Music History Monday Robert Greenberg

Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel” (18900-1877)





We mark the death on June 3, 1877 – 147 years ago today – of the Austrian lawyer, botanist, geologist, teacher, writer, publisher, composer, and “musicologist” Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel, of cancer, in Vienna.  Born on January 14, 1800, he was 77 years old at the time of his death.







Ludwig Köchel and the Archduke







Herr Köchel wasn’t born a “Ritter” – a “knight” – a “von” – with all the privileges and perks that such a title brought.  Rather, he was born to the middle class in the Lower Austrian town of Krems an der Donau (meaning “At the junction of the Kremas and Danube Rivers”) some 43 miles west of Vienna. Smart and ambitious, he studied law in Vienna and went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1827, at the age of 27.







Köchel was a polymath, someone who knew a lot about a lot of things.  As such, despite having a law degree, he chose a career as a teacher.  But he was not just any teacher, and he didn’t teach just any students.  For 15 years, Köchel was the tutor to the four sons of Archduke Charles of Austria.







This requires a wee bit of discussion/explanation.







Archduke Charles of Austria (1771-1847) in 1819





Archduke Charles Louis John Joseph Laurentius of Austria, Duke of Teschen (1771-1847) was an Austrian field-marshal, the third son of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and the grandson of the Empress Maria Theresa. He was the nephew of both Emperor Joseph II (of Amadeus fame) and Marie Antoinette (of “oops, has anyone seen my noggin?” fame). 







In a virtual sea of Austrian military incompetence against Napoleon, Archduke Charles stands out as the best Habsburg general officer of the Napoleonic era, and arguably the best commander ever produced by the House of Habsburg in its 636-year run (from 1282 until 1918). According to Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), Archduke Charles was:









“the greatest general of his time.”









This, then, is the man who chose Ludwig Köchel to educate his four sons. Köchel lived with and worked with the Archduke’s boys for 15 years, from 1827 to 1842 (from the time Köchel was 27 years of age to 42).  It would appear that everyone was satisfied with Köchel’s teaching, because upon his departure in 1842, he was rewarded by the archduke with a knighthood and life-time pension large enough to guarantee that he’d never have to “work” for a living again.…







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There Must Be Something in the Air







Have any of you done – or anticipate doing – anything particularly foolish today, anything particularly inappropriate?







If you do, know that you will be in good company.  Perhaps it’s the angle of the sun; perhaps it’s something in the air or water, because as dates go, May 27 is ripe with musical stories and actions that we shall deem as being “inappropriate.”







For example.







Coventry Evening Telegraph May 26, 1964: “In May of 1964, eleven 16-year-old boys were suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School, Coventry, for having Mick Jagger haircuts. They were told by the Head of School, Donald Thompson, that they could return once they’d cut their hair.”





On May 27, 1964 – 60 years ago today – four of the eleven 16-year-old boys suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School in Coventry, UK, for having Mick Jagger haircuts complied with their headmaster’s demand that they cut their hair, and returned to school.  The other seven lads put their hair (or at least the allegiance to Mick Jagger!) before their schooling and remained suspended.  According to an article in the Coventry Evening Telegraph:









“their headmaster Mr. Donald Thompson has said that he would not object if they returned to school with a ‘neat Beatle cut.’







           Mr. Thompson told the Coventry Evening Telegraph today that he was not against boys having modern hair styles, but he did object to the ‘scruffy, long hair style of the Rolling Stones with hair curling into the nape of the neck and over their ears.’”









Thompson’s anti-Jagger, anti-Stones, pro-neatly-shorn hairdecree was handed down about a month after the President of the UK’s National Federation of Hairdressers declared that the Rolling Stones’ haircuts were “the worst” of all their rock ‘n’ roll colleagues.  He then added:









“One of them [no doubt referring to Keith Richards] looks as if he has a feather duster on his head.”









Oh my goodness, how worried everyone was about hair in the 1960s!  Was it inappropriate for the parents of those eleven suspended boys to send their kids to school in violation of what was a stated “hair code policy?”  Yes, it was inappropriate of them.  Was it inappropriate for the headmaster to indefinitely suspend those children at the end of the school year?  Yes, doubly inappropriate.At least those boys weren’t yet wearing their pants down around their knees, as they might do so today.  Triply inappropriate.







Speaking of INAPPROPRIATE







The Sex Pistols in 1977: every parent’s worst nightmare





On May 27, 1977 – 47 years ago today – the Sex Pistols released their single, God Save the Queen,in the UK.







Now, if you thought I was going to label the Sex Pistols’ “song” God Save the Queen as being “inappropriate,” you are incorrect.  Insipid?  Yes.  Artless?  Surely.  Ridiculous?  Of course: it’s the freaking Sex Pistols, for heaven’s sake, the lowest, bottom-feeding punkers of the punks.







What was inappropriate was the reaction of the “establishment” to the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and the degree to which that reaction made the song a cause célèbres.  You see, after its release, the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was instantly banned from British TV and radio stations.  Many of the workers in UK record pressing plants refused to even manufacture the record, and many UK record shops simply refused to stock and sell it.

Gaston Leroux’s Paris Opera House (today the Palais Leroux) in 1875, the year of its inauguration





Before we get to the principal topic of today’s post, we must note an operatic disaster that had nothing to do with singers or the opera being performed on stage.  Rather, it was a disaster that inspired Gaston Leroux to write the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which was published in 1909.







On May 20, 1896 – 128 years ago today – a counterweight helping to hold up the six-ton chandelier at Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House fell into the audience during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera Hellé (composed in 1779).  We don’t know how the opera performance was going, but the counterweight was a big hit: one woman in the audience was killed and a number of other audience members were badly injured.







Installing the six-ton chandelier





The disaster was covered by a reporter for the Parisian daily Le Matin named Gaston Leroux (1868-1927).  The accident – to say nothing for the Paris Opera House itself and the lake beneath it – made quite an impression on Monsieur Leroux.







About that underground “lake.” Writing in The New York Times on January 24, 2023, Sam Lubell tells us that:









“When digging the foundations [for the Paris Opera House], workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, causing water to flood the site. It was impossible to remove all the water, so crews had to contain it with a massive concrete reservoir with a vaulted ceiling from which water is still pumped today. The so-called lake was dramatized by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, who made it the stomping grounds of the Phantom. [Christopher Mead, author of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism] was mesmerized by [the opera house house]. ‘You can see why it inspired Leroux,’ he said. ‘You could invent a whole world there.’”









Which, of course, is precisely what Gaston Leroux did.







Onwards to the star attraction of today’s post!







Clara Schumann in 1857, age 38





With our heads bowed, we mark the death – 128 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896.







She was among the great pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her adult contemporaries.  She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons we will discuss in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise.  She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, Robert Schumann (1810-1856), and the spiritual muse of her best friend, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).  Most of all she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end.







No One Escapes This Life Unscathed, But When it Came to Clara . . .







Next time one of us gets into a self-pitying funk (at which I am a particular virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Clara Schumann and her life as a cautionary tale, as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side.  If such reflection doesn’t temper our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will.…









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World Cocktail Day! Whoever wrote the copy for this notice was clearly well into their third, perhaps fourth cocktail





We recognize May 13th as being, among other “days” here in the United States, National Frog Jumping Day, Leprechaun Day, International Hummus Day, National Crouton Day, and – wait for it – World Cocktail Day!







National Days, Weeks, and Months!







Who creates these damned things?







We’ll get to that in a moment.  But first, let’s distinguish between a national holiday and a national day (or week or month).







In the United States, national (or “federal”) holidays are designated by Congress and/or the President.  There are presently a total of ten national/federal holidays, meaning that federal employees get to take the day off.  However, anyone can declare a national day (or week or month).  The trick is getting enough people to buy into the “day” that it actually gains some traction and has some meaning.  Such national days are created by advocacy groups; lobbying groups; industry groups; government bodies; even individuals.







A different sort of “cocktail” day, May 13 is also National Fruit Cocktail Day!





According to the “National Day Calendar,” today, May 13, 2024, is – along with those “days” listed at the top of this post – National Women’s Checkup Day; National Fruit Cocktail Day; and National Apple Pie Day.  May 13 of this year is also the first day of Bike to Work Week; of Dementia Awareness Week; Water Savings Week; American Craft Beer Week; National Salvation Army Week; National Stationary Week; and National Smile Month.







I am oh-so-tempted to call this list of promotional idiocy, well, idiocy.  But that today is both World Cocktail Day and the first day of American Craft Beer Week has gratefully given us the hook for both today’s Music History Monday post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post: the drinking habits of some of our favorite composers, and drinking songs we should all know (and love).







A Disclaimer and a Necessary, Pre-emptive Point







First the disclaimer.  While I like my dry, gin martinis as much as the next guy – hell, probably a lot more than the next guy – I am in no way promoting the consumption of alcohol in this post, especially in excess.  Rather, as is my usual m.o., my goal is to render as human as I can composers who are otherwise pedestalized and, as such, de-humanized.







And now the necessary point. Today, some of us tend to be very judgmental about the regular consumption of alcohol.  And no wonder: given its potentially addictive nature and sometimes adverse effects on our bodies, moods, and minds, it is – for many people – nothing less than poison.  But for most of us it is a great pleasure in a life otherwise in short supply of such.







Now please: in the centuries prior to the twentieth, alcoholic beverages were more than merely recreation fluids but lifesavers as well, as the dearth of clean drinking water necessitated the consumption of far more alcohol than many of us, today, would consider healthy.  But given the choice, say, between a mug of ale or a pilsner glass of cholera-infected water, I do believe every one of us would choose the ale every time.







There’s a tendency, then – today – to call all sort of historical figures “alcoholics,” despite the fact that the word and the concept behind it only came in to being in 1852.  Today, we can read that Mozart was an alcoholic, Beethoven was an alcoholic, Schubert was an alcoholic; Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc.: all alcoholics.







Please.

We mark the public release, on May 6, 2015 – nine years ago today – of a scientific/statistical study published by The Royal Society Open Science Journal, a study entitled “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010).”







Royal Society Open Science





Scoff not, my friends: this was, in fact, a high-end study conducted (and written up) by four high-end scientists: Dr. Matthias Mauch, of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, whose current professional title is “Research Manager for Recommender Systems and Music Intelligence at Apple Music”; Dr. Robert M. MacCallum, who teaches in the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College, London; Dr. Mark Levy, a former research assistant at the Centre for Digital Music at the University of London and for the last three years a principal research scientist at Apple, where he researches potential future applications of machine learning to music creation and listening; and finally, Armand M. Leroi, a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London.







Scary fine creds on display here: up, down, and sideways.







The study’s abstract is as follows.  I figure it’s better to get it directly from the quartet of Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi than to offer up a watered down and abbreviated version of the abstract by yours truly.









“In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. To rectify this, we investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music information retrieval and text-mining tools, we analyze the musical properties of approximately 17,000 recordings that appeared in the charts and demonstrate quantitative trends in their harmonic and timbral properties. We then use these properties to produce an audio-based classification of musical styles and study the evolution of musical diversity and disparity, testing, and rejecting, several classical theories of cultural change. Finally, we investigate whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated. We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991. We conclude by discussing how our study points the way to a quantitative science of cultural change.”









Fascinating, yes?







Methodology







The actual paper – “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010)” – is rather lengthy; 4614 words (FYI: I let my computer do the word count).  Overall, the paper is characterized by the sort of technical jargon we would expect to find in a scientific journal.  For example: in the course of their introduction, the authors lay out their methodology as follows. 







“We adopted an approach inspired by recent advances in text-mining. We began by measuring our songs for a series of quantitative audio features, 12 descriptors of tonal content and 14 of timbre. These were then discretized into ‘words’ resulting in a harmonic lexicon (H-lexicon) of chord changes, and a timbral lexicon (T-lexicon) of timbre clusters. To relate the T-lexicon to semantic labels in plain English [“plain English”; if only!], we carried out expert annotations. The musical words from both lexica were then combined into 8+8=16 ‘topics’ using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). LDA is a hierarchical generative model of a text-like corpus, in which every document (here: song) is represented as a distribution over a number of topics, and every topic is represented as a distribution o...

John Wayne as Genghis Kahn (1956); not one of his finest cinematic moments





We mark the birth of The Duke on April 29, 1899 – 125 years ago today – in Washington D.C. 







By “The Duke,” we are not here referring to the actor John Wayne (who was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa), but rather, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the greatest songwriters and composers ever to be born in the United States.  







Aside from their shared nickname, it would appear that the only thing Duke Ellington had in common with John Wayne was that they both suffered from lung cancer.  In Ellington’s case, cancer killed him at the age of 75 on May 24, 1974, at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (and not at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, as is inexplicably claimed on certain web sites!).







Born in Washington D.C., he grew up at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place) NW, in the district’s West End neighborhood. His father, James Edward Ellington, worked as a blueprint maker for the Navy Department and on occasion as a butler, sometimes at the White House.  His mother, Daisy (born Kennedy) was the daughter of formerly enslaved people.  Theirs was a musical household; both of Ellington’s parents played piano. (We are told that James Edward Ellington preferred to play arrangements of operatic arias, while Daisy preferred the semi-classical parlor songs that were popular with the middle and upper middle classes at the time.)







Ellington as a child





And let us make no mistake; the Ellingtons were indeed of the upper middle class: sophisticated, educated, upwardly mobile, proud of their racial heritage and unwilling to allow their children to be limited by the Jim Crow laws of the time.  According to Studs Terkel, writing in his book Giants of Jazz (The New Press, 2nd edition, 2002):









“Daisy [Ellington] surrounded her son with dignified women to reinforce his manners and teach him elegance. His childhood friends noticed that his casual, offhand manner and dapper dress gave him the bearing of a young nobleman.”









It was that noble bearing that prompted Ellington’s high school friend Edgar McEntee to come up with the nickname that Ellington wore so very well for so very long.  According to Ellington himself: 









“I think he [Edgar McEntee] felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship, I should have a title. So he called me Duke.”)









For the young Ellington, piano lessons were a must; it was, for children of his generation (and mine as well!) an inevitable childhood rite-of-passage.  Having said that, like so many red-blooded American kids, Ellington preferred baseball, at which he excelled.  In his autobiography he recalled that:









“President [Theodore] Roosevelt would come on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play.”









(For our information: Ellington’s love of the game ran deep, and his first paying job was selling peanuts at Washington Senators games.)







(Because we all should know: the Senators, also-known-as the “Nationals,” played in D.C. from 1901 to 1960.  It was in 1960 that the team broke the collective hearts of its District fans and moved to Minnesota, there to become the “Minnesota Twins”: “twins” as in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)







Ellington’s first piano teacher was the spectacularly named Marietta Clinkscales (OMG; who could make such a name up?). As a teenager, he took up ragtime piano and studied harmony, though as a teen his growing love of music shared equal time with a real talent for painting and design. …