Music: quotes, facts and reflections

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WonderArt

In his lifetime Bach was famous as an organist and harpsichord player, and churches invited him to test and open their new organs. He wrote his keyboard music for the organ, the harpsichord and the clavichord. The piano was still a new invention, and the modern concert grand did not yet exist.

The three instruments sound very different. On an organ, air is blown through pipes. On a harpsichord, pressing a key makes a small quill pluck the string, so the player cannot make one note louder than another by touch. On the clavichord, a small brass blade strikes the string and stays against it, which allows fine shading but is too quiet for a hall. The piano, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around 1700, let players play both soft and loud; its full name, pianoforte, means “soft-loud” in Italian. In the 1730s the German builder Gottfried Silbermann showed Bach one of his early pianos. Bach found the high notes too weak. In 1747, at the Potsdam court of Frederick the Great, he improvised on an improved model, and he later helped to sell Silbermann's pianos.

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WonderArt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) left more than a thousand surviving works, from church cantatas to keyboard pieces, concertos and chamber music. They are numbered in the BWV catalogue; his first Cello Suite, for example, is known as BWV 1007.

BWV stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, German for “catalogue of Bach's works”. The musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder published it in 1950 and gave every known piece a number, grouped by type rather than by date: the church cantatas come first, as BWV 1 to 200, and the organ, keyboard, chamber and orchestral works follow. A revised third edition, prepared with the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, appeared in 2022. Dozens of cantatas are known to be lost, partly because his manuscripts were divided among his sons after his death in 1750, and not all of them looked after their share. After his death most of his music fell out of use, apart from keyboard works studied by musicians such as Mozart and Beethoven, until Felix Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion, Bach's great choral setting of the suffering and death of Jesus, in Berlin in 1829.

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DriveArt

Between June 1724 and March 1725, Bach wrote about 40 cantatas in a row for the churches of Leipzig, one for almost every Sunday and holiday. A cantata is a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra sung during the service, and each of these was built on a well-known Lutheran hymn, using its words and its tune.

Bach became Thomaskantor, the director of church music in Leipzig, in 1723, and in his first year he supplied a cantata almost every week, some adapted from earlier works. For his second year he set himself a plan: each cantata would be built on one Lutheran hymn, or chorale. The opening chorus sets the first verse with the hymn tune in the sopranos, the middle verses are reworded for solo singers, and a plain four-part setting of the last verse closes the piece. The idea may have been inspired by the 200th anniversary of the first Lutheran hymn books, printed in 1524. The series stopped after Palm Sunday 1725, possibly because the writer who reworded the hymns for him, probably Andreas Stübel, had died that January. The Bach scholar Klaus Hofmann has called it the largest musical project Bach ever undertook.

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WonderArt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.

Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

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WonderHistory

A flute carved from a vulture's wing bone about 40,000 years ago, found in Hohle Fels Cave in Germany, is one of the oldest musical instruments known.

A University of Tübingen team led by the archaeologist Nicholas Conard recovered the flute in pieces in the Swabian Alb of south-west Germany and announced it in 2009. It is about 22 cm long, made from a wing bone of a griffon vulture, with five finger holes and notches cut at the end where the player blew. It comes from Aurignacian layers, left by the first modern humans to settle in Europe, and is at least 35,000 and probably close to 40,000 years old. Pieces of flutes made from mammoth ivory, a much harder material to hollow out, have been found in the same cave and in nearby Geißenklösterle. Hohle Fels also yielded a small ivory figure of a woman, one of the oldest known carvings of a human.

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DriveMind

When jazz pianists improvised inside a brain scanner, an area at the front of the brain linked to self-monitoring grew quieter, while a nearby area linked to self-expression became more active.

Charles Limb, an ear surgeon and jazz saxophonist, and the neuroscientist Allen Braun ran the study at the US National Institutes of Health and published it in PLOS ONE in 2008. Six professional jazz pianists lay in an fMRI scanner, which maps brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow, and played a small keyboard built to work inside it. Each played memorised music, then improvised over the same backing. While they improvised, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, tied to planning and checking one's own actions, quietened, and the medial prefrontal cortex, tied to expressing oneself, became busier. With only six players it is a small study, and each brain region has many roles.

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StillnessHealth

When people sing together in a choir, their breathing falls into step with the music, and their heart rates can begin to rise and fall together too.

In a 2013 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Björn Vickhoff and colleagues at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden recorded the heartbeats of fifteen 18-year-olds as they sang together. The heart naturally speeds up a little on each in-breath and slows on each out-breath, a rhythm called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Because a song decides when everyone breathes, the singers' heart rates began to rise and fall together. The effect was strongest for a slow chant with breaths only between phrases and clear for a hymn. When the group simply hummed one note and breathed freely, their hearts did not fall into step. It was a small study, but a 2011 study of a choir in Berlin found a similar link.

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StillnessArt

John Cage's 4′33″ (1952) is a piece of music in which the performers play nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds, so the audience hears the sounds of the room instead.

Pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. He sat at the piano and closed the lid to begin each of the three movements, opening it to end them. Cage recalled that wind stirred the trees outside during the first movement, rain pattered on the roof in the second, and in the third the audience muttered and some walked out. Two things led him to the piece: Robert Rauschenberg's all-white paintings, and a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb almost all sound. There he still heard two sounds, which he was told were his nervous system and his blood. He concluded that true silence does not exist.

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WonderScience

NASA's Voyager Golden Records, launched in 1977 on the two Voyager probes, carry sounds, pictures and music from Earth as a message to anyone who might one day find them.

Each record is a 30-centimetre gold-plated copper disc. A committee chaired by the astronomer Carl Sagan spent about a year choosing its contents: spoken greetings in 55 languages, 116 images encoded as sound, natural sounds such as surf, wind, thunder and birdsong, and about 90 minutes of music, from Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky to Chuck Berry and traditional music from around the world. The cover is engraved with diagrams showing how to play the record and where Earth lies in relation to pulsars. Both probes have now reached interstellar space, the region between the stars. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will pass within 1.6 light-years of another star.

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DriveArt

Hip-hop began at 1970s block parties in the Bronx, New York, where DJs used two turntables to repeat the drum breaks of records so that people could keep dancing.

Hip-hop is often dated to 11 August 1973, when Clive Campbell, known as DJ Kool Herc, played at a back-to-school party his sister Cindy held in the community room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Herc had noticed that dancers went wildest during the break, the short stretch of a record where the singing stops and the drums and rhythm take over. With two copies of the same record on two turntables, he switched from one to the other to stretch the break for minutes. Dancers who waited for it became known as b-boys and b-girls, and MCs began speaking and rhyming over the beat, which grew into rapping. DJs such as Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa took the ideas further.

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WonderArt

Many of the footsteps, rustling clothes and small everyday sounds in a film are recreated after shooting by Foley artists, who perform them in a studio while watching the picture.

The craft is named after Jack Foley, who worked at Universal Pictures. When sound arrived in cinema, Universal's Show Boat (1929), begun as a silent film, needed sound added after filming, and Foley and his team performed effects live in time with the projected picture. He went on doing this work for about 30 years. Today Foley artists walk on trays of gravel, wood or concrete in different shoes, rub fabric close to the microphone and use props: cornstarch squeezed in a leather pouch, for example, sounds like footsteps in snow. The microphone on set mostly records dialogue, so these sounds are added separately, and a separate effects track is also needed when a film is dubbed into another language.

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DriveArt

Motown, the record label Berry Gordy founded in Detroit in 1959, made its records in a converted house called Hitsville U.S.A. Between 1960 and 1969, 79 of its songs reached the American top ten.

Berry Gordy Jr. had worked on a Detroit car assembly line and written songs before he started Tamla Records in January 1959 with an 800-dollar loan from his family; the company became Motown Record Corporation in 1960. In 1959 he bought a former photography studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, turned the back into a small recording studio and moved his family upstairs. Songwriters, producers, the house band later known as the Funk Brothers and coaches who taught stage manners all worked under one roof, and a weekly meeting voted on which recordings to release. The Supremes, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder came through the house. As a Black-owned label, Motown won huge white audiences at a time when American radio and charts were still divided by race.

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WonderHistory

A griot is a West African storyteller, musician and oral historian who carries memory through performance.

In Manding languages a griot is called a jeli or jali, and in Wolof a gewel. The tradition is tied to the Mali Empire, founded in the 13th century by Sundiata Keita: in the Epic of Sundiata, the griot Balla Fasséké advises the young king, and the Kouyaté family of griots, who trace their line back to him, still perform today. The role usually passes down within griot families. A griot learns genealogies, histories and praise songs by heart, often performing them with the kora, a 21-string harp-lute, the balafon, a wooden xylophone, or the ngoni, a small lute. Griots have also served as advisers to rulers, go-betweens in disputes and keepers of a community's memory of who is related to whom.

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WonderMind

People tend to enjoy music most, and feel the strongest urge to move to it, when its rhythm is moderately syncopated: offbeat enough to surprise, yet still easy to follow.

Syncopation means putting the accent where the listener does not expect the beat, as in funk, jazz or reggae. Musicians call the pleasant pull to move with music 'groove'. In a 2014 study, Maria Witek, Peter Vuust and colleagues played listeners short funk drum breaks with different amounts of syncopation. Ratings of pleasure and of wanting to move formed an inverted U, a curve that rises and then falls: low for very plain rhythms, highest in the middle and low again for very complex ones. Vuust's group, now at Aarhus University's Center for Music in the Brain, explains this as the brain enjoying predictions that are challenged but not defeated. It is an average across listeners, not a rule for everyone.

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WonderMusic

Jazz pianist Fats Waller was, the story goes, pushed into a car by armed men in Chicago in 1926 and driven to a party where he was the surprise present for gangster Al Capone's birthday. He played for three days and left with his pockets full of cash.

According to the account his son Maurice later gave in a biography of his father, four men with guns seized Waller as he left a show in Chicago, and he feared he was about to be killed. They drove him to the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, Capone's headquarters just outside the city, and told him to play. Food and champagne kept coming, and Capone and his guests tipped him generously, reportedly with hundred-dollar bills. No police record or independent source confirms the story, so it is best treated as family history rather than proven fact. Waller himself was one of the great pianists and entertainers of the 1920s and 1930s, and his songs include 'Ain't Misbehavin'', written in 1929.

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DriveMusic

On New Year's Day 1962 the Beatles auditioned for Decca Records in London and were turned down. The label reportedly told their manager that guitar groups were on the way out. The band signed with EMI's Parlophone label later that year and became one of the most successful groups in popular music.

The audition took place at Decca's studios in West Hampstead, north London, where the band, then with Pete Best on drums, played fifteen songs. Decca signed another group, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, reportedly because they were local to London and would cost less in travel. The often-repeated line that ‘guitar groups are on the way out’ comes from later accounts by the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, not from any surviving Decca document. At Parlophone, producer George Martin heard the band's demo recordings and signed them. Five of the Decca recordings were released in 1995 on Anthology 1, revealing a young band that had not yet found its later sound.

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DriveMusic

In 1802, realising he was going deaf, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote a private letter to his brothers, now called the Heiligenstadt Testament. In it he described despair, isolation and thoughts of death, and wrote that only his art had held him back from ending his life.

Beethoven wrote it in October 1802 in Heiligenstadt, then a village outside Vienna, where his doctor had sent him to rest his hearing. It is called a testament because it reads partly like a will, but he never sent it; it was found among his papers after his death in 1827. He described the shame of hiding his deafness from others and his resolve to live on because he felt he still had music to write. He lived another twenty-five years and composed many of his greatest works as his hearing failed, including the Ninth Symphony. At its 1824 premiere, according to accounts, a singer turned him round to see the applause he could not hear.

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StillnessMusic

John Cage's 4′33″, first performed in 1952, asks the performers to play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The coughs, rustling and rain the audience hears instead become the music.

The pianist David Tudor gave the premiere on 29 August 1952 at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, a wooden hall open to the woods. He marked the three sections by closing the keyboard lid at the start of each and opening it at the end, without playing a note. Cage later recalled hearing wind in the first part, rain on the roof in the second and people talking or walking out in the third. The idea grew partly from a visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard, a room built to absorb all sound, where he still heard two sounds: his own nervous system and his blood circulating. True silence, he concluded, does not exist; there is only sound we did not intend.

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DriveMusic

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an American gospel singer and guitarist, was playing loud, virtuosic electric guitar in the 1940s, before rock and roll had a name. Her playing and showmanship inspired the first rock and roll musicians.

Tharpe grew up singing in a Pentecostal church with her mother and, from 1938, took gospel into nightclubs and onto records, which shocked some churchgoers. Her song 'Strange Things Happening Every Day', recorded in 1944, reached number two on Billboard's chart for Black music in 1945 and is often named as an early rock and roll record. In 1947 she heard a 14-year-old Little Richard singing in Macon, Georgia, and invited him to open her show, his first paid performance. Johnny Cash called her his favourite singer as a boy. In May 1964 she played in the rain on a disused railway platform in Manchester for British television. She joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

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WonderMusic

Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring caused an uproar at its first performance in Paris on 29 May 1913, with its pounding, irregular rhythms and stamping dancers. Stories of a full riot grew later, but the shock was real.

The ballet was made for Sergei Diaghilev's company, the Ballets Russes, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and sets and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. It shows pagan rites in ancient Russia and ends with a young woman chosen as a sacrifice, who dances until she dies. Nijinsky turned the dancers' feet inward and had them stamp rather than float. In the music, accents fall where the ear does not expect them and the metre changes from bar to bar. The conductor Pierre Monteux kept going through jeers, laughter and shouting; tales of fighting in the aisles come mostly from memories written years later. The score soon triumphed in the concert hall and is now one of the most performed works of 20th-century music.

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DriveMigration

During the Great Migration, from the 1910s to the 1970s, roughly six million Black Americans left the U.S. South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, reshaping work, politics, music and family life.

People left to escape Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation and kept most Black Southerners from voting, as well as racial violence and poorly paid work as sharecroppers, tenant farmers paid with a share of the crop. Historians usually describe two waves: the first, from about 1916 to 1940, began when the First World War left northern factories short of workers; the second and larger wave ran from 1940 to 1970. Chicago, Detroit, New York and Los Angeles gained large Black communities. Migrants brought Southern music with them: Muddy Waters moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1943 and helped create electric Chicago blues. In the North they still met discrimination, including redlining, in which lenders and a federal agency marked Black neighbourhoods as too risky for home loans.

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WonderMusic

Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer known as 'the Star of the East', was one of the most celebrated voices of the twentieth-century Arab world. Her monthly radio concerts of classical Arabic poetry, sung with long improvised passages, drew listeners across the region.

Born in a village in the Nile Delta in the early 1900s, she learned to recite the Qur'an as a child and sang religious songs in her father's small troupe, dressed as a boy so she could appear on stage. That training shaped the ornamented, flexible phrasing she later brought to love songs. From 1937 she gave a concert on the first Thursday of each month, broadcast live across the Arab world. A single song could last more than an hour as she repeated and varied a line in answer to the crowd, building the shared musical ecstasy known in Arabic as tarab. After Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war she gave concerts at home and abroad and handed the proceeds to the state. Her funeral in Cairo in 1975 drew an estimated four million people.

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StillnessMusic

Fado is a Lisbon song tradition that took shape in the early nineteenth century in the city's old working-class districts near the port, such as Alfama, Mouraria and Bairro Alto. Its name probably comes from the Latin fatum, fate. A solo singer is usually accompanied by a classical guitar and the twelve-string Portuguese guitar.

It was first sung among sailors, dock workers and the poor of the port districts. UNESCO describes fado as a blend of Afro-Brazilian sung dances, local song and dance, rural traditions brought to Lisbon by migrants, and the city songs of the early nineteenth century. Its lyrics range over love, loss, fate and everyday city life. Saudade, a hard-to-translate longing for someone, somewhere or some time that is gone, runs through much of it, though not every song. Fado is still sung in concert halls, small fado houses and neighbourhood associations, and joined UNESCO's list of humanity's intangible heritage in 2011.

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DriveMusic

Delta blues is the guitar-and-voice blues that grew among African Americans in the Mississippi Delta in the early twentieth century. Drawing on work songs, field calls and storytelling, it went on to shape later blues, rock and much of popular music.

Delta blues took shape among Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers who paid their rent with a share of the crop, and labourers in the Mississippi Delta. It drew on field hollers, the calls workers sang across the fields, on work songs and church singing, and on new guitar techniques such as sliding a bottleneck or knife blade along the strings. Charley Patton, often called the father of the Delta blues, and Son House played in juke joints, informal rural bars where Black workers gathered to drink, dance and hear music. Racial violence and the debts of sharecropping shaped the world the music came from. In the Great Migration many Delta musicians moved north; in Chicago Muddy Waters took up the electric guitar, and his electric blues fed directly into rock and roll.

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