What Are You Listening To?

#covidplaylist #tuftsmusicstayconnected

[tuftsmusic-blog]

DONALD BERMAN

From Eve Beglarian:

I had cut Milosz’s poem “Creating the World” out of The New Yorker when it was printed there several years ago, and when Paul Dresher called to ask me for a piece for his ensemble, I knew the time had come for me to take it on. Because the instrumentation of Paul’s ensemble allows for the possibility of live performance and control of A LOT of pre-recorded samples, it seemed the perfect opportunity to create a world of hedgehogs and sopranos and urban intersections and Mozart.At first, everything was big fun: I had a great time recording the text with the wonderful actor Roger Rees; I spent weeks collecting recordings of virtually every sound mentioned in the poem (including something like forty different settings of the word “gloria”); I got obsessed with Tosca (which became the soprano sample) and saw about four different performances of it (both live and on video: NYC is a great place for creating the world(!)); studied the complete works of Joni Mitchell from the point of view of guitar tuning (which ended up not being incorporated into the piece at all)…And then the abyss hit me.I realized I could not knit all these wonderful samples into a piece until I had a way of making sense of the central contradiction of the poem: that all the creation in the world does not necessarily make meaning. And it really threw me.I went back and read Milosz again, not only the poems, but also The Captive Mind, his analysis of the totalitarian mind-set, and  A Year of the Hunter, his journal from 1987 (around the time he wrote “Creating the World”), and things got even worse: all the horrors of the twentieth century came crashing down on me. The abyss of meaninglessness became the abyss of actual evil. The image of the Soviet soldiers standing outside the city watching the Germans destroy Warsaw for them became real for me, became my history.Gradually I went back to the poem itself, to its feeble invocation of feasts of love as protection against the abyss, and I remembered a lullaby that my Bangladeshi friend Babu (M. Faslur Rahman) had sung for me this summer, a very private form of love feast. And I started thinking about the Dionysian feasts of love that pervade every human culture, and I figured that the brittle present-directed pleasure of house music is the current American embodiment of that protection. And so you will hear these feasts of love, and I hope they will protect you as they protect me.

— Donald Berman, Director of the New Music Ensemble

[tuftsmusic-blog]

Isle Of Calm, a playlist by NPR Music on Spotify

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JULIE-ANN BRYSON

This “Isle of Calm” playlist from NPR music is great for background music when working from home, to listening to while cooking, or just as a great alternative to listening to the news!

— Julie-Ann Bryson, Lilly Music Library Music Coordinator

[tuftsmusic-blog]

JEFF RAWITSCH

My mom has always told me that, when I was two years old, my first favorite song was “Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac. Whenever we would go in the car, as soon as she put me in the car seat, I would start pounding my hands against the harness and chant, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!” It wasn’t enough for her to find the song on her “Rumors" audio cassette. She had to fast forward straight to the chorus before he son would cease his demands.

Fast forward to the pandemic and that little boy has grown up to become “Rainbow Jeff”, performing twice weekly sing alongs via Zoom for wall-bouncy children, their beleaguered parents, and their distantly-doting grandparents. One of the latter category attendees is a big Fleetwood Mac fan and asked if I would throw one of their tunes into the set list. Of course, “Don’t Stop” immediately jumped into my head, not only because of my own history with it, but because it has an uplifting message for everyone who is feeling anxious about the state of the world and self-isolation right now. Additionally, ending the sing along with this song was perfect for its upbeat tempo and easily-learned lyrical hook (the sing alongs are meant for young children, after all!) The version linked here, from the Fleetwood Mac reunion album “The Dance”, has become my new favorite as it features the USC Marching Band. I know it will become a staple of future sing alongs and be a good reminder, whenever I get down about today, to “just think what tomorrow will do”.

— Jeff Rawitsch, Granoff Music Center Manager

[tuftsmusic-blog]

RICH JANKOWSKY

Some of you may have heard this piece blaring from my Chair’s office from time to time this year. When I need a dose of inspiration or a mental reset in challenging times, at the top of my playlist is Ray Barretto’s “Power.” As a young jazz drummer, it was Latin jazz and salsa that opened my ears to world music and, later, the field of ethnomusicology that would eventually become my profession. This particular piece, however, I encountered much later in my life, at an unexpected but timely moment, and by the time I reached the song’s only lyric at 5:58 in the recording, my mindset had been altered so profoundly that it immediately became my go-to recharge tune. 

- Rich Jankowsky, Music Department Chair