he scored an informal trilogy of movies for director Oliver Stone that interrogated and lamented the years of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and the Richard Nixon presidency. All of these films are worth watching (Nixon is my personal favorite), and the scores are an exquisite tapestry of Americana tinged with melancholy and tragedy. The first was Born on the Fourth of July, the 1989 drama starring Tom Cruise as a real-life figure whose body and patriotism were shattered in Vietnam. Williams wrote an anguished string elegy as well as a solo trumpet theme that together tell the story of a profound, romantic love of country that is severely wounded, but not killed.

4. “Mom Returns and Finale” (from Home Alone)

One of Williams’ great gifts is ennobling even the lowest and silliest of material, and maybe the greatest example of this is Home Alone. On its face it is a juvenile, slapstick, live-action cartoon about a little boy torturing two idiot adults. But when Williams screened it, he saw the potential for a great Dickensian Christmas story, and he not only composed two indelible new Christmas carols, but also enhanced (and perhaps supplied) the emotional depth of its character relationships. The apotheosis of the film, and score, is the scene where Kevin McCallister’s mom finally comes home, they hug, and Kevin sees old man Marley embracing his own family in the falling snow. There’s a reason this movie has become a yuletide staple, and most of that reason is because John Williams treated it with literary respect and gave it an enormous heart.

5. “Remembering Emilie, and Finale” (War Horse)

Steven Spielberg’s unfairly overlooked movie about a horse in World War I—which is really about the tragedies as well as the humanity that war brings about—inspired Williams to write a romantic and very English pastoral score. There’s an homage to Old Hollywood in several scenes and images in the film, most of all in its emotionally cathartic finale, staged against a Technicolor MGM sunset. Williams reprises several of his intimate character themes, then strips away the whole orchestra for a solo piano rendition of an elegiac melody brimming with sadness and weary relief—and then concludes the whole thing with English nobility and heaving sentiment. This, for me, is ambrosia.

6. “Among the Clouds” (from Always)

Another overlooked and (in my opinion) unjustly dismissed Spielberg film, Always was his only “romantic comedy,” but really it’s a story about death and letting go of the person you love. It’s also a film with a lot of flight, a Williams specialty, and he wrote this cue for a scene where Dorinda (Holly Hunter) is flying her plane and the ghost of her paramour (Richard Dreyfuss) is saying goodbye. There’s a shimmering, levitational quality to this tone poem, a complicated mixture of quiet heartbreak and amorous love—with some gorgeous solo French horn playing by studio musician James Thatcher—that I find irresistible.

7. “E.T. is Alive” (from E.T. The Extra Terrestrial)

Most people know the famous “Flying Theme” from E.T., a score that, for my money, is probably Williams’ magnum opus. But most of my favorite moments in his scores (as evidenced throughout this playlist) are the sadder and more intimate ones—and the scene after E.T. dies and Elliott talks quietly to his alien friend, crying, is just so beautiful. Williams scored it with a tender reprise of his friendship theme for E.T. and Elliott on a celeste, an instrument with childlike sparkle that Williams loves, and then on a keening clarinet with empathetic string accompaniment. The cue rallies when E.T.’s heart begins to glow again, and the flying theme blooms like the flowers psychically linked to the character’s health. Williams has such a gift for taking potentially silly scenes and turning them into earnest holy moments.

8. “Cadillac of the Skies” (from Empire of the Sun)

Another “holy moment,” this is one of the all-time greatest standalone pieces of Williams music, for another overlooked Spielberg masterpiece. A young boy named Jim (played by Christian Bale) has been living in a Japanese internment camp for years; he has always been obsessed with airplanes, and when American bombers fly through to liberate the camp, he runs up to a rooftop in a state of euphoria. Williams scored this with choir, turning it into a quasi-liturgical drama; he has strings and brass join in, rising and rising, and then the music suddenly turns queasy and quiet as Jim collapses into his physician friend’s arms and says, “I can’t remember what my parents look like.” The score’s heart breaks from ecstasy to anguish in an instant, with the choir continuing hauntingly as the doctor carries Jim down from the roof like a toddler, the camp exploding behind them. This is definitely one of my “desert island” Williams tracks.

9. “The Search for the Blue Fairy” (from A.I. Artificial Intelligence)

In the summer of 2001, I saw A.I. three times in the theater. I was 16. After the first screening I was confused; by the third watch, I decided it was my favorite movie of all time, and it has remained so. It’s also my personal favorite John Williams score—full of gorgeous character melodies and emotional orchestral passion, but also layers of complex darkness and minimalism. David, an extremely lifelike android programmed to love his “parents,” has spent most of the film searching for the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio in the belief that she can turn him into a real boy and his mother will finally love him back. Williams scored the scene where he finally does find her (or at least a statue of her, in a drowned Coney Island) with his Blue Fairy theme sung by solo soprano. David pleads over and over—almost as if he is praying to the Virgin Mary—and Williams’ music is itself a prayer. A.I. is as beautiful and sad and sacred as any score he ever composed, and this track encapsulates everything that I love about his music.

_{Featured image by Jake Hills on Unsplash.}

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Prague: a playlist from the heart of Europe

Prague is a city steeped in history, where music has long been intertwined with its cultural identity. This playlist captures that spirit, featuring compositions that reflect the grandeur of its imperial courts, the struggles of its people, and the resilience of its artists. From Mozart’s Don Giovanni, composed specifically for Prague, to Smetana’s Má vlast, evoking the flowing Vltava, these works embody the city’s layered character. Jazz and rock music, too, played a key role in its modern history, fueling movements of resistance and unity.

Beyond its stunning architecture and historic squares, Prague’s music tells a deeper story of triumph and tragedy. This collection of ten pieces allows listeners to experience the essence of the city—not just as a visual marvel but as a place where melodies carry the weight of centuries. Whether through medieval chants, romantic symphonies, or revolutionary anthems, Prague’s soundscape is as enchanting as the city itself, ensuring that, as Franz Kafka wrote, “Prague does not let go; this little mother has claws.”

1. “Overture” from Don Giovanni, W. A. Mozart

Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote, “It is not easy to convey…the enthusiasm of the Bohemians for [Mozart’s] music.” Indeed, Mozart achieved some of his greatest successes in Prague, including the premieres of his Symphony no. 38 in D (Prague Symphony), the Clarinet Concerto in A, and the opera La Clemenza di Tito. The pinnacle of Mozart’s career, though, was the world premiere of Don Giovanni at Nostitz’s National Theater in the Old Town. On October 29, 1787, Mozart conducted the opera in front of a cross section of Prague society. Aristocrats sat sipping lemonade in the lower galleries, while the lower classes stood while downing sausages and beers. The singer Joseph Meissner wrote that when Mozart stepped onto the stage, a hush descended, and “one thousand hands lifted up to greet him.” At the end of the opera, the audience burst into “boundless applause,” and Mozart supposedly uttered the now-famous phrase, “My Praguers understand me.”

2. “Vltava” from Má Vlast,Bedřich Smetana

Bedřich Smetana wrote his magnum opus Má vlast (My Country) between 1874 and 1880. The piece comprised six symphonic poems, each celebrating a historical or natural site in Bohemia. The stirring second movement, “The Vltava” (Der Moldau), conveys the river’s journey through Bohemia. The composer explained that his most famous melody mimicked the region’s geography: “The Vltava swirls into the St. John’s Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe River.” Smetana wrote Má vlast while becoming deaf and ill from the effects of syphilis. He remarked that only his fervent patriotism enabled him to complete the work. The man known as the “Father of Czech Music” died in 1884.

3. “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák’s popular opera Rusalka premiered in 1901 at the Czech National Theater in Prague. In this era of national rivalry, the city’s Czech and German speakers maintained their own theaters. Rusalka’s librettist Jaroslav Kvapil based Rusalka on fairy tales gathered by Czech ethnographers Karel Jaromír Erben and Božena Němcová. While Rusalka has similarities to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, this opera has decidedly Czech elements, including Bohemian folk melodies and characters like Vodník (water goblin) and the witch Ježí Baba. In this beloved aria, the water sprite Rusalka asks the moon to reveal her love to a human prince.

4. “Ranní mlha” (Morning Fog), Jaroslav Ježek

During the 1920s, Prague became a center of avant-garde culture. Prague’s Liberated Theater was made famous by the comic duo Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, as well as Jaroslav Ježek, who composed music for the duo and conducted the theater’s orchestra. Ježek combined contemporary genres, including classical, jazz, dada, and incidental film music. He died in 1942, an exile in New York, having escaped the Nazi occupation of Prague. This moody orchestral piece was recorded sometime between 1929 and 1938 at the Liberated Theater.

5. “Motliba pro Marta” (Prayer for Marta), Marta Kubišová

In 1968, the Communist Party secretary Alexander Dubček implemented “Socialism with a Human Face,” restoring the freedoms of expression and movement. In August 1968, Warsaw Pact troops, led by the Soviet Union, crushed the reform movement known as the Prague Spring. Marta Kubišová’s heartfelt balladbecame an anthem during the invasion. The lyrics are by Jan Comenius, the exiled seventeenth-century Protestant theologian: “Let peace still remain with this country! Let hatred, envy, spite, fear, and strife cease!” Kubišová’s music was censored, and in 1977, she became a spokesperson for the Charter 77 movement.

6. “Magické Noci” (Magical Nights), Plastic People of the Universe

Influenced by the Prog Rock movement, this Prague rock band was not overtly political. Yet, artistic director Ivan Jirous and several band members were arrested in 1976 for “hooliganism” and performing illegally. The “Trial of the Plastic People,” inspired dissidents to issue Charter 77, calling for the end of censorship. This song was first recorded at Václav Havel’s country home in the early 1980s. Its lyrics capture the mystical associations many have with Prague:

The time of magic
Night has come…
Delirium
We live in Prague
That’s where the spirit itself will
One day appear
We live in Prague
That is where.

7. “Start Me Up,” The Rolling Stones

In 1990, signs throughout Prague announced: “The tanks are rolling out. The Stones are rolling in.” That August, the Rolling Stones played to an audience of over 100,000 fans in Strahov Stadium, which, only months earlier, had been the site of the largest demonstration against Communist rule. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were so impressed with the enthusiasm of their Czech fans, many of whom had grown up listening to illegal bootleg versions of Stones hits, that they decided to waive their fees and donate all proceedings to a charity for disabled Czechoslovak children. Their choice to open the concert with “Start Me Up” signified to the crowd that a new era had indeed begun.

8. “Paš o Paňori,” Věra Bílá and Kale

The Romani singer from Rokyčany, a town an hour southwest from Prague, became a phenomenon of World Music in the 1990s. Her rich alto voice and charisma led critics to dub her the “Ella Fitzgerald of Romani Music.” Bílá, who performed and recorded with the Roma band Kale, hailed from the Giňa family of Romani musicians. Their songs mixed pop harmonies with traditional Romani instrumentation.

9. “Nad Vltavou,” Lucie Vondráčková

Lucie Vondráčková is a popular stage, television, and film actress and singer. Her aunt Helena was a pop phenomenon who got her start singing with Marta Kubišová in the 1960s. In this wistful song from 2018, Lucie Vondráčková recalls her favorite places in Prague: whispering cathedral arcades, small theaters, and lofty halls. The nostalgic refrain recalls the rhythm of the Vltava River that Smetana captured in his masterpiece: “Over the Vltava River, Prague dances with a swaying gait. No matter where the clouds go, my dreams will remain with her forever.”

10. “Perfect Day,” Lou Reed

 In 1990, Rolling Stone magazine asked President Václav Havel for an interview, and he replied that he would do it only if Lou Reed asked the questions. Havel first heard Reed’s music in 1968, while in New York, and he smuggled the Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat into Czechoslovakia. Havel frequently cited Perfect Day as his favorite song. In 2009, in a concert marking the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, Reed performed the hit in an unlikely duet with opera star Renée Fleming accompanied by the Czech Philharmonic.

There are also a number of additional songs after these ten in the playlist for your enjoyment!

_{Featured image by William Zhang via Unsplash.}

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John Williams and the two notes that changed cinema

Two notes. Probably the most famous two-note unit of music in modern history.

When a composer has a hit song or an instantly iconic tune, it can be a blessing and a curse. That tune becomes eternally attached to you—and sometimes it can eclipse the rest of your work.

John Williams is no one-hit wonder, and he is culturally affiliated with more than a dozen melodies—the many themes in the Star Wars series, the “Raiders March” from the Indiana Jones movies, the flying theme from E.T., the anthem from Jurassic Park, “Hedwig’s Theme” from the Harry Potter films, and so many more. An embarrassment of earworms.

And it all started with his theme from Jaws, his first “hit” and arguably the two notes of his that almost everybody around the world recognizes, even fifty years later. Jaws itself was a phenomenon: society, en masse, was scared out of its wits and out of the water—and so much of their terror was owed to Williams’ obsessive, predatory score. That film and its score took Williams, who had been toiling as a mostly anonymous film and TV composer for nearly twenty years, into the stratosphere of success and pop culture omnipresence. It cemented his partnership with Steven Spielberg and led directly to Williams scoring Star Wars.

The long, fruitful phenomenon of his career—more Oscar nominations than any individual in history, acclaim from world leaders and cultural icons and audiences around the globe—can be traced back to those ominous, oscillating E and F bass notes that signaled the first appearance of the famous great white shark.

But the Jaws score is so much more than the famous “two-note” signature; it’s an entire symphony of primal tension, tender character notes, and adventurous sea shanties. Those “two notes”—the motif actually includes a third note, D—are undeniably the score’s almost literal heartbeat, its unforgettable signature. This thematic motor is not only memorable, it’s also a powerful and clever narrative device; Williams’ concept was to have the theme stand in for the shark, which is often unseen, to speed it up and slow it down as a way of conveying its proximity to the human protagonists. Without ever feeling cartoonish, it is scoring as storytelling, music as both narrative and mind control—a gift at which Williams would prove to be a wizard.

However, to only remember the two notes is to reduce a masterpiece—a veritable symphony—to its simplest denominator. We do something similar with the opening notes in Beethoven’s fifth symphony, but both compositions are large-scale works that develop a central, hummable theme into an epic musical drama. Williams would never claim that his film scores are symphonies. Technically they are not: they don’t follow strict sonata form, and they are necessarily constructed around the architecture of movie scenes, their durations and interruptions and moods at the mercy of the filmmaker’s blueprint.

But Williams, for several years leading up to 1975, had been on an unspoken stealth mission to elevate his film scores above the perfunctory gebrauchsmusik that Hollywood film music so often was, and to approach each scoring assignment like a symphonist. He adopted the leitmotif tradition from opera—assigning a melody or motif to individual characters and story elements—and he honed a way of serving a film’s needs and all its synchronizations while simultaneously developing themes across the length of an entire score, giving each score its own compositional arc and having individual cues inherently connected to one another. Where movie music had so often been disjointed and reactionary, he labored at giving his scores internal logic and developmental integrity.

The turning point for Williams was a 1968 TV movie, Heidi, and he matured this art even further in two films for director Mark Rydell: The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972). These were the same two scores that alerted a young, soundtrack-collecting Spielberg to Williams, and that made him want to hire Williams the moment he started directing features. (Their first collaboration was The Sugarland Express, in 1974.)

It was an incredible lightning strike. Spielberg, 29, going against the grain of his peers, wanted old-fashioned, symphonic, explicitly narrative scoring in his big throwback movies—which were already like visual music and primed for big, romantic accompaniment. Williams, 43, was a veteran, trained in the old ways of orchestral scoring, and chomping at the bit to run free with his newfound self-directive. It was a match made in cinematic heaven, and Jaws was the moment when these two artists alchemized and became luminous.

Listen again to the Jaws score—the whole score. It begins with fear and, yes, those two notes—aptly swimming, churning with a brainless, relentless appetite for flesh. The theme proper, which expands from that seesaw motor into a rising-falling melody on solo tuba, a ghostly string line, watery harp arpeggios, and a lot of orchestral angst, evokes the paganistic dance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Williams goes primal with it in the many scenes of violent dismemberment.

He also introduces, in just one scene, a short passage of humanistic poetry. When Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is sitting at his dinner table one evening, gloomy after being slapped in the face by a mother who blames him for the grisly death of her child, Brody’s own son lifts his spirits when he begins to imitate his father’s hand gestures and facial expressions. Williams scored this poignant grace note with a low pedal tone on double bass and halting, gossamer figures played by piano, harp, and vibraphone. It’s one of the earliest examples of Spielberg and Williams creating a sacred moment in the midst of popcorn action and adventure, and it’s one of the elements that makes Jaws so much more than just a “scary shark movie.”

When Brody, Quint (Robert Shaw), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) go out to sea for the film’s second half, Williams scored their adventure like a swashbuckling, seafaring ballet—using the language of singalong sea shanties and Old Hollywood pirate movies. All the while the main Jaws theme remains an active participant, and none of this feels incongruous or out of place. Williams deftly mapped a musical story to the needs of the film’s narrative, but one that listeners can also follow as its own exquisitely satisfying journey.

It wasn’t the first time he had done this, but Jaws was by far the best film he had ever scored—and it signaled a new era not just in his career, but in film music as an art form. Working with two young directors with old-school tastes (Spielberg, and soon George Lucas), Williams revived an ancient way of composing and perfected the art of film scoring. His music ennobled and transcended the films themselves, and with Jaws he began his reign as arguably the finest composer for cinema who has ever lived.

And it all started with two notes—but really, it was a whole damn symphony.

^{Feature image: Photo by Noah Negishi on Unsplash.}

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Journey into Darkness: The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest Basel, Switzerland

When you let me go
I barely stayed afloat
I’m floating all alone
Still holding on to hope

—JJ, Austria, “Wasted Love”
Winning song of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025

Many waters
Cannot quench love
Neither can the floods
Drown it

—Yuval Raphael, Israel, “New Day Will Rise” (from the original Hebrew)
Second place, Eurovision Song Contest 2025

How very different the bridges of the first- and second-place songs, JJ’s “Wasted Love” for Austria and Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise” for Israel, were at Eurovision 2025. And how uncannily the same. Does love survive when tested by the seas and floods threatening to inundate it? The survival of love is both denied and affirmed, threatened but still buoyed by the precarity of hope. Darkness haunts both songs, filling the stage with the stark play of light against the ominous backdrop of black. If the two songs and their metaphors are consonant at many levels, they were also portentous of the larger dissonance of the largest song contest in the world and its turn toward the darkness that envelops Europe in 2025.

The signs of Eurovision’s turn in 2025 took many and varied forms, but it is the abundance and commonness that pose questions about Europe itself. In significantly larger numbers than previously, the lyrics of the competing Eurosongs were in languages other than English. Each of the Baltic states, for example, sang in languages other than English—Latvian and Lithuanian, and Estonia’s Tommy Cash sang “Espresso Macchiato” primarily in Italian and Spanish. Larger and smaller nations alike chose to sing in national languages. Germany and Iceland, for example, both with long histories of Eurosongs in English, sang in their native languages.

The lyrics of the 2025 Eurosongs tended in greater numbers toward serious subjects, further reflecting the darkening moment. Songs with the comical lyrics that often distinguish Eurosongs did not entirely disappear, but they did not place as well as they frequently do. Sweden’s “Bara bada bastu” (Just Take a Sauna), sung by the Finnish group KAJ and wackily staged in a sauna, was favored to win prior to the Grand Finale, but it placed a fairly distant fourth.

The field of competitors in 2025 was noticeably smaller: thirty-seven as opposed to as many as forty-three in previous years. Above all, the nations choosing not to compete were in Eastern Europe—Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and North Macedonia—while Russia and Belarus are banned from competing due to the ongoing war with Ukraine. Despite the financial reasons for not competing, the result has been a realignment of European nations with political stakes that resemble an earlier division of Europe into East and West. Just as the first Eurovision Song Contest was a response to the Cold War in 1956, so too do recent Eurovisions reflect the East-West divide in the Europe of a New Cold War.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is responsible for organizing the participation of nations in its European media empire has long established rules meant to distance the Eurovision from politics. Over the contest’s historical longue durée these rules have been effective to varying degrees, often by requiring that Eurosongs with politically specific lyrics make changes that depoliticize them. Those changes are usually accommodated (e.g., in 2024 when Israel was required to change some lyrics and the title of its entry, from “October Rain” to “Hurricane”), but occasional rejections are not unknown (e.g., Georgia with its 2009 entry, “We Don’t Wanna Put In”).

In 2025, the dividing line between the political and apolitical collapsed, thereby releasing the flood waters of the political. The rules designed to prevent the political could no longer withstand the Realpolitik of a Europe in conflict with itself. At the center of the storm was Israel and the contradictions unleashed by its continued participation while at war in Gaza. Calls for banning Israel because of its conflicts with Palestinians, especially in Gaza, have been growing for years. Palestine has itself launched tentative efforts to participate in the Eurovision, but without luck because of the absence of a national broadcasting network. Protests of Israeli Eurovision participation coalesced in 2019, when the Eurovision took place in Tel Aviv. Palestinian musicians even went so far as to organize an alternative Gazavision in 2019.

In 2025, all forms of pro-Palestinian protest were banned in Basel. Palestinian flags were not allowed, and the negative response of audiences to Yuval Raphael’s performances (booing) were scrubbed from EBU broadcasts. When Raphael placed in the middle of the field after the professional-juries voted, she catapulted to first place after the Israeli government organized a massive popular-vote surge on social media. She led the field until the final announcement of popular voting nudged JJ ahead into first place. In the week following the Grand Finale in Basel, the critical response to the flood of politicking in the Eurovision had swollen to the point that many recognize it as an existential crisis for the Eurovision Song Contest. It either will or will not be a response to the political forces dividing Europe.

It is my custom each year to end this blog post by giving final voice to a song that has special meaning for me, often because it offers an alternative vision for what the Eurovision Song Contest has been and what it might become. I discover the meaning I seek in these final sonic epilogues through acts of return and remembrance, return to powerful and intimate Eurovision moments of the past, return also to the exquisite beauty afforded by song itself. Accordingly, I remind myself that it is song that lies at the heart of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is song, so the first great theorist of song, Johann Gottfried Herder, reminds us, that “loves the masses” and their humanity. In search of song, I return to Latvia, where the young Herder, living in Riga, may have experienced his first folk songs, and I look to this year’s Latvian Eurovision entry, Tautumeitas’s “Bur man laimi” (Chant of Happiness). To complete the rhetorical framing of this blogpost, I close with the bridge of a song from Latvian folk song tradition. I return to “Bur man laimi” to remember—and to remind us—that the journey into darkness can pave the way to new light.

I didn’t know my own happiness
I didn’t know my own happiness
Until I met my misery

_{Featured image: the stage of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 by MrSilesian. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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10 books to read this Pride Month [reading list]

Dive into ten remarkable books that illuminate the diverse and vibrant experiences of the LGBTQ+ community. From historical explorations that uncover the rich tapestry of LGBTQ+ history to biographies of influential musical figures who have shaped the cultural landscape, these books offer invaluable perspectives. Whether you’re looking to educate yourself, find inspiration, or simply enjoy compelling stories, these books are essential reads that honor and uplift LGBTQ+ voices.

Choosing Love: What LGBTQ+ Christians Can Teach Us All About Relationships, Inclusion, and Justice

What does the battle between conservative Christians and LGBTQ+ people look like from the vantage point of those who are both? Choosing Love brings together LGBTQ+ conservative Christian experiences with insights from civil rights thinkers, Black feminism, and queer thinkers of color.

Learn more about Choosing Love by Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin

On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide

A lively and imaginative exploration of the career and music of the Rocket Man. Elton John is not only “still standing,” he is a living superlative, the ultimate record-breaking, award-winning survivor of the great era of pop and rock music that he helped to shape during his six decades in the music industry.

Learn more about On EltonJohn by Matthew Restall

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour constitutes the first ever history of those dandies who emanated from the less privileged layers of the populace—the lowly clerks, shop assistants, domestic servants, and labourers who increasingly emerged as style-conscious men about town during the modern age. Discover the hidden history of the transgender dandy in interwar Paris and Berlin, the zoot suiter, the teddy boy, the New Romantic, and the many colourful dandies from the past that continue to influence us today.

Learn more about The Dandy by Peter K. Andersson

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

In the prize-winning The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. This year marks the 100th anniversary of The New Negro. What better way to celebrate than by learning more about the life of Alain Locke, the man who popularized the term.

Learn more about The New Negro by Jeffrey C. Stewart

The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America

The Things She Carried explores how purses have served as more than fashion accessories—they’ve been symbols of privacy, pride, and activism. Kathleen B. Casey examines their role in breaking social barriers, from Black women in the civil rights movement to LGBTQ+ individuals using bags to defend their bodies and as declarations of identity. This powerful history highlights how everyday objects can become tools for resistance and self-expression, making it a compelling read for Pride Month and beyond.

Learn more about The Things She Carried by Kathleen B. Casey

Colette: My Literary Mother

Colette was a pioneering, ground-breaking modernist writer, but has not always had her originality and worth recognized in Britain. Her work provocatively uses unstable narratives, gaps, silences, fairytale, mythical tropes, and sensual evocations of childhood, sex, and landscapes. Michèle Roberts examines how Colette expresses her unsettling content on desire, perversion, ageing, and different forms of love.

Learn more about Colette by Michèle Roberts

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

James Baldwin’s work remains profoundly relevant, offering a lens into the intersections of race, sexuality, and identity. His fiction explores personal dilemmas amid complex social pressures, as seen in Giovanni’s Room, which centers gay and bisexual experiences, and Sonny’s Blues, where music becomes a metaphor for resilience. Tom Jenks’s analysis of Sonny’s Blues highlights Baldwin’s meticulous storytelling, showing how the narrative stays with readers. Baldwin’s exploration of masculinity, race, and class challenged norms and shaped conversations around LGBTQ+ rights, making his work essential reading.

Learn more about James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” by Tom Jenks

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750

Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere in Europe, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys.

Learn more about Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by Sir Noel Malcolm

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness is among the most famous banned books in history. A pioneering work of literature, Radclyffe Hall’s novel charts the development of a ‘female sexual invert’, Stephen Gordon, who from childhood feels an innate sense of masculinity and desire for women.

Learn more about The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman put forward a radical new language of the body, the nation, and same-sex love.

Learn more about Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Check out these books and more on Bookshop US and Bookshop UK.

_{Feature image by Steve Johnson via Unsplash.}

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Ten transformative Andraé Crouch tracks that shaped gospel music [playlist]

At his passing in 2015, President Barack Obama celebrated Andraé Crouch as the “leading pioneer of contemporary gospel music.” The Guardian UK newspaper’s obituary called him the “foremost gospel singer of his generation.” Ten years after his death, Andraé Crouch’s songs are still found in more hymnals—Black and white—than any African American composer, save Thomas Dorsey (and Dorsey had a 30-year head start!).

While Crouch’s live performances galvanized audiences in venues ranging from Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall to Explo ’72, it is his compositions that are best remembered today. As Obama suggested, Crouch all but created contemporary gospel music. He’s also credited as the founder of the Praise & Worship music phenomenon. He was an innovative evangelist, a restless composer, musical experimenter, and a perfectionist whose gospel songs are still sung today around the world.

Choosing among Crouch’s many recordings from a 50-year career in music is an exercise in frustration but we have identified 10 songs that we believe can truthfully be said to be “transformative”:

1. “The Blood (Will Never Lose Its Power)” 

While watching the Rev. James Cleveland pour barbecue sauce on a brisket at a cookout, Crouch, still just in his teens, was inspired to write his first gospel song, “The Blood (Will Never Lose Its Power).” Frustrated, Crouch initially tossed the hastily scribbled lyrics, but twin sister Sandra Crouch fished the sheet from the trash and Billy Preston quickly fleshed-out Andréa’s melody. Crouch recorded two versions of “The Blood,” this one sung by Billy Thedford (later Bili Redd) from the album Take the Message Everywhere (1969).

2. “I’ve Got Confidence”

The most pop-oriented of all of Crouch’s hits, this happy, upbeat number caught the ear of Elvis Presley, who recorded it in 1972 on his final and best-reviewed religious album, He Touched Me. The song was quickly recorded by dozens of other artists. “I’ve Got Confidence” appears on Andraé and the Disciples’ Keep on Singin’ (1970).

3. “My Tribute (to God be the Glory)”

One of Crouch’s most symphonic—and beloved—compositions, “My Tribute” owes a spiritual debt to the beloved hymn writer Fanny Crosby’s “To God be the Glory.” The song’s soaring chorus comes to a dramatic crescendo and has become a part of the evangelical church’s core repertoire since its first appearance on Keep on Singin’ but it is Alfie Silas Durio’s heart-stoppingly stratospheric recording on the Finally album (1982) that remains the definitive version.

4. “Through It All”

In his short biography by the same name from 1974, Crouch tells the heartbreaking story of his first and greatest love, Tramaine Davis, who left the Disciples and married famed gospel singer Walter Hawkins. The loss threw Andraé into a deep depression that only lifted when the words and music to this triumphant ballad came to him, though he couldn’t bring himself to record it until the release of the Soulfully album in early 1972.

5. “Satisfied”

One of the defining moments of the Jesus Music movement and the beginnings of contemporary Christian music is Andraé Crouch and the Disciples’ electrifying performance of “Satisfied” before 80,000 screaming fans at Explo ’72 in Dallas—still one of the largest religious music festivals ever. The Disciples turned what was a pop song on Soulfully into a Holiness piano-driven gospel vamp/stomp. The Explo ’72 version is available on YouTube via a professionally-produced video that includes footage of the massive festival.

6. “Bless His Holy Name”

Perhaps the first recording of a song in the style of what would come to be called Praise & Worship music, “Bless His Holy Name” is the highlight of Crouch’s first “solo” album, Just Andrae (late 1972). Andraé would return to his format throughout his career, with gentle, reverent hymns like “Hallelujah,” “It Won’t Be Long,” and “Praises.”

7. “Jesus is the Answer”

Though recorded before Just Andrae, “Live” in Carnegie Hall was not released until a year later, in 1973. The album, which served as his breakthrough in both the Black and white Christian markets, showcases Andrae’s reliance on the Holy Spirit to “lead” the services. “Jesus is the Answer” was still only partially completed when he introduced it on the Carnegie Hall stage. Paul Simon found the happy, bouncy tune so appealing that he recorded it on Live Rhymin’ later that year.

8. “Take Me Back”

By the release of the Take Me Back album in 1975, “A-list” studio musicians were clamoring to record Crouch’s innovative, instantly memorable songs. The song showcases Billy Preston’s inspired work on the Hammond B3 organ and the brilliant vocals of Danniebelle Hall. Whatever musical adventures Crouch might explore elsewhere, he always included at least one triumphant, memorable gospel song like “Take Me Back.”

9. “Soon and Very Soon”

Though released on the It’s Another Day album (late 1976), “Soon and Very Soon” is based on a timeless Church of God in Christ chant—or perhaps an even older spiritual. It is compelling, haunting and irresistible, especially when the senior members of his father’s Christ Memorial Radio Choir, led by 80-something Mother Dora Brackins, join the chorus on the close.

 10. “Just Like He Said He Would”

Live in London (1978), with its iconic cover of a spaceship piano hovering over the United Kingdom, was Andrae’s last great release. Over the course of the two LPs, Crouch preaches, testifies, re-visits, and re-imagines beloved favorites, unpredictably introduces old hymns, and improvises several new songs on the spot. “Just Like He Said He Would,” originally released on Take Me Back, brilliantly synthesizes jazz, funk, R&B, rock, and gospel into a seamless whole—and thrills the stunned English audience.

_{Featured image by Matt Botsford via Unsplash.}

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Ten ways to see the Elton story [playlist]

Sir Elton John is a living superlative, unequaled in music history in terms of global sales, awards, and career longevity. His catalogue is therefore vast, comprising some five hundred songs recorded over almost six decades. So why choose just these ten? Although the list overlaps with any greatest hits package or essentials playlist, it represents neither my claim for the best ten nor my personal ten favorites. Instead, I chose each track to kick off one of the ten chapters of On Elton John; each song prompts a story about Elton, each one is a window that offers a particular way of seeing him and his career.

1. I’m Still Standing (1983)

At 177 bpm, “I’m Still Standing” has the fastest tempo of any Elton single. An infectious global hit, it helped Too Low for Zero become John’s biggest album since his mid-1970s imperial phase. Elton called it confident and swaggering, and it landed as a bold comeback statement—even more so in his post-rehab 1990s. By the time of 2019’s Rocketman biopic, the song could be deployed as an exaltation of survival. But there is a twist. The title and lyrics are not about Elton at all. They were written by his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, and they refer to Bernie’s recovery from the end of a love affair. It was really Bernie who was “pickin’ up the pieces of my life,” who was “still standing.”

2. Someone Saved My Life Tonight (1975)

Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’s sole single, “Someone Saved My Life” was a long and melancholy hit. It narrates the 1967 incident when Taupin rescued John from an ill-considered engagement to the woman with whom he had chastely cohabited for six months. Suicidally miserable, John’s life was literally saved. Or was it? The suicide attempt was, as John later admitted, unconvincing. And in the song, it is Long John Baldry, not Taupin, who intervened to save his old friend. Baldry, secretly gay by necessity, spotted that John needed saving not from marrying the wrong woman, but from marrying any woman—a fact as obvious now as it was hidden then.

3. Rocket Man (1972)

“Rocket Man,” John’s first global smash, boosted his career into the stratosphere of stardom. By the mid-70s, he was the planet’s biggest-selling recording artist—on top of the world, not “lonely out in space.” As a song and as a branding device, “Rocket Man” has had a long shelf life, its title used in everything from hits compilations to his 2019 biopic, from John’s record label and its film and TV offshoot, to his fan club and a funding initiative with the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Its bleak lyrics have been buried by positive associations; John even performed it live at the 1998 launch of the space shuttle Discovery. In contrast to David Bowie, whose Starman metaphor evokes an otherworldly spaceman, Elton is an earthly superstar.

4. Philadelphia Freedom (1975)

Billie Jean King is one of the few living people for whom John and Taupin have written a song. “Philadelphia Freedom” was created when King was the coach and leading player of a mixed-gender tennis team called the Philadelphia Freedoms. John gave the song an upbeat pop-disco vibe, imagining it as an anthem for his friend’s team. But Taupin was stumped. As he’d yet to meet King, knew nothing about tennis, and was unfamiliar with Philadelphia, he delivered ambiguous lyrics that lent themselves to various causes. In the US, the song caught a rising tide of patriotism in the build-up to the Bicentennial. In Philly, it served as a civic anthem. And, as both King and John went from being closeted to out, the song steadily grew into an anthem of gay pride.

5. Electricity (2005)

As Elton’s sixty-third and latest solo Top 40 hit in the UK, “Electricity” saw him enter his second decade as a highly successful composer of songs for musicals, which started with 1994’s The Lion King. Part of the score for Billy Elliot: The Musical—a film-based stage musical for which John wrote all the music (to lyrics by Lee Hall)—the song represents John’s evolution through genres to a natural destination for him. Echoing his origins as a composer-for-hire of piano melodies, “Electricity” also reflects his love and mastery of the genre that is one of his true homes: musical theatre pop.

6. Border Song (1970)

“Border Song” was the first John single to chart anywhere (#29 in the Netherlands, #34 in Canada) and his first to chart in the US (a week at #92). But it was also covered by Aretha Franklin. She made the song her own, embracing its gospel/R&B potential, adding to its title the phrase that begins the song— “Holy Moses.” Franklin’s recording was bigger than John’s, peaking at US #37, getting further attention when it was included as the closing track on her Grammy-winning 1972 hit album, Young, Gifted and Black. Franklin’s recording also drew attention to the final lines and its deeply resonant sentiment: “There’s a man over there / what’s his color, I don’t care / he’s my brother, let us live in peace.”

7. Bennie and the Jets (1973)

What an iconic opening chord! Elton’s fingers are on the keys for just a second before he pauses, that fleeting sound instantly recognizable. Concert crowds roar, taking collective delight in the recognition of a single, uniquely odd set of notes. Their noise fills the brief silence before the band comes in, four beats later, with Elton now playing the intended chord, the “right” one. For that initial chord was never intended for the final version of “Bennie and the Jets.” It was a mistake made as John was finding the right notes in the studio, the tape already rolling. The producer and engineer retained it as a production cue to “fake-live” the whole song. Elton approved, keeping the perfect mistake as his own opening cue for half a century through to the final concerts of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.

8. Candle in the Wind (1973; 1987; 1997)

“Candle in the Wind” has enjoyed a long life: three dates, three versions, three hits. It was originally a threnody—an elegy—to Marilyn Monroe. The E major melody that John composed for Taupin’s lyrics perfectly matched the topic of tragic celebrity, sentimental but just shy of saccharine. As a 1974 single, it reached #11 in the UK but was unreleased in the US. Yet its haunting and gently anthemic melody made it a fan favorite, and in 1987 it was chosen to promote John’s Live in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, hitting UK #5 and US #6. Its 1997 iteration would be its biggest, with lyrics rewritten by Taupin in honor of Princess Diana, her life cut short like Monroe’s at 36. Never performed again by Elton after Diana’s funeral, the studio version quickly became the best-selling single of all time worldwide.

9. Cold Heart (2021)

“Cold Heart” helped Elton break yet more records. A Top Ten hit in more than 40 countries, it made him the first solo artist to reach the UK Top 10 in six consecutive decades, and the oldest artist (aged 74) to hit #1 on the Australian singles chart. And it gave him the longest span (50 years and 10 months) of appearances in the US Top 40. All of which matters not simply because it is more data to add to Elton’s superlativeness. It matters because it matters to John himself, the consummate chart-watcher, the ultimate collector—of everything from vinyl records to chart records, art to artists whom he can collaborate with or mentor (like Dua Lipa, his partner here in “Cold Heart”).

10. This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore (2001)

 “This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore” is all about endings. A languid ballad built on Elton’s piano and vocals, the Songs from the West Coast closer was a single whose video featured Justin Timberlake as a young Elton— amusingly and poignantly invoking the theme of lost love and ageing. John leans into Taupin’s bitter-heartbreak lyrics, giving them his classic melodic piano treatment. Was this a perfect postscript to their lives and careers since the two first met in late-60s London—so full of promise and possibility, ready to be “riding on the storyline, furnace burning overtime”? It might have been, but John and Taupin kept writing together. John has repeatedly run out of steam, but he always gets going again. Musically and personally, Reg just keeps on striking back.

_{Featured image by Raph_PH. Cropped. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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The meteoric rise of Louis Armstrong [playlist]

In the five years between his first recording session as a sideman with King Oliver in April 1923 to his final date as a leader in Chicago in December 1928, Louis Armstrong changed the sound of American popular music, with both his trumpet and with his voice. He perfected the art of the improvised solo, expanded the range of the trumpet, popularized scat singing, rewrote the rules of pop singing, and perhaps most importantly, infused everything he did with the irresistible feeling of swing. In surveying the landscape on Spotify alone, one can find 269 sides with Armstrong from this period, totaling 13 hours and 30 minutes of music. Trying to boil that output down to 12 representative tracks is not an easy task, but hopefully this playlist conveys a taste of just what made Armstrong so special in this decade—and every decade.

1. “Tears” – King Oliver’s Jazz Band – Chicago, 5-15 October 1923

For Armstrong, the sun rose and set on cornetist Joe “King” Oliver, who served as a mentor/father figure during his formative years in New Orleans. Armstrong made his first records with Oliver but rarely got the opportunity to “tear out,” as he put it. He made the most of one such opportunity, taking a series of scintillating breaks on “Tears,” co-written by Louis and then-girlfriend Lillian Hardin. After Louis and Lil married in 1924, she convinced Louis that Oliver was holding him back and insisted that her husband quit the band. It was a difficult decision, but it ended up being Armstrong’s first major step towards stardom.

2. “Shanghai Shuffle” – Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra – New York City, 10-13 October 1924

Armstrong moved to New York City in the fall of 1924 to join one of the top Black dance bands in the nation, Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra. Though members of Henderson’s group initially looked down on Armstrong’s southern fried disposition, that all changed when they heard him play. “Shanghai Shuffle” is a perfect example of what Armstrong brought to New York, taking a short, explosive solo in the middle of a dated, quasi-exotic arrangement, much like a burst of sunshine emerging from the clouds. Henderson reedman Don Redman was paying attention and began transforming the orchestra into a pioneering swing band–using Armstrong’s improvisations as an inspiration.

3. “St. Louis Blues” – Bessie Smith – New York City, 14 January 1925

Armstrong became quite adept at blowing obligatos behind various blues singers during his time in New York, climaxing with this iconic meeting with “The Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith. Calling what Armstrong does on “St. Louis Blues” an “obligato” is rather limiting; it’s really a duet, as his responses to Smith’s powerful vocal are note perfect, establishing the rules of how to properly accompany a singer, rules that are still adhered to this day.

4. “Gut Bucket Blues” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 12 November 1925

In the fall of 1925, Armstrong moved back to Chicago, where OKeh Records finally gave him the opportunity to make records under his own name. In addition to Lil on piano, Armstrong hired three of his elders from New Orleans and formed a studio group, the Hot Five. After feeling stifled by Oliver and Henderson, Armstrong unleashed his infectious personality on the very first Hot Five side to be released, “Gut Bucket Blues,” confidently introducing the members of the band and establishing the template for what would become one of the most influential series of recordings in the history of American popular music.

5. “Heebie Jeebies” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 26 February 1926

OKeh’s E. A. Fearn encouraged Armstrong to sing on “Heebie Jeebies,” which was originally conceived as an instrumental by Boyd Atkins. Armstrong wrote down some rudimentary lines but during the actual recording of the tune, he claimed to have dropped the lyric sheet. Instead of spoiling the take, Armstrong began using his voice like an instrument, something he did back when he was a kid singing on the streets of New Orleans, singing nonsense syllables, but phrasing them like one of his swinging trumpet solos. This type of singing didn’t have a name but Fearn began marketing it as “skat” and the result was Armstrong’s first legitimate hit record.

6. “Cornet Chop Suey” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 26 February 1926

After already impacting the course of pop singing with “Heebie Jeebies,” Armstrong next turned his attention towards writing the rules on how to take an effective solo with “Cornet Chop Suey,” recorded on the same day. This is Armstrong’s show from start to finish, opening with a dazzling unaccompanied intro before moving into the forward-looking melody, composed by Armstrong two years earlier. But it was the stop-time interlude in the middle of the record that made trumpeters, trombonists, pianists, and other instrumentalists around the country sit up and take notes on how to create a memorable solo.

7. “Stomp Off, Let’s Go” – Erskine Tate’s Vendome Orchestra – Chicago, 28 May 1926

The Hot Five, as important as they are, was only a studio group and rarely performed in public. During this period, Armstrong performed nightly with Erskine Tate’s Vendome Orchestra, where he accompanied silent movies, did comedy routines, and was featured on classical numbers like the “Intermezzo” from Cavalleria Rusticana. Armstrong’s only recording session with Tate resulted in one of the decade’s hottest records, “Stomp Off, Let’s Go,” which showcases the piano work of Teddy Weatherford, in addition to offering a taste of Armstrong’s flashy style of the time.

8. “Big Butter and Egg Man” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 16 November 1926

Armstrong doubled for much of 1926, working with Erskine Tate at the Vendome Theater before heading to the Sunset Cafe, where he was featured trumpeter in Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra. “Big Butter and Egg Man” was a Sunset Cafe specialty before being adapted by the Hot Five in what became known as a legendary recording. Armstrong’s solo is a marvel of storytelling, but he also gets to display his good humor and showmanship in his vocal spot, hallmarks of his later career that were already firmly in place in the 1920s.

9. “Hotter Than That” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 13 December 1927

By the end 1927, Armstrong was beginning to outpace the original members of the Hot Five. The records began featuring more and more of his solos, which were of a higher caliber than the work of his New Orleans elders. Armstrong needed new musicians to inspire him, such as guitar pioneer Lonnie Johnson, who made his presence felt on “Hotter Than That.” Armstrong solos over the rhythm section for a full chorus at the start, eschewing the group’s usual New Orleans polyphonic style, and embarks on a scat episode that is positively thrilling, his mastery of rhythm on full display. Towards the end, he even uncorks a two-note riff that would become a staple during the big band era. As a farewell to the original Hot Five, it doesn’t get any hotter.

10. “West End Blues” – Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five – Chicago, 28 June 1928

In June 1928, Armstrong returned to the studio with a retooled Hot Five, made up of members of Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra and the man known as the “Father of Modern Jazz Piano,” Earl “Fatha” Hines. On King Oliver’s composition “West End Blues,” Armstrong opened with an unaccompanied trumpet cadenza in which he utilized everything he had learned about the instrument since first picking it up 15 years earlier. The entire record, from the cadenza to Armstrong’s mournful scatting to Hines’s dazzling piano solo, is simply a masterpiece of twentieth century recorded music, one that is still being studied in the twenty-first (a #westendblueschallenge was all the rage on social media a few years ago).

11. “Beau Koo Jack” – Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five – Chicago, 5 December 1928

By December 1928, OKeh Records realized the old trumpet-trombone-clarinet-banjo-piano sound was a thing of the past and began pushing Armstrong to record with slightly larger ensembles. On “Beau Koo Jack,” the addition of Don Redman’s alto saxophone and an arrangement by the song’s composer, Alex Hill, completely modernized the sound of Armstrong’s “Savoy Ballroom Five,” paving the way towards the Swing Era of the next decade. Armstrong shines in his setting, showing off every tool in his toolbox in a solo that still has the ability to astound in 2025.

12. “Tight Like This” – Chicago, 12 December 1928

The final song recorded at Armstrong’s final Chicago session before relocating to New York, “Tight Like This” can be viewed as a summary of Armstrong’s entire life up to this point. There’s comedy in the discussion about whether or not “it” is “tight like that”; there’s a minor-key mood that allows Armstrong to tap into the music he learned from the Jewish Karnofsky family; and there’s hints of the “Spanish tinge” as Jelly Roll Morton called it, incorporating a different, but no less important, flavor from his hometown. But most importantly, Armstrong’s three-chorus solo tells a story, taking its time and building to a roof-shaking climax that would be the blueprint for future soloists ranging from B. B. King to Jimi Hendrix to Eddie Van Halen (and those are just the guitarists). Full pop star stardom awaited Armstrong in New York in 1929 but the records he made in the 1920s established him once and for all as one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century—and beyond.

_{Featured Image From “Stomp Off, Let’s Go” Figure 27.1  1926 publicity photo of the original Hot Five. From left to right: Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr, Kid Ory, Lillian Hardin Armstrong. Credit: Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum. Photo restoration by Nick Dellow.}

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The unknown <i>A Complete Unknown</i>

Folk music is still and always with us. It is in the tap of the hammer to the music on the radio or, in older days, to the workers’ own singing. It is the rhythmic push of the cabinetmaker’s saw, the scan across the checkout station to the beat of songs inside the checker’s head. “Folk music is a river, always flowing, steady and heedless. It has always been the underground stream of American musical culture: the rhythms of daily life.”

In the Academy Award-nominated film A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan stalks off the stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival as the crowd boos. The filmmakers present this as a momentous turn for American culture, when rock’n’roll (factually, folk-rock and blues) trounces the feel-good, all-together-now world of American folk music. The significance of this event, which climaxes the film, is far more subtle. And the private reactions from Pete Seeger, whom Dylan once revered, have yet to be told.

The folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s emerged from eighteenth-century religious revivals, emphasizing individual honesty and spirituality, such as the Great Awakening. In the twentieth century, the first folk music revival was led by researchers and collectors, as in Germany, inspired by nineteenth-century Romantics. Preservationists of stories, jokes, or tunes visited libraries; tromped out in the hills and hollers of Appalachia, down the damp and dusty byways to find a local storyteller or that “fiddler in the woods.”

Out of these efforts came a cultural preservation movement pioneered by John Lomax, a collector of cowboy ballads, and particularly by his son, Alan Lomax. When Alan met Pete Seeger, son of musicologist Charles Seeger (who was the first to teach a course in folk music at an American university), they shifted that movement from cultural antiquarianism to activism, to reflect their desire to use songs for social equality. This fusion of folk music and social justice is what the filmmakers characterize as dissolving in the chaos of “Dylan goes electric” in July 1965. At this point, many of what could be called his followers were disaffected by his apparent turn from liberal politics and from traditional songs in his compositions.

Though depiction of the scene in Greenwich Village is accurate, the film misreads both traditional music and its profound influence on all of Dylan’s tunes and lyrics. Anyone listening to his adaptation of “900 Miles,” or how he turned “The Twa Sisters” (tenth in the collection of traditional ballads of Francis J. Child) into a deeply personal tale, or the traditional ballads and songs on his first album, Bob Dylan, (dismissed here as “other people’s songs”) can only marvel at his genius of reworking tradition. This corresponded to the purpose of the Newport Folk Festival which, instead of a parade of “stars,” devoted most of its stages to songs originating hundreds of years prior.

Dylan, however, was far more than a folk purist. Many do not realize that his first single had a rock band playing behind a rockabilly cut (“Mixed Up Confusion” in 1962), or that soon after that, he released a country-rock tune, “Rocks and Gravel,” also with a band. Dylan didn’t “go electric.” He’d been there for years. The film also disregards the aegis of that festival, directly traceable to the Romantic belief in the music of down-home, everyday folks and its uncommercial roots. The Newport board included Pete Seeger (and his wife and de facto manager, Toshi Ohta), and it had long allowed electrified instruments, though this was usually reserved for traditional blues musicians who had always played that way.

The question at the heart of the film then becomes one of Dylan’s motivation at provoking the citadel of American folk music: was he interested only in headlines and establishing himself commercially? Was he serious about singing out for social justice? (No careful listener to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Masters of War” can dispute this.)

In the film, viewers watch Dylan develop his chops—learning to work a mic, provoking interviewers, handling and at times dismissing baby boomers who sought him out as an oracle, singing alongside Seeger and Phil Ochs against injustice. We see him develop his performative, rebellious persona: mercurial, sullen, snarly, confrontational. Alongside him, we see his mentor Pete Seeger, here presented as benign but authentic, a citybilly singing hillbilly songs to syncretize them for urban audiences. Seeger was the Pied Piper of the folk revival introducing folk music, in one concert, to Dave Guard (Kingston Trio) and Joan Baez (for years Dylan’s partner to folk music). Seeger’s goal diverged from the commercializing instincts of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager, instead being rooted in the inherently democratic nature of folksong. And this is where A Complete Unknown stumbles. It captures the dress of folkies (Beat meets Hip) and their clubs: the Café Wha, Folk City, the Gaslight; but it fails to present folksongs as carriers of an important, centuries-long process. It presents Dylan as if he was unknowing and uncaring of folksong and the democratic, ground-up socialism implicit in them.

Finally, we arrive at the dramatic climax, with Dylan in leather jacket and boots (in contrast to Seeger’s flannel shirts) daring the folkies to accept him in his new coat of many colors. As usual, the search for truth through historical fiction requires fact separated from context and characters isolated from their motivation.

In this case, we must examine two issues with Dylan’s performance: a sound system unaccustomed to bands; and the distinctly non-folk, non-protest lyrics he sang. From the first booming chords of “Like a Rolling Stone,” conveniently released the week before this provocation, we hear the boos; objects tumble toward the stage. (Though the film presents audience reactions as mixed, in recordings derision clearly outnumbers cheers.) Seeger implores the sound mixers to turn down the volume; he wants the audience to hear Dylan clearly. “I just want to hear the words,” he kept repeating. Nevertheless, these were drowned out either because of the mix or because the sound system was never set up to handle instrumentation this loud. Add to this Dylan’s abandonment of civil rights and peace songs in favor of angry pop, and you have an audience and its leaders betrayed. That much is true. To many listening, Dylan should no more have a pop song on AM radio than Pete Seeger should replace Johnny Carson on late-night television.

There exist more published interpretations of this performance than of any other concert. (I’ve written mine in a biography of Seeger, How Can I Keep from Singing?) Some accused Dylan of prostituting himself for commercial success; or “I come to hear Dylan, not a pop group,” or, ineloquently: “Play folk music: You stink.” Dylan closed by returning to the stage with an acoustic guitar in place of his shiny Fender and played the prophetic, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” He charged off the stage with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, passing Toshi, who at this juncture is allowed one of her disgracefully few comments in the film: “Bob!”

In private, Seeger was far more upset by Dylan rejecting traditional song than he was about the sound system massacring the lyrics: “Last week at Newport, I ran to cover my ears and eyes because I could not bear either the screaming of the crowd nor some of the most destructive music this side of hell,” he wrote in a letter to himself.In this never-published critique, he referred to Dylan’s new career as a cancer eating away at the musician he had introduced to the world. Later, he would return to this moment repeatedly, trying to understand what had gone wrong.

The last word about his disassociation with folk music—though in later albums he repeatedly recorded traditional songs—comes from Dylan himself at the close of his autobiography, Chronicles: “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden. It was just too perfect.”

_{Featured image by Dave Gahr, used with permission.}

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Culture sounds the alarm: Tbilisi at the crossroads

This fall has been a season of momentous elections—and not just in the United States. Over the past several weeks, after two rounds of voting, Moldova voted to return to office its pro-EU President, Maia Sandu, as well as (despite noted Russian interference) narrowly approving a referendum in favor of Moldova joining the European Union. By contrast, in the Republic of Georgia, in a parliamentary election held on October 26 dogged with similar claims of internal and external vote-rigging, the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed a majority of the vote. These results have been strongly contested by Georgian opposition parties as well as by non-governmental observers within and outside of Georgia, who have provided numerous pieces of evidence of fraud and stolen votes. The Georgian president told multiple new outlets: “We were not just witnesses but also victims of what can only be described as a Russian special operation – a new form of hybrid warfare waged against our people and our country.” She also said, “So this is an election that has been stolen.” As a result, since the election, there have been a few protests in Tbilisi, with promises of more to come. The groundwork for these results and these events was laid well in advance: starting, arguably, in May 2024 (if not March 2023).

May 2024 was a pivotal month for the country of Georgia, marked by significant cultural events interwoven with the political and social upheavals of the time. The events that we witnessed in Tbilisi during the ongoing protests and other collective actions against the so-called “Foreign Agents Law” offer another case for testing music’s political valence. Although scholars have often discussed the politicization of music during the USSR (and, in Russia, after), Georgian music and cultural life has never been approached from the perspective of its political dimensions, even as after 1991 each successive Georgian government has continued Soviet political paradigms of music and culture.

In March 2023 the ruling Georgian Dream Party, which first came to power in 2012, first introduced the “Law about transparency of foreign influence,” colloquially known as the “Foreign Agents Law” or “Russian Law,”—legislation that aimed to require that any organization receiving more than 20% of its funding from non-Georgian sources register with the Georgian government as a Foreign Agent. A similar law had been introduced in Russia in 2011 and was one highly visible marker of that country’s recent slide toward authoritarianism. Yet in Georgia in 2023, under pressure from large demonstrations and rallies against it, Georgian Dream withdrew the law. Moreover, they promised never to bring it back.

The calculated reintroduction, at the beginning of April 2024, of this law ignited a powerful response from the Georgian people. Large, at times unprecedented, numbers of protesters took to the streets of Tbilisi, engaging in near-constant, daily demonstrations (see video 1, shot by Nana Sharikadze at the Woman’s March on April 20, 2024). Once re-introduced, the law sparked a series of events that threatened the very foundations of Georgian society, both its fundamental values and its generations-long aspirations. Once again, Georgia was forced to reckon with its colonial past, specifically with the tensions between that past, the decolonizing wishes of much of its citizenry, and its potentially recolonized future, yet again in the shadow of its dominating northern neighbor. As the Georgian president, Salome Zourabishvili remarked at a concert on May 9, 2024, “Georgia is at the crossroads between its European future and its Russian past.” As Georgia stood at this crossroads, the voices of its people, amplified through music and protest, made it clear that their fight for a democratic and European future was far from over.

The political amplifications arose largely through coincidence: no one could have predicted that concerts planned well in advance would overlap with such a political and social crisis. Prime examples were concerts in Tbilisi by the Berlin Philharmonic on May 1 and 2, 2024 along with a Europe Day concert on May 9, 2024, featuring assembled dignitaries from both Georgia and the European Union. (And note that this day is celebrated by Russia, and previously by the USSR, as Victory over Fascism day, the end of World War II.)The Berlin Philharmonic visited Georgia as part of a pan-European tour of cultural and historical landmarks; the concert in Tbilisi, the EuropaKonzert, was its final destination. The orchestra played at the well-known Tsinandali Estate in Eastern Georgia on May 1. The next day they repeated the concert at the Tbilisi Opera House. These performances illustrated how established musical pieces, with their multifaceted, often contradictory historical connotations, can gain deeper and additional meanings during times of profound crisis. I (Nana Sharikadze) attended the concert at the Opera House and found it difficult to remain purely professional. By that time, I had already participated in 20 days of protests, and as I sat in the opera house, I was surrounded by many friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who I had frequently seen in the streets during those protests. The music on the program by Schubert (“Die Zauberharfe,” Overture, D. 644); Brahms (Violin Concerto, op. 77, played by Lisa Batiashvili); and Beethoven (Symphony no. 5) acquired additional resonances in such a context. (The conductor was Daniel Harding, who substituted for Daniel Barenboim.) And not just for me. The powerful, triumphant motifs and message of fate in Beethoven’s symphony drove the audience at its conclusion to shout out, in one voice, “No to the Russian law.” Their chanting filled the hall of the Opera Theatre, symbolizing the dramatic social disruptions and the enduring impact of these events on Georgian society today.

At that time in Tbilisi, nearly every event carried extra significance. Another such landmark was the gala concert held a week later on May 9, 2024 a few steps down the street from the Opera Theatre, at the Rustaveli National Theatre, in celebration of Europe Day. This concert featured a diverse, all-star roster of Georgian musicians from such genres as classical music, jazz, and various traditional music genres, among them jazz pianist Beka Gochiashvili, violinist Lisa Batiashvili, mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, cellist Lisa Ramishvili, violist Giorgi Tsagareli (wearing a Georgian soccer jersey), the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gory Girl’s Choir, pianist Giorgi Gigashvili, and pianist and composer Tsotne Zedgenidze. The concert included, among other selections, a jazz arrangement of Giya Kancheli’s “Herio Bichebo” (ჰერიო ბიჭებო, an important patriotic song, whose title is difficult, if not impossible, to translate); the Habanera from Bizet’s “Carmen”; and Nikoloz Rachveli’s “The Way Back Home” (გზა შინისაკენ). (Rachveli was the organizer and conductor of the entire concert). Again, a program of works selected long before the concert spoke profoundly to the present circumstances, using nostalgia, for home and a sense of European classicalness. And it is important to know that in the days before the concert, the violence against protesters had escalated: prominent figures found their residences defaced with graffiti labeling them enemies of the state; others were assaulted. Furthermore, just a day earlier, on May 8, the government had announced the establishment of an online registry of its enemies. (Just before the concert, one of the other audience members said to me [Peter Schmelz] in passing, “This is a bad time to visit Tbilisi.”)

We both attended this Europe Day concert and recall vividly the electric energy in the hall. It was part group therapy, prayer, and requiem, for a dream, for the hope of European integration. The press gathered in front of the building and the European delegates and Georgian President greeted concertgoers in a receiving line as they entered. Significantly, several rows of seats had been reserved for members of the government, who pointedly did not attend. Zourabishvili was the sole Georgian government representative in attendance and its sole voice. She was then, and continues to be today, a prominent voice publicly supporting Georgia’s pursuit of European values. These visibly empty seats in the center of the hall were a constant reminder throughout the concert of the tensions gripping the country over the proposed legislation, highlighting the deep disconnect between the government and the people in attendance at the concert, and by extension, large numbers of Georgian citizens. The “Ode to Joy,” the anthem of the European Union paired at the start of the concert with the Georgian anthem, formed an audible symbol of Georgia’s alignment with European values, standing in stark contrast to its Soviet past and its Georgian Dream present.

In order to reach more citizens than had been able to attend the concert, Zourabishvili organized an outdoor event with the same artists that was held immediately after the Europe Day concert in front of the Orbeliani Palace, a landmark in central Tbilisi. Unlike the concert before the more elite viewers at the theater, this one involved more audience participation. The gathered listeners became part of the performance itself, whistling in approval, and joining in song at several moments, among them, yet again, the “Ode to Joy,” when the building energy of the concert reached a peak. Before the Orbeliani Palace the diversity of contemporary Georgian society, and pointedly its youth, was on full display, unified under the idea of a European Georgia.

An essential new element also emerged in Georgia during this period of turmoil: protest music. Koka Nikoladze (b. 1989), a Georgian-born, now Oslo-based sound artist, composer, and inventor, created a piece called People. His music, an urgent, desperate cacophony, served as a powerful auditory representation of the collective plight. When I (Nana Sharikadze) first heard the sample of the music (see, esp. from 4:48 and 8:11 onward) on Facebook on May 17, I commented: “This is Georgia in the last month. I don’t know when you started working on this or what concept you have, but the whole country feels like this. This is an alarm, we have reached the point of screaming, and yet they still do not hear us. Their doors are deaf, they have welded shut, not opening; The silence of some is even more deafening.” Koka created it in April, and noted: “I was born, grew up, and have become exhausted in this environment [i.e., Georgia]. I have never felt such a sense of helplessness. I am sitting here (in Oslo), my thoughts are not responding anymore, thinking but unable to communicate.” The piece is a scream, as Nikoladze said, composed of recorded natural voices sourced and sequenced with care.

The final, third vote by 84 deputies, a majority of parliament, in favor of the bill, ensuring its passage, on 28 April 2024, felt like a betrayal of generations of long devotion and centuries of resistance, while in the streets we, including my colleagues and I (Nana Sharikadze), were screaming to be heard. The law went into effect on August 1, 2024.

Yet as a result of the mounting crises of 2024, and especially after the October 26 parliamentary election, Georgian society is confronting dramatic, uncertain times. The country has a clear, existential choice: between the colonial past and the decolonial future. It is a choice about surviving as a country, about whether we want to live where we belong (in the country of our birth) or emigrate. I (Nana) refuse to become an emigrant. Artists, musicians, writers, and other members of Georgian society are seriously concerned about their future in a country that has already demonstrated its intolerance of critical opinions or, indeed, of any sort of dissent. Culture and politics, despite the dreams and wishes of many, remain closely intertwined. That is why culture, artists, civil society, and all who value our democratic future are unifying on different platforms in support of Georgia’s European path, for developments free from the shadows of our colonial Soviet past.

_{Featured image by Jelger Groeneveld via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-2.0.}

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George Harrison: ten quintessential songs [playlist]

This playlist with annotations that I have put together is not intended to be a “best-of” George Harrison (although all the songs here would easily be on such a playlist). Nor is it meant to be exclusive—one could easily devise a playlist with ten different “quintessential” George Harrison songs: one that would include “My Sweet Lord,” “It’s All Too Much,” “I Me Mine,” “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth),” “Blue Jay Way,” and, of course, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun.”

Rather, these are ten songs that represent various aspects of George Harrison’s brilliance as a songwriter and recording artist. They tie together themes, concepts, and musical and lyrical approaches in a manner that represents some essential aspects of George’s genius and creativity.

1. Don’t Bother Me

Written while he was lying ill in a hotel bed in August 1963, “Don’t Bother Me” could well stand as a credo for George Harrison, an early manifesto capturing his personality and entire mindset about fame. Especially in the context of the Beatles’ 1963 album, With the Beatles—replete with typically sunny original numbers by Lennon and McCartney including “All My Loving,” “I Wanna Be Your Man,” and “Hold Me Tight,”—“Don’t Bother Me” introduced the world to a new invention: the ambivalent pop star. For George, the very first message he chose to impart as a Beatles songwriter was that of a back turned to the crowd, foreshadowing his conflicted feelings about Beatlemania and particularly about the highly excitable crowds that flocked to their concerts.

2. If I Needed Someone

George explored the ambiguities of love and the difficulties of relationships in songs including “You Like Me Too Much,” “If I Needed Someone,” “I Want to Tell You,” “Long, Long, Long,” and even “Something.” Harrison wrote about love with a more sophisticated, mature understanding of its complexities than what was typically found in pop music of the time. Written in the conditional tense (note the first word of the title), “If I Needed Someone” (included on Rubber Soul) finds George singing behind the beat; the disparity between the melody line and the song’s rhythm echoes and implies the ambivalence of the lyrics. Plus, the song was propelled by Harrison’s patented jangle-rock style created by using the then-new Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar.

3. I Want to Tell You

With “I Want to Tell You” (on Revolver), George Harrison continued to write about the impossibility of putting feelings into words. In this way, he was very “meta” or post-modern. As startling as the jagged, dissonant piano chords that color the song’s overall sound is how perfectly they replicate in music the lyrical meaning, echoing the narrator’s stated inability to communicate clearly, while introducing a discordant sound rather alien to pop music. In less than three years, the Beatles went from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “I Want to Tell You.” That alone speaks volumes of the difference between Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting and Harrison’s

4. Within You Without You

“Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was George Harrison’s most sophisticated Hindustani-pop fusion effort—commonly referred to as raga rock. The structure of the song adhered mostly to the Northern Indian classical format, albeit with verses and refrain organized in a recognizable Western pop style. Harrison was the only member of the Beatles to play on the track, which employed musicians from London’s Asian Music Circle and Western classical musicians for the orchestral background. With the opening line, “We were talking about the space between us all,” the song continues to explore the perennial theme of the impossibility of clear communication.

5. All Things Must Pass

George Harrison had tried to get the Beatles to record this song, and they did rehearse it during the January 1969 “Get Back”/”Let It Be” sessions. It was even originally slated to be part of the setlist for the famed “rooftop” concert at Apple headquarters at the end of that month. But nothing ever came of it, Beatle-wise. George revived the tune for his first solo album, aptly choosing it as the title track, which could not help but be seen as a commentary on the breakup of the Beatles. Harrison self-consciously wrote and recorded the song in the style of The Band, with whom he had spent time in Woodstock, N.Y., in autumn 1968.

6. What Is Life

Also included on All Things Must Pass, “What Is Life” is a perfect pop single— channeling Motown and early rock ’n’ roll even as it creates an entirely new sound, bright and effervescent, soulful and anthemic, and incredibly catchy, its multiple riffs circling in and around one another, building a glorious celebration of the power of music to express a gleeful combination of love, lust, and gospel-like prayer. As in so many of his best songs, Harrison kicks it off with an invocation of frustrated expression: “What I feel, I can’t say.”

7. Be Here Now

Found on George Harrison’s second solo album, Living in the Material World, “Be Here Now” borrowed its title and concept from the 1971 book of that name by Baba Ram Dass (né Richard Alpert), one of the “bibles” of the Sixties counterculture. Its musical setting is vaguely reminiscent of Harrison’s Beatles numbers “Blue Jay Way” and “Here Comes the Sun,” although it was dialed down a few beats from the latter to make the music more meditative in keeping with the song’s message: that the past and future are illusory and that the only state of being that matters is the present. One of Harrison’s most profound and evangelical songs is thus delivered in one of the most quiet, gentlest performances of his career, one that is also, most appropriately, timeless—the most intimate performance on his most intimate album.

8. Dark Horse

The bouncy, rocking title track of his 1974 solo album served as an updated manifesto as well as an answer song to critics and former bandmates. Calling himself a “dark horse” (a name he also gave to his nascent record label), with the connotation of constantly being underrated and underappreciated, gave new meaning and focus to his work; it served to recontextualize his professional and personal lives with a new self-narrative. Whether it was as a Beatle or a solo artist or a lover or a husband, he seemed to be suggesting, he was “a blue moon,” as he sang in the song, something that only occasionally or rarely shows up, not unlike a “dark horse.” The smart money does not bet on a dark horse, as dark horses win only once in a blue moon. Harrison had a way of defying the odds.

9. You

“You” was originally composed for a projected solo comeback album by Ronnie Spector, which was going to be co-produced by Harrison and Spector’s then-husband, Phil Spector. The project was aborted midway through, but Harrison made eventual use of several of the songs he wrote for Spector, including “You,” found on his 1975 solo album, Extra Texture, where it was transformed into a joyously upbeat Motown-style love song. It has an instantly recognizable quality to it, one full of happiness and movement and delirium—a perfect bit of pop that just happened to have been made by one of the most serious songwriters and musicians of the rock era. One can even hear echoes of the music and lyrics in Paul McCartney’s megahit, “Silly Love Songs,” released the following year, whose refrain, “I love you”—which also figures prominently in Harrison’s song—could be a pun on “I love ‘You,’” a reference to the Harrison tune.

10. This Song

The funniest song ever written about being accused of plagiarism.

_{Featured image by despoticlickbild on Pixabay}

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A listener’s guide to James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” [playlist]

Discover the musical veins of James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” as we mark the 100th anniversary of the writer and civil rights activist’s birth.

Tom Jenks reflects on some of these key musical works.

1) “Am I Blue?”

Near the end of the story, Sonny and his bandmates perform at a village nightclub. The band finishes its first set to scattered applause, and without warning the bass player begins almost sardonically playing “Am I Blue?” But why sardonically? Billie Holiday, in her 1941 performance with the Eddie Heywood Orchestra, gives a lush, touching, and romantic upbeat lift to the song’s undertow of abandonment, sorrow, and loneliness. An earlier version by Ethel Waters has a somewhat more sentimental seriocomic tone. In a film version, Waters appeared surrounded by a troupe of smiling cotton pickers with cutaway shots of a white society couple in top hat and gown looking gaily down on the scene made for their entertainment. The bass player’s sardonic touch seems to say, Enough of suffering. Listen to what we can do instead with jazz.

2) “Body and Soul”

Louis Armstrong and this jazz standard harken back to swing-based music, which a teenage Sonny calls “old-time, down home crap.” Sonny’s distaste for Armstrong can be read as a younger artist’s natural need for self-assertion and transcendence of found forms. When Sonny’s older brother testily asks who Sonny admires then, the answer is Bird—Charlie Parker—and the shift in the story from Armstrong’s music to Parker’s signals an often-painful generational struggle for freedom beyond old conventions, styles, modes, expressions, and understandings. The thread of “Sonny’s Blues” follows the fate of estranged brothers within a larger context of races divided from one another; it embodies the truth that no one of any race can be free of the effects of generations of racial oppression so long as it continues.

3) “All the Things You Are”

Charlie Parker’s discovery that the semitones of the chromatic scale can lead to any key opened greater possibilities for improvisation and carried jazz beyond Dixieland and swing into an era of modal melodies as performed by musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In idolizing Charlie Parker, Baldwin’s Sonny is not only attracted to the music but also to drugs. Sonny would have known that Parker, as a teenager already on the rise in the jazz world, was using heroin. What Sonny couldn’t have known was that Parker would die at the age of thirty-four, the erosion from drugs and alcohol overpowering his sublime gifts, and that he himself would come to understand the personal cost of addiction.

4) “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again”

One of several spiritual songs in “Sonny’s Blues,” this gospel lament celebrates a mother’s Christian virtues and her grown child’s desire for return to childhood faith. When the brothers’ mother, whose faith is deep, counsels the older brother to always be there for Sonny, she’s thinking of her sons’ mortal and immortal fate. Without a redeeming connection in this life, could there be one in the next? “But what a terrible song,” Sonny comments and laughs. His laughter sounds softer, milder, more mature than his angry teenage dismissal of Armstrong was, yet strikes further notes in a generational musical progression from spirituals to blues to jazz. Music, myth, and man are advancing together.

5) “Is That the Old Ship of Zion”

In “Sonny’s Blues,” street revivalists sing this late nineteenth-century hymn derived from earlier spiritual and gospel lyrics. The song promises that the ship will carry its voyagers over the difficult waters to a brighter destination—many a thousand will be rescued. The older brother comments that not a soul hearing this song on the street in Harlem has been rescued. The cloth of the story is woven from biblical allusion, cadence, church music, and imagery, but Baldwin poses all this in such a way that the reader can decide according to his or her own beliefs about salvation. Baldwin doesn’t insist, but his view is humanist. His concern is with the here and now. He seeks to encourage everyone’s participation and kinship in improving the quality of all lives on Earth.

 6) “A Love Supreme”

To get a fully embodied sense of the musical progression embodied in “Sonny’s Blues,” a reader can listen to Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue?” and then listen to John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” the movement from one song to the other representing a shift from sorrowing to triumph and restoration, which is what James Baldwin’s short story is about. Coltrane’s song offers thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction, while Baldwin’s story poses two brothers’ estrangement over addiction and their ultimate rapprochement as an analogy to racial division and an inspiration toward unity and love.

_{Featured image by pinelife via Flickr. CC BY 2.0.}

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Racism, jazz, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than thirty-five years I’ve been reading and teaching the story, each time with an undiminished sense of awe and appreciation for how Baldwin issues a prophetic warning about the outcome of racism while making deeply felt gestures of hope and reconciliation.

As the title indicates, the story moves on its music, specifically jazz. Whenever I read “Sonny’s Blues,” I think of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” a long, prayerful piece that gives thanks for his recovery from heroin addiction and that percussively, sonorously refrains its title in praise of the Creator. Coltrane’s song dates from 1963, a few years after “Sonny’s Blues,” and both pieces take part in a shift occurring in race consciousness and the American psyche. “A Love Supreme” proceeds in four parts—a similar orchestration to “Sonny’s Blues,” which occurs in three acts with a denouement and begins with a song of denial:

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. I read it, and I couldn’t believe it, and I read it again. Then perhaps I just stared at it, at the newsprint spelling out his name, spelling out the story. . . .

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that . . .

The occasion of “Sonny’s Blues” is that a long-standing denial of a horribly painful truth has come home to the main character and can no longer be denied, though he tries. Having established this conflict, Baldwin promptly reveals the news: the narrator’s younger brother, Sonny, a jazz pianist, has been arrested for using and peddling heroin. From that moment, the story proceeds with forthcoming directness. What’s at stake is life and death.

In the 1950s the New York City rate of death from heroin use for Black users was as much as two times higher than for white users, and the median age of those who died was twenty-seven. Baldwin would have been all too aware of mortality even in youth, as in the course of his lifetime, he survived several suicide attempts. In an essay titled “The Uses of the Blues,” he writes:

I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.

In the early 1980s, when Toni Morrison was winding up sixteen years at Random House as a groundbreaking editor of Black authors, I was dismayed to hear various publishing personnel repeat the conventional wisdom of that era: Black people don’t buy books. It also meant that publishers were reluctant to spend money to support and publish work by Black writers, making it hard for those writers to find an audience. And going back to 1957 and Baldwin’s advent, how much more prevalent this conventional notion would have been and how very aware of it Baldwin would have been, taking into account the need to form his work in such a way as to summon an audience by touching readers of all kinds.

Wynton Marsalis has been credited with seeing jazz as a solution to a shared cultural mythology between Blacks and whites that can help move the needle on race relations. Baldwin employs this kind of perception in writing “Sonny’s Blues.” Throughout the story, readers aren’t necessarily aware of hearing jazz or blues in the scraps of sound that will ultimately crescendo in a transcendent performance at a Village nightclub, but that’s where the story will finish. Near the end, Baldwin’s narrator notes that not many people ever really hear the music they listen to:

And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.

And it can also be said that not many people actually see what they’re looking at. Look, Baldwin was saying, this is how things are, and he wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve. Across the sixty-five years since the story’s first publication, it has been assigned and taught in secondary schools and in colleges and universities throughout the world, ultimately reaching and moving many millions of readers to new awareness. Some things have changed for the better; some things have worsened; there’s still work to do.

When teaching “Sonny’s Blues,” I sometimes manage to get all the way through the lecture without letting my voice break or my tears well, though never without some students’ tears. But what are these tears? Grief, of course, at the terrible suffering. Wonder at the endurance required for survival and self-respect. Sorrow and joy mingled when the vulnerable heart’s truth is called forth, touched and held without sentimentality. Gratitude for Baldwin’s art.

_{Featured Image ‘James Baldwin on the Albert Memorial with statue of Shakespeare’ by Allan Warren via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)}

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Rediscovering <em>Piano Time</em>

It’s an eventful time in the OUP Music office—we’ve just sent to press the latest editions of our Piano Time method books by Pauline Hall. It’s always exciting to see the publication of a new titles, but these books feel extra special. We last updated the method books in 2004, with Pauline Hall herself spearheading the changes and providing new material. Sadly, Pauline passed away in 2015, but her books have remained consistently popular with teachers and students alike. We wanted to honour her vision and approach, while giving the books the update they deserve, both visually and pedagogically.

The journey to new editions

Pauline’s family have been fully supportive throughout the process of creating the new editions and, importantly, felt sure that Pauline herself would have been thrilled to see her books living on in this way.

From the beginning, I was lucky enough to work with two fantastic content consultants—Janet Bullard and Dr Jeanette Gallant—who advised on the areas that required a fresh approach to suit today’s market.

We wanted to introduce a handful of new pieces to each of the method books and together we identified which of the existing pieces we felt could be replaced. We were well aware that many teachers have their favourites and tried to avoid losing any Piano Time ‘classics’ if we could! We also discussed other proposed changes to the books for reasons of pedagogy (changing the order of some material or introducing a technique more explicitly) or context (adding short background notes to explain certain terms or the history behind a piece).

Commissioning new works from composers

This is always one of the most exciting parts of my job, and our new contributors—Reena Esmail, William Chapman Nyaho, and Kristina Arakelyan—did not disappoint! While the pieces themselves may be simple, the process of writing to such a specific pedagogical brief is certainly not; the composers did an incredible job of creating pieces that ticked all the educational boxes while, most importantly, being great fun to play. All three composers were completely collaborative and happy to adapt their work to suit the precise requirements of the books, which made for a really wonderful end result—exactly what we were hoping for.

Editing and proofing the books

Once the manuscripts were finalised, I handed the books over to our brilliant in-house editorial team, led by Managing Editor Laura Jones, who oversaw the process of editing and proofing the books, keeping to the original design where possible.

Working with the illustrator

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of the new editions was working with the illustrator Rosie Brooks. We’d all fallen in love with Rosie’s style of illustration and couldn’t wait to see the characters she would create for our new books! We worked through stages of pencil sketches before Rosie delivered the final colour illustrations, which were set into the proofs by our typesetter Julia Bovee.

A musician as well as an artist, Rosie was such an enthusiastic and talented partner to work with, and the process really was a joy. I am sure her artwork will brighten the practice sessions of many generations of pupils to come.

Rosie’s cover illustrations were sent on to our in-house designer Marten Sealby, who had the tricky brief of updating some very well-known covers so that they felt fresh but also recognisable. I think he did a great job of achieving that balance.

Recording the pieces

The final piece in the puzzle was, for the first time, recording all the pieces in the method books. Naturally, we wanted to make sure that what we recorded reflected exactly what was written in the scores, so this was left until the end of the process. We asked the renowned pianist Michael Higgins to make these recordings for us—he did a wonderful job of bringing the pieces to life. I hope they will inspire many young pianists as they work through the new editions.

The thing that I’m most proud of is how much these new books have brought the whole team together. We all understand the importance of continuing Pauline’s work and I know every single member of our publishing team (as well as many others) contributed to the books in one way or another—a real team effort. I hope they are enjoyed by many new learners, and that teachers appreciate the updates to the new editions—and also what we chose not to change.

Please do let us know!

_{Featured image by Rosie Brooks.}

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A listener’s guide to Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life [playlist]

The music has been hidden—unseen and unheard—for centuries. Listen to the playlist and hear a historic soundscape unfold—songs of compassion and hope, created to accompany the final breaths of life.

Music in Medieval Rituals for the End of Life took seven years—searching through medieval manuscripts, transcribing their music notation, and writing the book. As a musician who has attended to loved ones during their final breaths of life, I was determined to recover the historic music created for those awful and awe-filled moments.

But even as I researched and wrote, I knew that the book was only the beginning. The music was never meant to be confined to the written page.

Singers from the University of Notre Dame now offer the first recordings, completed in the campus’s historic Log Chapel. A soundscape from a distant time unfolds while listening to these chants. Transcribed from manuscripts dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, the chants acknowledge the suffering and pain that accompany death. But they also sing of a soul in motion—a soul journeying towards a loving creator and a place of hope and welcome. The following playlist highlights a selection of these chants, intended to accompany the final minutes of life, the last breath, and the time immediately following death:

Track 2.2 Suscipiat te Christus: When Israel was released…

The final minutes of life provided the time to tell the story of the Exodus—the Hebrew Bible narrative relating the Israelites’ escape from slavery. The experience of the Hebrew people was understood to parallel the experience of death. Just as the community of Israel escaped from captivity, so the soul escaped from the hard constraints of earthly life into heavenly freedom.

In the chant, the story of the Hebrew people (Psalm 113) is framed with a traditional Christian blessing:

May Christ receive you, who created you, and to the bosom of Abraham may angels lead you.

The Christian blessing and the Jewish narrative together form a single expression of reassurance and hope.

Track 1.8 Redemisti me: Into your hands…

This chant brings the dying person into the center of the Christian story. The last words Jesus spoke (following the gospel of Luke) were sung on the dying person’s behalf:

Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit

The chant mimics the movement depicted in the text. With the words “into your hands” (in manus tuas), the melody leaps up, musically echoing the spirit’s leap—from the human body to divine hands.

Track 4.1 Subvenite: Advance, saints of God…

The women of Aldgate formed a close community, and when one of their sisters was dying, they surrounded her with song. This chant was sung during the final breath of life. As it unfolded, it gently moved the sisters through the loss.

The chant begins by calling for help from angels and saints:

Come now and take this soul. Bring it to the Most High One.

It continues by offering a final blessing to the departing loved one:

May Christ receive you; may angels lead you.

It concludes with a final prayer, asking for peace:

Give them eternal rest, Lord.

Track 4.2 Kyrie, all voices: Have mercy…

When the final breath of their sister had passed, the women of Aldgate stood surrounding her. In a time of quiet prayer, before her body was cleansed and dressed for burial, they sang this chant:

Lord, have mercy

Christ, have mercy

Lord, have mercy

The simple words were familiar from their religious services; the graceful melody followed familiar patterns of breathing. Listen to the first words. The music gently rises and falls as the singers pass the melody back and forth. The final lines expand. As the opening melody mimics a gentle breathing pattern, the melody with the final words breathes more deeply.

The sister’s breath had stopped, but the community’s song continued, making their breath audible as sound.

Track 1.1 Dirige domine: Direct my ways…

The singing continued as the body was moved.

The elite, educated practitioners of Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican sang as they carried the body from the place of death to the church:

Direct my ways, Lord, my God

Let me walk in Your sight.

Did they sing in the voice of the one who had just died, whose soul was moving into the afterlife? Or was this a prayer for themselves, the ones who continued to move through the difficulties of earthly existence? Possibly both.

The medieval rituals blur the line between the living and the dead. Each person’s fate was the same; the need for help was the same: only time separated the living and the deceased.

Listen as the chant voices the words in conspectu tuo (“in your sight”). The melody ascends confidently, offering a reassuring musical image—God’s sight is broad and expansive, taking in any path a human might travel.

***

I am deeply grateful to the University of Notre Dame for making the entire playlist freely available.

_{Featured image by Chris Linnett via Unsplash.}

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“But you got to have friends…”: A Bette Midler playlist

Bette Midler began her recording career back when Richard Nixon (“Tricky Dick,” as she liked to call him) was still President, and her range and versatility were obvious from the very beginning. Since she first entered a recording studio, she’s tackled just about every genre of music. This tour through her recorded output reveals not just the familiar best-selling hits but five decades of deep cuts and delightful discoveries. Take a listen for yourself:

1. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (1972)

Midler’s affinity for 1940s music resulted in her first top ten hit: a period-perfect recasting of this Andrews Sisters’ World War II boogie woogie smash. Multi-track layering gave us Midler as Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne, all in perfect harmony.

If you like that, try this: “It’s the Girl” (2014): Decades on, Midler’s harmony chops were undiminished as she revisited this swinging 1930s hit by the Boswell Sisters, one of her childhood favorites.

2. “Do You Want to Dance?” (1972)

This sultry, slowed-down version of the Bobby Freeman hit opened Midler’s debut album, The Divine Miss M—no album ever got off to a better start. Midler has never sounded more sensuous as she pleads for one more dance in an arrangement that remained a staple of her live concerts into the twenty-first century.

If you like that, try this: “Under the Boardwalk” (1988): Midler brought a similar sexy vibe to this remake of the 1960s Drifters’ hit for the soundtrack of Beaches.

3. “Friends” (1972)

This jaunty sing-along ode to the importance of friendship became Midler’s unofficial theme song when she worked at the Continental Baths in the early 1970s and it’s been part of her act ever since. Its lyric, “I had some friends but they’re gone/Something came and took them away,” has meant different things at different stages of her career. In the 1970s it was a promise of solidarity with the gay men who made up her first audiences. During the AIDS epidemic, it acknowledged the unfathomable losses of the gay community. In later years, it marked the passage of time and the inevitable loss of aging friends.

If you like that, try this: “Samedi et Vendredi” (1976): Midler wrote lyrics to many of the songs she’s recorded over the years, and this captivating burst of witty wordplay and infectious rhythms is one of her best. Singing all the voices––and doing it entirely in French––Midler sounds like she’s gathered all her friends into one room and let them run wild.

4. “Hello in There” (1977)

Midler the actress made a meal out of John Prine’s poignant ballad about an old couple facing the end of an uneventful life. On her 1977 Live at Last album, she prefaced the song with an outlandish monologue about a giant, bald-headed woman on the streets of New York wearing a fried egg on her head, turning the fried egg into a metaphor for the existential anxieties of our era. After that introduction, “Hello in There” was more heart-wrenching than ever.

If you like that, try this: “Waterfalls” (2014): Midler turned TLC’s rambling scenario about mothers’ inability to keep their sons safe from the horrors of street crime and AIDS into a stripped down, mournful ballad.

5. “I Shall Be Released” (1973)

Midler claimed ownership of every song she ever sang. In the case of Bob Dylan’s classic lament for an incarcerated man, she turned it into a furious feminist cry. Barry Manilow’s piano arrangement slowly builds in intensity as it takes Midler from quiet resignation to righteous anger.

If you like that, try this: “Beast of Burden” (1983): Midler did a similar renovation of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s teasing riff aimed at a reluctant lover, redefining it as a woman’s demand for respect.

6. “Cradle Days” (1979)

Possibly the greatest vocal Midler ever laid down. In this slow-burning soul shouter, she’s a modern-day Medea pleading with a departing husband to restore both their relationship and their shared children. Her singing is equal parts untamed and tightly disciplined, all of it cushioned in creamy backing vocals led by Luther Vandross. Sublime.

If you like that, try this: “Birds” (1977): Midler’s take on Neil Young’s gentle breakup song gives it a driving R&B edge and features fierce vocal back-up from the Harlettes.

7. “Stay With Me” (1979)

Midler’s film debut as a tortured Janis Joplin-like star in The Rose gave her plenty of opportunities to rock. But her best moments demonstrated her (and Joplin’s) feel for combining rock and soul, as in this staggering plea to a lover as he heads out the door.

If you like that, try this: “When a Man Loves a Woman” (1979): The other great performance number from The Rose. Midler sings the old Percy Sledge ballad as a recognition of the difficulty a woman rock star can have finding love. For maximum impact, watch the performance clips of “Stay With Me” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” rather than only listening to the audio.

8. “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1988)

Midler’s first and (so far) only #1 hit demonstrates her skill at stirring in a bit of vinegar to cut the sticky sweetness. She rides the song’s anthem-like waves, but never falls off into bathos. Even if you’re immune to its message, it’s hard not to be moved by Midler’s sincerity.

If you like that, try this: “Laughing Matters” (1998): This rueful call to keep a sense of humor in a world gone increasingly mad gets a ravishing orchestral backing for one of Midler’s most reassuring vocals.

9. “The Rose” (1979)

Just about perfect. The hushed power of Midler’s voice captures the “endless aching need” so vividly evoked in Amanda McBroom’s evergreen hymn—a classic pairing of singer and song.

If you like that, try this: “Lullaby in Blue” (1998): Midler holds back on the emotion and her restraint makes this tender remembrance of a teenage pregnancy deeply affecting.

10. “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher” (1973)

Another great Barry Manilow arrangement, this one starts soft but gathers force as Midler and a stentorian choir take it to church. Just when you think she can’t go any higher––or wilder––she reaches even more frenzied heights.

If you like that, try this: “Bang, You’re Dead.” (1977): Midler was known to dabble in disco, and this propulsive Ashford and Simpson production is one of her best in that genre. It’s impossible to stand still when Midler’s scorching vocal rides that four-on-the-floor beat.

11. “Mele Kalikimaka” (2006)

Midler frequently evoked her background growing up on the island of Hawaii, and this holiday song, based on the Hawaiian derivation of the phrase, “Merry Christmas,” is an affectionate tribute to her home state.

If you like that, try this: “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening” (2003): Midler at her good-humored best, swinging lightly through Johnny Mercer’s dense, savory lyrics.

_{Featured image by Rob Bogaerts / Anefo. via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.}

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Summertime musicking

Many families imagine summer as a time of endless fun and warmth. But summer is full of parenting challenges, including disrupted schedules and kids having more free time while parents have less. Such parenting challenges make this a great moment to consider how to weave music into activities and routines of family life to make things a little easier and a little more fun—an approach I call “parenting musically.”

New Zealand-born musicologist Christopher Small (1927-2011) coined the term musicking, which he used to encompass every aspect of music-making, including composing, performing, listening, setting up the stage, taking tickets at a performance, and so on. Musicking can occur on stages, in strollers, and everywhere in between.

For families, the idea of musicking can be valuable because it helps us recognize that there are many fleeting moments of a day that are already musical, such as a child creating rhythms with a pencil on the metal ridges of a radiator. The broad umbrella of musicking also reminds us of the many ways we can incorporate music into family life; there is no need for special training or polished performances. We can slip in a sung “Hello, hello, hello” to our own tune each time we come home, creating a small but poignant ritual.

In my research with families and how they use music in daily life, I found it helpful to consider the purposes for which parents deployed music. I observed families using music in ways that were mostly practical, mostly relational, or a blend of the two. You might recognize that certain times of day call for practical musicking (such as a song that gets kids into their car seats and buckled without arguing!). Other summer moments are prime for relational musicking, like reconnecting as a family after children return from summer camp. The families in my research study reported that blended goals (practical and relational) helped sustain musical involvement over many years.

Practical musicking helps us get things done as a family with a little more ease, including brushing teeth, calming down, or building specific musical skills. For example, music playlists can help provide structure to wide-open summer days, with “get ready” playlists and “calm down” playlists. As a family you could put together a “get ready” playlist that lasts for the length of time you expect your children to accomplish specific morning tasks (eating, grooming, chores). Set the goal of finishing before the end of the playlist. Playlists can also bring a sense of stability if you are traveling or your schedule is disrupted—even though the location or time has changed, the music is the same for your kids. If your children have more free time than usual during the summer, consider pointing them to music composition apps such as Garage Band, Soundtrap, and BandLab to build skills and provide a creative outlet.

Relational musicking refers to music making that helps children deepen their relationship with self, family, friends, the world, or the divine. You could make a list of family members to connect with over the course of the summer, either in person or long distance, then brainstorm ways to connect musically with these family members. For instance, prepare three songs to play on the porch for grandparents, or collaborate with teenage cousins on a long-distance ringtone composition using Garage Band or a similar app. Model for your children the way you use music relationally, such as showing your excitement to attend a concert with college roommates or demonstrating how you create a new playlist for your partner with songs you think they will enjoy.

Summer is also a good time to explore new music—whether by new music listening, opportunities, and concerts, or by finding new ways to engage with music. Make a “new music” calendar and assign family members to find and share new artists each week during shared listening in the car or at home. If your family tends to use headphones to create their own sonic worlds, use the new summer schedule to designate a few times for shared listening. Make a summer bucket list of music festivals, outdoor concerts, or album releases you are excited about. Look around for free or low-cost opportunities to engage in music in new ways, like community dances or drum circles.

The suggestions for adding musicking to your summer do not need to include expensive or time-consuming activities. Small adjustments can add more meaning to existing family traditions. You might also notice that many of your musical interactions are practical and decide to intentionally “add more relational musicking to the mix.” Throughout, remember that music belongs to everyone and does not require special training or equipment. Create your own family hashtag or keep a family journal to document your shared musical adventures this summer, from practical to relational and everything in between.

_{Featured image by Aarón Blanco Tejedor via Unsplash.}

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The year of singing politically: The 68th Eurovision Song Contest 2024 Malmö, Sweden

Welcome to the show. Let everybody know I’m done playin’ the game. I’ll break out of the chains.

—Nemo, “The Code,” winning song of Eurovision 2024

Breaking out of the chains had emerged as a central leitmotif and call for activism at the Eurovision Song Contest long before Swiss non-binary singer, Nemo, performed it as the winning song, “The Code,” at the Grand Finale on May 11 2024 in Malmö, Sweden. Though the lyrics could and did allow for different interpretations when the 2024 national entries first began to circulate on the internet—whose show, whose game, who’s everybody, who’s playing—ambiguity had been stripped away by the height of the Eurovision season in April. Nemo’s own breaking of the code became an allegory for direct engagement with the most unbreakable of all Eurovision codes: performance of politics, understated or overt, is strictly forbidden.

Violating the code would lead to rejection of a national entry by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the largest broadcasting network in the world and the organizational infrastructure for the Eurovision itself. In extreme cases, when the politics of a song mirrored the geopolitics of Europe, violation of the code could lead to banning a nation from competing entirely, as it did in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. The Eurovision Song Contest, in a word, should be apolitical. It should channel a cultural democracy for Europe heralded by an annual motto, this year “Unity by Music.” Such lofty goals for song may well be cause for celebration, but the reality of the largest music competition in the world, in which nation vies against nation on the global television stage, undermines the myth of a world without politics.

At Eurovision 2024, that myth would be fully dispelled. It was the announcement of the Israeli entry, Eden Golan and a song called “October Rain,” that in February forced the EBU into its attempt at apolitical activism. The title and lyrics of the song, according to the EBU, were direct references to the October 7th Hamas attack in Israel. Whether direct or not, always an abstruse category for EBU censors, Israel was given the option of withdrawing, substituting a new song, or altering “October Rain” to contain no political references. Israel chose the third of the options, entering with a song called “Hurricane”. With that entry, political controversy was unleashed, with calls for banning Israel because of its war in Gaza, which led in turn to massive demonstrations on the streets of Malmö and loud booing of Eden Golan at the semi-finals and finals—and a fifth-place finish in the May 11th Grand Finale, highly respectable under any circumstances.

Just how does the EBU and the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest, including the host country that produces the shows for Eurovision Week, exercise its apolitical activism? To answer that question, one needs to consider the long history of the counterpoint between top-down organization by Europe’s media empire and the bottom-up participation of a musical citizenry seeking to win its place in a Europe constituted of diverse fragments. There are many ways to pose the question, but a critical way to answer it is to reflect on the different ways song itself expresses organization and participation.

In principle, any citizen of a nation whose broadcasting network is a member of the EBU has the potential to participate in the Eurovision. Competitions begin locally in the nation, move across regional boundaries, and eventually reach the stage provided nationally by the country’s broadcasting network, for example, the well-known Sanremo Song Contest in Italy. Winning entries are determined by a voting system that, though in variants among different countries, affords the feeling of democracy. The entry of San Marino (population 33,660) reaches Eurovision Week through a process that is comparable to that of Italy, albeit on a vastly different scale. The concept of Eurovision democracy in the bottom-up process is inherently political, which in turn is evident in the changing styles, languages, and symbolism of entries from year to year. Some nations choose to be more international, others recognizably national, for example, in the folk music-inflected entries of Croatia and Armenia on May 11th. The musical politics of some nations serve style and genre: for example, the consistent use of chanson and cabaret style by singers for France, the political meaning of the lyrics notwithstanding. In 2024, the LGBTQ+ signifying of the North African Muslim French entry, Slimane, fitted beautifully to the chanson style of his song, “Mon Amour.” National differences, when performed effectively, do not deter the voting public across Europe, who this year placed Croatia and France in the second and fourth positions.

The top-down musical democracy of the EBU and of the Eurovision Song Contest (as pageant and spectacle) depends on another set of criteria to enforce its apolitical activism. Not only the content of a song, but its structure must observe strict rules (for example, exactly three minutes, maximum six performers on stage). Infringing on these rules is an act of not belonging to Eurovision democracy. In 2024, as conflict and controversy enveloped the rest of the world, the EBU and the Swedish production team turned away from the roiling of external politics, instead looking inward, gazing at the Eurovision itself, its history, and a sort of fantasy world imagined as its alternative for Europe. In both the semi-final performances (May 7th and 9th) and the Grand Finale, the intermission acts on the stage in Malmö were consistently retrospectives of earlier Eurovision entries performed by former Eurovision stars. Host Sweden had made the decision that Eurovision 2024 should be a grand fiftieth-anniversary celebration for Eurovision 1974, won by ABBA singing “Waterloo,” the most popular song in Eurovision’s sixty-eight-year history. Many of the songs performed in the 2024 Eurovision imaginary came off as sad commentaries of a world no longer relevant, if apolitical. I found it rather pathetic to watch Johnny Logan (“Mr. Eurovision” from the 1980s and 1990s) during the first semi-final singing Loreen’s 2012 winning song, “Euphoria.” When Loreen, the Swedish winner from 2012 and 2023, introduced her “new song” at the appropriate ritual moment in the entr’acte of the finals, it was barely distinguishable from those earlier songs, as if she was trapped in a cycle of covering herself.

As the political world did battle with the apolitical world, it was the former that broke through, opening the stage for a politics that could capture a new attention. Criticism of the politics of ongoing war, in Gaza and Ukraine, can be openly expressed. Engagement with a different Europe, one unsettled, not united, by music, might someday occupy a presence on the Eurovision stage. In 2024, we witnessed that presence in the powerful cry to humanity in the Ukrainian entry of Alyona Alyona and Jerry Heil, “Teresa and Maria,” which concluded the Grand Finale in third place. As I did in my blogpost last year, I give the final words in 2024 to Ukraine, which show us why the Eurovision really can and should matter.

Spring makes its path, no matter what.
The world is on her shoulders,
Misled, winding, rocky. . . .
All the divas were born
As human beings with us.

_{Featured image by Arkland via Wikimedia Commons. CC4.0.}

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Working together: William Walton and Oxford University Press

The British composer Sir William Walton (1902-1983), writer of operas, symphonies, concertos, and instrumental music, enjoyed an exclusive publishing relationship with Oxford University Press from the mid-1920s until his death. The works collected in OUP’s twenty-four volume William Walton Edition are representative of all that composer and publisher together achieved. Sitting behind the published scores, however, is a collection of materials relating to the original publications, amassed during Walton’s lifetime and now in the OUP Archive: proofs, copyist’s scores, early versions, original orchestral parts, conductor-marked scores, programmes, and correction sheets. Together these artefacts, the chippings on the workshop floor, tell the story of publisher working with composer, bringing to life a corpus of music now known and admired worldwide. Let us glance at some of the collection’s most revealing items.

Troilus and Cressida: first thoughts

Despite playing to mixed reviews Troilus and Cressida was, in the words of Walton’s biographer Michael Kennedy, ‘the opera he wanted to write’: large-scale, big-boned, romantic. This complete recasting of Chaucer’s masterpiece Troylus and Criseide was composed to a libretto by Ivor Novello’s collaborator Christopher Hassall. Surviving in OUP’s collection is Hassall’s first draft, neatly scribed in a wartime issue ‘Stationery Office’ folio notebook. Now looking back at this draft, the libretto as finally set by Walton is all but unrecognizable within it. Hassall’s first version reads more as a play, having none of the crisp concision characteristic of an opera libretto—it is expansive, wordy, and overflowing with a cast of superfluous ‘extras’. While a few of the draft’s choice phrases (Pandarus on Troilus: ‘On jealousy’s hot grid he roasts alive’) survived into the final text, and a couple of the opera’s eventually famous set pieces (for example, the female chorus ‘Put off the serpent girdle’) were there, in some form, from the start, it is clear that it was only the ruthless cutting and re-writing undertaken by Hassall and Walton (as, for years, they worked together on the opera) that transformed it to become the spectacular piece of musical theatre first revealed as the curtain of the Royal Opera House rose on the night of 3 December 1954. Embedded in the draft, though, are many ‘lost gems’—it’s tempting to speculate on what otherwise might have been. Text, subsequently cut, for a humorous ‘round’ or ‘catch’, to be sung at sunrise, might well have resulted in a perfectly sardonic Waltonian redress to traditional and benign views of larks ascending: ‘Hark, hark, the horrid lark hilariously calls! How sprightly and depressing! How soon that tuneful blessing disgruntles and appalls!’. In all, this long-forgotten manuscript has a multitude of stories to tell.

Walton, Menuhin, and the Violin Sonata

‘Work in progress’ of a different order is preserved in a pack of materials relating to Walton’s Sonata for Violin and Piano. This was written for Yehudi Menuhin: he and the pianist Louis Kentner gave a public ‘run through’ in Zürich in 1949. They gave the first performance of the by then definitive version in London on 5 February in the following year. That London version had been ‘overhauled’ by Menuhin to the extent that upon receipt of Menuhin’s edited violin part OUP wrote to Walton, ‘It really is quite a nightmare since there is hardly a note which hasn’t got a marking of some kind’. This edited solo part, and a set of proofs, survive—with their multiplicity of fingerings, articulation marks, queries, and dynamic markings, they together demonstrate dramatically Menuhin’s important contribution to the work’s final form. There is a separate note about bowings, flamboyantly signed by ‘Yehudi’—this eventually appeared in the published score.

In May 1950 Menuhin and Kentner recorded the sonata for HMV. It is possible, by bringing this recording and the proofs together, not only to hear Menuhin creating the sonata in sound but at the same time also to watch him, collaborating with Walton through an intense shaping and a burnishing of the text, to perfection—a rare ‘open window’ on the creative process.

Outside the concert hall: big screen and airwaves

Some collection items serve as reminders of Walton’s work in what today would be labelled as ‘media’—music not written for concert hall or theatre, but for the cinema, and for radio. Although OUP was not directly involved in Walton’s works for cinema, radio, and television, his editors would nonetheless proffer advice and assistance, and Walton and the companies often placed the scores with OUP to ‘look after’. In many cases OUP then published suites and other selections, suitable for concert use, using the materials entrusted to them. In 1936 Walton wrote the score for Paul Czinner’s film As You Like It (the first of Walton’s several Shakespeare film scores): while his autograph manuscript is today in the Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, surviving in the OUP collection are two bags containing the hastily-written orchestral parts used by the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the recording session—these show alterations made as the music was recorded to film. And for the music written for the BBC Home Service’s broadcast of Louis MacNeice’s radio play Christopher Columbus on 12 October 1942, a 160-page manuscript full score (in the immaculate hand of a professional copyist) survives.

To the Bodleian Libraries

Other collection highlights include manuscripts relating to the early performances of Façade: An Entertainment (and a 1926 London performance programme), an arrangement of the Spitfire fugue made for the band of Bomber Command, and Walton’s marked score for the Piano Quartet revision. Oxford University Press is delighted that the whole Walton publishing collection will, this year, be transferred to the Bodleian Libraries Special Collections at Oxford’s Weston Library where, in due course, it will be catalogued, stored, and curated. In doing so, scholars and all with an interest in William Walton’s music will be enabled to take a glance behind the covers of the published scores, finding out more about how his works took shape.

_{Photographs by Jerry Black}

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Here’s Johnny––and Bette!

New York-based talk shows in the 1970s offered plentiful opportunities for quirky young talents like Bette Midler to sing a song or two and maybe kibitz with the host, regardless of whether they had a Broadway show or film or new record to promote. Midler had none of these when her manager Budd Friedman got her booked on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson not long after she began her legendary run at the Continental Baths. Her bawdy alter ego, the Divine Miss M, was birthed during late night performances for an audience of gay men sitting at her feet, naked but for skimpy bath towels. The Divine Miss M brought together gay, Jewish, feminist, and show business sensibilities in a package that combined raucous comedy, a jukebox’s worth of old songs re-energized, and devastating ballads that brought tears as well as cheers. Midler immediately became the most celebrated new star New York’s gay cognoscenti. 

Carson’s flirtatious/fatherly chemistry with Midler continued during her frequent visits over the next twenty years. In 1973, now a best-selling recording artist and concert star, Midler made a triumphant return in all her curly, red-haired glory. Midler, musical director Barry Manilow, and her backing trio, the Staggering Harlettes, tore the place up, with the Harlettes’ “Optimistic Voices” leading into Midler’s grand entrance for “Lullaby of Broadway” and a sizzling “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” They were a sight: Midler spilling out of a garish evening gown, accessorized with stone martens and platform shoes, and the Harlettes in vintage tie-and-tails harmonizing and dancing their stylized 1940s moves like contemporary women giddily discovering a new/old musical world. Manilow and the band in their 1970s long hair and street clothes jammed in the background. If any single performance exemplified the musical and sartorial fun of the early 1970s nostalgia trend, it was surely this one.

In 1980, publicizing her new book, A View from a Broad, Midler looked remarkably subdued, wearing what she might sardonically call a “tasteful” ensemble of slacks, jacket, and high-necked blouse, with her now-blonde tresses pulled back behind her ears. But she’s as vivid a conversationalist as ever. When Carson asks if she ever envisioned she would be as big a star as she has become, her answer is a straightforward, sincere, “Yes.” But she’s quick to point out that her early view of stardom was superficial. “I didn’t realize that the one thing that’s worse than not being looked at is being looked at,” she says, before launching into a comic riff on being followed in the grocery store by fans who judge her food choices. “I can only go to the fancy food section now.” It was a perfect Midlerian anecdote: outlandishly funny, told with mock horror, but with an underlying seriousness that made it entirely plausible.

In 1983, she was pushing her new single, “Beast of Burden” and her new book, The Saga of Baby Divine, a lavishly illustrated children’s book with adult appeal. Her savage re-envisioning of the Rolling Stones’ hit began with her on the floor, crouching like a caged animal. A tight, spaghetti-strapped cocktail dress and spike heels didn’t inhibit her from dropping to her knees and “humping the floor,” as she liked to call it. The performance ended with a full round of microphone swinging that threatened to destroy the set. The topper was her ad lib as she took her seat next to Carson: “And she writes books too!”

Midler had just turned forty when she returned at the end of 1985, and unlike so many other women in show business, she wasn’t afraid to joke about getting older and trying to stay in shape. A bit more zaftig than usual, and ruing her love of food, she launched into “Fat As I Am” while seated between Carson and sidekick Ed McMahon and proceeded to take over the set, lounging on Carson’s desk, kicking off her shoes, and pulling every laugh out of the comic torch song.

Then she turned around and offered a heart stopping “Skylark” that surpassed her recording from the 1970s.

By her next appearance at the end of 1988, she was one of the most successful and highest paid women in films following a string of hit Disney comedies. She was there to promote her latest film, the dramatic musical Beaches, and was very much the regal film star, complete with an opulent mane of auburn hair cascading around her shoulders while performing “Under the Boardwalk,” from the film’s soundtrack album.  

Midler was on another upswing when she returned just as For the Boys was opening in November 1991. The expensive and ambitious movie musical had good buzz and Midler, coming off big record and film hits, was in high spirits and looking splendid. It seemed more like The Bette Midler Show than The Tonight Show, with the star showcased in several songs from the film, including another impromptu (but not really) comedy number from her guest chair, making “Otto Titsling” a hellzapoppin’ history lesson about brassieres that even for her was wildly, comically flamboyant.

For the Boys was a high-profile failure for Midler and she laid low for months, finally reappearing, at Carson’s request, on his penultimate episode as host of The Tonight Show. After nearly thirty years, Carson was retiring from the show that had come to define late night television. His last guests were Midler and Robin Williams on 21 May 21 1992. It was rare for Robin Williams to be relegated to the role of second banana, but that night Midler left him in the dust. She pulled off one more sitting-on-the-chair song––this one for the television history books––with a specially-tailored version of “You Made Me Love You” and its introductory “Dear Mr. Gable,” first performed by Judy Garland to the movie heart throb, Clark. “Dear Mr. Carson” and “You Made Me Watch You,” with new lyrics co-written by Midler, Marc Shaiman, and Bruce Vilanch, hit all the comic bases, from Carson’s personal life (“I watched your hair turn slowly from dark to white/And when I can’t sleep I count your wives at night) to jokes about Ed McMahan and even Carson’s longtime producer Ted DeCordova (“Before you bid adieu/Don’t be cheap/Put DeCordova to sleep”). Midler was known for her razorlike timing, but her every slow take, grimace, and pause was delivered with comic perfection that was deepened by her genuine affection for and gratitude to Carson.

It was hard to imagine Midler topping that moment. But returning from a commercial, Midler sang Carson one last song. On a stool in the center of the soundstage, she delivered Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “One For My Baby (And One More For the Road),” turning this boozy barroom standard into a final, loving tribute, as if standing in for the millions who had watched him over the years. Midler could sometimes overdo the pathos, but here her smiling warmth was even more affecting because it kept the tears at bay. It was Carson who grew increasingly misty-eyed as the camera captured him over Midler’s shoulder while she bid him farewell on “that long, long road.” The moment was instantly iconic, a prime example of live television at its best.

The night was as much a milestone for Midler as it was for Carson. The eager, anxious-to-outrage young chanteuse had matured into an evergreen entertainer who could effortlessly toggle between uproarious comedy and deep emotion. All her Carson appearances had been notable, but this night it was impossible to imagine anyone in show business other than Midler creating this final moment for him.

_{Featured image credit: Publicity photo of Bette Midler from 1973 by Aaron Russo-manager. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Music Publishing: Looking to the Future

Music publishing is an exciting and fast-paced industry touching all our lives, whether as performers, composers, or music lovers listening in the car or in our favorite movies. Music publishers provide the conduit, the link, through which a composer’s or song-writer’s inspiration travels, allowing musicians and audiences to discover and explore different works. It’s a publisher’s job to disseminate as widely as possible the songs and the symphonies, the jingles and the jazz that we all so enjoy. 

Embracing the technology 

Publishing music has always been driven largely by both technological development and consumer behaviour, particularly in the multifarious ways through which music is delivered and consumed. Looking back, it is clear to me, for example, how publishers in the early twentieth century needed to respond (quickly!) to the mechanical reproduction of their music in then-new devices such as gramophones and pianolas. How were publishers and their composers to be paid for such use of their music? A new legal ‘right’ was the answer—the ‘mechanical reproduction right’—and from that rapidly followed infrastructures and processes to license and collect income from the soon-to-be ubiquitous availability and use of recorded and broadcast music. Oxford University Press, in the 1920s, was fast to embrace those new technologies commercially, issuing guides to ‘pianola repertoire’ and radio broadcasts, teaming with the BBC and Radio Times, and including gramophone records as components within some publications. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and we find ourselves still running that same race, keeping up with technological change and with the ever-hungry blanket consumption of music of all genres. There’s a near-constant need to find new solutions for delivering, monetizing, and protecting the music that we publish and into which so much inspiration, effort, and finance is invested. 

My role as Head of the Business Operations team at OUP entails understanding and embracing new technology and maximizing opportunities, whether through licensing, new partnerships, or perhaps reviewing our back catalogue for materials that we can refresh and supply in different ways and formats, always ensuring that we have the required legal rights: copyright drives our work, but equally important are our agreements with composers, authors, and partners. Publishing music is a collaborative business. 

Music today flourishes in a digital environment. Composers create their music ‘manuscripts’ as digital notation files and, from these, publishers work to produce printed scores, orchestral parts for hiring, and new files which can be distributed and sold (and even streamed) online. Sound recordings are now made, stored, delivered, and consumed in digital formats. The joys of ‘digital’ are many: its durability, flexibility, and accessibility are all key advantages for music publishers and for the communities which make music. A conventional printed choral music anthology, chunky and possibly heavy for singers to hold, provides comprehensive access to a wide range of content in a fixed and immutable form. But, because the ‘content’ used to create that anthology is digitally based, it is now possible to split this up and easily supply individual items from such anthologies, allowing choirs to choose repertoire from the larger collection, in formats suitable for those choirs’ (or even for the individual singers’) needs. We as publishers informally call this process ‘atomization’: breaking the bigger publication down into its smallest useful components. 

‘Atomizing’ the collection

To give an example, in 2023 OUP issued the collection The Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers (compiled and edited by Marques L. A. Garrett) as one of a select group of special publications marking OUP’s centenary as a music publisher. This celebratory collection is ground-breaking in its new and diverse content, and it also looks forward in opening accessibility to that content: a handsome printed anthology, yes, and many choirs continue to purchase it in that format—but of its thirty-five separate items, twenty-seven have also been made available separately to purchase as digital sheet music downloads. And of those twenty-seven, twelve are additionally available as printed sheet music ‘leaflets’. Much of the content is available, too, to browse and peruse free of charge on the Yumpu platform, making choice and selection a simple matter. In parallel, all of this is backed up by equally accessible sound recordings of twenty-five of the anthology’s titles, available (again ‘digitally’) as streams through Spotify—these tracks can be used for repertoire selection, for learning, or simply for pure enjoyment.   

The digital provenance of this anthology’s text and music notation files and of the audio recordings has clearly enabled the transformation of the Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers from a traditional ‘single anthology’ concept into a flexible, convenient, accessible, and multi-component resource. Choirs are now even able to customize their own ‘collections’ from the bigger collection! As did our OUP predecessors with their pianolas and their gramophones, so today’s publishers embrace the new and the emerging technologies, working with platforms and partners, to ensure the widest possible availability of the music which we publish. In the digital environment that presence and access is now only ever a few seconds away—from anywhere in the world.

Looking ahead 

OUP Music’s centenary allowed us to reflect on the profound changes that truly impacted on the shape and the content of our catalogue—not only technological, but social, political, and attitudinal change, wars and conflicts, and (most recently) the immediate and wide-ranging effects of the Covid-19 pandemic (music publishing was first bowed by this, but then rose splendidly to the challenge of delivering and supporting music in new and creative ways). 

But what of the future? The next one hundred years? All that is certain is that the ‘technology race’ will continue, as will societal and other developments, and that music publishers will have to (and surely will) keep up. Artificial Intelligence is merely the latest technology development, but it’s already challenging creator communities in terms of both content and its use, and the underlying copyright (as did those pianolas one hundred years ago, which essentially used ‘artificial intelligence’ to create live piano performances in real time, the same performances over and over again). The sophisticated digital supply routes with which we increasingly engage—and whatever may replace them in the future!—will mean that the old distinctions between ‘selling’ and ‘hiring’ and ‘licensing’ music will probably disappear or become blended. Solutions will be found and will be designed to continue delivering, in the best possible ways and to multitudes of users, the increasingly diverse and always exciting music created by our writers—across the globe, and possibly beyond. 

_{Feature image by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash.}

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Unheard voices: overcoming barriers in women’s music composition

Until recently, women were regularly dismissed as unable to compose music. In 1894, the French physician Havelock Ellis said, ‘There is certainly no art in which they have shown themselves more helpless’. In 1891, the music critic Eduard Hanslick stated that women were less capable than men of mental achievements. In 1940, the psychologist Carl Seashore blamed the lack of music composed by women on women’s urge to be loved and admired, rather than to achieve.

These men, and countless others like them, chose to ignore the many factors which inhibited women from composing, distributing, and hearing performances of their music. These factors included lack of education, the demands of marriage and children, societal pressures (Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1762 that ‘a woman outside of the home displays herself indecently’), limited opportunities for performance, difficulties in getting published, and limited archiving.

Educating women to the same level as men was unusual until relatively recently. The few who were lucky enough to receive a full education included wealthy aristocrats from artistic families, like Duchess Maria Antonia Walpurgis Symphorosa (1724-80) and those who studied privately with ambitious parents, such as Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-96). By the late 19^th century, women sought training and validation at institutions, but formal studies were complicated by various challenges: Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) and Betzy Holmberg (1860-1900) both left Leipzig Conservatoire early, finding its tuition unsatisfactory. At the Paris Conservatoire, Louise Farrenc (1804-75) found that composition classes were only for men. Oxford University blocked the Bachelor of Music degree earned by Elizabeth Stirling (1819-95) on learning she was female.

Marriage further impacted women’s composing. Fortunately, the husbands of Amy Marcy Beach (1867-1944) and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) allowed them to continue composing, though they forbade them from performing. Maria Agata Szymanowska (1789-1831) divorced her husband after he objected to her career. Betzy Holmberg stopped composing after her marriage.

Robert Schumann’s wife Clara (1819-96) continued composing until his death, but Robert believed his work took precedence over hers, saying that ‘Clara herself knows that her main occupation is as a mother’. Of course, Clara Schumann’s eight children, two miscarriages, her husband’s failing mental health and her career as a virtuoso pianist considerably inhibited her freedom to compose, but her famous statement: ‘a woman must not wish to compose—there never was one able to do it’ also points to another challenge which afflicted many (most?) women composers: the internalising of society’s doubts about their ability.

Women favoured small-scale works for ‘feminine’ instruments: the violin, piano, and harp, so the scarcity of music by women for organ—long considered a ‘male’ instrument—is hardly surprising. Perhaps women yearned for more sonority, colour, and volume, as many of those small-scale pieces transcribe easily; in fact, some are more effective on the organ than on the instruments for which they were written. For example, Louise Farrenc’s ‘Fugue on Two Subjects’ greatly benefits from the organ’s sustaining power and the structural clarity that imaginative registration on two or three manuals brings. Clara Schumann’s Op. 16, No.3 states ‘for piano’, but only by playing the bass notes on the organ pedals can the player cope with the wide stretches and sustain the long pedal-points adequately.

Those of us who care about making women’s voices heard must mourn the loss of so much music from the past; much was unpublished or discarded, and the authorship of published pieces was sometimes obscured by pseudonyms or gender-neutral names. Dozens of unpublished scores by Florence Price (1887-1953) were discovered by chance in 2009 in a dilapidated house. Augusta Holmés first published under a pseudonym; Betzy Holberg published her early works as the gender-neutral ‘B.Holmberg’, and ‘Clement de Bourges’ was only recently identified as Clementine de Bourges (c1530-61).

Women composers today thankfully face far fewer challenges in being published and heard. Yet, as Sara Mohr-Pietsch claimed in a recent article for the Guardian newspaper, 40% of living composers are female, and yet only about 17% of names on music publishers’ lists are female. The balance is slowly shifting in many publishers’ catalogues, as evidenced by new works such as The Oxford Book of Organ Music by Women Composers. However, this situation will only improve if we celebrate women’s music in every way available to us: by publishing, playing, recording, and teaching their music, as well as highlighting both their historic and ongoing contribution to music history, and joining bodies which promote them, such as The Society of Women Organists.

_{Feature image: Organ musical instrument by Eloy-CM. Getty Images via Canva.}

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The musician’s journey: preparing our students as entrepreneurs

Today, our college and university music students are facing a rapidly changing global marketplace. There are new technologies, career options, virtual education, and so forth. As educators, we continue to focus on the highest standards of pedagogy. However, we need to also expand our curricula to include the necessary preparatory training in skills that will transcend a dizzying rate of change. We are preparing our music students in some cases for jobs that may not yet exist! At the very least, our students are unlikely to simply inherit our careers. Rather, their careers are in their hands. And with entrepreneurship training they have the greatest advantage in developing thriving careers in today’s marketplace.

As we prepare our students for an entrepreneurial world, we must do so within the context of musical and intellectual rigor as well. Tradition and excellence meet innovation and imagination. The good news is that artists can indeed create thriving careers. If you need evidence, I direct you to two landmark research projects, both published in 2011. These groundbreaking studies came from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) out of Indiana University, and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

The SNAAP study constitutes to date the largest dataset gathered about the lives and careers of arts graduates, including 13,851 alumni from 154 different arts programs. They found that arts grads were putting together diverse career options with strong indications of personal satisfaction, and that most of the thriving artists tended to be highly entrepreneurial with similar levels of employment as other college graduates. The NEA’s study, “Artist Employment Projections Through 2018,” found that the projected growth rate for artists by 2018 was at 11%, with the overall labor force growing by 10%. Clearly, the notion of the starving artist is far from accurate.

While it may seem daunting, there are several innovative strategies that can incorporate entrepreneurship training within an undergraduate music degree program, requiring few if any additional budgetary resources or additional faculty time. The applied-lesson studio is the ideal setting for this since it is already home to academic advising, senior capstone projects, internships, professional networking, audition preparation, and the crafting of applications for postgraduate employment or advanced study.

A model for developing effective entrepreneurial training can be found in what I call “curricular cells.” For over twenty years, I have used this idea effectively with college students. These self-contained curricular cells function as units of instruction, as opposed to having one course for “music entrepreneurship,” or even a bona fide degree in this area. They are: Entrepreneurial Advising, Experiential Learning, and Entrepreneurship Instruction. These cells are sewn into the fiber of the applied-lesson studio. Depending upon the individual needs of the student, they can be swiftly adapted and developed to suit any emerging music entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurial Advising can begin at the end of the sophomore year. By then, students are usually ready to consider a deeper exploration regarding career preparation and to consider more profound questions such as: What is my personal vision as a musician? Why am I drawn to study music? What are my nascent career goals? What is needed to realize those dreams? At this juncture, one of my standard questions to my students is, “What would your perfect life look like ten years from now?” This prompts a host of responses that go far beyond what’s received in response to the more frequently asked question, “What will you major in at the university?”

At the heart of all thriving entrepreneurs is the understanding that first one must have a vision of what they wish to accomplish. This is followed by a concrete plan to achieve that vision. Successful teachers know this and can impart that wisdom to their students. Moreover, the music industry contains a diverse array of professional paths.

The second curricular cell I utilize is Experiential Learning. Students need hands-on marketplace experiences before they leave the protective cloister of our studios. I require my students to consider their senior capstone project as early as their sophomore year. By the junior year, students design their project and create a doable plan with the necessary timelines, all within the degree requirements of the major they have chosen. These professional projects may encompass performance, internship/thesis, job shadowing, a foray into music publishing, recording, journalism, financial development and fundraising, artist management, music technology, arts administration, and so forth. Through these professional projects, students also benefit from networking in an area they wish to explore, perhaps leading to a job. Furthermore, they acquire real world experience.

The third curricular cell that I include is that of Entrepreneurship Instruction. What this cell looks like can vary, as it requires using the resources at hand. For example, a weekly studio performance seminar is a great place to expose our students to new ideas. At least once a semester, I invite an industry professional to lecture on a topic of their choosing. I often organize exchanges with my colleagues. With professional bartering, numerous resources are available. A colleague in the music industry might be a great resource for students to hear about the vast array of jobs in our profession. On campus visiting artists are also an excellent resource, and they usually enjoy sharing career advice with students.

What can you add? Maybe a weekend retreat for exploring the idea of a professional vision. Create collaborative projects between students: a model for building an arts consortium. Discover volunteer opportunities for your students. Source an internship suited to your student that directly corresponds to their career aspirations. There is much more to say about this topic. Fundamentally, however, we want to teach our students that their careers are in their hands, that they must work creatively to develop opportunities, acquire the necessary skills for their careers, and be flexible, engaging in lifelong learning. In nurturing entrepreneurial skills alongside students’ artistic journeys, we empower them to find fulfilling careers—and lives.

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Cello and the human voice: A natural pairing

I’ve heard the phrase “It’s the instrument most like the human voice and that’s why it’s so expressive” countless times over the years. As a cellist myself I’m probably biased to some degree, but I truly believe that the cello has a unique voice which wonderfully synergises with the human voice.

In addition to being a cellist, I’m also a composer of mainly choral music, so I was thrilled when Oxford University Press invited me to edit a book of pieces specifically for choir and cello, particularly as such an anthology has never been published before. How interesting and rewarding to bring together a collection of pieces where the cello is seen in all its varied guises!

The cello is hugely versatile: it is able to mingle with or stand out above or below the voices of the choir; it can provide a jazz walking bass or a baroque continuo; it can function as a soloist with the voices of the choir accompanying; it is able to produce a variety of textures and rhythmic drives with pizzicato strummed chords or arpeggiated figures; it can provide a solid bass beneath complex rhythms or harmonies in the choir. What other instrument could switch between any of these roles in a moment?

Its ambit encompasses the whole vocal range, from bass to soprano, and its timbre is very similar to the human voice. Its sound can be earthy, gritty, soulful, or joyful; able to convey the deepest emotion, just like the human voice. Cellist Steven Isserlis said of the instrument “Even physically, one’s relationship to it is somehow similar to a singer with his or her voice; the cello seems to become part of one’s body, as one hugs it close and coaxes mellow sounds from it”.   

It is surprising that over the centuries comparatively little has been written for cello and solo voice—and even less for cello and choir. However, in recent years, music for cello and choir has become increasingly popular as composers (or commissioners?) seem to have discovered the wonderful possibilities of this combination.

Music for Choir and Cello includes not only new compositions but also adaptions of pieces from the classical canon, two of which I had the joy of arranging. “Agnus Dei II”   from Palestrina’s Missa Brevis has long been a favourite of mine, and it was easy to reimagine this exquisite piece in a new setting for choir and cello.

Unlike the rest of the mass, which is for four voice parts, this final movement has an additional superius part which is in canon with the cantus, and thus seemed to lend itself perfectly to rescoring with the cello taking the superius (or second soprano) part. I experimented with bringing the cello down an octave for certain phrases in order to exploit the richer tones of the lower strings (and to give the cellist a break from playing high up on the A string for an entire piece!), but in the end decided to keep it at the original pitch throughout as this really draws the listener’s attention to the imitation between the upper two parts.

Whilst exploring other possible repertoire to arrange for the anthology, I came upon J.S.Bach’s uplifting and energetic motet Lobet den Herrn which struck me as an ideal contrast to the pure serenity of Palestrina’s music. Here, the cello functions in an entirely different way, playing a continuo part which often doubles the bass vocal line, and occasionally the tenor, and provides harmonic direction and rhythmic momentum beneath the largely contrapuntal voice parts.

I would love to think that the inclusion of these arrangements in Music for Choir and Cello might bring a couple of gems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the attention of those who perhaps haven’t sung such music before. (After all, it’s not every choir that has Palestrina in its repertoire!) And of course, I hope very much that all the pieces in this book will be enjoyed by singers, cellists, and audiences alike.

_{Feature image by Isabela Kronemberger via Unsplash.}

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