The gang hams it up in honour of one of our sponsors, ATCO for the Mayor’s Evening for Business and the Arts.

It’s been a busy summer, and during my travels I have accumulated yet more gear. My birthday was a couple of weeks ago and my dad got me the PAIA theremax kit. http://www.paia.com/theremax.asp It looks like a fun build, and I even found a cool old 1920s radio case at a junk store to house it in. I’ll post pictures when it’s done for sure. Another thing I’ve been meaning to get for a long time is a Wurlitzer, and I bought a 200A from a friend who has since acquired a model 206 (the student model) for 30 bucks! Mine’s definitely going to need some work. It all works, but is lacking the sustain pedal, the legs, AND the internal speaker. All workable problems, but the sustain pedal sure would be nice. Some knobs would also be great. Luckily speakeasy vintage music http://www.shopspeakeasy.com/sess/utn;jsessionid=154aae8cb885c92/shopdata/0060_Wurlitzer+EP+Parts/product_overview.shopscript has all the stuff I need.

Previous experiments have shown that tamarin monkeys prefer silence to Mozart, and they don’t respond emotionally to human music the way people do. But when a psychologist and a musician collaborated to compose music based on the pitch, tone and tempo of tamarin calls, they discovered that the species-specific music significantly affected monkey behavior and emotional response.

Lowest voice in the world?  Russian basso profondo Vladimir Pasuikov and the Male Choir of St. Petersburg.

 

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

As usual, the Calgary Folk Music Festival had the island rocking at the end of July and Cantos was pleased to be a part of it by demonstrating our Theremin, Harmonium, Wurlitzer, Hurdy Gurdy, Mini Moog and DJ table as well as inviting a number of artists to perform on our stage including Mark Berube and the Patriotic Few, Jolie Holland, The Akron Family, Lyra Brown, MPSE, Bell Orchestre, The Sojourners and Emily Wells.

Pietro Amato of Bell Orchestre

Mark Berube & the Patriotic Few

The Akron Family with Clea Foofat

Richard Reed Parry of Bell Orchestre & Arcade Fire

Jolie Holland

Lyra Brown

Emily Wells

Music is powerful! Check out Playing For Change.

 

London artist takes 30 pianos to the streets of London with an invitation painted on each: Play Me, I’m Yours.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8114859.stm

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, “You’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the  Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier  Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration  camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy  writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the  world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble.  We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We  began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz- cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that?  How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies.  I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event “Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus”, from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

My very first experience of actually enjoying electronic music was when I went to the library and stumbled upon Listen Compute Rock Home, The Best of Dimension 5, by Bruce Haack and Esther Nelson in the children’s pop CD section. What caught my eye was the Xeroxed cover of a Lafayette tape machine robot. When I actually played the CD, it was as though for the first time I heard what I had always been looking for. It featured off-tempo drum loops, cheap-sounding synthesizers, simple hooks, strange sound effects, and a combination of singing, often annoying action call-out songs and educational stories. I immediately became a devoted follower.

Bruce Haack was born in the coal-mining ghost town of Nordegg, Alberta. He grew up nearby in Rocky Mountain House. Bruce’s application to study music at the University of Edmonton was rejected, so he studied psychology there instead. He was later granted a Canadian scholarship to study musical composition at Julliard in New York and dropped out after eight months. His first published music included musique concrète, pop music, Broadway and off-Broadway musicals and even a Composition for Orchestra titled Windsong which was performed by the Calgary Symphony sometime in the 1960s. He also composed piano pieces and music for commercials. 

Although he knew very little about electronics, Bruce would often build musical instruments out of  surplus parts and cannibalized circuits from other electronics. One of his creations, the Dermatron or People-odeon, was played by the operator touching another person, to create different notes.  He demonstrated  the Dermatron on several television shows, including I’ve Got a Secret, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Mike Douglas Show, and Merv Griffin’s Play Your Hunch. On one of these television appearances, Bruce played twelve young women in a chromatic scale with the device. Bruce also demonstrated how synthesizers work on the Mr. Rogers show.

 

Bruce would provide accompaniment for his friend Esther Nelson as she taught children to dance. The parents wanted the children to have something to dance along with at home and so Dimension 5 records was formed, which published 12 records from 1963 to 1988. Esther and Bruce would sing, call out actions or tell stories, and Bruce, sometimes using the pseudonym Jackpine Savage, would provide the psychedelic, electronic children’s music. Many of these albums, and later cassettes and CDs, were available in public libraries around North America, and one release was featured in Nick DiFonzo’s book, The WORST album covers in the world…EVER!

In 1982, Bruce Haack worked with Russell Simmons of Def Jam notoriety to produce a song called Party Machine which sounds much more like proto-rap music than like Bruce’s other songs. Bruce has one major label release on Columbia records. It was called the Electric Lucifer. This led Bruce to come to know Raymond Scott, also an electronic music pioneer and inventor. Together they worked on music using Scott’s invention the Electronium and Raymond even gave Bruce another of his creations, the Clavivox.

Bruce Haack has inspired and influenced many musicians. In the recent past, a tribute compilation was assembled benefiting children with autism that features several well known artists. He’d be glad to know his music is still reaching adults and especially children in new ways.

Craig

In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.

CBC Radio | Tapestry | Past Programs
Source: www.cbc.ca
Some people call Victor Wooten the greatest bass player alive. He started playing the bass when he was three years old. His stage debut came at age five. Victor is a member of the Grammy-winning Béla Fleck & The Flecktones and winner of two Nashville Music Awards for Bassist Of The Year.

And on drums…John Deere!

From the album, ‘everythinks a ripple’, available from www.dubfx.net