from Bruce
Anecdotes
Music
• Thea Phillips was asked by Sir Thomas Beecham to sing soprano solo in George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. She confessed that she did not know the part, and she was afraid to attempt to sing it because the concert was only a few weeks away, but Sir Thomas convinced her to undertake the part. Later, the two met again, and Ms. Phillips was carrying the score for Messiah with her so she could study wherever she was. She told Sir Thomas, “It goes everywhere with me, to work, at meals, up to bed at night.” Sir Thomas asked, “Then may we trust that you will have an Immaculate Conception of the part?”
• Conductor André Previn has in his office a cartoon showing a music stand marked “L.A. Symphony.” On the music stand is a Help Wanted Notice: “Resident Orchestra Conductor; Party Goer; Gladhander; Fundraiser; High Visibility; Some Knowledge of Music Desirable.” Mr. Previn also has in his office a cartoon of a conductor standing at a podium and reading a set of instructions: “Wave the stick until the music stops, then turn around and bow.”
• English entertainer Joyce Grenfell knew a couple of sisters who were interested in music. Whenever they needed a housemaid or a cowman, they would advertise for a housemaid or a cowman with a particular musical talent; for example, a contralto-housemaid or a tenor-cowman. These servants formed a choir for which the sisters provided professional direction. Frequently, the choir composed of servants gave concerts.
• Conductor Arturo Toscanini was having difficulty — musically and linguistically — with a star tenor in a Swedish opera house, and finally he asked a friend who spoke Swedish, “Ask that man if he knows who I am, and tell him to get the hell off the stage.” The tenor listened to the two requests, then replied, “Yes and no.” After hearing the translation of the tenor’s reply, Mr. Toscanini laughed and went on with the rehearsal.
• Jazz musician Louis Armstrong used to sing “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” although the lyrics contained such words as “mammies” and “darkies.” When singing the song, Mr. Armstrong frequently either changed the offensive words or substituted “scat” (nonsense) syllables in place of them.
• Some people live their life well. Asked what he was most proud of in his life, jazz saxophonist Benny Carter, who played with Charlie Parker and Fletcher Henderson, replied, “I can’t think of anything I’m not proud of.”
• Pianist Richard Goode became famous in part by playing Beethoven’s sonatas. A fan once told him, “You are Beethoven.” Mr. Goode responded by leaning toward the fan, cupping his ear, and asking, “What did you say?”
• In 1968, Josef Krips conducted the San Francisco Symphony in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When the song was finished, a member of the audience yelled, “Play ball!”
Names
• Names in ballet are often interesting: 1) According to ballet lingo, a particularly demanding dance is called a “puff,” because the dancer will huff and puff after dancing it. Of course, no matter how strenuous the role, the dancer must wait until after exiting to huff and puff. 2) A dance writer once flattered Maria Tallchief by writing, “There’s only one Tallchief.” Other, more clever people reminded the writer that Ms. Tallchief’s sister, Marjorie, was also a noted ballerina. 3) In the ballet Giselle, two Wilis (vampires) are given prominent roles. They are named Moyna and Zulma, but American ballet companies often give them nicknames, such as Laverne and Shirley. 4) George Balanchine once joked that all ballets should be named Swan Lake — that way, they would be guaranteed a large and interested audience. 5) People who are intensely devoted to ballet are known as balletomanes; people who are intensely devoted to melodic Italian opera are known as melomanes. 6) Ballet dancers need to cover their skin yet reveal the form of their body. A person who helped them do this was Jules Léotard, a French acrobat and trapeze artist who invented the body-fitting suit that bears his name.
• When H. Algeranoff was dancing with Anna Pavlova in Australia, a man named Bobbie Helpman came to him for lessons. The man showed talent, and Mr. Algeranoff told him, “This is a country where they don’t take easily to men dancing. I think you’d find it would be helpful if you called yourself Robert instead of Bobbie, and added a second N to your surname; it would give it a slightly foreign sound, which would be more acceptable to the general public.” Mr. Helpman — make that Mr. Helpmann — took his advice, and he made the new more foreign-sounding name famous.
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Michael Egan
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BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Track: "Big Mouthed Dog"
Album: AS GOOD AS IT GETS: 50 REASONS TO SAVE INDEPENDENT MUSIC
Artist: Juke Joint Kings
Artist Location: Hull, UK
Info:
“THE MUSIC WE BORROW AND ATTEMPT TO EMULATE WOULD NOT EXIST WITHOUT BLACK CULTURE.” — Juke Joint Kings
The song “Big Mouthed Dog” is also on the Juke Joint Kings album RIDING WITH THE JUKE JOINT KINGS. Price: £1 (GBP) for track; £5 (GBP) for eight-track album.
“Aldora Britain Records is an e-zine and record label that promotes the music and work of authentic independent or underground artists from all around the world. Originally established in 2013, they revamped themselves in 2018 with a brand-new approach. Their first weekly compilation, aptly titled THE SECOND COMING, was released in late 2019. They now also release original singles, EPs and charity projects.”
Price: £4.15 (GBP) for 50-track (plus one bonus track) album by various artists
Genre: Alt-Country. Various.
Links:
AS GOOD AS IT GETS: 50 REASONS TO SAVE INDEPENDENT MUSIC
RIDING WITH THE JUKE JOINT KINGS Juke Joint Kings on Bandcamp
Juke Joint Kings on YouTube
Aldora Britain Records on Bandcamp
Aldora Britain Records on YouTube
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Reader Suggestion
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BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
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Betty Bowers: The Killing in Killing
“While guns don’t kill people, they certainly seem to help.”
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Bonus Links
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Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
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that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Remarkably quiet day.
Eurovision Winners Sell Trophy To Buy Drones
Kalush Orchestra
Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra, which won the Eurovision Song Contest, has sold off its trophy for $900,000 to raise money for drones for the country’s armed forces fighting Russia’s invasion.
The money raised would be used to buy three Ukraine-made PD-2 drones, TV presenter Serhiy Prytula, who hosted the auction, announced, according to Reuters.
The crystal microphone trophy was auctioned off on Facebook, with the band writing: “You guys are amazing! We appreciate each and every one of you who donated to this auction, and a special thanks to the team (of cryptocurrency exchange) Whitebit who purchased the trophy for $900,000 and are now the rightful owners of our trophy.”
The sale Sunday coincided with an appearance of the band at a charity concert at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, whose goal was to raise money for medical care and supplies, the BBC reported. At the concert, bandmember Oleh Psiuk urged people not to get used to the war, started by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. “It should be on the front pages always, until peace comes,” Psiuk said, according to the BBC.
Sweeping the public vote at the Eurovision Song Contest final on May 14, Kalush Orchestra won the competition with their song “Stefania.” The band had received special permission to leave Ukraine for the event, given that most Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not allowed to do so in case they are needed to fight.
Kalush Orchestra
Family Displeased
Isaac Hayes
The family of Isaac Hayes has rebuked Donald Trump the twice-impeached one-term president for walking off and dancing to the late soul musician’s song after delivering a controversial speech at the National Rifle Association convention this weekend.
On Friday, the former US president delivered a speech at the gun association’s annual convention in Houston, just 280 miles east of the site of the school shooting in Uvalde that left 21 people dead on Tuesday.
Following his remarks, which included suggestions to arm teachers and put up metal fencing around schools’ perimeter, the one-time commander in chief began to make his way off stage while dancing to the 1966 song “Hold On, I’m Comin’”.
Though made popular by the American R&B duo Sam and Dave, the song itself was written by the song writing team of Hayes and his colleague David Porter.
“The estate and family of Isaac Hayes DID NOT approve and would NEVER approve the use of “Hold on I’m coming’” by Sam and Dave by Donald Trump that national embarrassment at this weekends @NRA convention,” the family posted on Twitter through the deceased songwriter’s blue-check verified account. “Our condolences go out to the victims and families of #Uvalde and mass shooting victims everywhere.”
Isaac Hayes
Boyhood Home For Sale
Van Zants
The Florida house where Lynyrd Skynyrd rock legends Ronnie, Donnie and Johnny Van Zant grew up is on the market for $629,000.
The home in a working-class Jacksonville neighborhood comes with eight lots, plus a fourplex home and a manufactured home, property records show. There is also a historical marker, put in the front yard in 2018, which reads: “The Van Zants’ legacy, memorialized in this house, commemorates their prodigious contribution to the world of rock music.”
Blue Horizon Property Solutions purchased the home for $67,500 in 2015, property records show.
The west Jacksonville area was called Shantytown when the Van Zant brothers were growing up in the house, the Florida Times-Union reported.
Van Zants
Antisemitic Relic
Wittenberg
A German federal court on Monday mulled a Jewish man’s bid to force the removal of a 700-year-old antisemitic statue from a church where Martin Luther once preached, and said it will deliver its verdict in the long-running dispute next month.
The “Judensau,” or “Jew pig,” sculpture on the Town Church in Wittenberg is one of more than 20 such relics from the Middle Ages that still adorn churches across Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
The case went to the Federal Court of Justice after lower courts ruled in 2019 and 2020 against plaintiff Michael Duellmann. He had argued that the sculpture was “a defamation of and insult to the Jewish people” that has “a terrible effect up to this day,” and has suggested moving it the nearby Luther House museum.
Placed on the church about four meters (13 feet) above ground level, the sculpture depicts people identifiable as Jews suckling the teats of a sow while a rabbi lifts the animal’s tail. In 1570, after the Protestant Reformation, an inscription referring to an anti-Jewish tract by Luther was added.
In 1988, a memorial was set into the ground below, referring to the persecution of Jews and the 6 million people who died during the Holocaust. In addition, a sign gives information about the sculpture in German and English.
Wittenberg
Never Seen
Violent Images
After Lenny Pozner’s 6-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, the father briefly contemplated showing the world the damage an AR-15-style rifle did to his child.
Grief and anger over two horrific mass shootings in Texas and New York only 10 days apart have stirred an old debate: Would disseminating graphic images of the results of gun violence jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?
From the abolition movement to Black Lives Matter, from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, photographs and film have laid bare the human toll of racism, authoritarianism and ruinous foreign policy. They prompt public outcry and, sometimes, lead to change. But the potential use of these images to end official inertia after mass shootings presents new, wrenching considerations for victims’ families — many of whom adamantly reject such an idea.
Mainstream news organizations sometimes show disturbing images of people who have died to illustrate the horrors of an event, like the photograph by Lynsey Addario of a mother, two children and a family friend killed in March in Irpin, Ukraine, or the image of a 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. But they rarely show human gore.
In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley invited a Jet magazine photographer, David Jackson, to photograph the brutalized body of her 14-year-old son Emmett Till, who had been savagely beaten, shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi by two white men who were speedily acquitted. The images, and Emmett Till’s open coffin at his funeral in Chicago, helped ignite the civil rights movement.
Violent Images
Archaeologists Uncover Trove Of Mummies
Egypt
Archaeologists working near Cairo have uncovered hundreds of ancient Egyptian coffins and bronze statues of deities.
The discovery at a cemetery in Saqqara contained statues of the gods Anubis, Amun, Min, Osiris, Isis, Nefertum, Bastet and Hathor along with a headless statue of the architect Imhotep, who built the Saqqara pyramid, Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said on Monday.
The 250 coffins, 150 bronze statues and other objects dated to the Late Period, about 500 BC, the ministry said.
They were accompanied by a musical instrument known as a sistrum and a collection of bronze vessels used in rituals for the worship of the goddess Isis.
The painted wooden coffins were found intact in burial shafts and contained mummies, amulets and wooden boxes. Wooden statues of Nephthys and Isis from an earlier period were also found, both with gilded faces.
Egypt
Archaeologists Discover Passageways
Peru
A team of archaeologists has discovered a network of passageways under a more than 3,000-year-old temple in the Peruvian Andes.
Chavin de Huantar temple, located in the north-central Andes, was once a religious and administrative center for people across the region.
The passageways were found earlier in May and have features believed to have been built earlier than the temple's labyrinthine galleries, according to John Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University who was involved in the excavation.
Located 3,200 meters above sea level, at least 35 underground passageways have been found over the years of excavations, which all connect with each other and were built between 1,200 and 200 years B.C. in the foothills of the Andes.
"It's a passageway, but it's very different. It's a different form of construction. It has features from earlier periods that we've never seen in passageways," Rick said.
Peru
World's Most Active Volcano
Kilauea
The Kilauea volcano in Hawaii is said to be the world's most active volcano, and yet we still don't really know how it was born.
New research suggests the original womb of magma lies more than 90 kilometers beneath the hotspot. While previous studies have found two shallow chambers of magma beneath Kilauea, they weren't big enough to explain all the liquid rock this volcano spews.
A larger chamber, about 11 kilometers deep (that's 6.8 miles), was detected using seismic waves in 2014, and yet now it seems the original magma chamber lies even deeper.
A new analysis of broken fragments of ancient volcanic rock, dredged from the south-eastern flank of the Big Island, suggest Kilauea was born from a pool of pyroclastic material close to 100 kilometers deep.
Kilauea
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