800 Words and Friday Playlist: Towards a Canon for the Rock Era Part 1

Skinner: Reverend, this is Principal Skinner. I'm facing a crisis, and I didn't know to whom to turn …

Lovejoy: Well, maybe you should read your Bible.

Skinner: Um, any particular passage?

Lovejoy: Oh, it's all good.


"Canon" means many things to many people, but it literally means 'rule' in the sense of a measuring stick. The term, allegedly, comes from the end of the biblical era (New Testament), and it means a closed, authoritative collection. The canon is the yardstick by which the religious authorities and redactors measured closeness to God.

Those of us who have trouble with the idea of God nevertheless have our own canons. We may not believe in the Bible, but it's almost inevitable that there are moments in our lives when we turn to it for consolation, for wisdom, for transcendence, and for catharsis. The Bible has many, many passages that are just plain dull, and others that are downright offensive. Fortunately, we live in an era when we can ignore them...

But the truly glorious biblical excerpts - Exodus (at least chapters 1-24) and Genesis (just about all of it), Jonah and Isaiah (heavily edited), Jeremiah and Ezekiel, Jonah and the Song of Deborah, the Psalms and the Proverbs, Joel and Amos, Micah and Jonah, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs (let it never be said that the Hebrews didn't know how to have a good time...), and the St. Mark Gospel... for obvious reasons, I never read as much of the New Testament, and what I read seemed to be not quite as interesting - are still some of the greatest literature we yet have. Even for a non-believer (especially?), these writings are every bit as moving, as challenging, and as beautiful as anything in Shakespeare or Beethoven. In the same way that I can hear Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in my head and know that obstacles can be overcome, or read Sonnet 29 (hopefully one day I can quote it from memory) to remember better days, so too could I turn to Psalm 23 or 27, and know hope and comfort, even if God won't be the one to provide it. Everyone has their own personal canon, comprised of works as close to our hearts as any family or close friend, and after sampling something from that canon, we can only hope that our demons can be purged, and life becomes that much easier to live.

(Text continued in Part 2...)

John Lennon: Imagine

Marvin Gaye: What's Going On

Aretha Franklin: Respect

Chuck Berry: Johnny B Goode

The Beatles: Hey Jude

Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come

Bob Dylan: Blowin' in the Wind

The Beatles: Let It Be

The Beatles: In My Life

Curtis Mayfield: People Get Ready

The Beach Boys: God Only Knows

Tina Turner: River Deep, Mountain High

U2: One (under protest, and only when Johnny Cash sings it)

Martha & The Vandellas: Dancing in the Street

The Band: The Weight

Ray Charles: Georgia On My Mind

Simon & Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water

Percy Sledge: When a Man Loves a Woman

Bob Dylan: The Times They Are a-Changin'

Buffalo Springfield: For What It's Worth

Bob Marley: Redemption Song

Bob Dylan: Tangled Up in Blue

Dionne Warwick: Walk On By

Stevie Wonder: Superstition

Bob Dylan: Mr. Tambourine Man

Bruce Springstein: Thunder Road

Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire

The Mamas & The Papas: California Dreamin'

U2: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (goddamnit...)

Al Green: Love and Happiness

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Fortunate Son

Rolling Stones: You Can't Always Get What You Want

Stevie Wonder: Living For The City

Simon & Garfunkel: The Boxer

Van Morrison: Brown-Eyed Girl

Otis Redding: I've Been Loving You Too Long

The Drifters: Up On The Roof

Al Green: Take Me To The River

Ben E. King: Stand By Me

James Brown: It's a Man's World

Rolling Stones: Jumpin' Jack Flash

The Shirelles: Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

(along with more songs...)

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Friday Playlist: Benny Goodman (part 1)

King Porter Stomp

Bartok: Contrasts (with the composer on piano and the great Joseph Szigeti on violin)

How High The Moon

Coconut Grove

The Man I Love

When the Sun Comes Out

Fable of the Rose

Shake Down the Stairs

Madhouse

House Hop

Swingtime in the Rockies

Jam Session

Goodbye

The Hour of Parting

Peckin'

Life Goes to a Party

Ridin' High

It's Always You

Darn That Dream

Down South Camp Meeting

Smoke Dreams

If Dreams Come True

Organ Grinder's Swing

Don't Be That Way

Yeah, Man

Music Hall Rag

Nitwit Serenade

Bugle Call Rag

Downhome Rag

Blue Moon

Limehouse Blues

I've Found a New Baby

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Early Louis Armstrong Playlist: Part 2

Weather Bird

Muggles

Beau Koo Jack

Skip the Gutter

Savoy Blues

Savoyager's Stomp

Two Deuces

No! (Papa, No)

Basin Street Blues

St. James Infirmary

Tight Like This

Mahogany Hall Stomp



and just for the hell of it, once again - West End Blues

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Early Louis Armstrong Playlist: Part 1

West End Blues

Hotter Than That

I'm Not Rough

I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle

Big Butter and Egg Man

Potato Head Blues

Muggles

The Last Time

Texas Moaner Blues

Mandy, Make Up Your Mind

Mabel's Dream

Go 'long Mule

How Come You Do Me Like You Do

Static Strut

Stomp Off

Sweet Little Papa

Struttin' with Some Barbecue

Melancholy

S.O.L. Blues

Wild Man Blues

Chicago Breakdown

Put'em Down Blues

Ory's Creole Trombone

Got No Blues

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A Brief Ellington Playlist

"What distinguishes Ellington's best creations from those of other composers, jazz and otherwise, are their moments of total uniqueness and originality. There are many such flashes in his oeuvre, and it is a pity they are virtually unknown to most non-jazz composer colleagues. Perhaps this is due ot the fact that you cannot go into the nearest music store or library and obtain the orchestral scores of Duke Ellington. There is no Ellington Gesamtausgabe, alas, although this is something that should become someone's life work. However, even if such scores existed, they still would not readily disclose the uniqueness of which I speak. For Ellington's imagination was most fertile in the realm of harmony and timbre, usually in combination. And as played by some of the finest musicians jazz has ever known, the specific effect produced in performance and on records is such that no notation has yet been devised to capture it on paper."

- Gunther Schuller

Subtle Lament

Blue Light

Mystery Song

Azure

Jack the Bear

The Clothed Woman

If this is not music indicative of the highest possible genius, then genius has no meaning.

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Pesach Playlist

(Things really worth listening to will have an asterisk next to it, really worth it will show more asterisks):

Salamone Rossi: Adon Olam **

Salamone Rossi: Al Naharot Bavel (Psalm 137... by the rivers of babylon...) *

Salamone Rossi: Hallelujah (Psalm 146)

Charles-Valentin Alkan: Paraphrase of Super Flumina Babylonis  (Psalm 137)

Alkan: Trois Anciennes  Melodies Juives (or at least the first two)

Alkan: Hallelujah (Psalm 150)

Halevy: La Juive *

Mendelssohn: Elias/Elijah] ****

Joachim: Hebrew Melody #1 for Viola and Piano

Schoenberg: Mose und Aron ***

Schoenberg: De Profundis *

Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw *****

Zemlinsky: Psalm 83

Ullmann: 3 Hebrew Boys' Choruses (written in Terezinstadt) ****

Ullmann: A Maydl in di Yorn **

Copland: Vitebsk ***

Milhaud: Trois Psaumes de David

Schnittke: Psalms of Repentence I *, VIII ****, X ****,

Golijov: Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind ***

Golijov: Yiddishbbuk **

Paul Ben-Haim: Sweet Psalmist of Israel: 1, 2, 3, ***

Ben-Haim: Suite 'From Israel': 1, 2, ***

Steve Reich: Daniel Variations *****

Reich: Tehillim  ***

John Zorn's Kristallnacht ****

John Zorn: Kol Nidre

Leonard Bernstein: Jeremiah Symphony ****

Bernstein: Kaddish Symphony  (with the better narration) **

Bernstein: Chalil **

Bernstein: Hashkivenu ****

Bernstein: Chichester Psalms *****

Ernest Bloch: Voice in the Wilderness *

Bloch: Israel Symphony - I, II, III **

Bloch: Schelomo ***

Bloch: Ba'al Shem ****

Bloch: Suite Hebraique **

Bloch: Psaume 22 ***

Bloch: Avodat Hakodesh *****

Kurt Weill: The Eternal Road **

Hugo Weisgall: Esther (only a preview...)

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International Women's Day Playlist: A Sampling of Women Composers

Lili Boulanger: Psalm 24 (had she not died at 25, she'd have been one of the great composers of the 20th century)

Lili Boulanger: Faust et Helene

Lili Boulanger: Psalm 130

Nadia Boulanger: Fantasie for Piano and Orchestra (similarly gifted to her sister, but she stifled her gift to teach many of the greatest musicians of the century: including George Antheil, Burt Bacharach, Daniel Barenboim, Marc Blitztein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Clifford Curzon, Irving Fine, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Adolphus Hailstork, Roy Harris, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Robert Levin, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Gian Carlo Menotti, Ginette Neveu, Astor Piazzola, Roger Sessions, Elie Siegmeister, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Henryk Szeryng, Virgil Thomson, and Antoni Wit. Both Stravinsky and Boulez would consult her for suggestions about their compositions)

Amy Beach: Gaelic Symphony

Ruth Crawford Seeger: Suite no. 2 for Four Stringed Instruments and Piano (yes, related to Pete and Bob, She was also more gifted than either :) )

Ruth Crawford Seeger: Three Chants for Female Chorus

Ruth Crawford Seeger: The Music for Small Orchestra

Ellen Taafe Zwillich: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (one of my favorite contemporary American composers)

Ellen Taafe Zwillich: Septet for Piano Trio and String Quartet

Kaija Saariaho: Stilleben (she's probably the most hailed contemporary composer who's a woman. However, she's not my favorite. For that, see Zwillich and Ustvolskaya, who technically died in 2006, but ultimately I prefer her to Gubaidulina)

Meredith Monk: Dolmen Music (a composer whose great music is great and whose other music is... well... not)

Meredith Monk: Turtle Dreams

Libby Larsen: Mephisto Rag (more light-hearted, but extremely enjoyable)

Libby Larsen: Barn Dance

Sarah Kirkland Snider: Penelope (an extremely promising up and comer)

Shulamit Ran: Vessels of Courage and Hope

Sofia Gubaidulina: Viola Concerto (by common consensus, she will probably be the first composer who is a woman in nine-hundred years to enter the 'canon' of great composers)

Sofia Gubaidulina: Seven Last Words

Sofia Gubaidulina: Two Paths

Sofia Gubaidulina: Light at the End

Galina Ustvolskaya: Symphony no. 5 "Amen" (The Twentieth Century belongs to Russian music, and Galina Ustvolskaya was a composer to whom the great Dimitri Shostakovich wrote "people will say that your music is influenced by mine, but that is not true. My music is influenced by yours.")

Galina Ustvolskaya: Grand Duet for Cello and Piano

Galina Ustvolskaya: Fifth Piano Sonata

Barbara Strozzi: Che si puo fare (a Renaissance composer who wrote gorgeous music)

Barbara Strozzi: Sino alla morte

And of course...

Hildegard von Bingen

Voice of the Living Light

11,000 Virgins, Chant for the Feast of St. Ursula

Heaven and Earth

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Playlist For Eric Ericson (1918-2013)

There's no other description for Eric Ericson that suffices except to say that he was, bar none, the greatest choral conductor of the twentieth century. In 1945, he formed the a cappella Eric Ericson Chamber Choir in Stockholm, and led it until 2003. He lead the Swedish Radio Choir from 1951 to 1982, and the all-male choir Orphei Drangar from 1951 until 1991, and there was not a single important professional choir which he did not guest conduct. Sergiu Celibidache, a conductor as frugal with his praise as he was with fast tempos, called him 'the grand chief of choir of our time' (it probably sounded more idiomatic in French...). 

Ericson, more even than Robert Shaw, is responsible for the international blend of sound which most choirs today have - creating a middle ground between the perfectly straight-toned blend of the English church choir and the full-throated operatic chant of the Russian Orthodox church. His repertoire spanned the entire era of written music, from the earliest pre-polyphony to countless world premieres of choral works from composers as well known as Henze, Penderecki, Dallapiccola, Nono and Ligeti (whose Requiem Ericson premiered and who dedicated his Drei Chorphantasien to Ericson) to dozens if not hundreds of Scandinavian composers. 

Richard Strauss: Der Abend

An Album of Swedish Choir Jazz (probably closer to gospel..)

Francis Poulenc: Tout puissant, tres Saint

Bela Bartok: Four Hungarian Folk Songs

Dimitri Shostakovich: The Ninth of January

Arnold Schoenberg: Friede auf Erden

Einojuhani Rautavaara: Sommarnatten

Conducting as an Old Man

Richard Strauss: Deutsche Motette

Zoltan Kodaly: Jesus and the Traders

Johann Sebastien Bach: Gratias Agimus Tibi

Henry Purcell: Hear My Prayer O Lord

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Playlist: For Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013)

He was a fixture on the international music scene for more than fifty years, and in all that time he never got enough credit. Wolfgang Sawallisch was a German conductor who was roughly contemporary with both Herbert von Karajan and Carlos Kleiber, and of the dozens of phlegmatic German kappellmeisters to appear before the world's great orchestras from their generation, Sawallisch was the only contemporary of theirs from a German-speaking land who clearly had the ability to match those two giants.

Not that you could tell from appearances. Karajan and Kleiber had charisma to match their extraordinary talent. But in an era when conductors are measured as much by their aesthetic appearance as any musical acumen, Sawallisch success seemed rather unlikely. While The Guardian's obituary called him suave, it would be difficult for any young American to think of him that way. His reputation in America was always more than a little unfair. In later years his comb-over and aviator glasses made him look more less like a conductor and more like a retired banker sitting on the orchestra board. And towards the end of his career gathered a reputation for musical arch-conservatism that was entirely undeserved considering all the more contemporary German composers he championed when he was head of the Bavarian State Opera. By the time he became music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in his 70's, he was perhaps the textbook example of the geriatric foreign music director - a 'name conductor' (and not a huge name at that) brought to an American city because of past accomplishments in Europe. If he succeeded surprisingly well during his ten years in Philadelphia, it's because his musicmaking was nowhere near as dull or characterless as he seemed. Not eveybody agrees with that assessment, but the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra certainly do.

He wasn't 100% consistent in his ability to get extraordinary performances (who is?), but Sawallisch had a particular combination of forces that worked a kind of miracle. He could draw the most stupefyingly viscral sound from orchestras, yet simultaneously shape it (Georg Solti could have learned a thing or two by watching him). He was not a conductor who went for the sort of individualized interpretations one finds in Furtwangler or Eugen Jochum, he was a thoroughgoing traditionalist who made the best case of any German conductor from his era to keep tradition going.

One look at Sawallisch's baton technique on video is all it takes to realize that this was a conductor with a technique that could hold its own with the greatest stick technicians in music history. But unlike Lorin Maazel or Seiji Ozawa, that stick technique was unfailingly used to shape phrases imaginatively. There's no doubt that Sawallisch could be uncomfortable when he wasn't feeling the music, but in the German masters he knew so well, he was among the greatest there has ever been. Sawallisch was a conductor of the anonymous school whom if he could would always hide behind the music, and yet when the music sounded as well as he made it, why not? He was a kappellmeister, but in very highest sense of the term.

Schumann: Requiem

Strauss: Four Last Songs

Wagner: Siegfried's Funeral March

Strauss: Capriccio

Schumann: Symphony no 4

Britten: War Requiem - Libera Me

Schubert: Symphony no 9 "Great"

Wagner: Siegfried's Rhine Journey

Wagner: Overture and Venusberg Music to Tannhauser

Find Sawallisch's Ring Cycle in this Playlist

Mendelssohn: Elias/Elijah (excerpt - in German)

Beethoven: Ah! Perfido,

Beethoven: Symphony no 6 "Pastoral" (The Storm)

Beethoven: Piano Concerto no. 5 "Emperor"

Beethoven: Symphony no 7 (finale)  (as a very old man, all he needs is a few fingers...)

Mozart: Symphony no 38 "Prague" 

Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 22

Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 21 "Elvira Madigan" 

Mozart: The Magic Flute

Brahms: Fourth Symphony

Brahms: First Symphony

Brahms: Piano Concerto no. 2

Bruckner: Sixth Symphony

Schubert: Complete Symphonies

Strauss: Don Quixote

Strauss: Symphonia Domestica

Rehearsing Till Eulenspiegel

Rehearsing the Three Boys in The Magic Flute

Conducting Edda Moser as Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute

Dvorak: Stabat Mater

Dvorak: Slavonic Dances

Britten: War Requiem - Dies Irae

Tchaikovsky: Symphony no 5 (finale)

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Sunday Playlist: Sun Records

The Memphis Record Label that founded Rock'n Roll (at least the white half... maybe I can find a Chess Records playlist for the other half)

Part 1:

1 Mystery Train (Little Junior's Blue Flames) SUN 192
2. Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins) SUN 234
3. Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On (Jerry Lee Lewis) SUN 267
4. Bear Cat (Rufus Thomas) SUN 181
5. Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash) SUN 232
6. Color And Kind (Look-A Here Baby) (Howlin' Wolf)
7. Flyin Saucers Rock n Roll (Billy Lee Riley) 260
8. Ten Cats Down (The Miller Sisters) 255
9. I Never Knew (Roy Orbison) 
10. Your Cheatin' Heart (Cliff Gleaves)
11. Just Walkin In The Rain (The Prisonaires) 186
12. The Hucklebuck (Earl Hooker)
13. Shake 'Em Up Baby (Frank Ballard)
14. Willing And Ready (Ray Smith)
15. Rock 'n' Roll Ruby (Warren Smith) 239
16. Born To Lose (Carl McVoy)
17. Lonely Weekends (Charlie Rich) PHILLIPS 3550
18. I Need A Man (Barbara Pittman) 253
19. Ubangi Stomp (Carl Mann) 
20. Sadie's Back In Town (Sonny Burgess) PHILLIPS 3551
21. Groovy Train (Wade Cagle & Escorts) 360
22. Don't Be Runnin' Wild (Problem Child) (Ken Cook)
23. Go! Go! Go! (Roy Orbison) 242
24. Red Velvet (The Kirby Sisters)
25. Greyhound Blues (D. A. Hunt) 183
26. I Forgot To Remember To Forget (Charlie Feathers)
27. Lewis Boogie (Jerry Lee Lewis) 301
28. Peace In The Valley (Million Dollar Quartet)
29. Down By The Riverside (Million Dollar Quartet)
30. Who Will The Next Fool Be (Charlie Rich)

Part 2:

1. Great Balls Of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis) 281
2. Matchbox (Carl Perkins) 261
3. Feelin' Good (Little Junior's Blue Flames) 187 
4. Mona Lisa (Carl Mann) phillips 3359
5. Ooby Dooby (alternative version) (Roy Orbison) 242
6. Guess Things Happen That Way (Johnny Cash) 295
7. My Babe (Narvel Felts)
8. It's Me Baby (Malcolm Yelvington)
9. Paralyzed (Million Dollar Quartet)
10. I'll Wait Forever (Anita Wood)
11. Somebody Told Me (Little Milton) 200
12. Rockin' Bandit (Dubbed version) (Ray Smith) 319
13. Pearly Lee (Billy Lee Riley) 277
14. Red Hot (Billy 'The Kid' Emerson) 219
15. Uranium Rock (Alternate Take) (Warren Smith)
16. Raunchy (Bill Justis)
17. Got You On My Mind (The Miller Sisters)
18. Just In Time (Harold Jenkins)
19. Ain't Got No Home (Carl Mann) phillips alt take
20. Ain't Got A Thing (Sonny Burgess) 263
21. Cheese And Crackers (Rosco Gordon)
22. Got Love If You Want It (Warren Smith) 286
23. Feelin' Low (Ernie Chaffin)
24. There's Another Place I Can't Go (Charlie Rich)
25. Handsome Man (Barbara Pittman)
26. How Long Can It Be (Maggie Sue Wimberley)
27. Goin Crazy (Mack Self)
28. Rockin' Daddy (Eddie Bond)
29. Cloudy (Brad Suggs)
30. Goodnight Irene (Johnny Cash)

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Friday Play and Quote List: Sir Thomas Beecham

Handel: Hallelujah Chorus

"It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it, but they absolutely love the noise it makes."


Mozart: Symphony no. 41 (Part of a 1934 set of Mozart Symphonies that for eighty years has never been excelled.)

"A musicologist is a man who can read music but not hear it."


Beethoven: Fourth Symphony

"Beethoven's late quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man."

Schubert: Fifth Symphony 

(On the dotted rhythms in the first movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony)
"What can you do with it, it's like a lot of yaks jumping about."

Berlioz: Harold in Italy

"There are two golden rules for an orchestra. Start together, finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between."

Mendelssohn: Italian Symphony

(When asked by the musicologist Neville Cardus what he thinks of Bach.)
"Too much counterpoint. What is worse: Protestant counterpoint!"

Verdi: Otello - Act IV

(to a soprano):
"Your voice reminds me of a cart racing down a hill with the break on."

Wagner: Tristan und Isolde Act II Love Duets

(to a tenor playing Tristan)
"Have you ever made love?"
"Yes, Sir Thomas."
"Well concerning your acting technique and observing your grave and deliberate movements to our dear Isolde, I am reminded of that estimable quadruped, the hedgehog."

Gounod: Faust

"I have just been around the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it."

Brahms: Symphony no. 3 (perhaps my favorite performance of it...)

"The Harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof."

Borodin: Polovtsian Dances

"Try everything once except folk dancing and incest."

Bizet: Carmen 

(Upon rehearsing Don Quixote by Massenet, he complained to the Soprano that she came in too late, she replied that the star Bass, Feodor Chaliapin, enacted his death too soon.)
"Madam. In my opinion no opera star has ever died too soon."

Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Suite

(About the very long and 'deep' Bruckner Seventh Symphony)
"In the first movement alone I took note of six pregnancies and four miscarriages."

Dvorak: Symphony no 8:

(to a female cellist) "My Dear Madam, you hold between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it."

Grieg: Peer Gynt



"Bass trombone, you're out of tune."
"The bass trombonist hasn't arrived yet."
"Oh. Well when he arrives tell him he's out of tune."



Chabrier: Espana

"Brass bands are all very well in their place - outdoors and several miles away."

Faure: Pavane

(when passing a gravestone that read: Here lies a fantastic organist and excellent musician.)
"What? Both in the same grave?"

Delius: North Country Sketches

(about Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony)
"A city life for me!"

Strauss: Four Last Songs

"No composer has written as much as 100 bars of worthwhile music since 1925."



Sibelius: En Saga


"Have you heard any Stockhausen?"
"No. But I once trod in some."

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Soul: The American Music - Part 1: Ray Charles

Soul music was the unique moment of history in American music - its confluence of facets forms a body of music more complete than any other genre produced by our country. In its marriage of musical sophistication to the complete gamut of human experience, it is almost unique among American musical genres. To this day, it has done a better job than any other American music in marrying the best in recording technology to the most individual and emotionally committed performers, and both to the best songwriters and lyricists and the most sophisticated musical arrangers. It marked the first true era of reconciliation and redress between white and black cultures, and marks the first time when the extraordinary musical culture of American Blacks were backed by the full might, support, expense, and hired talent of a recording industry controlled almost entirely by Whites. The result was a music which married the old world sophistication of European composition to the brave new world of American immediacy and improvisation, and both to furthering the emerging influence of the African musical roots that would come to dominate world music as the twentieth century progressed to the same extent which Europe dominated the nineteenth. All of Soul Music’s various facets synthesize in a fusion which mirrors the best of the democracy which produced the genre. It is the climax, the apex, and the ambassador for everything which American musicians are capable of achieving. It is the most American music there has ever been, and perhaps will ever be.

Not all soul music is created equal, and lots of it has all the same problems as the rest of the 1950’s and early 60’s musical genres - solid musical values, sometimes extraordinary ones, married to total vapidity; bad lyrics, sappy romantic sentiments, the desire for a commercial hit trumping the desire to create something meaningful. There is plenty by Ray Charles and James Brown which does not deserve to be heard again. Much of their second rate music can be amazingly fun and beautiful, and occasionally brilliantly inventive, but if mere fun and beauty and novelty is what people want from music, there’s plenty of music from their own eras which speak better to their experience. If you want to find what’s eternal in this music, you have to separate what might be forgettable from what’s truly unforgettable. If you want to understand why Soul Music is everything to America, here is a mere pebble in the pool of why that is.

Ray Charles:

You Are My Sunshine - If you want to understand the importance of Soul Music to America, start right here. You Are My Sunshine, that innocent children’s song, was written by Jimmie Davis - a country music singer and a virulently segregationist governor of Louisiana. Ray Charles takes that white bread melody and with fistfuls of dominant and diminished chords, he makes the song into something completely black - existing in a waystation between big band, gospel, Motown and the blues. Using a purely musical language, it is perhaps the most subversive cover in American musical history.

What’d I Say: If I have one complaint about any form of ‘popular music’, it is the obsession with sex. I know, I know, I’m a total stick in the mud. But sex is the primary signifier of vapidity in popular culture. If a musician feels the need in his songs to resort to incessant talk about love or sex, or selling a watered down version of romance that has nothing to do with the real thing, it’s an almost guaranteed indicator that a musician has nothing more profound to offer the world. It is no different than how classical musicians can create the most boring music in the world and can then slap a religious title on it and be lauded for their 'profundity' and 'depth.' But if you’re going to talk about sex in music, really talk about it. Don’t prettify it with romantic emotions which are completely divorced from anyone’s actual experience of love, lust, and loss. For various reasons, other Ray Charles songs get close to erotic realities too ((Night Time is) the Right Time, Hallelujah I Love Her So, Hit the Road Jack being prominent examples). But What’d I Say is unique among Ray Charles songs, in many ways unique among anything written until the day it was released. It was the first American song which actually traffics in the genuine sounds of sex. For perhaps the first time ever and the only time during the 1950’s, Americans could hear the sounds of fucking on the radio.

Unchain My Heart: So many American lyrics, particularly in the mid-20th century, traffic in euphemism. It’s probable that 90% of the euphemisms are very simple: they’re employed to disguise extremely sexual images in the terms of innocent love. But Soul Music brings an entirely different dynamic to that equation - what seems flippant and shallow at first glance contains far more depths to fathom. Unchain My Heart, in addition to having two of the most gripping hooks in the American popular tradition, has the metaphor of a heart in chains. Hailing as he did from Georgia, Ray Charles would have to view the image of chains as a very, very loaded symbol. Is this about an unfeeling woman in a bad affair, or is this about a region where the shackles of oppression still control people’s lives if not their legal states-of-being; a region that may have freed slaves in name, but not in deed? It’s entirely possible that the song is precisely as shallow as it seems on the surface, but I would stake a claim that this music alludes to something much deeper, and much more troubling.

Drown in My Own Tears: Moreso than perhaps any other nationality, one of the great qualities of American music is the seemingly effortless ability so many of its greatest exemplars have to skirt the line between comedy and tragedy. Other nationalities have their few, Austria has Mozart, Russia has Stravinsky, France has Jacques Brel, Britain has The Beatles, and America has dozens for every one of theirs. This ability is a simple question of taste and time. If there is such a thing as a national character, then it’s clearly not in American temperament to commit too much to any emotional extreme - and our music reflects that. Other countries view the ability to unquestioningly follow their primal instincts as a virtue, but we are (or at least we were) a nation which views apathy as something approaching our most cherished value. Music, at least in its written form, was the playground of obsessives who pursued their craft to the limits of infinity, and went through many corresponding periods of over-the-top expression that reflected the unbalanced obsessions of its creators. But with the development of recorded technology, music requires far less technical accomplishment to be powerful, and perhaps it is far more reflective of the way life is lived as a result. Life is not quite tragic, not quite comic or perhaps it is both all of the time. But so much of the Great American Music exists in precisely that state. And what you feel from this music is a Rorschach test of wherever on the emotional spectrum you’re feeling at the moment you’re listening to it. Drown in My Own Tears contains some of the most extravagantly emotional depictions of loss ever put on pen. The lyrics themselves are not particularly memorable, though perhaps the line “I sit and cry/just like a child/my pouring tears/are running wild/if you don’t think/you’ll be home soon/I guess I’ll drown, oh yes, in my own tears.” can’t help but make us wonder if this song is not in fact about the younger brother who's drowning Ray witnessed as a child. But what makes this song extraordinary is its major-key understatement. Yes, it’s clearly a sad song, but it sounds more nostalgic than tragic, and is not nearly as sad-sounding as such a sentiment would warrant, but it’s all the more moving for it.

Busted: I can’t lie, this is easily my all-time favorite Ray Charles song - another song which effortlessly glides the tragicomic line, and yet does so much more. Anyone would instantly relate to this song who’s ever been broke, or couldn’t live up to their responsibilities to those they love. It is an ultimate example of music endowing dignity to the lives of people who most desperately need it. There is something defiant about it, as though for all the indignities life has in store, we should, we must, we will nonetheless, keep marching forward, and celebrate in pure E-flat major brass glory. All it takes is two minutes, and within that tiny framework this song shows us a vision of life as it perhaps truly is; something full of heartache and humiliation, loss and misery, squalor and torpor, and yet still something exquisitely beautiful.

Seven Spanish Angels: There is a huge metaphorical resonance to this duet between Ray and Willie Nelson - perhaps the ultimate ambassador of White Southern Music. Is this song a romantic ballad about a violent Bonnie-and-Clydesque death of two lovers at the hands of evil men, or is the conjuration intentional which this song brings of a decision which hundreds if not thousands of widows who’d recently watched their husbands murdered by Klansmen had to make in the century before this duet was recorded? On the one hand, it is a glamorized view of death, romanticizing the idea of a glorious death in a way that’s slightly quease-inducing. On the other hand, the song is all too redolent of a decision which many women probably had to make after they watched their loved ones murdered in cold blood.

Georgia On My Mind: And finally we come to Georgia On My Mind, probably THE Ray Charles song in the mind of most people, and certainly the emotional heart of his output. There are two different sentiments that can be interpolated from this overexposed yet never too exposed simple song. The first is more obvious, the longing we all have for home and inner peace. Most people find that the further they grow from their origins, the more they long to go back. But there’s another sentiment made in this song that is far more challenging.  Like You Are My Sunshine, there is a definite and important statement being made in this song. Georgia, the heart of slavery, is a place not only just as valued by its black population as its white one as a homeland, but also a place cherished for its beauties and consolations by a people whose history in the state is a litany of misery. It is a message of both liberty and of equality. It is the message of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come (which was probably modeled on Georgia On My Mind much more than Blowin’ in the Wind as Sam Cooke claimed), of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, of dozens of American hymns and spirituals both black and white, and even the message of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. And that message is the ultimate message of music: that all humans have a right to cherish the same things, that dignity is universal, that he who oppresses his fellow man is oppressing his brother (and sister), and that no law which separates can prevent them from feeling love.

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800 Words: Evan and Hauptmann Rinderherz Go Through the Early History of Popular Music (a digression)

Evan: Herr Hauptmann, I’m afraid you suffer from Manny Ax Syndrome.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What syndrome is that? And what does Emanuel Ax have to do with any of this?

Evan: Well, as I hope you know, Emanuel Ax is one of the greatest pianists of this, or any, time.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: He’s a bit too intellectually curious for my taste.

Evan: Well, that’s not his problem.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It’s the world’s problem.

Evan: Regardless, Manny Ax is an amazing musician, but I remember reading an interview in Amazon. Manny recommended his favorite recordings. It was a great list: Cortot’s Chopin, Fleisher’s Beethoven, Adams’s Harmonielehre, Eugene Onegin, Oscar Peterson, and some other great discs. But there was only one thing to besmirch this otherwise terrific selection... Remember Two Things by Dave Matthews Band, which he said he was introduced to by his daughter.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Was ist Dave Matthews Band?

Evan: Dave Matthews Band was a fad rock group in the late 90’s which still sells out everywhere they perform. But music lovers have not taken them seriously in more than ten years. Every note Dave Matthews ever played is a love-letter to blandness and boredom.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: (finds Remember Two Things on youtube) Sounds like just another blundering American musician to me.

Evan: A much worse American musician than Manny Ax. But apparently, like you, Manny Ax can be the height of discernment on classical taste, yet a blithering idiot on any matter outside his purview. Apparently, his taste in non-classical contemporary music is precisely the same as millions of people who do not have enough interest in music to ever be interested in classical music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: This is what happens when you try to appease the vox populi.

Evan: I don’t think that’s quite true. I think he genuinely liked what he heard. But unlike the rest of the world, he wasn’t subjected to Dave Matthews every day for four years, and he never had a chance to grow to hate them the way the rest of us did. And this is your problem too Herr Hauptmann. If you listened to David Hasslehoff for more than five minutes every five years, you’d want to kill yourself. But you like David Hasslehoff in the same way that Manny Ax likes Dave Matthews. It’s so bland that it doesn’t even offend the sensibilities of any out of touch classical music lover, and therefore by listening to it you won’t have to challenge any of your preconceived notions of what true art is.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ah! Now I remember who Dave Matthews is! Isn’t he der new judge on American Idol?

Evan: No, that’s Keith Urban. You’re confusing your douchebag musicians who're popular in the South. And you never told me you watch American Idol!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I watch to observe the badness of American music.

Evan: At what point does this continual need to experience the badness of American music become a love of something you claim to hate? It’s almost like a form of pornography for you.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I’ve never looked at pornography in my life!

Evan: You should probably try it, it’ll make you happier.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Infamy! How dare you suggest such a dirty thing!

Evan: Albeit don’t do that dirty thing in my house.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How can you suggest that any popular music will laed me to anything but suicide?

Evan: Because some of it is great!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I’ve heard enough of it to know that is not true.

Evan: No you haven’t. If I’d listened to as little popular music as you did, I’d have probably concluded that everything was crap too.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: So you admit that it’s dreck!

Evan: No. Not at all. I admit that 70% of what people generally listen to is dreck. 20% of their music is mediocre. 5% of it is decent. 3% of it is good. 1.5% is great. And roughly .5% of it is as great as the greatest classical music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is still .5% too much!

Evan: Herr Hauptmann, I’m willing to meet your snobbery most of the way. But you’ll have to settle for at least a small compromise. I’ve heard too much that’s good to ever regard my culture’s music as a total waste.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What need there is for compromise when you are right?

Evan: The need is because you’re not right.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: History will vindicate me!

Evan: I guess that’s possible in some strange way, but you won’t be around to hear its verdict. In any event, there are already Americans who feel the same way as you, only they feel that way about American Jazz Music. To some Americans, music begins in New Orleans around 1920 and ends in New York around 1965.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Ach, Jazz. The barbaric horror of the jungle.

Evan: That barbaric horror is constructed from the same folk roots from which your beloved Deutsch Musik hails.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Prove it!

Evan: Alright. What’s most jazz improvisation except just the same way of developing counterpoint and ornamentation around a ground bass or cantus firmus?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But it is such an inferior way of so doing!

Evan: Why is it inferior?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because it is not written down! There is nothing planned, and therefore we cannot control the music!

Evan: Why can’t it be planned? Duke Ellington used to write out most of his instrumentalists’ solos. And even if they’re not written down, what do you think recording is? It’s just a new way of establishing permanence.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But they still do not control the music.

Evan: Sure it is. It’s just a different way of controlling music.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But it sounds so disorganized.

Evan: And yet when your beloved Furtwanglers and Edwin Fischers bend the tempo or rhythm, that doesn’t sound chaotic to you?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Nein. Because they do so to underline the harmonic rhythm and invention of der grossten meister!

Evan: Well, it’s just a different sort of rhythm in 20th century music. Most 20th century music takes the emphasis away from harmony and puts it on rhythm, often extremely complex rhythm. You might almost say that if the 19th century was about harmonic rhythm, then the 20th century was about rhythmic harmony.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Welche art von Bullshit ist das?!

Evan: Alright, you asked for it. I’m going to give you the quickest journey through 20th century music’s mainstream that you’ll ever get.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: It had better be quick...

Evan: Let’s start with Scott Joplin. Let’s just say he’s the American Bach. (Puts on a recording of Maple Leaf Rag)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: How could you dare even to mention this in the same sentence as Bach?

Evan: Because he’s at a similar waystation in music history. Bach took the accomplishments of the great polyphonists and created a music comprised of harmonic rhythm. Scott Joplin took the harmonies of the German tradition and created a music generated entirely by rhythm itself. Listen to those harmonies, they’re pure Schumann but with more rhythmic emphasis.  

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Do not you dare compare this mull to the Tondichter.

Evan: Alright, well, I give up. Did you hear about the lost impromptu by Schubert that was just premiered? It’s really beautiful.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Gruss Gott! Can I look it up on youtube?

Evan: Sure. Here, I’ll put it on for you. (puts on Solace by Scott Joplin)

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Prachtvoll! Simply magnificent! Listen to those chromatic innovations, as daring as anything until Schoenberg! Yet still mit die inner glut!

Evan: So...I have a confession to make.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Oh nein....

Evan: That was Solace by Scott Joplin.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Then I don’t like it.

Evan: What do you mean you don’t like it!? You just exclaimed it was Prachtvoll!

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because Schubert would have written it in the correct spirit. When Scott Joplin writes something like this, it is unconnected to the proper wellspirit of music history and culture!

Evan: That’s entirely in your mind. You can will yourself to like and dislike anything you want with that mentality.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: What’s wrong with that?

Evan: Everything! Rather than focus on what strikes your ear as beautiful, you’ll just have a checklist of requirements from music which limit your reactions.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Some reactions are undesirable and base.

Evan: Why does it have to be that way?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Because it is the base of the kultur which redeems us all from the terrors of our world!

Evan: What if it doesn’t?

Hauptmann Rinderherz: But it does!

Evan: There’s no arguing with you. But for reasons passing my understanding, I’ll continue to preach to you. Try George Gershwin.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: At least he tried to write classical music.

Evan: He didn’t try. He succeeded. He was one of the great geniuses of the century, and had he lived past 38, he might have become the greatest composer of the 20th century and rescued classical music from the ghetto in which you’re so keen to keep us.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is unfair. It is not a ghetto. It is liberation!

Evan: Says the man who never leaves my couch.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Your couch is the most liberated part of you!

Evan: Anyway, if Joplin is the American Bach, then perhaps Gershwin is the American Handel. He’s ostentatious and theatrical where Joplin is inward, and yet he has far more expressive range and diversity than Joplin just as Handel did than Bach. He wrote at least one of the greatest operas ever written. He can write amazingly dramatic music for seemingly every scope and every mood, including dark ones, and also wrote some of the most artlessly beautiful music ever composed.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Er ist ein Nachahmung eines Komponisten.

Evan: Alright. Well then you’ll loooorve the next two.... Whereas Joplin and Gershwin both established their fame in the North, the other two ‘founders’ of American music established their eminence down South. They might be considered the “Vivaldi and Scarlatti” of American music because they took forms which other people used, produced literally hundreds of compositions in exactly the same form, and in so doing made these new forms palatable for a new era.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I don’t care much for Scarlatti, and Vivaldi is terrible - the same boring sonatas and concerto 500 times!

Evan: If you listened to the new period practice recordings of Vivaldi you’d probably feel differently. But the new Vivaldi was a man named W. C. Handy, who grew up in rural Alabama and came up with the idea of notating the local form, the 12-bar blues pattern. He realized that you could become an endlessly inventive songwriter in that form, in music that could be endlessly adapted and still retain its universality. If you hear him in a great performance, Vivaldi makes minor keys fun. But W. C. Handy makes major key music into something sad.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: There is no way to make a major key sad! It is a violation of music’s fundamental laws!

Evan: Not only is there is no such fundamental law, but music is usually better when expectations like that are subverted. W. C. Handy wrote songs that smile through their tears, much as Mozart composed or Chekhov wrote.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: That is absolutely unfair to Mozart and even to Chekhov!

Evan: Is it? It’s just a different aesthetic, but no less profound.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Great workmanship is part of profundity! And there’s no need for workmanship in a 12-bar blues pattern!

Evan: Sometimes, you’re right. But that’s when the music is bad. When the music is good, there is an entirely different kind of workmanship that goes into it. And even when workmanship is great, instinct and emotional resonance are just as important. A great craftsman who expresses nothing but his craft (ahem, Hindemith) is infinitely less worthwhile than a mediocre craftsman who communicates with infinite expressive force (ahem, Janacek).

Hauptmann Rinderherz: I do not disagree, but I believe Janacek is an inferior composer.

Evan: Of course you do. Anyway, let’s look at our final composer before I go to bed. If W. C. Handy is the Vivaldi of the American “Mass” Tradition, then Jelly Roll Morton is our ‘Scarlatti.’ Scarlatti created the ‘sonata’ as we know it today. He may not have rendered it to the scale we see in Beethoven or even Haydn, but he created the binary sonata form in embryo, at the smallest possible scale. In almost exactly the same way, Jelly Roll Morton did the same with Jazz. The kernel of every innovation which Jazz later pioneered can be found in his pieces - the rhythm, the instrumentation, even the modal and chromatic harmonic daring of bebop.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Has it occurred to you that you’re generalizing and that these descriptions of American musicians are as worthless as your ‘Great Conductors’ Lists.

Evan: Of course, but who cares? In any event, we’ve digressed, and you certainly have a point. I’m already getting bored with these analogies, and we haven’t even made it to the Louis Armstrong/Haydn connection. In any event, let’s think about what comes next before we continue this dialogue.

Hauptmann Rinderherz: Long as I don’t have to listen to more of this Dschungelmusik I’m fine with that.

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