I was just two years old – and therefore too young to notice or remember – when Elvis Presley made his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9, 1956. More that sixty million people tuned in to watch, a number that dazzles to this day. (In fact, they saw neither Elvis nor Ed Sullivan in Sullivan’s New York Studio. Presley was filming his first movie in Hollywood, so he performed from a local CBS studio. Ed Sullivan was on medical leave, recovering from a head-on collision suffered a few weeks earlier. It was the Oscar-winning English actor and director Charles Laughton who subbed for Ed Sullivan that evening. He introduced Elvis by saying, “Away to Hollywood to meet Elvis Presley.” The scene shifted to Elvis, wearing an absurd plaid jacket that made him look like a used car salesman. After acknowledging that being on the Sullivan show was “probably the greatest honor I have ever had in my life,” he began his mini-set with a performance of “Don’t Be Cruel”.) So I missed out on Elvis’ spectacular national premiere. But I was old enough to watch and remember the next epochal event to occur on the Ed […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Podcast – Page 31
The phrase “one of a kind” would seem fairly useless when applied to the arts in general or music specifically. Really, aren’t all great musical artists – by definition – “one of a kind?” Monteverdi, Purcell, Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Springsteen, Weird Al? Yes: these good folks (and many, many, MANY more) are indeed all “one of a kind.” But then But then there are those very few who are SO truly weird (sorry Maestro Yankovic; you are not really that weird), SO far out, SO iconoclastic, so radical, subversive, and idiosyncratic that they stand utterly solitary, disconnected from anything and everything but themselves; singular, detached, ALONE: truly, one of a kind. Such a person was the American experimenter, instrument builder, guru, high priest and “composer” – and that’s “composer” in scare quotes – Harry Partch, who died on September 3, 1974 – 44 years ago today – in San Diego, California, at the age of 73. Harry Partch was one of a kind. He rejected the entire Western musical tradition and created, in its place, an alternative musical universe for which he proselytized and composed. He created a tuning system that divided the octave into 43(!) different […]
Continue ReadingToday we recognize the birth and the death of two musical masters from entirely different times and places who nevertheless, by the most extraordinary of coincidences, share the same nickname: the jazz tenor saxophonist Lester “Prez” Young and the Franco-Flemish composer Josquin “des Prez” Lebloitte. Lester “Prez” Young Lester Willis Young was born on August 27, 1909 – 109 years ago today – in Woodland, Mississippi. He was the consummate jazz hipster, who played “cool” long before “cool jazz” was recognized as a genre of jazz. Known in particular for his long association with Billie Holiday, Lester Young died on March 15, 1959, at the age of 49. Josquin des Prez Josquin des Prez (or “Desprez”; we will talk about the surname Lebloitte in a moment) was born circa 1450 and died on August 27, 1521: 497 years ago today. He was, simply, the greatest and most respected composer of his time. That he is not still a musical household name speaks to the fickleness of history and not to his music, which is superb. Josquin was the first composer to become a legend after his death, the first to have his music widely disseminated thanks to the newly invented […]
Continue ReadingA little inside information about me. Since I was a kid, I have loved architecture and home design magazines: house porn, to be honest. The one constant in my reading has been Architectural Digest, to which I’ve been addicted since I was a teenager. Other mags have floated in and out of my consciousness over the years, including one called “Metropolitan Home”, to which I subscribed for many years (but no more; there’ just so much time for mags, I’m afraid). “Is this going somewhere” you ask? Yes: bear with me… “Metropolitan Home” had a regular feature (perhaps it still does) in which a designer would be asked to identify “the 10 things you cannot live without;” basically “your favorite things”. These good people would vie with each other to come up with the coolest, hippest, most sophisticated things-they-could-not-live-without: the caviar and lobster frittata at the Revo Café in Dubai; “my platinum Faberge cuticle scissors”; vicuna cashmere scarves: “my Swarovski crystal-studded Lixil Satis Smart Toilet” (this can be yours as well for just 130k);“my solar-powered Black & Decker Nose Hair Trimmer”, and so forth. (As best as I can recall, not one of those questioned ever came up with any of […]
Continue ReadingOn this day 58 years ago – August 6, 1960 – the 18 year-old singer and dancer Chubby Checker performed The Twist on American TV for the first time on the rock ‘n’ roll variety show American Bandstand. For reasons we will discuss, American Bandstand was, both artistically and socially, one of the most important programs ever broadcast on television. It aired for an incredible 37 seasons, from October 7, 1952 (when Harry Truman was President of the United States) until October 7, 1989 (three years before the election of Bill Clinton). (In case you were wondering, the longest-running television show of any kind, anywhere, is NBC’s Meet the Press, which made its debut on November 6, 1947; it has run continuously for 70 years and 9 months!) In its 37-year run, some 3000 episodes of American Bandstand were produced. From 1952 until 1964, the showwasfilmed in Philadelphia at the studios of WFIL, the local ABC affiliate. (That would have been channel 6; having grown up in South Jersey watching Philadelphia TV, it was one of the three network channels we received, along with WCAU – channel 10, which was then the CBS affiliate – and KYW, channel 3, which was […]
Continue ReadingToday we mark the birth – 267 years ago, on July 30, 1751 – of the “other” surviving Mozart child. Four-and-a-half years older than her brother Wolfgang, her full name was Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart; she was known as “Marianne” and went by the nickname of “Nannerl.” Nannerl was something of a musical prodigy herself, and by an early age she had become a formidable harpsichordist and pianist, to the degree that in the earliest of the Mozart family musical tours, she often received top billing over her brother. But her life as a performer came to a screeching halt when she turned 18 in 1769. Having reached a “marriageable age”, she was no longer permitted by her father to publically “exhibit” her talents. Yes, Nannerl could have gone renegade like her brother and defied her father, but such a thing would have been inconceivable to her. From her first breath to her last, Maria Anna/Marianne/Nannerl – whatever we choose to call her – was her father’s daughter, and she could no more have gone against his wishes than I can pole vault 19 feet (or 4 feet, for that matter). She did not marry the man she loved […]
Continue ReadingAs events in music history go, July 9 is definitely on the lighter side. (Although, for me – personally – it is an important day, and I would use this opportunity to wish the happiest of birthdays to my beautiful daughter Rachel Amy, who was born in Berkeley, California 32 years ago today!) But back to musical business. We will indeed recognize the birth on July 9, 1879 – 139 years ago today – of the Italian composer, musicologist, and violinist Ottorino Respighi in Bologna, the city of lunch meat and red sauce fame. Respighi’s fame as a composer rests on four works: his three orchestral tone poems Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals; and the eighth of his nine operas, a work entitled La fiamma (meaning “The Flame”), which received its premiere on January 23, 1934 in Rome. Fancy that: an Italian composer writing opera! In fact, there’s nothing more natural in the world. Opera was invented in Italy for the same reason that surfing was invented in Hawaii: Hawaii is surrounded by warm ocean water and perfect waves and Italians are surround by the musical warmth and beauty of the Italian language: that seemingly perfect […]
Continue Reading240 years ago today – on July 2, 1778 – the Swiss-born philosopher, novelist, educator, music theorist and critic, and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau died at age 66 in the township of Ermenonville, roughly 25 miles north-east of Paris. Rousseau was one of the greatest and most significant thinkers ever born to our species. According to Will and Ariel Durant, writing in their book Rousseau and Revolution, Rousseau: “transformed education, elevated the morals of France[!], inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoy, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before.” Rousseau also helped to redefine the role and substance of opera at a time when opera – like movies and television today – was not just a form of entertainment but both a reflection and a driver of the political and social values of its time. A little background Opera was invented in Florence Italy around 1600 as a […]
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