A while ago my friend was doing some work in a stately home, a very quiet place at the time he said, because as far as he knew he was alone. He heard out of nowhere the sound of a piano. To cut to the chase, the piano was situated on an upper floor - the sound he was hearing was coming from a taut wire affixed at one end to the piano, with the other end and fixed to the solid ground floor. Was this a common practice, and did the method have a name?

In 1973, Ira Kaplan (later of Yo La Tengo fame) drew up a plan with two friends to start a music magazine. It was called Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press for the Rock Consumer and the first issue, with The Who on the cover and costing 25 cents, would be completed in March 1974 and would go down in history known as simply Trouser Press.

https://preview.redd.it/e858aaiensqc1.jpg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f600096b4ebc431b53694c3bcbdffe6755357f6

Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974-1984 was just released and compiles, all these 40 years later, some of what Kaplan considers the best material, including Pete Townshend’s letter to the magazine after that first issue, which served as a major inspiration for the gang to keep the presses rolling.

One of the early features from the magazine was an interview with The Rolling Stones’ red-headed manager Andrew Loog Oldham. He talked about his early days working with The Beatles but that he needed to leave to give their manager Brian Epstein enough space to do his thing, which led to him going to work with the Stones. He said he didn’t ever change the image of the band although he did suggest clothes for them from time to time. He had never produced a record until he joined the Stones’ entourage, really just becoming their producer by default.

At the time of the interview, Oldham said he still got along with each of the Stones - who he had stopped working with in 1967 during the recording of Their Satanic Majesties Request - except for the already-deceased Brian Jones. He said it was “the first time I’d been in the studio when I didn’t understand what they were doing.” But luckily the split was “before the days when everybody had lawyers ... really very clean.”

The story of Syd Barrett’s long road to oblivion is another early essay in the collection. It tells how younger Syd was a bit of a leader of the Cambridge “freak scene” where all the artist types hung out. He had two cats, Pink and Floyd, who still lived there long after Syd had gone, despite all the acid Syd and friends had given them. Later, in his cat-inspired band, Barrett was often unable to do anything on stage and would completely blank out in the later part of his stint as Pink Floyd’s leader.

Once he was removed from the band, David Gilmour and Roger Waters produced Syd’s first solo album, then Waters couldn’t take it anymore so Gilmour and Rick Wright produced the second one. Gilmour, who had replaced Syd in the Floyd, was ironically really helpful on those solo records, often recording demos that would help better explain to the other musicians what they were supposed to be doing. Those two solo records may have never existed if not for Gilmour. Syd briefly formed a band called Stars, but bad press contributed to his near-complete disappearance from the world - certainly the world of music.

https://preview.redd.it/zh56msxfnsqc1.jpg?width=665&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6ab8dfabf87d9f02d0f0fe0a171726e1c4c7964b

A lot of what appears in the book was probably really eye-opening in the 1970s, but much of it is rock lore by now. As for Ira Kaplan-related material, I think the Yo La Tengo book Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock may be more up my alley. Here are some interesting tidbits from the opening:

Nowadays everything is spelled out on the internet, but when Yo La Tengo was starting out, their name was often misspelled as Mo La Tengo, even when they played shows at the nightclub in their hometown of Hoboken, N.J., Maxwell’s.

The band was originally named A Worrying Thing.

"Yo La Tengo" came from a book about baseball, which explained how the phrase means “I’ve got it” in Spanish, which is important for baseball players communicating with each other about which one is going for the ball.

So far, I’m not that into the book because it has an overly lengthy section on the history of working-class Hoboken. That part seems inessential, although it's interesting that Maxwell’s was named for the nearby Maxwell House coffee plant that offered aromatic smells nearby.

Like everyone else who grew up old enough to experience the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Kaplan was influenced. Excessively.

He and his family grew up in Croton, up the Hudson from Manhattan and Hoboken, and assimilated with a typical secular Jewish life, going to baseball games with his brothers and seeing Country Joe, Fleetwood Mac, and a strip show as his first concert.

This is probably a book worth adding to my rock collection, but for now, this is all I learned from Amazon’s free sample. Good, but I’m not totally gripped yet.

Hi guys! How’s it going? Today, I have a question that any of you can answer and/or comment on or give suggestions to: which country has created the highest amount of music in the key of A-flat (especially Church music, because I’m doing some personal research on Christian music across the world)? (and I already know the A-flat major / F Minor is a very uncommon key signature, but I still want to know which country it is most prevalent in, especially from a perspective of Church music) Any responses would be very appreciated, and I’m open to hearing as many perspectives and responses as possible. Thanks, guys!

I’m reading “Music and Trance” Gilbert Rouget and some of “Formalized Music” by Xenakis and I’m curious about how the roll of the composer is different, similar, or incomparable across different times and cultures and it’s made me wonder about the lifestyles and habits of 20/21st century western composers.

Lots of influential philosophers and artists have taken drugs but I don’t hear much about composers doing drugs. I know Ligeti struggled with opioids, Robert Ashley struggled with alcohol, Terry Reilly is pretty forthright about their substance use. We hear a lot about drugs in jazz and rock history, but what about 20/21st century western composers? We can’t really guess from the composers work, like Zappa didn’t do drugs but the music he wrote is pretty far out.

Considering how popular lsd was with social elites in the mid 20th century, I’m guessing most composers in that era tried psychedelics, but I have no citations.

https://preview.redd.it/wzfvzz806bpc1.jpg?width=300&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9fc28c68426f8c2240e3e3eb2c86c724726fba01

In the 1980s, rock stars were no longer coming from the world of music, according to Joe S. Harrington in his excellent 2002 musical and cultural history Sonic Cool: The Life and Death of Rock n’ Roll.

He argues that heroes like Mick Jagger were being replaced by the computer and tech creators like Bill Gates and that the regime change from Democrats to Republicans helped speed along the corporate takeover. Ronald Reagan had been working for years leading up to this environment, fighting in the 1960s to outlaw LSD and push along the Vietnam War and crying for family values in the 1970s to replace the morally decrepit hippy takeover. He finally took over the whole she-bang at age 69 - the second-oldest president elect ever behind Joe Biden - which actually helped him in the eyes of many who had begun to distrust the youth culture that had supposedly ruined the country over the past decade-plus. Religion came back strong in the 80s as well, partly branded as a way to restore moral fiber, which could obviously be seen hanging by a thread in the parking lot of any high school in the U.S., with dope and acid and other poisonous gases porously escaping into the atmosphere. 

Like with punk before it, certain segments of music started to happen completely outside of the mainstream. In the Bronx, DJs started talking over extended funk and disco jams, which was morphing into a new art form called rap. While it was Sugarhill Records that got the hip hop and rap balls rolling, it was Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin with Def Jam Records who “revolutionized the realm of recorded sound,” with the likes of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy, bands that all brought in dirty words to the genre as well. While criticized by Blacks and whites, the Beasties’ debut License to Ill was a major departure from their previous hardcore sound and turned rap into a money-making proposition for the first time. 

Rock music, and music in general, was becoming less of a focus for consumers because video games and VCRs were now entering the picture and taking up people’s time. In fact, it was inevitable that TV and music would merge. USA Today’s Night Flight and HBO’s Video Jukebox preceded MTV. It may have been the blandness of FM radio at this time that also helped MTV succeed.

Rock criticism was changing too. Whereas before, a good or bad album review in Rolling Stone could make a real difference, now people were seeing the music they wanted to listen to and could make choices based on that. Dave Marsh had helped break bands like the Who and Bruce Springsteen, but his decrees that MTV was killing rock got him fired from Rolling Stone by Jann Wenner, who appreciated anything that made money. Kurt Loder was an example of someone who could swallow his pride and his tastes to become a regular MTV presence. 

The consumerist mindset of the country took deeper root with the help of the first generation of MTV stars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince, and the record companies loved that they could replace albums with CDs, were much cheaper to produce and distribute. While the Beatles, Stones, and Bob Dylan pumped out an album a year in the 1960s, by the 1980s, top artists were lucky to release one every four years, partly because they were all acting, doing TV shows, and making videos for optimal mass marketing. 

The only guitar-based music still having major mainstream success began to be “poodle-haired bands like Bon Jovi, Poison, and Def Leppard.” Female empowerment grew by leaps and bounds in the decade, with Madonna leading the charge of women emasculating men in her music videos. Exercise also became big as the yuppies needed to alter their decadent behavior of the past two decades and find a way to clean up their acts and their minds and bodies. Many men were baffled by the newfound control that women were using and retreated into the world of porn, which would explode with the later introduction of the Internet. All this set up the right climate for Tina Turner to finally write her autobiography and hang her wife-beating former husband Ike out to dry. 

Sonic Cool is a really fun book to read. In a way that's surprising because it's a fairly academic perspective on rock music's place in society, but nearly every paragraph offers a display of Harrington's cutting wit and discerning eye. He's strongly opinionated and I don't always agree with him. For instance, I still think rock is alive, but he has a point that it now occupies a far smaller percentage of the public's imagination than it did during its heyday of the 1960s through the 1980s.

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.com/p/were-the-1980s-truly-the-death-of

I was listening to some Indian folk music on instagram and thought I was going a bit crazy…because I was hearing a Celtic vibe. Did some research and it turns out that the British army brought the bagpipes to India. It then gained favour with some of the musicians there. So there must have been a crossover that happened at some point. Could anyone here expand on this? Anyway…here is the clip-

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C22d1RvCtMO/?igsh=dW8xMmxtNXd4YXlv

Hi guys! I did a little research project on Sacred Harp / shape-note vocal music from the Southern U.S. : I wanted to find out how often Sacred Harp singers in the American South sang songs that had musical accidentals (which are any notes in a piece of music that purposefully differ from the main musical scale (set of notes) / musical key, that the given musical piece uses). So, I carefully examined every song that was in a hymnbook called “Southern Harmony” (which is a very credible and respected source of sheet music for Sacred Harp songs that were sung in the American South), taking a tally of how many songs in the hymnbook have at least 1 musical accidental. “Southern Harmony” has 336 Sacred Harp songs, and only 20 (around 5.9%) of them have musical accidentals, which heavily suggests that the vast majority of the Sacred Harp songs that were sang in the American South have no musical accidentals, and are instead were very diatonic (which means that the Sacred Harp songs in the Southern U.S. do not stray away from their written musical keys and scales).

I'm looking for sources, about this song for an essay and I can't find any primary sources that aren't relatively recent I'm really struggling with

I have an odd and rather specialized request. I am doing research for my graduate thesis, and one thing I’m looking at is the American issue of Die Reihe (the German magazine about serial music). I have access to scans of the American issue, but there is a Commentary on an article by John Cage that I don’t know if it was in the original German issue or not. Does anyone out there know where I can get access to scans of the original German issue? I know this is an odd request.

I recently read the history book Albion's seed by David Hackett Fischer, which explores the cultural origins of the different subregions of America. One thing he doesn't really touch on is music, which is unfortunate because it is well known how influential the American south has been in America's music culture and how we are perceived abroad. Practically every major American music genre stems from the folk music of the American south in some fashion. Knowing this, it does make me curious about what the traditional folk music of Americans on the Northeast and upper-midwest were. Since that region of America was almost exclusively white until the great migration, then there definitely would have been little influence from black folk music on the type of music there. Another thing to consider is that what with there being little immigration prior to the 20th century, I also imagine there would have been less influence from the folk music of other European ethnic groups. In this "pure" folk music scene of the North, would it have been similar to Appalachian type music? That is the only group that would seem analogous to this cultural context. I imagine the well-to-do would have enjoyed things like classical music and early showtunes, but these both were not a representation of a natural evolution, just an aristocratic appeal for the European musical tradition. I would rather want to know what kind of music small bands and folk singers of New England, the Mid-atlantic and Midwest were singing and playing prior to their styles of music being subsumed under the popularity of southern-originated music genres. In the same way that we can easily imagine some boy in the delta playing blues on a guitar or a boy in appalachia strumming some mountain jig on a banjo. I just don't have the same mental image when thinking about some other region and I never see this explored in historical movies set in these places.

I recently read the history book Albion's seed by David Hackett Fischer, which explores the cultural origins of the different subregions of America. One thing he doesn't really touch on is music, which is unfortunate because it is well known how influential the American south has been in America's music culture and how we are perceived abroad. Practically every major American music genre stems from the folk music of the American south in some fashion. Knowing this, it does make me curious about what the traditional folk music of Americans on the Northeast and upper-midwest were. Since that region of America was almost exclusively white until the great migration, then there definitely would have been little influence from black folk music on the type of music there. Another thing to consider is that what with there being little immigration prior to the 20th century, I also imagine there would have been less influence from the folk music of other European ethnic groups. In this "pure" folk music scene of the North, would it have been similar to Appalachian type music? That is the only group that would seem analogous to this cultural context. I imagine the well-to-do would have enjoyed things like classical music and early showtunes, but these both were not a representation of a natural evolution, just an aristocratic appeal for the European musical tradition. I would rather want to know what kind of music small bands and folk singers of New England, the Mid-atlantic and Midwest were singing and playing prior to their styles of music being subsumed under the popularity of southern-originated music genres. In the same way that we can easily imagine some boy in the delta playing blues on a guitar or a boy in appalachia strumming some mountain jig on a banjo. I just don't have the same mental image when thinking about some other region and I never see this explored in historical movies set in these places.

I can find data for the modern day (4 million/year), but I am curious how many songs were released in the days before the internet and widely accessible DAWs. Does anyone know where this information could be found?

Today, when attending a classical performance, you will often see, for example, a piano player roll their head and breathe deeply in time with the music, the violinist furrow their brow and bend at the waist for emphasis when playing an "emotional" part of the composition, etc.

Has this always been accepted as part of classical performance? Or in earlier eras, was it expected that you would play in an impassive manner?

Witness the History, Feel the Passion, and ... Heed `The Warning'!!!
Their entire discography, to date, is immaculately conceived! They are, IMHO ...

"The Best Hard Rock Power Trio of the 21st Century" 🦉🤟⚡🪨🍩

More of a trivia question than a brilliant historical question, I guess, but I think we’re thinking of the wrong musician.

The hype around Taylor Swift during the eras tour has been huge, in this video I look into her musical history and compare her to some of the icons of yester year.

​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxM1tuqKF4c&t=32s&pp=ygUOY2hhbm5lbCBibGFpbm8%3D

Ive been a country music fan for years and have recently been loving Beyonce’s country pop single “Texas hold’em”.

When looking into how she’s developing a country album, I came across a lot of articles talking about the reclaiming of country music by foundational black Americans and how foundational black Americans created country music.

My previous understanding was that country music is a permutation of folk music across the European, African, and Hispanic American diaspora. The banjo is a west African instrument, the guitar was Spanish but became popular in South America, the fiddle was brought over by English and Irish immigrants, and the mandolin brought over by Italian immigrants. All there musical styles came together in what became country music with different levels of cultural influence per artist.

Foundational black Americans created the blues, rock, funk, hip hop, and many other music genres so I’m not surprised they influence and/or created country too.

My question is if country was solely created by foundational black Americans, how is it that there is 0 musical influence from the European diaspora if many of those instruments were brought over from Europe? Did they just play them in army marching bands or something?

I also tried this on r/musictheory, and got bupkis.

I’m looking for the name of this humorous tag: “so so so re mi do, do^1” that has of rhythm of (4/4) 1-e-a / e-& / 3 / 4. It’s not “Shave and a Hair Cut”, and not “That’s All Folks” from Looney Tunes.

I’m trying to remember who the black female singer was who would carry around duffle bags and get paid up front. This was right around desegregation when they would hire black artists and then not pay them, so she would collect payment up front?

I am a obsessive fan of Joy Division and The Smith, both bands interestingly both from Manchester, England.

And I’ve found Mark Fisher’s elaboration in Ghosts of My Life that Joy Division is a kind of music that arised out the socio-politcal process that foreshadowed the rise of Thatcherite neoliberal capitalism and a depressive foreclosing of the liberatory horizons that animated the culture of the post-war/60’s era and it’s political movements

I’m curious if there’s any good books/resources discussing the rise of music alternative to the punk scene in this era of history in music, the aforementioned bands themselves, and what they reflected about the historical conditions of the world around them?

I am looking for the exact quote, but I cannot find it anywhere. It was said somewhere in the 17th or 18th century (I am more inclined towards the former and I found it when researching composers from that time period. Could somebody help me out?