Search Results for: Music

Playing House

Longreads Pick

A look at why a growing tide of musicians are moving their shows away from sweaty clubs and into cozy living rooms, and the cottage industry that has sprung up around the production of so-called house shows.

Source: Pitchfork
Published: Mar 12, 2015
Length: 14 minutes (3,600 words)

The Cold Rim of the World

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2015 | 13 minutes (3,199 words)

 

We docked just past midnight, the sun to the south shining through a thin layer of clouds. It was late June, and the sun hadn’t set for months in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard; it wouldn’t set again until the end of September. For the previous two weeks I’d been on board a ship sailing the perimeter of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, as part of the artist residency The Arctic Circle, and we’d reached one of our final stops. The dock we tied the boat to was a decayed mass of wood, warped and chewed to the appearance of shredded wheat. To our left, a massive structure for loading coal onto ships. To the right, blocks of buildings without form or purpose or inhabitants. This was Pyramiden, a Soviet-era mining town that’s been abandoned for over 15 years. Read more…

I Ship It: Six Stories About Fanfiction

Photo: Karen Roe

OTP: You and this reading list. I’ve wanted to share writing about fanfiction for some time. Fanfiction is often ridiculed (Why can’t the authors keep from inserting themselves into the story? Why is everyone having sex? Why does 50 Shades of Grey exist?!), but it’s a legitimate creative outlet. Fanfiction has played a small but significant role in my own life, and I’ll elaborate in my list. If you’re totally lost right now, check out Vulture’s beautiful, if patchy, primer (#3 on this list), and then plunge into these funny, fascinating stories about the world of fanfiction.

1. “Stories are Waves.” (Michelle Nijhuis, Aeon, July 2014)

I love–love–this essay from Aeon about a mother who gender-bends classic characters (meet Girl Bilbo!) at her daughter’s request. It’s advocacy for diversity and equality in literature, as well as the power of seeing yourself in a story–which fanfiction often provides. Read more…

Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Prep,’ 10 Years Later

Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2015

 

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, was first published. And not just because the passage of time, in hindsight, is always kind of baffling, but because I have thought about that book so regularly it seems my brain only just first absorbed it. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo of Cody Spafford by: Geoffrey Smith

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Maestro as Detective

At a mere 31 years old—practically an infant in classical music years—British conductor Robin Ticciati is already a major maestro. He made his La Scala debut at 22, making him the youngest conductor ever to grace the podium at the world’s most famous opera house. Two years later he was named principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and he is now the musical director at the UK’s Glyndebourne Festival Opera. Though notoriously media-shy, Ticciati allowed violinist and writer Clemency Burton-Hill to shadow him over a period of months, through meals, conversations and conducting engagements. The resulting More Intelligent Life profile provides a vivid window into his life and work.

How does a man who has already found so much success find new ways to engage classic material? It seems Ticciati isn’t afraid of doing a little detective work:

He now strives to engage both head and heart. “I might read a symphony score for the first time and read it like a novel, and get awash with feelings. And then I might look at it going, ‘hmm, so there it goes to the supertonic, he’s used that inversion to get to there, there’s a three-bar phrase, there’s a seven-bar phrase…’” A lover of words, he often tackles an opera text first. “I might have a month of reading the libretto, without even the notes, and then gradually I’ll put it all together.” Contemporary music is another story. “I probably won’t do a Schenkerian analysis [of the structure],” he laughs. “I’ll probably just look at it and go, ‘how the hell am I going to beat this?’ Every departure point is always different, so every process is always different.”

What is consistent is his desire to be “investigative”, going to primary sources—letters, biographical material, contemporary theorists, “quite academic stuff, but one sentence can make you go, ‘God, maybe those ten bars could be done like that!’ Or there’ll be a throwaway moment in a letter, like [the violinist Joseph] Joachim just happening to mention to Schumann, ‘you know, I’ve been really playing at the tip a lot today, and it’s created this effect, like snowflakes’.” Ticciati’s melodious voice drops, as it often does, to an awed near-whisper. “One line, from one little letter that you don’t even need to share with anyone, can colour an entire movement of a symphony when you conduct it.”

It is this detail, he says as his pigeon arrives, that enables him to “go beyond painting in primary colours”. The next stage is the essence of conducting: how to convey his interpretation to the musicians who actually make the noise? “That’s the beauty of it,” he says, gnawing at a wing and proffering his plate again. (“Go on, have some, shovel a bit of bacon on there.”) “You have to have a physicality, so you can get up in front of an orchestra, lift up your arms and tell them how to play the music—everything: dynamic, phrasing, colour, shape, speed, emotion—by not saying a word.”

Inside the restaurant, a glass shatters. Ticciati grimaces in sympathy with whoever dropped it. After a moment he says, “It’s a beautiful sound, though, isn’t it?”

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Meet the Maestro

Longreads Pick

Robin Ticciati—the new music director for the UK’s Glyndebourne Opera company—is not your typical conductor. He’s young, “radically collaborative,” and out to shake things up.

Published: Mar 9, 2015
Length: 25 minutes (6,400 words)

How the Hand Painted Rock ‘n’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip Came to Be

Photo by Weho City, Flickr Rock N’ Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip Exhibit Reception - July 30, 2013

Driving down the Sunset Strip has always felt a little like being in a magazine. The billboards loom and beckon, towering and untouchable and yet still totally in your face. Today they advertise luxury brands and new TV shows, but once upon a time—back when the Sunset Strip was at the heart and soul of rock ‘n’ roll—they were hand painted musical monoliths, larger-than-life variations on album art and psychedelic interpretations of soon-to-be hit records. As Hunter Oatman-Stanford put it, “in the 1970s, you knew you’d made it big if your record label paid for a hand-painted billboard on the Strip.” The hand painted rock billboards on the Strip were an art form specific to LA’s car culture, intended not for gallery walls but to be seen through a windshield at cruising speed, and preferably with the convertible top down.

According to the Los Angeles Times, each billboard took roughly ten days to produce, with costs ranging from $1,200 to $10,000. Craftsmen would hand paint the illustrations on individual wood panels at warehouses in Mid City, before ultimately reassembling the pieces on location in the wee hours. And they were by nature ephemeral—each was destroyed after its contract ended.

Luckily for us, a photographer named Robert Landau documented many of the billboards during their roughly decade-and-a-half heyday (from 1967 to the advent of MTV in the early 1980’s). Landau was a teenager living with his dad in the hills above the legendary Sunset Strip Tower Records when he first started documenting the fleeting masterpieces, shooting with a Nikkormat camera and Kodachrome film. A few years ago, he published a complete catalog of his photos with Angel City Press, and in a few weeks the billboards will finally grace museum walls, when an exhibit of Landau’s work opens at the LA’s Skirball Cultural Center.

Over at Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford has interviewed Landau about his work and the billboards themselves. Below is a short excerpt:

Collectors Weekly: Who started the music industry’s billboard trend?

Landau: As far as I can tell, it was the Doors in 1967 for their debut album. I talked with Jac Holzman—the head of Elektra Records who signed the Doors—while writing my book. In 1967, he had just come out here from the East Coast and opened an office on La Cienega Boulevard, not far from Sunset Boulevard, and it occurred to him that billboards were being used for everything except promoting records and music. A lot of radio stations where popular disc jockeys worked were farther east on Sunset, and he knew they drove on the Strip, and that the entertainment industry in general was based there.

The Doors were really into it; the whole band even climbed up on top for a photo shoot. Jim Morrison was quoted as saying he thought it was cool he’d be hanging over the Strip like a specter. I think at that time, it cost about a thousand dollars a month, which was quite a bit of an investment then. Elektra signed on for a year, and they had several different billboards. Little by little, the other record companies caught on.

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Identify an Aesthetic, and Then Recreate That Aesthetic

To understand why Urban Outfitters and American Apparel have declined so spectacularly, it’s helpful to remember what it was that made them so successful in the first place. In their heyday, each made a science of identifying exactly what it was that made hipsters so attractive, then recreated that aesthetic in their stores.

They mass-marketed the counterculture by honoring art, music, and fashion of the past; rejecting traditional lifestyles and careers; and appreciating irony. “You would flip through one of their lookbooks or walk into their stores and think, I am in this world,” Brandes recalls. They made a hard-to-define bohemian lifestyle accessible to an entire generation of young people growing up in the cookie-cutter suburbs.

Urban Outfitters and American Apparel identified their target audiences, moving into neighborhoods with a high density of 18 to 25 year olds who were beginning to experiment with their personal style and values. In college towns, students looking to express their newfound interest in indie rock or ’80s nostalgia could put together an entire look in a matter of minutes at one of these stores; they didn’t need to dig through bins of old T-shirts at Goodwill anymore. Even though you weren’t technically thrift shopping, the ambiance and layout inside these stores mimicked the experience, making you feel like you were stumbling across rare, special objects.

Elizabeth Segran writing for Racked about the decline of the “hipster brand,” and why American Apparel and Urban Outfitters are struggling.

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‘We Are the World’ at 30: A Minute-by-Minute Breakdown

Longreads Pick

How Quincy Jones, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson helped gather 46 of the biggest stars in music for an all-night recording session for charity.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Mar 8, 2015
Length: 21 minutes (5,273 words)