Intellect Plus
Music
820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 14.
- Why directors, authors and real people keep slipping into their own storiesHitchcock could not fit himself into Lifeboat, a film set entirely on one small boat, so he appeared in a newspaper advertisement instead. The cameo, borrowed from a word for tiny…
- Cardi B went from viral videos to a record-breaking run on the chartsIn 2013 a young woman from the Bronx started posting short, loud, funny videos online. Four years later her first major-label single, Bodak Yellow, reached No. 1, making her the f…
- Carl Maria von Weber, Mozart's cousin by marriage, helped invent German Romantic operaCarl Maria von Weber's father wanted another Mozart, and the family link was real: Mozart had married Weber's cousin Constanze. The boy could not walk until four, was running an o…
- Carl Wilson, the youngest Beach Boy, quietly held the band togetherIn the mid-1960s concert promoters booking the Beach Boys had to sign contracts naming Carl Wilson plus four other musicians. The youngest Wilson brother sang God Only Knows, took…
- Carnegie Hall nearly fell to the wrecking ball before a violinist intervenedWhen the New York Philharmonic announced it was leaving for Lincoln Center, the city's most famous concert hall looked doomed. A public campaign led by the violinist Isaac Stern s…
- Coconuts are named after a Spanish bogeymanPortuguese sailors thought the three dimples on a coconut shell looked like the hairy face of El Coco, the monster Iberian parents invoked to scare children to sleep, so they name…
- Bohemia still carries the name of Celts who left it two thousand years agoThe heart of the Czech Republic is named after a Celtic tribe, the Boii, who were beaten by Rome in northern Italy and later drifted away. Roman writers called their old homeland …
- One Springsteen song took six months to recordAfter two acclaimed albums that barely sold, Bruce Springsteen gambled everything on a record built like Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. The title track alone took six months in the…
- Bradley Cooper nearly quit acting after tearing his Achilles tendonIn his late twenties Bradley Cooper was a sidelined supporting player on Alias, recovering from an Achilles tendon torn on a basketball court and wondering whether to give up acti…
- Medieval towns ran their own brothels and closed them on SundaysBetween 1350 and 1450, European cities began owning and regulating brothels themselves, confining them to designated streets and banning Sunday opening. Those zones foreshadowed r…
- Bryan Adams signed his first record deal for one dollarIn 1978 an 18-year-old Vancouver singer who had left school at 15 signed with A&M Records for a single dollar. The label sped up his vocals to turn a demo into a disco track he la…
- Billy Preston is the only musician credited on a Beatles singleGet Back came out in 1969 billed as The Beatles with Billy Preston, a credit the band itself requested. John Lennon even floated making the keyboard player a full member, until Pa…
- Björk made her first album at 11 after a school recital aired nationallyWhen a young Björk sang a Tina Charles disco hit at a school recital, her teachers sent the tape to Iceland's only radio station. It was broadcast nationwide, a record label calle…
- The Black Panthers began by legally following Oakland police carsIn 1966 two Oakland college friends, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, used California's open-carry law to trail police patrols and record their conduct. Within three years the Blac…
- Bobby Darin learned at 32 that his sister was really his motherBobby Darin grew up believing his grandmother was his mother and his mother was his older sister. The truth reached him in 1968, when he was 32 and weighing a political career, an…
- Bharadvaja, the Vedic sage behind a yoga pose and a cow hymnYoga students who twist into Bharadvajasana are honouring a seer from India's oldest scripture. The family of poets that carried his name composed much of the Rigveda, including t…
- Bill Evans doubted his own talent before helping make Kind of BlueBill Evans first learned piano by copying what he overheard during his older brother's lessons. Years later, after Army critics shook his confidence, he spent a year alone practis…
- Billy Idol took his stage name from a school report calling him idleA chemistry teacher named Bill Price once wrote that young William Broad was idle. The pupil, who admits he hated the subject, turned the insult into a stage name, swapping the sp…
- Before Congress, Bernie Sanders was asked to leave a Vermont communeIn 1971 a young writer visiting a Vermont back-to-the-land commune was told to go after three days. His offence was talking politics instead of doing farm work; one resident said …
- Berry Gordy turned an $800 family loan into MotownBefore he built the most famous Black-owned record company in America, Berry Gordy was a high-school dropout boxer, an Army chaplain's assistant in Korea and the owner of a failed…
- Bette Midler built her following singing in a New York bathhouseBette Midler's big break came in the basement of Manhattan's Ansonia Hotel, where in 1970 she sang to the patrons of a gay bathhouse with a young pianist named Barry Manilow. The …
- Betty White wanted to be a forest ranger before television existedBetty White dreamed of becoming a forest ranger, but women were not allowed the job. Instead, a month after finishing high school in 1939, she sang on an experimental broadcast wh…
- Beyoncé's first job was sweeping hair in her mother's salonAs a child in Houston, Beyoncé Knowles earned her first wages sweeping up hair at her mother's salon, sometimes singing for the customers. At seven she beat teenagers twice her ag…
- The Hindu epic framed as advice to a king with seven days leftThe Bhagavata Purana opens with a death sentence. King Pariksit insults a forest sage, and the sage's son curses him to die of snakebite within seven days. The king retreats to th…
- Barbra Streisand only wanted to act; singing was her way inA teenager from Brooklyn who dreamed of the stage, Barbra Streisand was told she was too unattractive to be a star and advised to fix her nose. She refused, sang instead, and even…
- The most common male voice was lumped in with basses for centuriesMost men who sing are baritones, sitting between the deep bass and the bright tenor. Yet for hundreds of years opera houses barely recognised the voice as its own category. It too…
- How three New York punks made the first chart-topping rap albumThe Beastie Boys started as a teenage hardcore punk band playing CBGB. A prank call to an ice cream shop became their first hip-hop track, a university student named Rick Rubin be…
- The father of Czech music grew up barely speaking CzechBedřich Smetana gave his first public performance at six, wrote marches for the 1848 Prague uprising, and composed the river portrait known as The Moldau. He did much of his great…
- A broken record turned three Gibb brothers into singersIn Manchester in December 1957, the young Gibb brothers were rushing to a cinema to mime along to a record when the brittle shellac disc snapped. Forced to sing live, they got suc…
- A music school built for jazz when everyone else taught classicalIn 1945 an MIT graduate named Lawrence Berk quit his job at Raytheon and opened a small school on Newbury Street in Boston. Nearly every music school then trained classical player…
- The composer of Sabre Dance had no musical training until he was eighteenAram Khachaturian arrived in Moscow in 1921 with no formal music education and enrolled at a music institute anyway, starting on the cello. Within fifteen years his Piano Concerto…
- A fifteen-minute audition turned a small-town Ontario teenager into Avril LavigneIn November 2000, the head of Arista Records heard a 16-year-old from Napanee, Ontario, sing for a quarter of an hour and signed her on the spot: $1.25 million for two albums. Her…
- Ann Wilson, Heart's operatic voice, first sang because a stutter kept her quietA shy teenager with a stutter found her outlet in music. Ann Wilson went on to front Heart, one of the first hard rock bands led by women, which has sold over 35 million records a…
- Charlotte Brontë blocked a reprint of her sister Anne's boldest novelAfter Anne Brontë died at 29, her sister Charlotte decided which of her books lived on. She let Agnes Grey be reissued but stopped The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from being republish…
- Antonio Banderas learned his first Hollywood lines phonetically, barely speaking EnglishWhen Antonio Banderas shot The Mambo Kings in 1992, he spoke so little English that he memorised his dialogue by sound. Critics praised him anyway. It was a long way from Malaga, …
- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam missed becoming a fighter pilot by one placeOnly eight Indian Air Force pilot places were on offer, and the young engineer Abdul Kalam finished ninth. Missing his dream pushed him into rocketry instead. Decades later the ne…
- Alex Jennings played Prince Charles, then the uncle who gave up the throneAlex Jennings is the only performer to win Olivier Awards for drama, musical and comedy. On screen he has become a specialist in royalty: Prince Charles in The Queen, the abdicate…
- Alfred Molina's career began with one doomed guide and a lot of octopusesHis first time in front of a film camera lasted only minutes: a treacherous jungle guide who begs Harrison Ford to throw him the idol. Alfred Molina later called that job a gift f…
- The 2001 fanfare ends a Strauss tone poem that refuses to pick a keyMost people know only its first minute, the blazing sunrise Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Richard Strauss's 1896 tone poem runs about 33 minutes, draws on Nietzsc…
- André Rieu turned the waltz into stadium entertainment, and critics still argue about itA Dutch violinist with a 1667 Stradivarius, André Rieu founded a twelve-piece waltz band in 1987 and grew it into a touring spectacle that fills stadiums. In Australia he outsold …
- Angela Lansbury was cast as older villains at nineteen before becoming Jessica FletcherAt 17, Angela Lansbury was working a department store counter in Los Angeles for 28 dollars a week. Months later she had an MGM contract and an Oscar nomination. Then the studio s…
- Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture officially lists a battery of cannons in its orchestraAlongside flutes, horns and violins, the score of the 1812 Overture calls for artillery. Tchaikovsky wrote it in about six weeks to mark Russia's defeat of Napoleon's invasion, an…
- Albert Bierstadt sold the American West to Europe with showman flairAlbert Bierstadt painted the Rockies and Yosemite on canvases so vast and theatrical that audiences bought tickets to see them. One sold in 1865 for $25,000, close to $400,000 in …
- Scriabin wrote his first great sonata as a cry against GodTold by a doctor that his damaged right hand would never recover, the young pianist Alexander Scriabin poured his fury into a piano sonata he called a cry against God and fate. Th…
- The Lord of the Rings composer started out naming the Blues BrothersBefore Howard Shore won three Oscars for The Lord of the Rings, he led the house band on Saturday Night Live, once performing in a beekeeper suit, and suggested the name Blues Bro…
- Hyperpop got its name from a line of Spotify metadataA data analyst tagged some tracks hyperpop in Spotify's system in 2018. A year later a playlist editor spotted the label, built a playlist around it, and a scattered online scene …
- Ian Anderson swapped his electric guitar for a flute and built Jethro TullConvinced he would never match Eric Clapton, a young Ian Anderson traded in his electric guitar for a flute. He had been playing it only a few months when Jethro Tull cut its firs…
- Iannis Xenakis wrote music with probability theory and designed buildings with Le CorbusierIannis Xenakis composed using set theory, game theory and the mathematics of chance, gave every player in an orchestra their own separate part, and scattered musicians among the a…
- Hadestown began in small Vermont towns and ended with eight Tony AwardsIn 2006 a folk songwriter staged her retelling of Orpheus in two small Vermont towns, with herself playing Eurydice. Unsure it would ever go further, Anaïs Mitchell turned it into…
- String players coax glassy, eerie harmonics by barely touching the stringRest a fingertip lightly on a violin string at just the right spot, draw the bow, and a pure, silvery note floats out, higher than the open string and strangely hollow. Players ca…
- Every note you hear is a stack of hidden tones in whole-number ratiosPluck a string and it does not vibrate at one frequency but at many at once: the full length, the halves, the thirds and so on. Those extra tones, the harmonic series, are why a c…
- Haruomi Hosono made the first video game music album back in 1984Long before chiptune had a name, the bassist of Yellow Magic Orchestra sat down with Namco arcade sounds and mixed them into a record. Haruomi Hosono's Video Game Music came out i…
- Hatsune Miku began as singing software and became a virtual pop starIn 2007 a Japanese company released a voice synthesizer and, almost as an afterthought, gave it a face: a turquoise-haired android girl. Fans on a video site began posting songs s…
- Honkai: Star Rail sends a train between planets styled on real culturesA steam train running through the stars comes straight out of Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad and the manga Galaxy Express 999. miHoYo borrowed the image for Honka…
- West Africa's griots carry centuries of history in memory and songIn much of West Africa, history was not shelved in libraries but carried in people. Griots, hereditary singers, poets and storytellers, memorise family lines, battles and the deed…
- A quiet seven-string Chinese zither is now drifting beyond the solar systemThe guqin is so soft it suits a private room better than a concert hall, yet a recording of it is travelling through interstellar space. Guan Pinghu's performance of Flowing Water…
- The guzheng, a Chinese zither with movable bridges, fathered the kotoOne legend says the guzheng was born from a squabble: two people fought over a 25-string zither and snapped it in two, one keeping 12 strings and the other 13. Whatever its origin…
- The flugelhorn began as a hunting signal and ended up as jazz's velvet trumpetPlay the same note on a trumpet and a flugelhorn and the second sounds rounder, almost smoky. The difference lives in the tubing: the flugelhorn widens gradually along most of its…
- Fragile X comes from a short genetic stutter that grows across generationsMost people carry somewhere between 5 and 40 copies of a three-letter DNA sequence, CGG, in a gene called FMR1. Push that count past 200 and the gene shuts down. The result is fra…
- Why the orchestra's French horn is really German, and hornists just say hornMost orchestral hornists today play a double horn in F and B-flat, a German design. The International Horn Society has asked since 1971 that people drop the word French altogether…