John Alden Carpenter was a lifelong Midwesterner: he was born in Chicago in 1876 and died there in 1951. He reached his compositional maturity in the twentieth century. He was a businessman and thus, a compositional amateur. (“Amateur” in the best sense: as a practitioner of something not for money but for love, which is what “ama-teur” means.) He adored American popular culture and music and he filled his compositions with aspects of both. As opposed to Paine, Buck, Foote, and MacDowell, all of whom came to their compositional maturity in the nineteenth century. (For our information, Paine and Buck were born almost 40 years before Carpenter.) Paine, Buck, and Foote were all born in New England; MacDowell in New York. They all had academic musical careers; they all worshipped at the altar of German music; and they were all embarrassed by what they perceived of as the provincial cretinism of American musical culture. As such, this stylistically schizoid album inadvertently tells us something of the “story” of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American concert music: the reliance on German musical models by academic composers working primarily in the nineteenth century, and the celebration of things “American” by some […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for David Weuste – Page 2
Last week’s Music History Monday post – which appeared on February 14, St. Valentine’s Day – offered up some of the very worst love songs ever written and recorded. That “worst love songs” topic grew out of an anniversary: the 30th anniversary of the U.S. opening of the movie Wayne’s World on February 14, 1992. My brief discussion of Wayne’s World noted that to this day, it remains the highest-grossing film based on a sketch from Saturday Night Live (SNL). The second highest-grossing SNL-inspired flick was The Blues Brothers, starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, which was released on June 20, 1980. The “Blues Brothers” – Jake (Belushi) and Elwood (Aykroyd) – made their debut on April 22, 1978, when their fellow SNL cast member Garrett Morris introduced them as that evening’s musical guests. Accompanied by Paul Schaffer (born 1949) and his incredibly tight SNL house (horn) band, the “brothers” performed Soul Man (1967) by Isaac Hayes and David Porter. For our information, Elwood (Aykroyd) carries his harmonica in a briefcase, handcuffed to his wrist. The performance is linked below. Surprisingly, as musical performers, Belushi and Aykroyd weren’t bad at all. In particular, John Belushi had a musical background: the […]
Continue ReadingLet’s get this out of the way up front, because the pretext for today’s post on Lennie Tristano was yesterday’s Music History Monday which, for the large part, was about sightless musicians. Writes Tristano biographer Eunmi Shim (Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music; The University of Michigan Press, 2007): “Born with weak sight, Tristano’s vision grew worse and by the time he was nine or ten years old he became completely blind. According to Bob Blackburn [writing in the Toronto Telegram, July 22, 1964], it was ‘the result of glaucoma probably stemming from his mother being stricken in pregnancy by the post-World War I flu epidemic.’ Judy Tristano, Lennie Tristano’s first wife, recalled that Tristano’s parents tried unsuccessfully to cure his blindness: ‘they had tried everything to cure his glaucoma. Legitimate doctors, quacks, going to church and everybody praying en masse, praying for his sight. But of course, nothing worked. They couldn’t cure glaucoma or treat it.’” As an adult, when the subject of his eyesight came up, Tristano’s standard response was, “I’m blind as a motherf***er.” Brief Biography Leonard Joseph Tristano was born in Chicago on March 19, 1919, and died in New York City on November 18, 1978. […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post featured the trumpet, trombone, and flugelhorn virtuoso Mic Gillette (1951-2016). In fact, Gillette could play virtually all modern brass instruments, and though he was primarily known as a trumpet player, he was an outstanding trombonist as well. (Gillette was known to switch instantly and effortlessly, back-and-forth, between the trumpet and trombone. This might not sound like a big deal to most of us, but for brass players it was – literally! – breath taking. In terms of the nature of the embouchure required, the size and shape of the mouth pieces, and playing technique, the trumpet and trombone are two very different instruments.) (BTW: for those intrepid trombone aficionados out there, I’d refer you to my Instrumental Outliers post for March 25, 2021, which focused on the magnificent, kidney-rattling contrabass and subcontrabass trombones.) Back, please, to Mick Gillette and his “bipolar/bi-instrumental” personality. The people who play the trumpet and the trombone are usually as different from each other as the instruments they play. In an orchestra, the flutes, first violins, and trumpets are considered the “glamor” instruments because they are on top and as such, we can always hear them. Likewise, the fine people who […]
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