Still going after all these years.
There are some songs where my attraction to the music is clear and immediate; others drift in over the transom.
I first found Coralie Clément‘s song “Bye bye beauté” in a cover version by Nada Surf, on their 2010 covers album If I Had a Hi-Fi. After I found I couldn’t get the song out of my head, I finally went looking for the album. The music (written by Clément’s brother Benjamin Biolay) simmers and builds; her voice is above it, breathy but intense.
I’ve been slowly working my way through digitizing a bunch of records and finally finished one I picked up last year when I was visiting my parents in Asheville. (Thanks to the awesome Harvest Records.)
There’s a lot to be said for finding bootleg releases of bands you love — they can be great documents of moments in the band’s history that don’t appear in official releases. There’s also a lot to be said for getting records instead of digital downloads, between the tangible artifact and the often warmer sound. But I’m not sure there’s much to be said for getting vinyl of bootleg recordings from the late 1960s.
The Velvet Underground boot pictured above is a two record set recorded in 1968, between The Velvet Underground and Loaded. The Doug Yule version of the band is in full effect here, with John Cale’s drones replaced with the choogling multiple guitar work that characterizes both the official releases from this period (“What Goes On”) and some of the often-anthologized but never-on-official-LP release songs (“I Can’t Stand It”). The band is in good shape here. But the recording isn’t. Our bootlegger was standing too close to some of the speakers for some songs, or Lou’s vocals weren’t high enough in the mix, or something, and it’s hard to listen to the performance from start to finish as a result. I should have just looked for a download of the thing instead.
This is a continuation of a post from earlier this week.
I’ve finished an index of Virginia Glee Club members who gave their lives in World War II. Here are a few more stories:
Mason Williams was shot down over Munich at the end of 1944.
John McCown died fighting in the mountains near Florence and is buried there.
John Gordon died serving in the cavalry in Europe.
Moss Plunkett was killed in action in New Guinea in 1943.
Louis Smith died two months before V-J Day, somewhere in the Pacific Theatre.
Alfred Marshall Luttrell, like Robert Gamble and Edmund Van Valkenburg, was killed in action, though we know nothing further about his death.
In addition to the casualties, a further ninety-eight Glee Club alumni are known to have served in the war.
As part of my ongoing work on the history of the Virginia Glee Club, I started researching the lives of Club members who became casualties of World War II. With some help from fellow fossil Andrew Breen, who thoughtfully photographed the Rotunda memorial tablet for me, I’ve been able to fill in a few additional names of Glee Club alums who gave their lives in service. This work is ongoing; I have no doubt I’ll find more than the seven I’ve found thus far.
It’s fascinating to me to learn about the particulars of the heroism of these young men. Of the seven I know about so far, five died in action overseas, but two died in accidents in training or at Stateside bases. One, Edwin Robson Nelson, died a prisoner aboard a Japanese ship in the Philippines. Another, Bruce H. Bode, suffered engine failure in his small plane while taking off in France, and changed course to avoid crashing into a backyard occupied by children playing, knowing that he would destabilize his aircraft and almost certainly die as a result. William Noland Berkeley Jr. landed in France six weeks after D-Day and was killed in action in an ambush a month later. Robert Gamble and Edmund Van Valkenburg were killed in action, though we know nothing further about their deaths. Ralph Chandler‘s plane disappeared while on a flight to the USMC base at El Toro, California, and Fielding Mercer died while Stateside in Pensacola, Florida.
The variety of ways in which young men gave their lives to save their country during this war is both inspiring and daunting. I’ll post more information as I get it.
I’ve written about SheepShaver a few times on the blog, but generally in passing. Today seems like a good day to acknowledge this software for the miracle it is.
Computers are simultaneously the most advanced and the most fragile thing humanity has invented. There’s no guarantee that a piece of software more than a few years old will actually still work (well, there’s no guarantee that any software will actually work, but there we are). And yet, a German programmer has created an emulation environment that actually works and runs classic Mac OS software.
The latest version has a weird crash on my late-2016 MacBook Pro, but setting the memory allocation to 512MB seems to fix that. So far, I’ve successfully played Lode Runner, Abuse, the Ambrosia shareware apps, Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, and various CD-ROM titles (the latter on my older MacBook Pro at home, which still has an optical drive). Oh, and Reagan’s Watching (above), which I dimly remembered being called SimReagan and which turns out to be slightly less funny, but still topical, all these years later.
I started my kids on Super Mario Brothers, which we own in emulation on the Wii (the only game console I own). I’m still trying to teach my son which way to hold the Wiimote to play the game, but my daughter is pretty conversant already with the game. So I can already tell I need to practice if I want to stay ahead of them.
Super Mario HTML5 looks like a pretty good way to do that while I’m away from the Wii. The gameplay is pretty close, at least for the two levels I’ve played so far, with the exception that the sky and ground expand to fill the browser window.
Increasingly my new music hunting has been on Bandcamp, where I’ve found some amazing music just by browsing and sampling. Other than Grand Banks (of course), it’s been fantastic for getting archival records, out-of-print Jim O’Rourke, and new jazz.
An especially rich vein has been jazz from London groups. I first stumbled across Ill Considered, by saxophonist Idris Rahman, late last year. Last weekend I went back to the site and discovered Brownswood Recordings and Yussef Kamaal. The latter, a group featuring Kamaal Williams (aka Henry Wu) on keys and Yussef Dayes on drums along with an assortment of session musicians, make experimental groove-based jazz-funk that wouldn’t have been out of place in Herbie Hancock’s early to mid 1970s discography—except for the hip-hop inflected drums, a common thread in the Brownswood recordings I’ve heard, and in fact in most of the really exciting 21st century jazz I’ve found.
Infuriatingly, Yussef Kamaal were one of the musical groups caught up in President Trump’s travel ban. Denied entry to the United States in March, they missed the opportunity to perform at this year’s SXSW.
The debut album from Yussef Kamaal, Black Focus, is engaging and rewarding, and a fun listen on a snowy day like today. Recommended. I’m also enjoying the live sets by the group on Youtube, including the group’s very first show, the Boiler Room session.
(This is Part 2 of the story of how I got my hands on a copy of the 1943 radio transcription record of the first performance of Randall Thompson’s The Testament of Freedom. Read Part 1 for context about the recording.)
Finding the record on eBay was a heady, exciting moment, tempered by two things: it wasn’t complete, and I wasn’t alone.
I have learned over the years that, while they don’t draw hundreds of bidders, works of history from the University are of enough interest to a small number of collectors that bidding can be competitive. I knew that I could probably win the auction if I paid enough attention—though I’ve lost my fair share of items, I’ve won more than I lost, thanks to a sixteen-year-old paper by one of my grad school professors. I knew that there was at least one other bidder, so I set an alarm for the last day of the auction and waited.
The completeness point was a little more concerning. The available information about the recording indicated that it was a three-record set (not uncommon in the days before 33 1/3 RPM records), but this was only one record. Thankfully, the photo of the label indicated that it was the last movement, easily my favorite of the four. Though Thompson’s setting of Jefferson’s text still plods in places (like any time the word despotism is sung), there is a note of real challenge to the opening words “I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance…”
The day of the auction arrived and I won, despite a flurry of bids earlier in the day. (The odds are good that the other bidder is reading this; sorry and better luck next time!) Now I just had to get the record. And here Fate intervened and made me wait.
The auction ended New Years Eve, one of a series of bitterly cold days with highs in the single digits. The next day the seller contacted me to tell me that he would mail the package a day later, since it was so cold his truck wouldn’t start. I could sympathize, having had to jump-start my own car so that I could take it to the garage to get a new battery. So I waited and watched as the package was shipped—two days before a huge storm that dumped 17 inches of snow on Lexington, Massachusetts.
Perhaps because of the storm, the package took a … circuitous route from New Hampshire to Lexington:
But it finally arrived earlier this week, and to my delight, while the original sleeve was in poor shape (the seller thoughtfully put the record in a new sleeve), the record looked like it was pretty good. Now all I had to do was to listen to it.
Here we had a small snag: my otherwise-wonderful Denon DP-45F turntable has no 78RPM setting. But I was going to digitize the record anyway. So I played it back at 45RPM, and then (as I noted earlier this week) used Amadeus Pro to speed up the playback by 173.3% (78/45). I tried noise reduction but didn’t like what it did to the tone of Thompson’s piano, so I left it alone.
Ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance. Listening to Thompson’s solo piano introduction to the movement, one is reminded of the historical moment in which the work was written. This was April 1943, more than two years into World War II, and many of the young men singing the work were painfully aware that Jefferson’s words about dying with light and liberty on the advance were not going to be hypothetical for them. The following vocal entrance is appropriately hushed, and the Glee Club declaims Jefferson’s text with clarity and good pitch. The reintroduction of the first-movement “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time” is not strident (as in the 1945 BSO/Harvard Glee Club performance) but nuanced—perhaps because the Virginia men only had to be heard above a piano, not a full orchestra. Only the final chord shows vocal strain in the high tenors.
And here it is! As noted above, the only manipulation was speeding up the playback to restore normal speed, and to join the two halves of the recording into one—which fortunately was pretty straightforward. Enjoy!
Sometime in late 1942 or early 1943, University of Virginia president John Newcomb commissioned a new work from the head of the music division (not yet the McIntire Department of Music), composer and professor Randall Thompson, to commemorate the 200th birthday of Thomas Jefferson, which would be celebrated April 13, 1943. Thompson looked for appropriate texts for the occasion and found them in Jefferson’s own letters.
In January 1943, Thompson had taken over the directorship of the Virginia Glee Club as Harry Rogers Pratt stepped down to focus on the war effort. The Glee Club provided, presumably, a solution to a significant challenge: how to mount the forces for a concert with a student body that was perpetually being shipped off to war. The Glee Club, while reduced greatly by the war effort (the 1942-1943 group officially numbered 45, down from 130 in 1940-1941), at least still performed. And Thompson knew them, having conducted them in his “Tarantella” the preceding spring. Accordingly Thompson composed the new work for men’s chorus and piano.
The actual concert was held on Founder’s Day and featured “music proved to have been owned or known by him,” according to the program notes from the concert. Significantly, the concert was broadcast nationwide on the Columbia Broadcasting System, and was recorded for later playback over the Armed Forces shortwave in Europe. It was a hit; Thompson’s obituaries noted it as his best-known work, and it was used in 1945 by Serge Koussevitzky (with the Boston Symphony and the Harvard Glee Club) to mark the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
I have long known that copies of the recording existed—in fact, a few years ago I found mention in a contemporary issue of College Topics, the precursor to the Cavalier Daily, that the Glee Club was privately selling “records … being made by Columbia Recording Corporation” that featured “reproduction of the first performance of [The Testament of Freedom] last April 13 with Stephen D. Tuttle conducting and the composer at the piano.” I figured I would have to go to the University to hear its archival copy.
And then I checked eBay, as I’m wont to do, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw the listing:
“1943 Randall Thompson/Univ. of Virginia Glee Club Testament of Freedom 78”
I couldn’t let it go. I had to be able to listen to it.
Tomorrow: getting, and listening to, the record.
Just found an Italian archive site that provides a tantalizing glimpse of the first major-orchestra performance of Randall Thompson’s The Testament of Freedom, as recorded by RCA (presumably following close on the BSO premiere of the work in April 1945). (You can view the full catalog record of the recording, in Italian, here.)
And by glimpse, I mean listen—though you can only hear a 30-second preview of each of the six sides of the six-record set (from the 78RPM era). To hear the samples, click the Play button beneath the scan of the record label in the center, then hit the Next button (right triangle) in the header and click Play again. It’s clumsy but it works.
And interestingly, side 5 raises doubt that Harvard’s Glee Club in 1945 was substantially more musically sophisticated than its Virginia counterpart. The opening of the last movement, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” is here shouted with uneven pitch and vowel pronunciation (direct link to a downloadable 30-second sample). I hope to be able to compare the recording to the Virginia Glee Club’s 1943 premiere soon.
Ars Technica: Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again. The article, which Lawrence Lessig pointed to, is a little skimpy on the research. OK, so the RIAA and MPAA say they’re unlikely to pursue another copyright term extension. I still say we’re likely to see legislation that shows up at the last minute to keep 1923 era works from entering the public domain.
Why? Because it’s happened before, twice, and because I can’t believe the borg-that-is-Disney would voluntarily let go of the opportunity to monopolize the monetization of its collective intellectual property without a fight.
I might be wrong about this, and it’s possible that their ongoing absorption of Lucasfilm, Marvel, and other entertainment properties are a way to diversify so that they can survive losing exclusivity over some of their earliest art. But I’m not holding my breath, until I see Disney swear that they aren’t going to lobby for another round of copyright exclusions.
UVA Today: The Gift That Keeps Giving: Bookstore Donates Annual Surplus to Students in Need. When your non-profit is running almost a half million surplus every year, where can applying that money have the most impact? If you’re the UVA Bookstore, the answer is taking the entire profit and donating it to Access UVA, which allows kids from disadvantaged economic backgrounds to attend the University of Virginia.
I’ll be doing more shopping there, knowing this.
Webkit.org: What Spectre and Meltdown Mean for Webkit. Detailed technical explanation of how the Spectre attack reads system memory it’s not allowed to, and the changes Webkit is making to address the problem. This is important given the foundational position Webkit holds on the web—it impacts Safari on iPhone and iPad, Safari, the Apple Watch, and the built in browsers on thousands of iOS applications.
Quirkspace: 78 RPM Records. One user’s tips for recording 78RPM records when your turntable only supports 33/45 RPM, including settings in Amadeus Pro.
Stereophile: My Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2017. Fred Kaplan runs down a list of great jazz releases from last year, including both new and historical releases. Totally agree about the Cecile McLorin Salvant release.
Gaffa: Lou Reed og Laurie Anderson: DR Koncerthuset, København. A review of late-period Lou Reed, from 2009, four years before his death, in concert with Laurie Anderson. From the review, this was a true collaborative show. There may be a bootleg of the performance floating around out there…
