Mixed Media

Listen Again: Music of Monks and Drunks

by Ted Libbey

(Click here to listen to the audio story and excerpts from Carmina Burana)

Carmina Burana was the title of a collection of medieval Latin and German lyrics published in 1847,   taken from a 13th century manuscript then in the possession of a Benedictine abbey near Munich.

To this day, the original manuscript remains the richest source of secular poetry by the goliards — itinerant scholars and monks active in Europe from the late 10th century to the early 1200s. In 1935, the German composer Carl Orff (1895-1982) encountered the collection and was immediately seized by the earthy, unbridled imagery of its material. He made use of some two dozen texts (though none of the melodies in the manuscript) to fashion one of the 20th century's most popular works for chorus and orchestra. The score, completed in 1936, received its premiere in Frankfurt on June 8, 1937.

Orff's Carmina Burana invites the performer and listener alike to participate in the hedonistic enjoyment of rhythmically catchy and frequently repeated tunes, as well as equally simple forms, consonant harmony, powerful singing and colorful scoring marked by unstinting use of percussion.

'Burana' With A Bang

German conductor Eugen Jochum's picturesque recording has a Germanness that is exactly on the mark. The orchestral playing sounds clean, characterful and suggestive; the choral singing suitably lusty. No one has ever done the Bavarian beer hall bit any better, and the whole performance is fun from start to finish. Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau brings the nuance of a Lieder artist to his solos, while tenor Gerhard Stolze, in spite of some liberties with phrasing, proves unerringly comical.

This article is from NPR's Classical 50 series, a weekly guide to essential classics. For the full archive of NPR's Classical 50, click here.

Listen Again: Why 'The 27s' Made Early Exits

Eric Segalstad has spent the past few years researching a group of musicians who have been dubbed "The 27s" — rockers who died at that age, either through tragedy, misadventure or excess. The club includes Kurt Cobain, who took his own life 15 years ago Sunday.

The king of grunge is just one of the more than 20 musicians featured in Segalstad's book, The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock & Roll. It includes artists across all genres — from Jim Morrison to Robert Johnson.

So, what is it about the number 27?

"It's a strange number," Segalstad tells NPR's Robert Smith. "It also happens right around that time in your life where most people go from the stage of youth to the stage of maturity."

Some of the subjects of The 27s — like Hole's Kristen Pfaff — didn't make that leap, turning instead to the cliché of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that led to early deaths.

"But they weren't all victims of rock 'n' roll stardom … living life fast and furious," he says. "There were also quite a few accidents and other tragic events that cut their lives short." Take, for example, the case of punk singer Mia Zapata, who was murdered in Seattle in 1993.

Others, says Segalstad, were victims of the business side of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle — like Pete Ham of Badfinger.

"I found him compelling because he did live life pretty purely," says Segalstad. "He didn't have any strong drug addictions, and he didn't live life any harder than you or I did at the time. But he was victim to crooked managers and record label quarrels that rendered him penniless and frustrated, and he ended his life by hanging himself in his studio garage."

In a way, the early deaths of so many of these stars have changed the way we look at performers.

"Janis Joplin said that, whether people know it or not, they like their blues singers miserable. And I think that's part of it," says Segalstad. "We need these musicians to be out there for us, to feel what we feel and to be what we want to be and can't. It is a dangerous profession."

But Segalstad says that, overall, The 27s is not a depressing book.

"It celebrates the lives and legacies of all these musicians," he says. "We want people to remember who they were and the music they created while they were here."

Listen to the full interview here.

Listen Again: Emiliana Torrini

If you're a Lord of the Rings fan, you might know the voice of Emiliana Torrini and not even realize it. That's her voice on "Gollum's Song," which plays during the closing credits of The Two Towers. But Torrini's talent goes much further than just a song on a movie soundtrack. In the U.S., she's released three soft-spoken yet confident and moving albums, including her latest, Me and Armini. She's also co-written songs with Kylie Minogue — one of which, "Slow," was a No. 1 hit.

Torrini's honest and beautiful voice, her constantly improving songwriting ability and her willingness to experiment across musical genres all help make her an artist worth following. In this session, Torrini stripped away the minimal but lush production of her music, leaving just her voice and Ian Kellett on acoustic guitar. Even in their sparest form, her songs still have a magical quality.

Listen to the full session from WFUV.

 

Listen Again: A Journalist's 'Ordinary Day' in Iraq

Iranian-American journalist Farnaz Fassihi was stationed in the Middle East from 2002 until 2006, where she covered the Iraq war and the daily struggles of the Iraqi people. A Shiite Muslim, Fassihi established close personal ties to many Iraqi citizens, who invited her into their homes. She recounts their stories — and their suffering — in her memoir, Waiting for an Ordinary Day.

Now The Wall Street Journal's deputy bureau chief for the Middle East and Africa, Fassihi grew up in Tehran and Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. in English from Tehran University and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Listen to the interview of Farnaz Fassihi originally broadcast on October 27, 2008 on Fresh Air.

Listen Again: Henry Mancini on Piano Jazz

Composer, arranger and pianist Henry Mancini was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. His father, a flutist and piccolo player, encouraged his son to pursue music, and the young Mancini began taking lessons from Philadelphia concert master and jazz enthusiast Max Adkins. Adkins was influential on the local music scene, and Mancini's cohorts in Adkins' stable included Billy Strayhorn and Jerry Fielding.

Mancini decided to pursue music and attended the Juilliard School. After a brief stint in the Army band during WWII, Mancini worked as a composer and arranger with the Glenn Miller Band. There, he met and later married the group's singer, Ginny O'Connor.

The couple settled in L.A., and after working odd jobs as an arranger and freelance musician, Mancini was eventually hired by Universal Studios. Universal proved to be a unique training ground for Mancini; there, he was called on for a multitude of jobs, from producing new arrangements of old tunes to writing original pieces for all kinds of theatrical situations. His big-band experience made him a natural choice to score The Glenn Miller Story in 1954, as well as The Benny Goodman Story in 1956.

After a successful run at Universal, Mancini left and began working as an independent arranger and composer. In 1958, he was tapped to write the score for a new television series, Peter Gunn. The theme song for the show became an immediate success; the soundtrack went to No. 1 on Billboard's charts, and Mancini received an Emmy nomination and two Grammys for the album.

In the early '60s, with a growing reputation as a composer who could write hits, Mancini made a living as a freelance composer/arranger, and during this time, he wrote such hits as "Moon River," "Days of Wine and Roses" (both with Johnny Mercer) and "The Theme from The Pink Panther."

Mancini continued composing and arranging for film and television through the early '80s. Newhart, Remington Steele and Hotel were some of the hit shows for which he penned the theme. In addition to his composition work, Mancini began actively appearing as a conductor and special guest of symphony orchestras around the world.

Throughout his career, Mancini recorded more than 90 albums, eight of which went gold. He won 20 Grammys, though he earned a whopping 72 nominations. Mancini also received a Golden Globe, two Emmys and four Oscars.

Mancini died in Beverly Hills in 1994.

Listen to the full program here.

Listen Again: From page to stage, The Bonesetter's Daughter bursts into song

Novelist Amy Tan has turned The Bonesetter's Daughter into an opera, which premiered at the San Francisco Opera on Saturday. Transforming the book into a libretto wasn't easy for Tan, nor was resurfacing the painful stories of her family's past.

When composer Stewart Wallace began to travel to rural China with Tan a few years ago, they were in search of an answer to a question that had been haunting them: "What does it sound like for a ghost to talk to a living person?"

The question of how a ghost sounds, feels, moves and is brought back to life is essential to the opera, which Wallace and Tan created over the course of many trips to China.

Tan is known for novels that delve into Chinese-American life. Here, the pair was on a quest to bring the novel — and elements of Tan's own life — to the stage. Wallace would write the music, Tan the libretto. But she'd never written one before, and it wasn't easy.

"You know, the key was really to cut out the words and let the music stand for the emotions, because that's what opera is," Tan says. "It's music, it's performance, it's great voices. And the story was a framework in a way."

The Bonesetter's Daughter begins with three characters emerging from a mist. One is a Chinese-American daughter, like Tan; the second is a mother, like hers, born in China. The third is a haunted and haunting ghost named Precious Auntie. The three entities make their way through a fog and sing about the things they know to be true.

Listen to the full story here.

Listen Again: A remembrance of 60s artist Alton Kelley

If the Summer of Love had a visual, it probably came from the drawing pad of artist Alton Kelley. Kelley's work graced album covers and concert posters, and has been described as art that defined a generation. The 67-year-old artist died this week in California from complications of osteoporosis.

Alton Kelley arrived in Haight Ashbury in 1964 with a sketchbook full of hot-rod drawings. He'd raced cars and bikes back home in Connecticut. But when Kelley met a fellow hot-rod artist from Detroit named Stanley Miller a few years later, cars and motorcycles gave way to skeletons and roses.

The two started making posters for dance concerts featuring up-and-coming groups such as The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Miller, who goes by the name "Mouse," says the work — and good times — rolled like a freight train.

At their peak, Kelley and Mouse were cranking out their elaborate posters once a week, and later expanded their portfolio to include album covers.

The Grateful Dead liked the skeleton-and-roses image the pair created for a concert poster so much that the musicians adopted it as their logo.

Some call the art a visual extension of the music. Others call it the visual for a psychedelic experience. Mouse says it was both, and that the joke between the two of them was that you had to be under the influence to understand it. But ideas, Mouse says, came from trips to libraries and art galleries. Kelley and Mouse pored over books of Gustav Klimt, Japanese poster art, and art nouveau.

Mouse says he and Kelley developed a work style that allowed them to stand side-by-side at the same art table. The pair worked together for more than four decades, and Mouse says that his work routine with Kelley never changed.

Just five months ago, Alton Kelley and Stanley "Mouse" Miller completed their last work together, a poster for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Click here to listen to the piece that aired on All Things Considered.

Listen Again: Riverwalk Jazz explores the heroes of swing

At the dawn of jazz, in early 20th century New Orleans, players like trombonist Kid Ory and cornetist King Oliver taught themselves how to play—or learned informally from other musicians. Many worked 'day jobs' on the docks, or as servants. 'First generation' jazz musicians created a driving, rhythmic style that caught on around the country. But it was a relatively simple music—you might have called it 'urban folk music.'

Though early New Orleans jazz lacked the spit and polish of technical proficiency, jazz soloists of the Swing Era declared this territory their battleground. These 'Heroes of Swing' won their medals with precise intonation and the ability to play fast, clean runs, with absolute accuracy in both low and very high ranges. As author John McDonough wrote in "Streamlining Jazz: Major Soloists of the 1930s and 40s" in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, "In the struggle to outgrow its origins, jazz became caught up in an arms race of virtuosity that took the solo form from folk art and popular art to the portals of high art."

Just as King Oliver was the visionary who wrote the rules on what ensemble-style jazz bands should sound like, his protégée Louis Armstrong led the pack on defining the art of the jazz soloist.

And ever since Louis Armstrong recorded his first spectacular jazz solo inventions in the 1920s, the music has revolved around stellar solo playing. Louis Armstrong and reedman Sidney Bechet were among the first jazz players to define their art with equal emphasis on technical expertise, dazzling solos, and passionate performances. But by the mid-30s, their influence was heard in a new generation of jazzmen, in some cases, using formal musical training to expand the language of jazz, inventing new rhythms and more daring harmonies. The results thrilled audiences.

In this program, Riverwalk Jazz salutes the great soloists of the 1930s, who propelled jazz to a new level. We'll hear the music of two Irish-American brothers from Pennsylvania who shared a drive for musical perfection—Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey; as well as the work of the self-taught, European gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose solo playing re-invented jazz guitar. And, also on the bill is music from a trio of highly inventive reedmen—Benny Goodman, Bud Freeman, and Benny Carter.

Find a link to the program here.

Listen Again: William Kapell reDiscovered

In the 1940s, William Kapell was classical music's next great pianist.

He won his first competition at age 10. By the time Kapell was in his early 20s, he was famous.

In 1953, he spent 14 weeks touring Australia, playing 37 concerts. But on the return home, he was killed when his plane crashed outside of San Francisco. He was only 31.

By the 1960s, Kapell's recordings were out of print. Only the most dedicated of collectors hunted them down in secondhand stores, and William Kapell was largely forgotten.

But long before TiVo, MP3s or even cassette tapes, there was an Australian music fan named Roy Preston. He avidly recorded concerts broadcast on Australian radio, including several from Kapell's last tour more than half a century ago.

Those recordings have just been issued commercially in a two-CD set called Kapell reDiscovered: The Australian Broadcasts. Washington Post music critic Tim Page has written extensively about Kapell — he wrote the liner notes for the new album — and spoke with Andrea Seabrook about the collection.

Click here to listen to the piece that aired on All Things Considered, and to listen to recordings of William Kapell's final tour in Australia.

82 and Still Painting

"We're living in a total illusion here on earth for better or worse, but whatever is beyond, that's where I'm looking... to the reality behind it all," says George Rhoads (pictured, right). He's talking about his landscape oil & acrylic paintings, his "chosen profession" as he puts it. But isn't he most famous for his huge moving sculptures, which appear at the Corning Museum of Glass, the ScienCenter in Ithaca, the Port Authority in NYC, and around the world? "In the 60's is when I started making the sculptures, and that provided me with kind of a living from then on, so I was able to paint quite a bit." Those paintings hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in the collections of Leonard Bernstein, and Lawrence Tish, among others. "Commercially, that hasn't done me a lot of good," says Rhoads. But painting is his first love. His rare solo exhibit, Landscapes of the Fingerlakes, is at Ithaca's Community School of Music and Arts through March 28.

Rhoads moved to the Ithaca area in 1970, in part because he was tired of living in New York. "I paint what's around me, and I was tired of painting the city," he says. Now his adopted home has named the month of March in his honor. In proclaiming March to be "George Rhoads Month," Ithaca mayor Carolyn Peterson cited, among other things, Rhoads' "international reputation as a painter, sculptor, and designer of kinetic art as well as being one of the first North American origami masters, and a yoga teacher." Rhoads says of the proclamation "it's rather gratifying, but strange... It's fun. I feel that I really belong here in Ithaca."

A few years back, the late Fred Rogers brought a crew to Ithaca to film an episode visiting George Rhoads' studio and looking at his fanciful rolling-ball sculptures. "That was a great day when he and his crew came to do the show, really unforgettable" says Rhoads. "Mr. Rogers was exactly as he seems on TV, a marvelous character."

The area landscapes in Rhoads' rare solo exhibition were all completed within the last three years, some of which had languished for years before being completed for this exhibit. (Pictured, left: Lake Afternoon, up for a raffle to benefit CSMA.)

He'll give an artist's talk Sunday, March 9 at 2pm at the CSMA gallery. He says he'll ask those attending what they want to know about... his career in general or the specific creation of the landscapes on display.

The exhibit's "gala opening" 5-8pm tonight (3/7) is timed to coincide with Gallery Night of Ithaca. Landscapes of the Finger Lakes runs  through March 28 at the Community School of Music and Arts, 330 E. State Street, Ithaca. Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 10am - 8pm.

LISTEN AGAIN: Hear my interview with George Rhoads online.

Read an article by Peggy Haines about George Rhoads in Life in the Finger Lakes magazine.

Visit George Rhoads' website.

--Gregory Keeler
gkeeler@wskg.org