NYT
April 8, 2011
Voodoo, an Anchor, Rises Again
By DAN BILEFSKY
IT was past 3 a.m. in a dim basement in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Jack Laroche, a Haitian-American computer engineer, nervously awaited his bride: a voodoo spirit named Ezili Freda who believers say has the power to lavish love and wealth and render wayward spouses impotent.
As four drummers pounded rhythmically, voodoo priestesses in bright-colored dresses danced in ecstatic circles, dousing the floor with rum and chanting, “Ayibobo!” — the voodoo “amen.” The bride’s dramatic entrance was signaled when a priestess in a shimmering pink silk dress started trembling violently, her eyes rolling toward the back of her head before she fainted. When she came to, apparently possessed by Ezili Freda, she took Mr. Laroche’s hand and nibbled on his ear coquettishly before the happy couple exchanged vows in French.
Long misunderstood and maligned in Western popular culture, voodoo has become a spiritual anchor in New York City’s vast Haitian community and in Haitian enclaves across the country as practitioners look for comfort after the devastating earthquake in the impoverished Caribbean nation last year.
In New York, where there are roughly 300,000 people who were born in Haiti or are of Haitian descent — the largest concentration in the United States — richly painted basement voodoo temples are sprinkled around Harlem and in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Mambos, or voodoo priestesses, say they can barely keep up with “demann,” or prayer requests; spiritual love recipes to lure recalcitrant lovers are the most popular. Voodoo prayer circles in which practitioners meet to commiserate have also proliferated, with a notable intensity in the months since the earthquake.
But the world of voodoo has fallen under an unwelcome spotlight in recent weeks as a result of two episodes in which the authorities say voodoo played a central role — a fatal five-alarm fire in Brooklyn and the coming trial in Queens of a woman accused of severely burning her daughter.
The fire, in a building in Flatbush in February, was ignited by candles surrounding a bed during a ceremony in the apartment of a voodoo priest who the authorities said was hired by a woman to chase away evil spirits. The fire killed a 64-year-old woman in another apartment and left dozens of tenants homeless.
In Queens, a Haitian immigrant, Marie Lauradin, 29, is to go on trial this summer because prosecutors say she performed a voodoo exorcism ritual two years ago during which she lighted a flammable liquid in the form of a circle on a floor and placed her 6-year-old daughter, Frantzcia, within it, engulfing her in flames. Ms. Lauradin is charged with assault and endangering the welfare of a child.
The child’s grandmother Sylvenie Thessier, 72, whom prosecutors accused of doing nothing while her granddaughter was burned, was sentenced last week to one to three years in prison after pleading guilty to reckless endangerment.
The episodes have shaken the tight-knit and largely secretive voodoo community in New York, and practitioners say they were aberrant acts perpetrated by ignorant people who were abusing the religion.
Dowoti Desir, a Haitian-American voodoo scholar who has a temple in her home in Harlem, said the episodes were contributing to the demonization of voodoo and forcing people to practice it underground.
“Voodoo practitioners are in the closet for fear of being hounded or suffering reprisals,” she said. “The truth is that voodoo has been a source of empowerment for generations of Haitians.” (Many practitioners and scholars prefer alternate renderings of the word “voodoo,” like “voudou” or “vodun,” which they say more accurately reflect its origins.)
Some people are turning to voodoo in response to financial hardships caused by the recession. And among younger Haitian-Americans, voodoo is a means to reconnect with their roots.
Read the full story plus photos in the NYT HERE.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Researchers Dig Up 'Homosexual Or Transsexual' Caveman Near Prague
NPR
Researchers Dig Up 'Homosexual Or Transsexual' Caveman Near Prague
by Eyder Peralta
Researchers from the Czech Archaeological Society made an interesting discovery outside of Prague: The 5,000-year-old remains of a caveman were buried in an unusual manner. First, the male body was lying on its left side and its head was facing east. Second, the body was buried with domestic jugs and an egg-shaped pot.
Why is this odd? Time reports the way the body was buried might mean the man was gay, because the burial is consistent with the way women were buried. The bodies of men faced west and they were buried with hammers, flint knives and weapons.
Time adds:
"From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," [Kamila Remisova Vesinova, a researcher for the Czech Archaeological Society,] said at a press conference. "Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual."
Vesinova told Ireland's Press TV that the man would have lived during the Stone Age's Corded Ware culture, which existed between 2,500 and 2,800 BC.
Katerina Semradova, another member of team, told The Daily Mail that colleagues had once found the body of a woman warrior buried as a man:
She added that Siberian shamans, or witch doctors, were also buried in this way but with richer funeral accessories appropriate to their elevated position in society.
"This later discovery was neither of those," she said. "We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a transvestite or third-gender grave in the Czech Republic."
Now, let's sound a note of skepticism here: Dr. Lemont Dobson, a historian and archaeologist at Drury University, told us determining the sex of a skeleton by looking at the pelvis is 90 percent accurate but not perfect.
"There is always the possibility that the individual had some form of shamanistic role in their society," he says. "If so, the female position would be appropriate. I know the excavator suggests that this was not the case, but I am not convinced by the argument. I haven't seen enough compelling reason to discount such a role in this case."
Researchers Dig Up 'Homosexual Or Transsexual' Caveman Near Prague
by Eyder Peralta
Researchers from the Czech Archaeological Society made an interesting discovery outside of Prague: The 5,000-year-old remains of a caveman were buried in an unusual manner. First, the male body was lying on its left side and its head was facing east. Second, the body was buried with domestic jugs and an egg-shaped pot.
Why is this odd? Time reports the way the body was buried might mean the man was gay, because the burial is consistent with the way women were buried. The bodies of men faced west and they were buried with hammers, flint knives and weapons.
Time adds:
"From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," [Kamila Remisova Vesinova, a researcher for the Czech Archaeological Society,] said at a press conference. "Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual."
Vesinova told Ireland's Press TV that the man would have lived during the Stone Age's Corded Ware culture, which existed between 2,500 and 2,800 BC.
Katerina Semradova, another member of team, told The Daily Mail that colleagues had once found the body of a woman warrior buried as a man:
She added that Siberian shamans, or witch doctors, were also buried in this way but with richer funeral accessories appropriate to their elevated position in society.
"This later discovery was neither of those," she said. "We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a transvestite or third-gender grave in the Czech Republic."
Now, let's sound a note of skepticism here: Dr. Lemont Dobson, a historian and archaeologist at Drury University, told us determining the sex of a skeleton by looking at the pelvis is 90 percent accurate but not perfect.
"There is always the possibility that the individual had some form of shamanistic role in their society," he says. "If so, the female position would be appropriate. I know the excavator suggests that this was not the case, but I am not convinced by the argument. I haven't seen enough compelling reason to discount such a role in this case."
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Concussion Indiophones: Beer Bottles-(1979 Film The Warriors)
Concussion idiophones: sub-group of idiophones that consists of two or more similar non-flexible objects that are struck together to make sound.
I remember seeing this in a theater back in the day, and no one watching knew what that sound was when it began. Everyone tripped out seeing the beer bottles both in terms of surprise at the sound source and admiration for the inventiveness. Combined with the increasingly twisted call of "Warriors....come out to play-hay" was a perfect blend of over-the-top menacing insanity (especially after watching the protagonists running for their lives for over an hour) and cleverness.
I remember seeing this in a theater back in the day, and no one watching knew what that sound was when it began. Everyone tripped out seeing the beer bottles both in terms of surprise at the sound source and admiration for the inventiveness. Combined with the increasingly twisted call of "Warriors....come out to play-hay" was a perfect blend of over-the-top menacing insanity (especially after watching the protagonists running for their lives for over an hour) and cleverness.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Earth, Wind & Fire in the late 1970s
Bought this photo back in the day, I am assuming it was in San Diego in the late 1970s. Verdine White (L) is the reason i eventually became a bassist, and I cannot count the hours of joy Maurice White's (C) music has given me. Guitarist Al McKay (R) played some mean rock and rhythm, but he was replaced in the early 80s. If I had to guess I would say this was 1978 or so. Can't say enough about the powerhouse that this band was.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
"Beat Deafness": Study on Inability to hear beats correctly
Science News
A man lost in musical time
Researchers document the first case of ‘beat deafness’
By Bruce Bower
March 26th, 2011; Vol.179 #7 (p. 9)
The Go-Go’s had a 1982 hit record with “We Got the Beat,” but a 23-year-old man named Mathieu never got their message. Researchers have identified Mathieu as the first documented case of beat deafness, a condition in which a person can’t feel music’s beat or move in time to it.
Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody, unlike people who don’t dance particularly well but generally move in sync with a musical beat, according to a team led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, both of the University of Montreal. What’s more, Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, the researchers report in a paper that will appear in Neuropsychologia.
“We suspect that beat deafness is specific to music and is quite rare,” Phillips-Silver says. She and her colleagues plan to investigate whether Mathieu takes an offbeat approach to nonmusical activities, such as conversational turn-taking and adjusting one’s gait to that of someone else.
Language lacks the periodic rhythms found in music, so it’s unlikely that Mathieu’s problem affects speech perception, remarks cognitive scientist Josh McDermott of New York University. If periodic sounds of all kinds confuse Mathieu, this problem may loom large when he confronts complex musical beats, McDermott suggests.
Mathieu does much better — although still with room for improvement — at bouncing in sync to a metronome’s periodic tone, indicating that he has a timing problem specific to music, Phillips-Silver says. Mathieu sings in tune and recognizes familiar melodies, so musical pitch doesn’t elude him.
Hearing and motor areas of Mathieu’s brain appear to be healthy, the researchers add.
They hypothesize that the young man’s beat deafness arises from disconnects in a widespread brain network involved in musical beat, rhythm and meter. Babies recognize simple musical beats within days of birth, possibly reflecting the operation of an inborn neural timekeeper (SN: 8/14/10, p. 18).
With further research, beat deafness may join tone deafness as a music-specific disorder. Researchers regard tone deafness an inherited disruption of a brain network that decodes musical pitch.
........
Read the post and see video HERE.
A man lost in musical time
Researchers document the first case of ‘beat deafness’
By Bruce Bower
March 26th, 2011; Vol.179 #7 (p. 9)
The Go-Go’s had a 1982 hit record with “We Got the Beat,” but a 23-year-old man named Mathieu never got their message. Researchers have identified Mathieu as the first documented case of beat deafness, a condition in which a person can’t feel music’s beat or move in time to it.
Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody, unlike people who don’t dance particularly well but generally move in sync with a musical beat, according to a team led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, both of the University of Montreal. What’s more, Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune, the researchers report in a paper that will appear in Neuropsychologia.
“We suspect that beat deafness is specific to music and is quite rare,” Phillips-Silver says. She and her colleagues plan to investigate whether Mathieu takes an offbeat approach to nonmusical activities, such as conversational turn-taking and adjusting one’s gait to that of someone else.
Language lacks the periodic rhythms found in music, so it’s unlikely that Mathieu’s problem affects speech perception, remarks cognitive scientist Josh McDermott of New York University. If periodic sounds of all kinds confuse Mathieu, this problem may loom large when he confronts complex musical beats, McDermott suggests.
Mathieu does much better — although still with room for improvement — at bouncing in sync to a metronome’s periodic tone, indicating that he has a timing problem specific to music, Phillips-Silver says. Mathieu sings in tune and recognizes familiar melodies, so musical pitch doesn’t elude him.
Hearing and motor areas of Mathieu’s brain appear to be healthy, the researchers add.
They hypothesize that the young man’s beat deafness arises from disconnects in a widespread brain network involved in musical beat, rhythm and meter. Babies recognize simple musical beats within days of birth, possibly reflecting the operation of an inborn neural timekeeper (SN: 8/14/10, p. 18).
With further research, beat deafness may join tone deafness as a music-specific disorder. Researchers regard tone deafness an inherited disruption of a brain network that decodes musical pitch.
........
Read the post and see video HERE.
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
NYT on Commercialism and Conflict in the Carnival of Trinidad
NYT
March 9, 2011
Carnival’s Louder Commercial Beat Adds Dissonance
By JOHN ELIGON
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — To some people here, Dean Ackin, 38, with his boyish face, is an inspiration of entrepreneurship, a bearer of this country’s evolving culture. To others, he is a threat to this nation’s most beloved social and cultural treasure: Carnival.
Mr. Ackin runs one of the country’s most popular Carnival bands, the groups of people who don costumes and masquerade — or play Mas, as locals call it — in the raucous annual two-day street parade. The roughly 5,000 spots available in Mr. Ackin’s band, Tribe, sell out every year almost as fast as they go on sale. Demand has been so high since he started Tribe in 2005 that Mr. Ackin just started a second band.
But some say Mr. Ackin and others like him, who have in recent years spun profitable, year-round businesses out of organizing these bands, threaten the existence of Carnival as Trinidadians know it.
By shunning the conservative, traditional costumes for cheaper, skimpier outfits that are sometimes produced outside of Trinidad, these new bands, critics say, are distorting their forebears’ creation and sending work elsewhere at a time when the government and others are trying to turn Trinidadian-style Carnival into a more profitable and exportable industry.
“We call it two-piece and fries, the bikini and the bras,” said Stephen Derek, a traditional costume maker, referring to the skimpy costumes that have become a staple of the new bands. “The costume comes like a fast food. To them, the bottom line is profit. It has nothing to do about country or culture anymore.”
The entrepreneurial bandleaders counter that they are part of a natural evolution, merely offering what people want.
“If you really look at those people who play Mas with the younger bands, or if you talk to a visitor abroad and say: ‘Hey, have you ever heard of Trinidad Carnival? What band would you play with?’ they would call Tribe or they would call one of the younger bands,” Mr. Ackin said. “That says we are reaching out further than the traditional bands. We are reaching out to the international market.”
With few exceptions, the 1.3 million people living on these twin West Indian islands believe that they do Carnival better than anyone in the world. But the generational clash has raised questions over how today’s Carnival is shaping the country.
Is the reliance on mass-produced bikinis — a far cry from the elaborate, hand-crafted costumes Trinidadians had grown accustomed to — stifling the creative works that have been the hallmark of traditional Carnival, which the government of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has been pressing to revive since she took office last year?
Or does it reflect the country’s new energy, representative of a push beyond Trinidad’s reputation for complacency in developing revenue streams beyond oil production?
Read the full post, including photos and video, HERE.
March 9, 2011
Carnival’s Louder Commercial Beat Adds Dissonance
By JOHN ELIGON
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — To some people here, Dean Ackin, 38, with his boyish face, is an inspiration of entrepreneurship, a bearer of this country’s evolving culture. To others, he is a threat to this nation’s most beloved social and cultural treasure: Carnival.
Mr. Ackin runs one of the country’s most popular Carnival bands, the groups of people who don costumes and masquerade — or play Mas, as locals call it — in the raucous annual two-day street parade. The roughly 5,000 spots available in Mr. Ackin’s band, Tribe, sell out every year almost as fast as they go on sale. Demand has been so high since he started Tribe in 2005 that Mr. Ackin just started a second band.
But some say Mr. Ackin and others like him, who have in recent years spun profitable, year-round businesses out of organizing these bands, threaten the existence of Carnival as Trinidadians know it.
By shunning the conservative, traditional costumes for cheaper, skimpier outfits that are sometimes produced outside of Trinidad, these new bands, critics say, are distorting their forebears’ creation and sending work elsewhere at a time when the government and others are trying to turn Trinidadian-style Carnival into a more profitable and exportable industry.
“We call it two-piece and fries, the bikini and the bras,” said Stephen Derek, a traditional costume maker, referring to the skimpy costumes that have become a staple of the new bands. “The costume comes like a fast food. To them, the bottom line is profit. It has nothing to do about country or culture anymore.”
The entrepreneurial bandleaders counter that they are part of a natural evolution, merely offering what people want.
“If you really look at those people who play Mas with the younger bands, or if you talk to a visitor abroad and say: ‘Hey, have you ever heard of Trinidad Carnival? What band would you play with?’ they would call Tribe or they would call one of the younger bands,” Mr. Ackin said. “That says we are reaching out further than the traditional bands. We are reaching out to the international market.”
With few exceptions, the 1.3 million people living on these twin West Indian islands believe that they do Carnival better than anyone in the world. But the generational clash has raised questions over how today’s Carnival is shaping the country.
Is the reliance on mass-produced bikinis — a far cry from the elaborate, hand-crafted costumes Trinidadians had grown accustomed to — stifling the creative works that have been the hallmark of traditional Carnival, which the government of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has been pressing to revive since she took office last year?
Or does it reflect the country’s new energy, representative of a push beyond Trinidad’s reputation for complacency in developing revenue streams beyond oil production?
Read the full post, including photos and video, HERE.
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Music Therapy Helping Congresswoman Gabby giffords
A nice little article about how music therapy is helping Congresswoman and gunshot victim Gabby Giffords to recover (plus there is a nice little dig against atonal music):
From ABC
Music Therapy Helps Gabrielle Giffords Find Her Voice After Tucson Shooting
Melody, Rhythm can Rewire a Damaged Brain
By KATIE MOISSE, ABC News Medical Unit
March 8, 2011
It has been two months since the Tucson shooting spree that killed six people and injured 12, including Arizona Rep.Gabrielle Giffords. Now Giffords, who survived a gunshot wound to the left hemisphere of her brain, is finding her voice through song.
"Gabby responds to music because she knows a lot of songs," said Maegan Morrow, Giffords' music therapist and a certified brain injury specialist at TIRR Memorial Hermann Rehabilitation Hospital in Houston.
Since Giffords was transferred to TIRR Jan. 21, reports of her singing "Happy Birthday" for husband Mark Kelly and Don McLean's "American Pie" have signaled what some have called a miraculous recovery. "The brain can heal itself if you do the right protocol," Morrow said. "It just needs lots of repetition, lots of consistency."
Protocols like music speech stimulation and melodic intonation therapy can help patients with damage to the brain's communication center, like Giffords, learn to speak again.
"It's creating new pathways in the brain," Morrow said. "Language isn't going to work anymore, so we have to go to another area and start singing and create a new pathway for speech."
Music therapy was first recognized as a tool to aid soldiers returning from World War II with brain injuries.
"It was discovered that music was more that a diversion or recreational activity -- it could be incorporated into the overall treatment of an individual," said Al Bumanis, director of communications for the American Music Therapy Association. "It could address non-musical goals in a very unique way -- sometimes coming in through the
backdoor where some therapies can't."
Indeed, a person who has suffered an injury due to stroke or trauma may have difficulty speaking but be able to sing.
"Patients can be essentially mute, unable to utter a single word but put on the Beatles' "All You Need is Love" and suddenly patients can sing. Substitute some of the words and now patients are speaking again," said Dr. Michael De Georgia, director of the Centers for Neurocritical Care and Music and Medicine at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. "Music is very powerful."
Music Can Rewire the Brain
Evidence supporting a healing role for music in the recovery from brain injury is mounting. But many people remain skeptical, and few insurers will cover it.
"I think the name, 'music therapy,' is a barrier. Most people are like 'what is that?' It sounds childish," Morrow said. "I know that it really works. They're already seeing that healing in Gabby."
Music is very closely linked with language. Some people believe that we may have started to sing before we started to speak, De Georgia said, citing "The Singing Neanderthal: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body," by British archaeologist Steven Mithen.
"In fact, one of the reason we enjoy music (particularly tonal music like Bach, Beethoven) is that it follows clear structural, syntactical rules that we can follow, understand, and anticipate," said De Georgia. "We tend not to enjoy atonal music as much (like Schoenberg) because it is all over the place tonally and structurally. Our brains don't get it."
.........
Read the whole story HERE.
From ABC
Music Therapy Helps Gabrielle Giffords Find Her Voice After Tucson Shooting
Melody, Rhythm can Rewire a Damaged Brain
By KATIE MOISSE, ABC News Medical Unit
March 8, 2011
It has been two months since the Tucson shooting spree that killed six people and injured 12, including Arizona Rep.Gabrielle Giffords. Now Giffords, who survived a gunshot wound to the left hemisphere of her brain, is finding her voice through song.
"Gabby responds to music because she knows a lot of songs," said Maegan Morrow, Giffords' music therapist and a certified brain injury specialist at TIRR Memorial Hermann Rehabilitation Hospital in Houston.
Since Giffords was transferred to TIRR Jan. 21, reports of her singing "Happy Birthday" for husband Mark Kelly and Don McLean's "American Pie" have signaled what some have called a miraculous recovery. "The brain can heal itself if you do the right protocol," Morrow said. "It just needs lots of repetition, lots of consistency."
Protocols like music speech stimulation and melodic intonation therapy can help patients with damage to the brain's communication center, like Giffords, learn to speak again.
"It's creating new pathways in the brain," Morrow said. "Language isn't going to work anymore, so we have to go to another area and start singing and create a new pathway for speech."
Music therapy was first recognized as a tool to aid soldiers returning from World War II with brain injuries.
"It was discovered that music was more that a diversion or recreational activity -- it could be incorporated into the overall treatment of an individual," said Al Bumanis, director of communications for the American Music Therapy Association. "It could address non-musical goals in a very unique way -- sometimes coming in through the
backdoor where some therapies can't."
Indeed, a person who has suffered an injury due to stroke or trauma may have difficulty speaking but be able to sing.
"Patients can be essentially mute, unable to utter a single word but put on the Beatles' "All You Need is Love" and suddenly patients can sing. Substitute some of the words and now patients are speaking again," said Dr. Michael De Georgia, director of the Centers for Neurocritical Care and Music and Medicine at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. "Music is very powerful."
Music Can Rewire the Brain
Evidence supporting a healing role for music in the recovery from brain injury is mounting. But many people remain skeptical, and few insurers will cover it.
"I think the name, 'music therapy,' is a barrier. Most people are like 'what is that?' It sounds childish," Morrow said. "I know that it really works. They're already seeing that healing in Gabby."
Music is very closely linked with language. Some people believe that we may have started to sing before we started to speak, De Georgia said, citing "The Singing Neanderthal: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body," by British archaeologist Steven Mithen.
"In fact, one of the reason we enjoy music (particularly tonal music like Bach, Beethoven) is that it follows clear structural, syntactical rules that we can follow, understand, and anticipate," said De Georgia. "We tend not to enjoy atonal music as much (like Schoenberg) because it is all over the place tonally and structurally. Our brains don't get it."
.........
Read the whole story HERE.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Carnival 2011
NYT article on the early music performance movement
Nice NYT article on the early music performance movement in academia.
March 4, 2011
Early Music Is Enjoying Its Moment
By NICHOLAS KENYON
ARTISTIC revolutions rarely happen overnight, and if they do happen quickly, they do not necessarily spread uniformly. In recent decades the early-music movement has provoked a radical shift in performance styles throughout much of the music world. As an eccentric, irrelevant outsider in cultural life, the movement has managed to transform attitudes toward tradition and has wrought major changes in orchestral practice. A movement that started in powerful opposition to modern conventions has become increasingly integrated with mainstream performance.
But New York, an early leader in the movement through the medieval and Renaissance explorations of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica Antiqua in the 1950s and ’60s, more recently lagged behind in crucial ways. Now, during the coming weeks, in a sort of serendipitous festival, the city plays host to some of today’s outstanding early-music ensembles and conductors and puts forward a leading period-instrument ensemble of its own being nurtured at the Juilliard School, Juilliard415.
Can there be any more telling indication that the worlds of period and modern performance are becoming ever more closely reconciled and intertwined than the entry of Juilliard, long a bastion of modern, machine-tooled virtuosity, onto the scene? Juilliard students are learning to perform on gut strings, wooden flutes and valveless horns in what now passes for proper period style.
William Christie, the American harpsichordist and conductor long resident in France, whose dazzling ensemble, Les Arts Florissants (some three decades old), presents music by Rameau at Alice Tully Hall on Friday and Saturday evening, has played a major role in the development of a historical performance program at the Juilliard School, now in its second year.
“We are so excited and so thrilled that we really cannot believe it is happening to us,” Mr. Christie said recently. “Here, after all the years when there was such a negative and unloving reaction to the whole idea of old instruments, we have a terrific commitment from the school and an enthusiasm that’s spreading through the students. I think everyone would say that it has created a real buzz, and the students are fascinated by the idea of what it can bring to their music-making.”
Ara Guzelimian, dean of the Juilliard School, agrees that the injection of energy has been remarkable. “One of the most surprising things about the program is how quickly and easily it has been integrated into the fabric of the school as a whole,” he said. “This year alone we are mounting two fully staged operas with the vocal arts department, and we have a waiting list of modern-instrument students who want to take period-instrument lessons.”
This wide-ranging fascination with the fruits of historical study may, as Mr. Christie surmises, be partly because “the kids see a new opportunity to earn a living.”
“But it goes much deeper than that,” he added. “They are much more sophisticated in their attitude. They show a recognition that this way of performing is now a central part of our musical lives.”
In that sense the early-music revolution, which began on the fringes, can claim to have triumphed. It has also evolved: the very term “early music,” which originally denoted a repertory (pre-Classical, later pre-Romantic) and the instruments appropriate to it, has come to stand more broadly for a performance aesthetic, an approach to music in the context of its time that has been carried into 19th- and even 20th-century repertory.
The movement’s spirit of inquiry and adventure is now completely embedded in our way of making music and thinking about it. With the added perspective of these latest gains, it may be useful to take a fresh look at how this all came about.
For the past generation pioneers of the early-music movement have worked with modern orchestras and have carried their insights into that area. At the beginning this was an occasional specialist event, a toe dipped briefly in the historical water. But the approach has become well established as part of an increasingly diverse musical mainstream. Great conductors are newly fascinated with the products of the historical performance movement.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
March 4, 2011
Early Music Is Enjoying Its Moment
By NICHOLAS KENYON
ARTISTIC revolutions rarely happen overnight, and if they do happen quickly, they do not necessarily spread uniformly. In recent decades the early-music movement has provoked a radical shift in performance styles throughout much of the music world. As an eccentric, irrelevant outsider in cultural life, the movement has managed to transform attitudes toward tradition and has wrought major changes in orchestral practice. A movement that started in powerful opposition to modern conventions has become increasingly integrated with mainstream performance.
But New York, an early leader in the movement through the medieval and Renaissance explorations of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica Antiqua in the 1950s and ’60s, more recently lagged behind in crucial ways. Now, during the coming weeks, in a sort of serendipitous festival, the city plays host to some of today’s outstanding early-music ensembles and conductors and puts forward a leading period-instrument ensemble of its own being nurtured at the Juilliard School, Juilliard415.
Can there be any more telling indication that the worlds of period and modern performance are becoming ever more closely reconciled and intertwined than the entry of Juilliard, long a bastion of modern, machine-tooled virtuosity, onto the scene? Juilliard students are learning to perform on gut strings, wooden flutes and valveless horns in what now passes for proper period style.
William Christie, the American harpsichordist and conductor long resident in France, whose dazzling ensemble, Les Arts Florissants (some three decades old), presents music by Rameau at Alice Tully Hall on Friday and Saturday evening, has played a major role in the development of a historical performance program at the Juilliard School, now in its second year.
“We are so excited and so thrilled that we really cannot believe it is happening to us,” Mr. Christie said recently. “Here, after all the years when there was such a negative and unloving reaction to the whole idea of old instruments, we have a terrific commitment from the school and an enthusiasm that’s spreading through the students. I think everyone would say that it has created a real buzz, and the students are fascinated by the idea of what it can bring to their music-making.”
Ara Guzelimian, dean of the Juilliard School, agrees that the injection of energy has been remarkable. “One of the most surprising things about the program is how quickly and easily it has been integrated into the fabric of the school as a whole,” he said. “This year alone we are mounting two fully staged operas with the vocal arts department, and we have a waiting list of modern-instrument students who want to take period-instrument lessons.”
This wide-ranging fascination with the fruits of historical study may, as Mr. Christie surmises, be partly because “the kids see a new opportunity to earn a living.”
“But it goes much deeper than that,” he added. “They are much more sophisticated in their attitude. They show a recognition that this way of performing is now a central part of our musical lives.”
In that sense the early-music revolution, which began on the fringes, can claim to have triumphed. It has also evolved: the very term “early music,” which originally denoted a repertory (pre-Classical, later pre-Romantic) and the instruments appropriate to it, has come to stand more broadly for a performance aesthetic, an approach to music in the context of its time that has been carried into 19th- and even 20th-century repertory.
The movement’s spirit of inquiry and adventure is now completely embedded in our way of making music and thinking about it. With the added perspective of these latest gains, it may be useful to take a fresh look at how this all came about.
For the past generation pioneers of the early-music movement have worked with modern orchestras and have carried their insights into that area. At the beginning this was an occasional specialist event, a toe dipped briefly in the historical water. But the approach has become well established as part of an increasingly diverse musical mainstream. Great conductors are newly fascinated with the products of the historical performance movement.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Tom Hanks Toddlers & tiaras video
It's gone viral but the reason I'm posting it is because I've always loathed the sexy toddler/kid stuff. It's a ripe target and Jimmy Kimmel's post-Academy Awards slot has had some great skits. The kid pageants is a big fat target and hanks doesn't miss.
Adya & Geisha Do Mozart Aria Europop Style
Cherubino's Aria - Non So Piu Cosa Son Cosa Faccio; From the Opera "Le Nozze di Figaro" (The Marriage of Figaro) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It's a tribute to the tune itself that it can survive the Europop treatment.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
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