The history of early twentieth century African-American vocal ensembles is a rich one: the highly successful Mills Brothers inspired a large number of singing groups in the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Using only their voices and sometimes some sparse instrumentation, these groups combined jazz, pop, and gospel to produce music that anticipated the rise of R&B, rock ‘n roll, and doo-wop in the 1950s. Such groups as the Spirits of Rhythm, the Golden Gate Quartet, the Four Vagabonds, Cats and the Fiddle, the Ravens, and the Ink Spots were all pioneers and integral parts of musical history.
The Ink Spots gained international fame in the 1930s and 1940s and were widely accepted in both the white and black communities. They had started out in 1934 as a group singing comedy jive songs in the manner of Fats Waller or Cab Calloway, but when their original tenor singer Jerry Daniels left the group, his replacement Bill Kenny would transform them into a seriously melodic vocal harmony group that would sell millions of records. It’s no exaggeration to say that every singer who sang a ballad in the 1950s and early sixties was influenced by the Ink Spots.
If I Didn’t Care was the record that defined their trademark sound. Written by Jack Lawrence, it is the perfect showcase for the Ink Spots’ deliciously warm harmonies. The angel voices of Bill Kenny and bandmates Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Orville Jones, harmonise together like honey. Check them out here.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) is often hailed as Russia’s greatest composer (from a strong field), and his works epitomise the emotional depth for which Russian music is known. You might say he was something of a Russian Beethoven, with the same genius for dramatic intensity and emotional range, and indeed Tchaikovsky deeply respected and acknowledged Beethoven. Although his true love was in fact Mozart, it is Beethoven’s influence that is evident in his compositions, particularly his later symphonies such as his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, with its exploration of melancholia. Today, however, I’m highlighting his remarkable Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor, Op. 23.
It’s one of those tunes from the world of classical music which you instantly recognise when you hear it even if you don’t necessarily know it from its title. It was composed during the several months leading up to February 1875 and first performed in October of that year, in Boston, by pianist Hans von Bülow. It was to become one of the best known piano concerti of all time and in a nutshell it is a sublime piece of music. Strange then, that it should have been so roundly slated by the man who Tchaikovsky had originally wanted to play it before approaching von Bülow, namely Nikolai Rubinstein.
As the story is related, Tchaikovsky invited Rubinstein to the Moscow Conservatory to demo his composition, just three days after completing it. Full of anticipation and hope that Rubinstein would be blown away and agree to play it, Tchaikovsky sat at the piano and played the first movement. To Tchaikovsky’s chagrin not a single word was spoken and after a period of silence he could stand it no more: “Well?” he said, to which Rubinstein’s tactless and rather brutal response is described in Tchaikovsky’s own words:
“It turned out that my concerto was worthless and unplayable; passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten.” Rubinstein went on to say “that if I reworked the concerto according to his demands, then he would do me the honour of playing my thing at his concert. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I answered, ‘I shall publish the work exactly as it is!’”.
You can only imagine the indignation Tchaikovsky must have felt at that cutting critique. And that’s why Tchaikovsky approached von Bülow to play it…
Postscript: Rubinstein changed his opinion of the piece and became a big fan (you know what it’s like, you sometimes need to hear an album three or four times before properly appreciating it), and finally even played it, with gusto, in Moscow, St Petersburg and Paris, in 1878.
Let’s hear the opening four minutes as played by the seventeen-year-old prodigy Evgeny Kissin, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Salzburg 1988.
Kate Bush is nothing if not innovative. She burst onto the scene in 1978, aged nineteen, with her debut single Wuthering Heights. Whilst the rest of the charts were populated either by the new generation of punk and new wave or the old generation of disco and soft rock, here was Kate singing theatrically about a Victorian novel and dancing ethereally on Top of the Pops. The nation was strangely hooked and it went to number one (and no doubt Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights experienced a boost in sales at the same time).
Kate had been writing songs for years, having grown up in a music-loving household in Kent, and had recorded a bunch of them on demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour who immediately recognised the song-writing talent and other-worldly vocals. He encouraged Floyd’s label EMI to sign her up, which they duly did. She was sixteen and still at school so she continued her studies, honed her craft, learned interpretive dance under choreographer Lindsay Kemp, and in the interests of good research read Wuthering Heights (she had written the song before actually reading the book, having caught the back end of a BBC TV adaptation of it). And the rest, as they say, is history — she went on to record nine studio albums all of which reached the UK Top 10, and recently enjoyed something of a renaissance following the use of her song Running up that Hill in the Netflix blockbuster series Stranger Things.
Cloudbusting remains my favourite Kate Bush song. If the record-buying public thought that the subject matter of Wuthering Heights was somewhat quirky, it hadn’t seen nothing yet. The song took inspiration from the 1973 memoirs of Peter Reich (Book of Dreams), written about his close relationship with his father the psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich, at their farm named “Orgonon”, in Maine. Wilhelm Reich had been experimenting with a cosmic energy which he termed orgone, and had built devices called orgone accumulators which he claimed could cure cancers and promote health. Later he would build a rain-making machine called a cloudbuster and father and son would spend hours on their farm pointing it at the sky and trying to make rain. Like all promoters of fringe ideas (ask Nikola Tesla), Reich eventually fell foul of the authorities, was imprisoned, and had his inventions and ideas suppressed.
Kate’s musical interpretation of the story is outstanding. It is at once mesmeric with its mantra-like backing vocals and hypnotic cello strokes, and a masterclass in story-telling with its setting of the scene from the very first line “I dream of Orgonon”. That line, with that word, had such an intriguing feel to it, long before I discovered its true back story. The video accompanying the single, is genius: a masterstroke casting of Donald Sutherland as the father, and Kate herself with a pixie cut to stand in for the son. The “cloudbuster” itself, designed by the same people who designed the “xenomorph” for Ridley Scott’s Alien, is a wonderful steam-punk invention. After Reich’s arrest, we see Kate/Peter taking over the reins and achieving success with his father’s inventions – I don’t know how true this is, but at least Kate was gratified that the real Peter Reich hailed the video and said it captured the situation and the emotion perfectly. Watch and enjoy here…
We all have our favourite Christmas songs. Most of these we like through sheer tradition – songs like Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody (1973) or Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime (1979) are just as part of the Christmas landscape, ingrained by sheer repetition, as Christmas trees and Father Christmas. I have delved into Spotify to explore Christmas songs from way back, many of which you no longer hear on the radio but which nonetheless are often very enjoyable – check out Kay Starr’s (Everybody’s Waitin’ for) The Man with the Bag (1950) or Mitch Miller’s Must Be Santa (1960) to name just two worthy old classics (I’m also a fan of Bob Dylan’s cover of the latter).
However, the Christmas song that resonates the most with me remains Greg Lake’s glorious debut solo single in 1975, I Believe in Father Christmas. It manages to encapsulate the required Christmas magic whilst remaining a great piece of music in its own right. Greg Lake wrote the song initially with a view to protesting at the commercialisaton of Christmas, but the lyrics provided by King Crimson co-founder Pete Sinfield brought it back on track as a picture-postcard Christmas song (albeit with a theme of lost innocence as the narrator “saw through the disguise” and seems a bit disgruntled about broken promises regarding snow and peace on Earth, but never mind).
The instrumental melody between the verses comes from the “Troika” portion of Sergei Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite, written for the 1934 Soviet film of the same name, and provides a very Christmassy, sleighbell-heavy motif. This was added at the suggestion of Greg’s bandmate from ELP, Keith Emerson, who was no stranger to incorporating themes and motifs from classical music. An orchestra and choir were added too, contributing to an ebullient musical finale. The song was recorded at Abbey Road studios, and the video was shot on the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and in the West Bank.
The song was released in November 1975 and got to number two in the UK singles chart, held off the number one slot by a certain Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Lake commented: “I got beaten by one of the greatest records ever made. I would’ve been pissed off if I’d been beaten by Cliff (Richard).”
If you’re a music history enthusiast, hours of fun can be had perusing the Roud Folk Song Index (https://archives.vwml.org/search/roud), the online database of around a quarter of a million references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world, and named after its compiler Steve Roud. It correlates versions of traditional folk song lyrics independently documented over past centuries by many different collectors across the UK and North America. Take Roud number 6393, for instance: The House of the Rising Sun.
Although widely known from the most successful contemporary version, recorded by the Animals in 1964, The House of the Rising Sun is a traditional folk song with deep roots: it was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s, but probably goes back much further, emanating from the tradition of so-called “broadside ballads”. A “broadside” was a sheet of cheap paper used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries to distribute news and so on, but also, most popularly, ballads. “Ballads” were narrative rhymes and songs developing from the minstrelsy of the earlier fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which told folk stories on every topic under the sun, from legends and heroes and religion to the more prosaic side of life.
The House of the Rising Sun ballad tells of a person’s life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans, and is a classic cautionary tale, appealing to his listeners to avoid the same fate:
There is a house in New Orleans They call the Rising Sun And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy And God, I know I’m one
Folk song collector Alan Lomax noted that “Rising Sun” was the name of a bawdy house in at least two traditional English songs, and a name for English pubs (Leeds dwellers may be familiar with the one on Kirkstall Road, albeit now sadly disused). He hypothesised that the location of the said drinking hole-cum-brothel was then simply relocated from England to the US by roaming performers. In 1953, Lomax met Harry Cox, an English farm labourer known for his impressive folk song repertoire, who knew a song called She was a Rum One (Roud 2128) with two possible opening verses, one beginning:
If you go to Lowestoft, and ask for The Rising Sun, There you’ll find two old whores and my old woman is one.
The oldest known recording of the song, under the title Rising Sun Blues, is by Appalachian artists Tom Ashley and Gwen Foster, who recorded it in 1933. Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather who had got married around the time of the Civil War, suggesting that the song was written years before the turn of the century.
In 1941, Woody Guthrie recorded a version; Lead Belly recorded two versions in the forties; Joan Baez recorded it in 1960 on her eponymous debut album; Nina Simone recorded a version for the live album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962; and Bob Dylan recorded the song for his debut album, released in March 1962. But it was the Animals, Newcastle’s own blues-rock band made up of Eric Burdon, Alan Price, Chas Chandler, Hilton Valentine and John Steel, who scored a transatlantic number one hit single with it in 1964 and made it their signature tune.
Amazing Grace is one of the most recognisable songs in the English-speaking world — who hasn’t been exposed countless times to these iconic opening lines?
Amazing grace, How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see
It was written in 1772 by English Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725–1807), drawn very much from personal experience. He had grown up without any particular religious bent and after a time having been pressganged into service with the Royal Navy, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. However, in 1748 he was on a vessel caught up in a storm so violent that he begged God for mercy and underwent (having presumably got his feet back on terra firma) something of a spiritual conversion. Thereafter, Newton gave up seafaring, studied Christian theology, and became a vocal abolitionist. He once was lost but now was found.
Newton was ordained into the Church of England in 1764, and took a post as curate at Olney in Buckinghamshire, where he met and began to write hymns with William Cowper (who himself would become a celebrated poet and hymnodist). They wrote Amazing Grace to illustrate a sermon Newton was giving on New Year’s Day 1773 with the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God. It debuted in print in 1779 in their collaborative Olney Hymns.
At this stage, Amazing Grace, like all the other Olney hymns, was still relatively obscure but it took off in the United States when it was picked up and extensively used by Baptist and Methodist preachers during the Protestant revival movement of the early 19th century (the so-called Second Great Awakening). In 1835, American composer William Walker set the words to the tune known as New Britain and this is the version you’ll hear today.
The song has unsurprisingly become a staple of Gospel music, and has also crossed over into secular music with a particular influence in folk music. It’s been recorded thousands of times in the twentieth century, from Elvis Presley to the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards; today though, I offer a version by American folk singer Judy Collins, recorded in 1993 with the Boys’ Choir of Harlem.
The Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) wins my ‘coolest composer’s name’ award, with honourable mention to German composer Engelbert Humperdinck (1854–1921) who of course is not to be confused with mellow British pop singer Arnold Dorsey who used Engelbert Humperdinck as a stage name. Mussorgsky was one of the “The Mighty Five” alongside Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, and (another contender for the cool name award) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Together, these five fashioned a distinct national style of Russian classical music in the second half of the 19ᵗʰ century.
Mussorgsky’s works were inspired by Russian history and folklore, such as his opera Boris Godunov (about the Tsar who ruled Russia between 1598 and 1605), Night on Bald Mountain (a series of compositions inspired by Russian literary works and legends), and Pictures at an Exhibition. This latter piece is a piano suite in ten movements, written in 1874, and inspired by an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Hartmann was as devoted as Mussorgsky to making intrinsically Russian art and the two had become firm friends. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual artwork.
Art critic Vladimir Stasov described the piece as Mussorgsky “roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend.”
The composition has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists, but has also became widely known from orchestrations and arrangements produced by other composers, such as Maurice Ravel’s 1922 adaptation for orchestra. The excerpt below is the opening promenade from the Ravel version, as played by the National Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, New York. This is another tune where I say “I bet you know it…”.
Incidentally, prog rock trio Emerson Lake and Palmer did a version of Pictures at an Exhibition, just as they did a version of another blog topic here, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
It was Gladys Knight who first made a call to legendary Motown founder Berry Gordy to tell him about an exciting new act she had overheard from her dressing room on the second floor of the Regal Theater, Chicago. Gordy never returned that call but a short time late Motown was approached again, this time by Bobby Taylor of Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers who told A&R Vice President Ralph Seltzer about this sensational act that had opened for them at the High Chaparral club. So it came to pass that the Jackson Five – for it was they – went to Detroit to audition for Motown, and Gordy signed them up right away.
In October 1969, the Jackson Five’s first national single, I Want You Back, was released, and became their first number one hit on 30ᵗʰ January 1970. It was performed on the band’s first television appearances on Diana Ross’s The Hollywood Palace and on their milestone performance of 14ᵗʰ December 1969, on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The song was written and produced by the production team known as The Corporation, comprising Motown chief Berry Gordy himself, Freddie Perren, Alphonso Mizell, and Deke Richards. Originally considered for Gladys Knight & the Pips and later for Diana Ross, the song was re-worked to suit its main lead vocal being performed by a tween, the then-11-year-old Michael Jackson. Here’s Jackie Jackson’s memory of the event:
“I remember going into the Motown studio and hearing the track coming through the big studio monitors right in our face,” says Jackie Jackson. “It was slamming. The intro was so strong. Berry always taught us to have a strong intro to get people’s attention right away. And I remember the Corporation teaching us the song. Michael picked it up so fast; it was easy to learn for all of us. They kept changing it here and there for the better. We told them it was great, but the next day Freddie and Fonce added more things to it. They wanted to make it perfect. Michael did these ad-libs at the end of the song. They didn’t teach him that; he just made up his own stuff.”
And “slamming”, it certainly was: an exuberant pop masterpiece that remains one of my favourite all-time songs. It’s joyful — even if it is about a lover who is ruing his hastiness in dropping his girl! Enjoy the whole package here: the glorious costumes, the boys’ voluminous Afros, the well-rehearsed dance moves, and of course the genius of Michael Jackson manifested at a precociously young age. Recorded in the Goin’ Back To Indiana TV special in 1971.
German author E T A Hoffmann (1776–1822) was one of the major writers of the Romantic movement and his stories of fantasy and Gothic horror highly influenced 19th-century literature. For example, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker is based on Hoffman’s novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, while Delibes’ 1870 ballet Coppélia is based on the short story, The Sandman. Incidentally, this excerpt from the latter story, describing that folkloric character the Sandman, amply illustrates that the term ‘Gothic horror’ is no exaggeration (in bygone ages we didn’t half spin some horrific tales for our young, eh?):
“Most curious to know more of this Sandman and his particular connection with children, I at last asked the old woman who looked after my youngest sister what sort of man he was. “Eh, Natty,” said she, “don’t you know that yet? He is a wicked man, who comes to children when they won’t go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. He puts their eyes in a bag and carries them to the crescent moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up there. They have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.”
The Sandman (and two other of Hoffman’s tales, Councillor Krespel and The Lost Reflection) also inspired the subject of today’s blog, the opéra fantastique by French composer Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffman. Offenbach (1819–1880) was already a famous composer of around 100 operettas, such as Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) and La Belle Hélène (1864), when he collaborated with Jules Barbier to bring The Tales of Hoffman to the stage. It proved to be his final work: knowing he was dying, he wrote to impresario Léon Carvalho:
“Hâtez-vous de monter mon opéra. Il ne me reste plus longtemps à vivre et mon seul désir est d’assister à la première” (“Hurry up and stage my opera. I have not much time left, and my only wish is to attend the opening night”)
But it wasn’t to be: Offenbach died in October 1880, four months before the opera’s premiere…nevertheless, his work entered the standard repertory and is a popular piece to this day. Here, listen to Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča sing the soprano and mezzo-soprano duet, the Barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour) from Act III. You either know it or you think you don’t know it…but you’ll know it!
It’s Christmas time and once again, like many of you, my family and I enjoyed a candlelit carol service at our local church. I do like this event each year; it marks the arrival of Christmas-proper and is the time when you can pause from the merry-go-round that is Christmas-in-practice and just enjoy the moment. Carols such as O Come All Ye Faithful and Hark, The Herald Angels Sing are ideal for a packed church with a rousing organ (who doesn’t enjoy blasting out those barnstorming Victorian lines such as “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb” and “Hail th’incarnate Deity”?). The carol that I want to write about today, on the other hand, is better suited to a far more reserved affair: Silent Night is made for hushed tones and a gentle accompaniment, and for me is the very epitome of the reflective element of the season.
The story goes that the carol was first performed on the evening of Christmas Eve in 1818, in St Nicholas Church, Oberndorf, in present-day Austria. The young Catholic priest at the church, Joseph Mohr, found himself in a bit of a pickle when the church organ became incapacitated just before that evening’s Christmas Mass service (in the manner of boilers breaking down at just this wrong time of year, I suppose). Thinking on his feet, he remembered that he had written a nice poem a few years before called Stille Nacht, and wondered if local schoolmaster and organist Franz Gruber might set its six stanzas to music for guitar.
Gruber readily agreed to step into the breach and wrote a melody there and then — and that night, the two men sang Stille Nacht for the first time at the church’s Christmas Mass, with Mohr playing guitar and the choir repeating the last two lines of each verse. According to Gruber, the organ builder who serviced the instrument at the Oberndorf church, was so enamoured of the song that he took the composition home with him to the Zillertal valley in the Tyrol where he shared it with musical friends. From there, two travelling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, included the tune in their shows, and its popularity spread all over Europe.
Rainer family
It’s a very moving and humbling song; as a testament to its global popularity, it was sung by troops during the famous Christmas truce of World War I, perhaps because it was the one tune that was familiar to all of them. How poignant the words must have seemed at that particular moment!
German lyrics
English lyrics
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Alles schläft; einsam wacht Nur das traute hochheilige Paar. Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar, Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh! Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Hirten erst kundgemacht Durch der Engel Halleluja, Tönt es laut von fern und nah: Christ, der Retter ist da! Christ, der Retter ist da!Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Gottes Sohn, o wie lacht Lieb’ aus deinem göttlichen Mund, Da uns schlägt die rettende Stund’. Christ, in deiner Geburt! Christ, in deiner Geburt!
Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright Round yon virgin mother and child! Holy infant, so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace! Sleep in heavenly peace!Silent night! Holy night! Shepherds quake at the sight! Glories stream from heaven afar, Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia! Christ the Saviour is born! Christ the Saviour is born!Silent night! Holy night! Son of God, love’s pure light Radiant beams from thy holy face With the dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus, Lord, at thy birth! Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!
Here is a rendition by the Spanish sopranos Montserrat Caballé and her daughter Montserrat Martí. Merry Christmas!
Franz Gruber
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