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Boulder Bach Beat

~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

Boulder Bach Beat

Tag Archives: bicycle

A Bicycle Tour Connects the Bachs

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach Excursions, Bach's Life, Other Artists

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Anna-Luise Oppelt, Arnstadt, Bachfest Leipzig, bicycle, cycling, Dornheim, Eisenach, Gotha, Halle, Internationaler Arbeitskreis für Musik, Johann Sebastian Bach Bicycle Tour, Köthen, Leipzig, Mareike Neumann, Naumburg, Ohrdruf, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Wechmar, Weimar, Weissenfels

BiketourcropJ. S. Bach spent most of his life in the region which today comprises the German federal states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. The places that are linked to his life can now be experienced on a 400km bicycle tour.

In 2012, professional musicians and passionate cyclists Mareike Neumann and Anna-Luise Oppelt initiated the “Johann Sebastian Bach Bicycle Tour” which starts in Bach’s birth place, Eisenach, and connects the cities of Gotha, Wechmar, Ohrdruf, Arnstadt, Dornheim, Weimar, Naumburg, Weissenfels, Leipzig, Halle and Köthen. The tour uses already existing cycle routes, mostly along rivers. The level is considered to be “easy” to “medium.”

The organizer “Internationaler Arbeitskreis für Musik” (International Association for Music) offers three tours in 2014, one of which will stop for performances during the Bachfest Leipzig.

– Internationaler Arbeitskreis für Musik e. V.

Leyla McCalla Chooses the Cello

30 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Works, Music Education, Other Artists, World View

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bicycle, blues, Carolina Chocolate Drops, cello, Creole, Dixieland, French Quarter, Greensboro, guitar, Heart of Gold, Langston Hughes, Leyla McCalla, mandolin, New Orleans, New York, piccolo, Rhiannon Giddens, Rufus Cappadocia, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Vari-Colored Songs

Layla McCalla

Layla McCalla

“‘When I chose to play it in fourth grade, I didn’t know what a cello was. I thought it was a woodwind instrument. I walked up to this table in the classroom with all these different instruments on it and picked up the piccolo. But from across the room, the teacher called out: ‘Leyla McCalla! Leyla McCalla!’ I turned around and she had a cello in her hands. It was almost as big as me, really cumbersome and not at all what I was expecting.”

Leyla McCalla has been finding out what a cello is – and what it can do – ever since. Having initially restricted herself to the classical music world, her artistic brief now takes in the folk songs of her parents’ native Haiti as well as the old-time music of the American south. A touring member of the African-American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, with whom she is almost permanently on the road, McCalla has found time and space to record an album of her own – the exquisite Vari-Colored Songs.

Today is something of a rest day, a stopover in Greensboro, North Carolina, en route to her adopted home in New Orleans. Not that it is much of a rest day, though. She is surrounded by musical instruments in the living room of Rhiannon Giddens, her Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate. A break in rehearsals – while Giddens takes her seven-month-old son for a stroll around the neighborhood – allows McCalla to explain why she diverted from the cellist’s usual passage towards conservatoire and orchestra.

“My family moved to Ghana for two years when I was in high school and I quit playing,” she says. “There was no one to study with there and it put my conservatory hopes on hold. After we moved back to the States, I met a cellist called Rufus Cappadocia. His playing blew my mind – really rhythmic and exciting. It made me want to explore this instrument, to figure out what it can do besides all the things I love about it.”

McCalla not only reassessed how she played the cello – experimenting with finger-picking, strumming it like a mandolin – but also stepped outside the classical canon to embrace old-time tunes and Haitian folk songs, traditions previously untouched by the cello. “I get more out of music creating things that people have never heard before,” she says. “And that continues to propel me.”

Three summers ago, McCalla took the decision to up sticks from New York and settle in New Orleans. “I thought that moving there would bring out some creative things that I couldn’t explore in New York, where so much of my life was spent trying to figure out how to pay the rent. I moved on a wing and a prayer, but suddenly I was totally in charge of my own life.”

She soon became a fixture on the streets of New Orleans, strapping her faithful cello on her back and riding her drop-handlebar bike to a regular spot in the French Quarter, outside the police station. There she would treat passersby to Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12).”The police, and everyone else, seemed to like me because the music was classy for New Orleans. Usually, it’s bands playing Dixieland jazz or a guy stomping his foot and playing plugged-in bluesy guitar. But they were like: ‘Oooh, classical music. Wow!’ I’d sit there for five hours a day, sometimes more. I met people that way. I started playing with local bands, sitting in with a few people, starting to play more jazz, starting to write more songs.”

As well as freeing her up creatively, McCalla’s relocation put her closer – geographically and culturally – to her Haitian heritage. “I didn’t realize there was such a connection between Haiti and New Orleans,” she says, citing their shared Spanish colonial past (originally French, it was part of the Spanish empire during the late eighteenth century). “But if you go to cemeteries in New Orleans, you see my family name on a lot of the tombs. Haiti is such a part of Louisianan history.”

Using songs to dust off this hidden history, McCalla’s art was chiming with that of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who had tracked her down to that pitch outside the police station. “I appreciated the clarity of what they were doing – telling the untold story of the black string band tradition and living that music, sharing its history with people.”

These graceful, defiant Haitian folk songs, sung in Creole in McCalla’s bell-clear voice, elegantly illuminate Vari-Colored Songs. The record’s title comes from its opening track, a poem by the African-American literary titan Langston Hughes, set to music and retitled Heart of Gold. It’s one of several Hughes poems to take song form on the album. “Music was such a big part of what inspired him to write in the first place,” explains McCalla. “His poems just feel so musical. I began recording little snippets that became songs. It could have become a huge project. I could have been doing this for the rest of my life!”

Even though McCalla’s curiosity has sent her down paths previously untrod by the feet of cellists, the events in that New Jersey classroom a couple of decades ago have long defined her. “I got stuck playing cello,” she sighs. “My teacher said: ‘You have long legs. You’ll be good at the cello.’ Not that that has anything to do with it but, proportionately, it does fit my body.” She laughs, presumably at the accidental wisdom she showed as a nine-year-old. “It’s definitely been the right instrument for me.”

Nigel Tassell – The Guardian

Kraftwerk Returns to Its Roots

11 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Other Artists, World View

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Autobahn, Beethoven, bicycle, cycling, Düsseldorf, hip-hop, Kraftwerk, Milli Vanilli, Museum of Modern Art, Nena, popular music, Scorpions, synthpop, techno, Tour de France, Wagner

For those of us of a certain generation, German music has very little to do with Bach, Beethoven or Wagner, and much more to do with Nena, the Scorpions and Milli Vanilli. Less well-known but exponentially more influential was the pioneering electronic band Kraftwerk, whose revolutionary sounds and technologies in the 1970s would inspire a generation of artists and influence a range of genres stretching from synthpop to techno to hip-hop.

In recent years, the notoriously reclusive band, which now has only one of its four original members, has been making appearances rather than going on tours. But it is has decided to return to its roots and play for the hometown crowd in the western city of Düsseldorf for the first time in twenty-one years, even though its studio has been based there for decades.

Beginning on 11 January 2013, the band will perform an eight-night concert series entitled “The Catalogue – 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8” at the city’s Kunstsammlung NRW art museum. Each concert will feature a complete album, beginning with Autobahn and ending with Tour de France in the order of the album’s release, as well as 3-D background visualizations and additional works from the Kraftwerk catalog.

In April 2012, the band performed a similar concert series at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as part of the “Kraftwerk Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” an exhibition showcasing the band’s “historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture.”

Tickets for the Düsseldorf shows cost €50 per night, and sales begin at 10am local time on 11 November, exclusively at http://www.kraftwerk.tickets.de. Tickets for the MoMA events sold out within a matter of minutes.

jtw – Der Spiegel

How Music Works

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Books, Other Artists

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Beethoven, bicycle, Bicycle Diaries, Borders, Brian Eno, cycling, David Byrne, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, HMV, How Music Works, Leonard Bernstein, Luaka Bop, minimalism, Mozart, Pink Floyd, popular music, recording technology, rock and roll, Talking Heads, Tim Page, Tom Waits, Tower, Virgin

David Byrne has always resisted easy definition. His long-ago group Talking Heads stood out initially for its geeky, reductive, white-bread minimalism, then reinvented itself as a swinging, latter-day big band, brimming over with influences from North Africa and South America.

In the years since, Byrne has worked in theater, film, photography and many other genres. He founded a venturesome record company, Luaka Bop, which presented many artists then unknown in the United States, and he has continued to make his own albums (with and without his longtime musical partner, Brian Eno). Most recently, he has taken up the cause of bicycling, specifically bicycling in New York, which is the usual way the Scotland native gets around his adopted city and which he chronicled in a breezy series of observations published as Bicycle Diaries.

Byrne’s new book, an ambitious, illustrated 345-page volume titled How Music Works, puts me in mind of what it might be like to run into the author at a bar and spend the next few hours talking about a lot of things. Some disclosure may be in order here: I knew Byrne slightly more than thirty years ago, we have a number of mutual friends, and we lived in the same Manhattan building for a while. Still, as Byrne recalls, he was “incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years,” and I remember our few meetings as virtually monosyllabic, both of us staring resolutely at the ground.

How Music Works suggests that such anxiety is long past. This is a decidedly generous book – welcoming, informal, digressive, full of ideas and intelligence – and one has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years. It is part autobiography, part how-to guide, part history and part prognostication – all engaging but none really complete. While those who want an in-depth memoir of Talking Heads, for example, may be disappointed (although there are some terrific nuggets), Byrne touches on so many subjects that few readers with a more general interest in music will feel left out.

Not surprisingly, he is least convincing when writing about classical music and opera. He’s even a little flinty about it: “I never got Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven – and I don’t feel any worse for it,” he acknowledges. “I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.” Such absolute dismissal comes across as intellectual insecurity (really – “a worse person?” What is this, high school?) and tarnishes Byrne’s authority. Still, in fairness, how many classical artists, with the eternal exception of Leonard Bernstein, ever had anything smart to say about pop music?

Byrne has plenty of smart things to say about pop music. For example: “We now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version.” True enough, for better or for worse, and a distinct change from even fifty years ago. He points out that some of Tom Waits’s songs “would sound pretty corny, sung ‘straight,’ without his trademark growly vocals. The sound of his voice is what makes them work.”

Writing of the vast traveling theatrical extravaganzas that the leading progressive rock bands of the 1970s, such as Pink Floyd, lugged from arena to arena, he says: “These shows were light years away from any connection to our reality. They were an escape, a fantasy, and hugely entertaining, but they had no relationship to any sense of what it felt like to be young, energetic, and frustrated. Those artists sure didn’t speak to or for any of us, even if they did have some good songs. If we wanted to hear music that spoke directly to us, it was clear that we’d have to make it ourselves. If no one else liked it, well, so be it – but at least we would have some songs that meant something to us.”

Byrne has been around long enough to recognize that music may be an extraordinary art but that it can also be a very tricky business. He examines the history of recording, from wax cylinders to MP3 downloads. He talks specifically, in dollars and cents, about the advances and royalties he has received from various record companies, and then compares the figures with those accrued when he self-produced his recent collaboration with Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. He notes the irreversible decline of traditional record stores – Tower, Virgin, Borders and HMV – but recognizes that, through the Internet and other venues, “there have never been more opportunities for a musician to reach an audience.”

“I’ve made money and I’ve been ripped off,” Byrne says. “I’ve had creative freedom and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. . . . If you think success in the world of music is determined by the number of records sold, or the size of your house or bank account, then I’m not the expert for you. I am more interested in how people can manage a whole lifetime in music.”

It’s a worthwhile goal – and Byrne and his book make for good company.

Tim Page – The Washington Post

Eisenach at the Crossroads

11 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach Excursions, Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, World View

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Berlin, Berlin Wall, bicycle, bike path, Cold War, cycling, Eastern Bloc, Eisenach, German border, German Democratic Republic, Iron Curtain, Iron Curtain Trail, Martin Luther, Plattenbau, St. George Church, Thuringia, Via Regia, Wartburg

For nearly a thousand years, the east-west Via Regia (King’s Road) had passed through Eisenach, thereby attracting merchants, pilgrims and invading armies as they traveled between Ukraine and Spain, but when in 1961 the German Democratic Republic’s border with West Germany was fortified with land mines, watchtowers and high fences, west-bound travelers suddenly found themselves facing an 800-mile long and 3-mile wide death trap. Eisenach’s minimally safe distance from the border, connection with historical figures (Martin Luther’s refuge at Wartburg Castle and Bach’s baptism at St. George Church) and industrial capacity allowed the little city to survive, but, at first, life in Eisenach under the new regime was a struggle as both a housing shortage and air pollution were intensified by the influx of thousands of refugees from former German territories. Crowding and environmental concerns were gradually eased as officials systematically replaced derelict sections of the Old City with new Plattenbau housing developments, and by the time that the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1989, Eisenach was hosting two million Eastern Bloc visitors every year.

Now that Germany has been reunited, Eisenach finds itself back at the midpoint of the German segment of the Via Regia and, surprisingly, discovers that it is benefitting from its proximity to the former border zone between the two Germanies. The substantially north-south swath of land that had cut indiscriminately across pristine farmland, beautiful villages and dense forests filled with wildlife has been transformed into a green belt featuring a challenging bike path called the Iron Curtain Trail. Once again Eisenach and the state of Thuringia, the geographical center of Germany and homeland of the Bach clan, are ready to welcome all visitors.

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