Intellect Plus
Music
820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 14.
- The tenor got its name from holding the tune, not from singing highTenor comes from the Latin for to hold. In early church polyphony the tenor line carried a borrowed melody in long notes while other voices were built around it, and it was usuall…
- Tex Avery bluffed his way into directing and helped invent Bugs BunnyIn 1935 Tex Avery told producer Leon Schlesinger he was an experienced director. He later admitted he was nothing of the sort and had simply talked his way in. Within a few years …
- Two lead guitars, two drummers: the Allman Brothers built Southern rock around jammingDuane Allman wanted a different kind of band, with two lead guitarists and two drummers. In 1969 he gathered them in Jacksonville, Florida, pushed his brother Gregg to sing his gu…
- Super Bowl LX went three quarters without a touchdown, and Seattle still won 29–13In Santa Clara on February 8, 2026, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29–13 in a game with no touchdown until the fourth quarter. Seattle's Dark Side defense did …
- Mötley Crüe's drummer was born in Athens to a Miss Greece contestantTommy Lee, the drummer famous for playing inside a spinning, airborne drum kit, began life as Thomas Lee Bass in Athens. His father was an American army sergeant, his mother had c…
- The Prodigy took their name from a synthesizer scrawled on a mixtapeA dancer at an Essex nightclub asked the DJ for a mixtape. Liam Howlett handed back a cassette with his own tracks on the flip side and one word scratched on it, the name of the M…
- Before My Girl, Motown insiders called them the Hitless TemptationsFor three years after signing with Motown in 1961, the Temptations released song after song that went nowhere, earning a cruel nickname. Then Smokey Robinson wrote a tune for the …
- Thomas Tallis wrote church music for four Tudor monarchs who disagreed about GodHenry VIII broke with Rome, Edward VI pushed Protestant reform, Mary I restored Catholicism and Elizabeth I reversed course again. Thomas Tallis served them all at court, reshapin…
- Disney fired Tim Burton for being too dark, then Hollywood hired him for exactly thatIn 1984 Disney let go a young animator whose short film about a boy reviving his dog seemed too frightening for children. Paul Reubens watched that same short and immediately want…
- Tim Robbins turned down a million dollars and won Cannes insteadAround 1991 Tim Robbins was offered a million dollars to star in a comedy called Folks! He said no and took the lead in Robert Altman's The Player, playing a scheming studio execu…
- Tina Turner got her big break because the booked singer never showed upIn 1960 Ike Turner booked studio time for a singer who failed to arrive. Rather than waste the money, a teenager from Nutbush, Tennessee, offered to sing the lead on a demo meant …
- Tom Petty traded a slingshot for Elvis records after watching the King filmIn the summer of 1961 a ten-year-old from Gainesville, Florida, visited a film set in nearby Ocala where his uncle was working and saw Elvis Presley in person. Elvis glowed, Tom P…
- The Doors began with a chance beach meeting and one sung lyricOne July day in 1965, two former UCLA film students ran into each other on the sand at Santa Monica. Jim Morrison admitted he had been writing songs and sang a few lines about swi…
- Gilbert and Sullivan opened Pirates in New York to beat the real piratesThe title of The Pirates of Penzance hides a jab. After roughly 150 American companies staged H.M.S. Pinafore without paying a penny, Gilbert and Sullivan premiered their next ope…
- The US Navy was disbanded after independence and revived to fight piratesIn August 1785 Congress sold off Alliance, the Continental Navy's last ship, because it could not afford to keep her. For nearly a decade the United States had no navy at all, unt…
- UBC students marched through Vancouver to shame the government into building their campusIn 1922 more than 1,200 University of British Columbia students were crammed into makeshift quarters at Fairview, their promised campus unbuilt. So they marched through Vancouver,…
- The Victorian era was really three different eras hiding under one long reignQueen Victoria reigned for 63 years and seven months, longer than any monarch before her, and that single stretch can make the period look uniform. The writer Michael Sadleir disa…
- Before directing Gigi, Vincente Minnelli dressed shop windows at Marshall Field'sThe director of An American in Paris learned his eye for colour and mood arranging antiques in a Chicago department store window. Lester Minnelli later renamed himself Vincente, a…
- Bob Hope renamed Anthony Benedetto, and Tony Bennett sang for seven more decadesAnthony Benedetto was a Queens grocer's son who sang for tips as a waiter at 13. After Bob Hope shortened his name, Tony Bennett landed a number-one hit in 1951, and seventy years…
- Trinity College, Cambridge exists because a queen talked Henry VIII out of closing collegesIn 1545 Henry VIII took the power to seize any college he liked. Catherine Parr persuaded him to build one instead, and he merged two old foundations into Trinity. Its members hav…
- Twin Peaks returned after 25 years, and critics called it the decade's best filmTwin Peaks premiered on ABC in April 1990 as a small-town murder mystery and quickly became something stranger: a mix of detective story, soap opera and dream logic. Cancelled in …
- Udmurtia's name probably means 'meadow people', a label recorded back in 1557West of the Urals, between the Kama and Vyatka rivers, lies a Russian republic named after a Finno-Ugric people whose ancestors may never have moved. Scholars consider the Udmurts…
- Uma Thurman calls turning down Éowyn one of her worst decisionsScouts spotted Uma Thurman playing Abigail in a school production of The Crucible, and she left school to act. By 24 she had an Oscar nomination for Pulp Fiction, and Quentin Tara…
- Umm Kulthum began singing hymns dressed as a boy and became Egypt's Fourth PyramidIn rural Egypt a century ago, girls were not supposed to sing in public, so Fatima el-Beltagi's father dressed her in boys' clothes when she performed hymns alongside him. As Umm …
- Music can be composed with chance, words, brainwaves or no notation at allComposing music does not have to mean writing notes on staves. Some pieces exist only as instructions in words or graphics, some leave outcomes to chance, some pop songs are never…
- Why Germans call B an H and Indian musicians sing Sa Re GaA musical note seems universal, yet its name depends on where you learn it. English speakers use the letters A to G, much of Europe sings do re mi, Germany and Czechia swap B for …
- How Nancy Ajram became the most-streamed female voice in Arab popNancy Ajram started singing with her grandmother at eight, won a televised talent contest at twelve and had a record deal with EMI by fifteen. A risqué video for Akhasmak Ah in 20…
- Why Nathaniel Hawthorne added a W to escape a Salem witch judgeNathaniel Hawthorne was born a Hathorne, great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, one of the judges at the Salem witch trials. Probably in his early twenties, just after college, he…
- How a Melbourne pub band topped American charts with Down UnderMen at Work began as a Melbourne pub act whose name was scrawled on a hotel blackboard. By January 1983 they had become the first Australian artists to hold the top album and sing…
- The Met opera was born because old money snubbed new moneyIn 1880 New York's newly rich industrial families could not get boxes at the Academy of Music, so 22 men met at Delmonico's and planned a rival house. The Metropolitan Opera opene…
- A chance meeting on a Dartford platform that launched the Rolling StonesMick Jagger and Keith Richards first met as primary school classmates, then drifted apart. On 17 October 1961 they bumped into each other at Dartford station, where Jagger happene…
- The teenage multi-instrumentalist whose Tubular Bells launched Virgin RecordsMike Oldfield was fifteen when he walked out of school rather than cut his hair. A few years later, his largely instrumental Tubular Bells became the first release on Richard Bran…
- How Mila Kunis bluffed her age to land That '70s ShowCasting for That '70s Show required every actor to be at least 18. Mila Kunis was 14, so she told the producers she would be 18, without saying when. By the time they worked out t…
- Paint It Black nearly got scrapped until a joke on the organ changed its moodThe Rolling Stones first recorded Paint It Black as a plodding minor-key pop tune that Mick Jagger compared to music for Jewish weddings. They almost dropped it. Then Bill Wyman s…
- Nicki Minaj turned down a record deal because it came with a ghostwriterIn the early 2000s Warner Brothers wanted to sign a broke young rapper from Queens, on one condition: someone else would write her lyrics. Onika Maraj refused. She built her follo…
- NSYNC got its name from a mother's remark and the last letters of first namesJustin Timberlake's mother Lynn told the new group their voices sounded so in sync. The name also hid a trick: the last letters of Justin, Chris, Joey, Jason and JC. When Jason qu…
- On an ocarina, where you drill the holes barely mattersA recorder's notes depend on where its holes sit along the tube. An ocarina ignores that rule. Its whole egg-shaped body rings as one resonating chamber, so pitch depends on how m…
- Why a note and its double sound like the same noteAsk men and women to sing a tune together in unison and they usually end up an octave apart without noticing. The octave, a jump to exactly twice the frequency, sounds so much lik…
- Before Awakenings, Oliver Sacks squatted 600 pounds and rode 100,000 motorcycle milesThe neurologist the New York Times called medicine's poet laureate spent his early American years lifting weights at Muscle Beach, where he briefly held a California squat record,…
- Messiaen wrote a masterpiece for the only four instruments in his prison campCaptured at Verdun in 1940, the French composer Olivier Messiaen found a clarinettist, a cellist and a violinist among his fellow prisoners. A sympathetic German guard slipped him…
- The fretless oud is the ancestor that gave Europe its luteEurope's Renaissance lute began as a Middle Eastern import. The oud, a pear-shaped, short-necked instrument with no frets, travelled west with the Umayyads into Spain in 711, and …
- New-age music's biggest stars mostly hated being called new ageWhen the Grammys launched a new-age category in 1987, its first winner, Andreas Vollenweider, said naming something timeless was ridiculous. Vangelis, Yanni, Harold Budd and Georg…
- The New York Philharmonic began as a musicians' cooperative that split the takingsAmerica's oldest major orchestra started in 1842 with players voting on who could join, what to play and who would conduct, then dividing any profit at season's end. It took near-…
- Phil Spector turned the record producer into the star behind the hitsAt 18, Phil Spector wrote a number one hit whose title came from the words on his father's gravestone. Within three years he co-owned a record label, and by the mid-1960s his dens…
- Your headphone jack began life on a nineteenth-century telephone switchboardThe plug on a guitar cable and the one on old headphones share an ancestor: the connectors operators jammed into telephone switchboards in the late 1870s. The very word jack comes…
- Before discs, records were wax cylinders you could shave and reuseThe first records were hollow cylinders, not flat discs. Early wax ones wore out after a few dozen plays, but owners could shave the surface smooth and record something new. That …
- Medieval popes once tried to ban singing in more than one melodyIn 1322 Pope John XXII banished polyphony from the liturgy, and two years later he issued a bull warning against its unseemly novelties. Critics called harmony frivolous and lasci…
- Speed up a polyrhythm enough and it turns into a musical chordTap three even beats against two and you have a hemiola, the simplest polyrhythm. Speed the pattern up until the taps blur into tones and your ear hears a perfect fifth. Three aga…
- Popular music was a sheet-music business long before records and radioBefore anyone could buy a record, popular music meant cheap printed sheet music, played by middle-class amateurs around the family piano. The song publishers of New York's Tin Pan…
- Pan flute makers can predict each pipe's length with one simple numberMultiply a pan flute pipe's length in centimetres by the note it plays in hertz and you get roughly 8575, every time. That tidy rule falls out of the physics of a tube closed at o…
- How a Prince song led to music's famous black-and-white warning stickerTipper Gore bought Purple Rain for her 11-year-old daughter, then heard the sexually explicit lyrics of Darling Nikki. The group she co-founded pushed the record industry into a S…
- The pedal steel guitar bends chords with feet and knees while notes ringIn 1954 Bud Isaacs pressed a pedal mid-chord on Webb Pierce's Slowly, shifting some notes while others kept sounding. It was the first Billboard number one country hit to feature …
- The perfect fifth: three vibrations against two, from Twinkle Twinkle to punkSing the opening of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and the jump from the first twinkle to the second is a perfect fifth. The upper note vibrates three times for every two of the lo…
- Six major record labels in 1929 shrank to just threeThe phrase record label comes from the paper circle in the middle of a vinyl disc that printed the maker's name. For most of the 20th century six big companies dominated that busi…
- Rent's creator died the night before its first previewJonathan Larson spent years waiting tables while writing Rent, a rock musical that reset Puccini's La bohème among struggling artists in New York's East Village during the AIDS cr…
- A PET scan works by annihilating antimatter inside your bodyIn a PET scan, a radioactive tracer releases positrons, the antimatter twins of electrons. Each one meets an ordinary electron almost at once, and the pair vanish in a flash of tw…
- Primus changed its name because of a prank legal threatLes Claypool's band started out as Primate, until a member of a group called the Primates rang up pretending to be a lawyer and threatened to sue. It was a joke, but they switched…
- Progressive metal grew from fans who loved both Rush and Iron MaidenTake the volume, distortion and aggression of heavy metal, add the long, cerebral, almost classical structures of progressive rock, and you get prog metal. Its pioneers in 1980s A…
- Paul Reed Smith knocked on backstage doors until Santana bought his guitarAs a college student, Paul Reed Smith earned four credits for a guitar judged professional quality. He dropped out, built instruments by hand and hauled them to concerts, knocking…
- A Chinese mouth organ sparked the pump organs of Victorian parloursEurope had no idea how a free reed worked until a Chinese instrument called the sheng reached Russia in the early 18th century. That tiny vibrating tongue of metal led to the harm…