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Music

820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it.

1. Can music-rooted practices help you reclaim control of your internal narrative?Singer and actress Rhonda Ross explores the concept of emotional sovereignty. This video explains how the repetitive thoughts in your mind shape your feelings and introduces a mus…
2. How musicians transform fleeting moments into lasting memoriesEver wondered why a specific melody stays with you forever? Songwriter Scarlet Keys explores the precise musical tools used to create unforgettable songs and the science of why th…
3. How the art of deep listening can reveal the hidden layers of human connectionMusician Hrishikesh Hirway demonstrates how applying the same intense focus we give to music can transform our conversations. This 2022 talk explores the profound discoveries made…
4. Why the convenience of streaming might be costing us our musical historyWhile streaming offers instant access to nearly every song ever recorded, music professor Tom Rizzuto explores the hidden risks of a purely digital library and the enduring value …
5. Can an orchestra perform a song they have never heard?In this musical experiment, conductor Jacob Collier leads the VSO School of Music Orchestra through a piece of music that none of the musicians have ever practiced. Watch as he us…
6. How a lifelong musical obsession transforms personal grief into cosmic connectionFrom receiving her first guitar at just six months old, Irish songwriter Wallis Bird has lived a life defined by melody. Discover how her genre-bending performance explores the pr…
7. Nancy Wilson had to audition for Heart by learning a Yes intro overnightWhen Nancy Wilson followed her sister Ann into Heart, some of the men in the band were not keen. They made her earn the job by working up the tricky introduction to a Yes song. Sh…
8. The passacaglia began as street music strummed between Spanish songsThe word passacaglia comes from Spanish for walking the street. In the early 1600s it was a quick strummed filler between dances. Within decades Frescobaldi turned it into chains …
9. Al Green's father threw him out for listening to Jackie WilsonAs a teenager, Al Green was kicked out of the family home when his devout father caught him playing Jackie Wilson records. A few years later, Memphis producer Willie Mitchell coac…
10. Borodin composed Prince Igor in his spare time from chemistryAlexander Borodin is remembered for Prince Igor and In the Steppes of Central Asia, but he considered himself a chemist first and wrote music mainly on days off or when ill. In th…
11. Casting directors called young Angelina Jolie too dark, then she won an OscarAt sixteen Angelina Jolie decided to act professionally, only to be rejected at auditions for seeming too dark. She was so dismayed by her first lead, a direct-to-video robot sequ…
12. Queen's guitarist finished his astrophysics PhD 36 years after starting itBrian May began doctoral research in astrophysics in 1971, then got rather busy as Queen's lead guitarist. He finally received his PhD from Imperial College London in 2007. Since …
13. Charles Lamb spent his life caring for the sister who killed their motherIn September 1796, Mary Lamb, in the grip of severe mental illness, killed their mother at home in London. Her younger brother Charles, just 21, refused to let her be locked away …
14. Glen Campbell learned guitar on a five-dollar Sears instrument in rural ArkansasGlen Campbell grew up on a cotton farm without electricity, the seventh son among twelve children, playing a five-dollar guitar from Sears. He was on local radio by six. Years lat…
15. Guns N' Roses began the night a manager fired Axl RoseIn March 1985 a manager sacked singer Axl Rose from L.A. Guns. That same night, guitarist Tracii Guns decided to start a new band with him, fusing the names of their old groups. T…
16. Offenbach rented his own theatre when the Paris opera ignored himJacques Offenbach, a cantor's son from Cologne, wanted to write comic musical theatre, but the Opéra-Comique showed no interest. So in 1855 he leased a tiny theatre on the Champs-…
17. Rishabhanatha, the Jain first teacher said to have invented cooking and marriageJain tradition says that people once lived without work, fed by wish-granting trees. When the trees began to fail, their king Rishabhanatha taught them farming, writing, trade, cr…
18. Did Assam's great saint-artist Sankardev really live about 120 years?Tradition says Srimanta Sankardev was born in 1449 and died in 1568, a lifespan of about 120 years. The scholar Baniprasanna Misra argues that biographers double-counted stretches…
19. Slash's famous top hat began as shoplifted goods from Melrose AvenueBefore a 1985 club show, a young guitarist lifted a black felt top hat from one Melrose Avenue shop and a silver concho belt from another, then combined them into custom headgear.…
20. Slipknot took shape during night shifts at an Iowa gas stationMuch of Slipknot's early planning happened late at night at a Sinclair gas station in Des Moines, where drummer Joey Jordison worked the graveyard shift. There, in late 1995, he p…
21. Syncopation puts the stress where your ear least expects itCount a bar as one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and. Lean on the numbers and the rhythm sits squarely on the beat; lean on the ands and it starts to swing. That small shift of empha…
22. A 1975 Kraftwerk gig persuaded two future pop stars to ditch their guitarsWhen Kraftwerk played their first British concert in 1975, two young men in the audience, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, decided to throw away their guitars. They went on to f…
23. The black paste on a tabla is what makes the drum ring like a bellEach head of a tabla carries a dark circle called the syahi, or ink, built up from layers of rice or wheat starch mixed with black powder. Its shaping reins in the drum's naturall…
24. Michael Tilson Thomas returned to finish a Mahler symphony twenty-two years laterIn 1985 a police helicopter roared over the Hollywood Bowl during Mahler's Eighth Symphony, and Michael Tilson Thomas walked off the stage. In 2007 he came back to the same venue …
25. Ravidas, the leatherworker's son whose hymns sit in the Sikh scriptureBorn into a Chamar family of leatherworkers, a caste then treated as untouchable, Ravidas became a poet-saint whom Brahmins reportedly bowed to. Forty-one of his poems were placed…
26. Remembrance Day's bugle calls reenact a night vigil kept over the fallenThe Last Post once closed the military day, and The Rouse opened the next morning. Sounding one, then keeping silence, then sounding the other turns a Remembrance service into a s…
27. Those two stacked numbers at the start of a score quietly decide how music feelsA time signature looks like a fraction but works like a recipe: the bottom number names a note length, the top says how many fit in a bar. Mathematically 3/4 and 3/8 are interchan…
28. The humble tambourine has travelled from ancient Egypt to Motown and MozartIt looks like a toy, a hoop with jingles, yet the tambourine appears in writing as early as 1700 BC. It kept rhythm for enslaved Americans denied drums, carried gospel into Motown…
29. How the South Park creators and an Avenue Q writer built a Broadway giantTrey Parker and Matt Stone spent hundreds of thousands of their own dollars workshopping a musical about two Mormon missionaries in Uganda, still unsure it would go anywhere. It o…
30. Tina Fey's The Four Seasons brings Alan Alda's 1981 film back, with Alda aboardIn 1981 Alan Alda wrote, directed and starred in a film about married friends whose holidays together expose cracks in their lives. Over four decades later Tina Fey remade it for …
31. The Moody Blues started as a Birmingham beat band and nearly broke up brokeBefore Nights in White Satin, the Moody Blues were a scrappy Birmingham rhythm and blues act named partly after a brewery they hoped would sponsor them. They scored a number one w…
32. American networks passed on The Muppet Show, so Jim Henson made it in EnglandJim Henson feared Sesame Street had typecast him as a children's entertainer, so he pitched a variety show for grown-ups. ABC aired two pilots and passed; other US networks said n…
33. The Voice was designed around one trick: judges who cannot see the singerA Dutch programme director asked the creator of Big Brother for a talent show that went further than The X Factor. John de Mol's answer was the blind audition, where famous coache…
34. One London blues band launched Clapton, Beck and Page in five yearsBetween 1963 and 1968 the Yardbirds passed their lead guitar from Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck to Jimmy Page, three players who all later landed in Rolling Stone's top five guitarist…
35. Ticino is the Swiss canton that sits on the wrong side of the AlpsEvery other Swiss canton has some natural link to the country's central plateau. Ticino does not: almost all of it lies south of the Alps, Italian is its only official language, a…
36. Taiko ensembles are ancient drums played in a style barely seventy years oldJapanese drums have sounded at shrines, battles and theatres since at least the 6th century. Yet the thunderous ensemble shows most people picture as taiko, many drummers playing …
37. Wednesday pulled Tim Burton back from thoughts of retirementAfter Dumbo left him creatively drained, Tim Burton was weighing an exit from filmmaking. Then a pilot script about Wednesday Addams arrived, and he said it spoke to how he had fe…
38. A whip crack is a tiny sonic boom, the first human-made oneFlick a long whip and a ripple races down the lash, gathering speed until the tip outruns sound itself, more than 30 times faster than the handle moved. The crack you hear is a mi…
39. Kung fu films and comic books built the Wu-Tang Clan's empireTwo Staten Island rappers dropped by their labels regrouped around a strange recipe: Eastern philosophy lifted from kung fu movies, Five-Percent Nation teachings and comic books. …
40. Nobody called it yacht rock until a 2005 web series didThe smooth, studio-polished soft rock of 1975 to 1984 went by names like the West Coast sound. Its current label comes from an online video series made in 2005. The show's creator…
41. Yes got its name as a stopgap nobody ever bothered to replaceIn 1968 the new band tossed around names. Jon Anderson offered Life, Chris Squire offered World, and guitarist Peter Banks simply said Yes. Banks later admitted it was meant to be…
42. The Tohono O'odham rejected a nickname meaning bean eaters for desert peopleFor centuries outsiders called them Papago, a Spanish rendering of a neighbour's word meaning eating tepary beans. Since the 1980s the tribe has insisted on its own name, Tohono O…
43. Tommy Dorsey, the smooth trombonist who taught Frank Sinatra to breatheFrank Sinatra said he learned breath control by watching Tommy Dorsey play trombone. The bandleader nicknamed the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing was anything but gentle in busines…
44. The tritone earned the nickname devil in music, but the church never banned itSplit an octave exactly in half and you land on the tritone, six semitones of restless tension. Theorists labelled it the devil in music, and legend says singers were punished for…
45. The plastic that floats yet outpulls steel eight times over by weightUltra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene is chemically ordinary polyethylene, only with chains stretched to millions of daltons. Spun into fibres like Dyneema, it becomes light en…
46. The veena began as a harp and became India's goddess-held luteStatues of Saraswati, Hindu goddess of arts and learning, cradle a long-necked instrument with a gourd at each end. That is the veena, a name ancient Sanskrit applied to almost an…
47. Heavy metal's first orchestra collaboration left its guitarist feeling looked down onIn 1969 Deep Purple played a 50-minute piece with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, an early fusion of rock band and symphony. Guitarist Richie Blackmore later called the orchestr…
48. How Al Pacino learned to play blind for Scent of a WomanTo play a sightless retired Army officer, Al Pacino spent time with clients of New York's Associated Blind, especially people who had lost their vision through trauma, hearing how…
49. From Stone Age buttons to Chinese company chops, seals still prove who you areStamp seals carved from stone go back at least to the 6th millennium BC, and the device never really went away. In China, Japan and South Korea, a registered seal can still bind a…
50. The three-minute pop song was shaped by the limits of shellac discsWhy do so many pop songs last about three minutes? Early 10-inch shellac discs spinning at 78 rpm held roughly that much music per side, and writers learned to fit the medium. The…
51. Sleep handed their label one hour-long song, and the band fell apartSigned to London Records after a breakthrough second album, the San Jose trio Sleep delivered a follow-up that was one track running over an hour. Executives called it unmarketabl…
52. Sly and the Family Stone broke rock's colour and gender lines at onceWhen two brothers merged their bands in San Francisco in November 1966, the result became the first major American rock group whose lineup mixed Black and white players, men and w…
53. Before bugles, snare drum patterns told soldiers when to wake, eat and sleepLong before radio, armies ran their day on drumbeats. American troops rose to roughly five minutes of fife and drum, often a piece called Three Camps, were summoned to meals by tu…
54. Long after its debut, the film Saltburn sent Murder on the Dancefloor back up the chartsSophie Ellis-Bextor's biggest hit first peaked at number two on the UK singles chart in the early 2000s and was Europe's most played song of 2002. Then the 2023 film Saltburn feat…
55. Steve Reich built whole pieces from two identical loops drifting slowly apartIn 1965 Steve Reich took three words from a street preacher's sermon, it's gonna rain, copied them onto several tape loops and let the loops slip gradually out of step. The overla…
56. Ritchie Valens was only 17 when La Bamba made rock historyRitchie Valens took a Mexican folk song, gave it a rock beat and turned La Bamba into a 1958 hit that helped launch Spanish-language rock and roll. Eight months after his breakthr…
57. Rob Zombie grew up in a carnival family before building a horror empireRob Zombie's parents worked at a carnival until a riot in 1977, when he was 12, persuaded them to leave. The boy who dreamed of being Alice Cooper, Spielberg and Bela Lugosi at on…
58. Robbie Williams once sold 1.6 million concert tickets in a single dayThe youngest member of Take That, who joined at 16 after his mother spotted an advert, became Britain's biggest solo pop star. Robbie Williams holds a record 18 Brit Awards and a …
59. Robin Thicke signed a record deal at 16, years before Blurred LinesLong before Blurred Lines topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013, Robin Thicke was a teenage songwriter crafting R&B tracks for other artists. A demo paid for by jazz singer Al Jarr…
60. Rockabilly got its name from rock and the hillbilly music that fed itRockabilly, one of rock and roll's earliest forms, fused country music with rhythm and blues in the American South of the early 1950s. Its name joins rock with hillbilly, the labe…

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