Song of Fire

Ringing Rocks Park in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, contains a field of boulders that produce a metallic ringing sound when struck, as if they were hollow. The boulders consist of a volcanic basalt called diabase, and thus have a high content of iron and aluminum. In 1890, Dr. J. J. Ott collected a number of these rocks with different pitches and performed with a brass band. He was not the first person to give such a performance. [Read more →]

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More than anything else, we like to beat on things. Our most ancient musical instruments are percussion. Paleolithic excavations have revealed a child’s rattle made of clay, generally considered to be one of the first instruments known to prehistoric man. We can’t tell what percussive activities arose first, but it’s reasonable to assume that stamping, clapping, and striking sonorous material with a stick or bone were the earliest musical impulses. Instruments that we strike have proliferated throughout history: bells, gongs, wood blocks and, especially, drums. There is more variety in the names for drums around the world than any for other kind of instrument, as you can see from the fairly exhaustive list below. [Read more →]

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The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is a non-profit mobile recording studio dedicated to providing students of all ages with hands-on opportunities to make music and produce video projects. The traveling program works together with local partners to create free events for middle, high school, and college age students to tour the bus and participate in the production of music, video and digital photography projects reflective of their ideas and concerns, regardless of their levels of expertise. I was able to visit the Bus during its stop at the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and was impressed by the state-of-the-art equipment on board. [Read more →]

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One of the best known Russian composers of the 20th century, Dimitri Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Leon Trotsky’s chief of staff. As he explored the more dissonant style of his international peers, however, his music came under attack by the Stalinist bureaucracy. His music was denounced twice — in 1936 and 1948 — and periodically banned. The first denunciation coincided with the Great Terror, in which “enemies” of the state were imprisoned or killed, and Shostakovich’s music was deemed to be “primitive, coarse and vulgar” by the newspaper Pravda. The subtext was that it was decadent like the West, and insufficiently celebratory of the working class. Consequently, commissions dried up and his income fell by three-quarters. [Read more →]

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