Conor Gillies | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

This Week's Show •

Good News for Bad Times: Gospel Music from Boston

In transition time, pre-inauguration, was there ever a clearer cue for Gospel music? “Good news for bad times,” it’s been called. Sanctified music for a broken world. While Michele Obama’s hope is challenged, the giants of rap are owning up to their church roots: Kanye West says his Life of Pablo is a gospel album; and Chance the Rapper is singing re-birth and redemption on Coloring Book: “When the praises go up, the blessings come down.”

Out of slave spirituals like “Down at the cross where my savior died,” Gospel music keeps reinventing itself: It’s akin to the blues, but gospel is never secular, even when it’s commercial. And Gospel has a doctrine under the hand-clapping and shouts: that the least of us deserve better, that victory is coming and God can work it out.

Around the piano in my living room, we’re listening for the balm of tradition. This hour could sound like a party tape or a prayer meeting. The key players are Pastor Michael Haynes, who’s drawn multitudes to the historic Twelfth Baptist Church in the activist heart of African American Boston. Martin Luther King Jr. was Mike Haynes’s co-apprentice at Twelfth Baptist as a Boston University theology student in the early 1950s.

And then in the mid-80s, out of Shreveport, Louisiana came the prize pianist in the room today, Dennis Montgomery III. Thirty years ago when his wary parents delivered him, age 17, to the Berklee College of Music, legend is that eyes met in a Howard Johnson on the Expressway in Boston – parents looking for a church home for their son, pastor Haynes looking for a pianist. Thirty years later, Dennis Montgomery runs the gospel program at Berklee, the biggest music school in the world, and makes big waves in a mighty stream of American music.

We’re hearing from several other local gospel stars, too, including the young Kwame Nkrumah, 22 year old Berklee alum and student of Dennis’s, who plays for us a sublime version of “Over My Head.” See a video of his performance below:

Joining Kwame is Jonathan Singleton, assistant professor at Berklee and current music director at Twelfth Baptist Church, and David Sparr, who’s bringing gospel spirit into his synagogue in Brookline.

This Week's Show •

Beethoven at the Piano

This show originally aired December 2014. We’re getting the Beethoven fundamentals, as never before, at my own piano. At a short safe distance from the keyboard, I’m learning, among other things: As volcanic was the ...

This show originally aired December 2014.

We’re getting the Beethoven fundamentals, as never before, at my own piano. At a short safe distance from the keyboard, I’m learning, among other things:

As volcanic was the man’s painful life and descent into deafness, so his musical production was miraculously steady, virtually flawless, endlessly various in form and surface, scale, sonority and feelings — furious, lyrical, melting, often humorous, on the way to a “God sound” in the unearthly late work. Improvisation and variations at the piano were the twin engines of his imagination, on an instrument whose sound he kept reinventing. Those sonatas, variations and bagatelles for piano alone, most of them conceived as private statements, unperformed in public in Beethoven’s time, were the springboard of the giant symphonic spectacles with orchestra. And those same piano pieces can be taken today – fresh thrills and chills on every hearing – as Beethoven’s short stories. Much as Henry James’s stories record the self-study of a great novelist, Beethoven’s piano pieces give us a journal of his inner life, a view into his laboratory and maybe his soul.

The occasion is Jan Swafford’s acclaimed 1000-page biography: Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, the biggest Beethoven book in a century. The opportunity is to engage around my piano with Andrew Rangell, who made his bones—as the great pianists all seem to do—by performing all 32 of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Years later, Andrew Rangell is still recording the late Beethoven masterpieces.

Jan Swafford, left, and Andrew Rangell.

Throughout these piano works, we hear Beethoven the master of forms: sonata, fugue, and perhaps variations as his signature. The notion was to take a motif and re-imagine it, transfigure it, over and over. One thing is continually becoming many.

That big, shape-shifting idea in Beethoven’s own life comes from the German Enlightenment. It’s all in the Ode to Joy, Friedrich Schiller’s hugely popular poem from 1785, set to many tunes before Beethoven’s. The Ode declared the universal brotherhood of mankind through a sublime experience of art and the natural world. This becomes a north star motivating Beethoven through what we call his early, middle, and late periods. Irony, perhaps, that Beethoven himself became a kind of divine figure, worshipped long after his death in the great temples of music. In Boston Symphony Hall built in 1900, Beethoven is the one composer’s name in block letters on the giant medallion in the arch over the stage. He shaped the size and sonority of pianos and symphonies, the carrying capacity of LPs and CDs, also our expectations as listeners, for fire and depth and heroic fury in overwhelming music.

This hour, some of the rest of the story: the joy, the darkness, and the depth of Beethoven’s piano world. Three personal points are not incidental to this conversation: Jan Swafford was a composer before he was a biographer. He wrote the big life stories of Johannes Brahms and the American modernist Charles Ives before his Beethoven. And he’s still a composer. Andrew is an uncommonly reflective player, a reader, a writer, cartoonist as well. And finally, these guys are good friends. They have been hashing out their different takes on Beethoven over pizza and Patriots games for more than 20 years, and now blessedly for our mikes. Thank you, Jan and Andrew.

Music From the Program

Following Lepore’s keynote address, we asked two foreign-born, radical observers of law and civil society – Ugo Mattei and Roberto Unger – to play Tocqueville’s role today.

Mattei, a Professor of International and Comparative Law at Turin University, was the one who first told Christopher Lydon that Obama would be our nation’s Gorbachev: a good man who would be forced to manage the decline of a failing political system. Now, he sees the election of Donald Trump as part of a global trend that has ceded the will of the people to “mighty men”; those who promise to strongarm change by turning power over to corporate interests.

Roberto Unger is the Brazilian professor of law at Harvard University who once served as Obama’s teacher and mentor. Not unlike Cornel West, he later turned against his former pupil, becoming one of the president’s most vociferous critics.

Unger identifies himself as a “man of the left” but he also views Trump as the “lesser evil” in this election. He believes that the hypocrisies exposed by Trump’s election will reveal the fundamental weakness of political parties in the U.S. Now, he says, progressives will be forced to return to higher goals: they can no longer be satisfied by minor amendments and material redistribution. Instead, if Trump promises to “Make America Great Again”, the resistance must make an even grander promise: “Make Humans Great Again”. The political project in the U.S. must work towards what he calls “the divinization of humanity.”

This Week's Show •

Bob Dylan, The Poet

Bob Dylan, the poet, has been singing more than 50 years, but have you ever really stopped to listen to the words? Now that Dylan is a Nobel giant of literature, we asked Christopher Ricks, professor of English ...

Bob Dylan, the poet, has been singing more than 50 years, but have you ever really stopped to listen to the words? Now that Dylan is a Nobel giant of literature, we asked Christopher Ricks, professor of English at Boston University, for a line-by-line, close-reading of a few lyrical wonders.

First page of “Like A Rolling Stone” manuscript.

Listening to Dylan the poet, you hear many things: rural protest storyteller, Greenwich village freewheeler, king of rock surrealism. A people’s poet and songster (in the tradition of Robert Burns), a modernist beatnik (in the zone of Allen Ginsburg), a classic versifier (in the bardic tradition of Orpheus—that’s what Salman Rushdie says), and a prolific quoter and sampler (in the old, weird, American blues style, as Greil Marcus says). The novelist Francine Prose hears Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman; the journalist Charlie Pierce hears gonzo journalism. Only Ricks would dare to compare Dylan to literary jumbos like Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Eliot.

Of course, Dylan is in a category of his own (not just because, unlike most writers, Dylan is heard through records, radio, and on stage); in fact, Ricks contends that Dylan the “greatest living user of the English language.”

Here are some of our favorite annotations from Ricks:

Desolation Row

They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown,

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors, the circus is in town

Here comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants

And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight, from Desolation Row

Christopher Ricks: Hanging is lynching… Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if “selling postcards of the hanging” was only a surrealist sickness. No, no. It was the American way of life. It was quite central. So then you move into these things that are surrealist, all right. “Painting the passports brown.” Oh, that’s “painting the town red.” And the town is going to turn up a moment later in the song. So you’ve got this strange feeling that you often have in a dream, that there’s a word just below the surface, there’s some sort of link, there are strange things floating one into the other. Is the “blind commissioner” a commissioner who is blind, or a commissioner for the blind? It’s blind partly because you’re visualizing things. Sound wonderfully visualizes.

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen

She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children

Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage

And never sat once at the head of the table

And didn’t even talk to the people at the table

Who just cleaned up all the food from the table

And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level

Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane

That sailed through the air and came down through the room

Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle

And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger

And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Take the rag away from your face

Now ain’t the time for your tears

Ricks: Cain, as the first killer, turns up in many of Dylan’s songs. So the question is, when you sing a word like “cane,” it’s identical in sound with C-A-I-N. And when you have “table,” “table,” “table”—are you near Abel? Maybe not. But it’s a little bit of a coincidence. You’ve got cane. “Slain by a cane” reminds you: That was the first killing ever. So that you’ve got the primal curse of mankind on it!

Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

With your mercury mouth in the missionary times,

And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes,

And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes,

Oh, do they think could bury you?

With your pockets well protected at last,

And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass,

And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass,

Who could they get to carry you?

Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,

Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,

My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,

Should I put them by your gate,

Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

Ricks: This is like a huge, Petrarchan poem. It’s like four, six sonnets by Petrarch. Every one of which lists all the wonderful apparatus which surrounds a seductive woman. The seduction may be her very goodness, or it may be other things about her. The song overlaps terrifically with Swinburne’s poem “Dolores,” where Dolores is our lady of sorrows, “the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands.” … The refrain is a very great beauty with great dignity. It’s about “should I lead them by her gate? Or sad eyed lady, should I wait?” “Should I wait” is like Shakespeare’s sonnets, where the speaker in the sonnets is always saying “please, I’m perfectly happy to wait, happy to wait”—with a terrific edge of resentment—and this a song which understands resentment. That is, it’s not simply grateful to a woman who puts you through all of this with her this and her that, “with your, with your, with your…” Terrific song. Terrifying song, really.

If you want to learn more about Dylan’s time in Cambridge, read our own Zach Goldhammer’s piece on the ARTery.

Illustration: Susan Coyne; Photos: Ted Russell/Polaris, Hulton Archive/Getty Images. The audio above is a re-run, broadcast June 8, 2017. Listen to the original program at the Internet Archive here.

September 21, 2016

Revenge of the 90s

If all elections are about the future, why does this one come with so much baggage from our political and cultural past? It was in the misfit decade of the ‘90s that both Donald Trump ...

If all elections are about the future, why does this one come with so much baggage from our political and cultural past?

It was in the misfit decade of the ‘90s that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton cemented their almost ubiquitous presence on the national stage. Trump, already a bold face name in New York real estate, left the Plaza Hotel behind for Hollywood. (Here he is on Letterman Show, here in Home Alone 2, and over here The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.) Hillary debuted as First Lady, but bet on her skills as a West Wing wonk for the prize assignment of reforming health care. Her penchant back then for secrecy, loyalty, and vast right wing conspiracies started the trail of scandal headlines—Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate—that dog her today.

Our guest Maureen Dowd of the New York Times calls the 2016 election the “Seinfeld election.” ”It’s really about nothing,” she says. “Except the two most famous people on the planet that nobody really seems to know.”

So we’re looking back at the Seinfeld decade—that sunny time after the Cold War that ended abruptly with 9/11. The era of peace and prosperity. The heady days of business porn, corporate synergy, and the “personal brand.” The first digital decade, a drug decade in Pharmacy Nation (including Viagra, Prozac and Ritalin). The Third Wave Feminism decade, too.

The ‘90s live on, not only in our Truman Show-like obsession with Trump, or the persistence of Third Way politics, or normcore fashion trends, but also in wounds never healed from NAFTA, welfare reform, the 1994 crime bill, and finance deregulation. Maybe with these two candidates we’re trying to resolve the ‘90s: the racial violence, the feminist and gender identity questions, the inequality, the global war and domestic safety. Let’s party like it’s 1999 and get our heads around the origin story of Campaign 2016.

May 5, 2016

Ireland Rises Again!

It has been 100 years since Ireland’s Easter Rising, a fascinating, tragic episode that blended literature and liberation, defeat and victory, national reverence and remorse, and, in William Butler Yeats‘s high poetic oxymoron of “Easter, 1916“, ...

It has been 100 years since Ireland’s Easter Rising, a fascinating, tragic episode that blended literature and liberation, defeat and victory, national reverence and remorse, and, in William Butler Yeats‘s high poetic oxymoron of “Easter, 1916“, beauty and terror.

The Rising was led by a schoolteacher obsessed with death (Patrick Pearse), a veteran Fenian dynamiter (Tom Clarke), and a committed Marxist (James Connolly)—though women, volunteers, and farmers shared in the planning.

The rebels seized Dublin’s General Post Office, held it for six days, and proclaimed an independent Irish republic, optimistically, “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”—that meant women and men, Catholics, Protestants, and others.

It was a brief period of insurrection: for example, Enniscorthy—hometown of our guest Colm Toíbín—was seized for a period of days; hundreds of British soldiers and Irish civilians were injured and killed. But after just a week, the rebels had been routed; Dublin had been shelled. When the leaders were captured, fifteen were executed and buried in quicklime without a funeral, setting off a permanent alienation of the Irish people from British occupiers.

A hundred years on, the history of the Easter Rising—and of the Irish republic that rose from it—is, like all histories, a mixed bag. Along the way: civil war, partition of the island (north and south), and emigration. In the 1990s the “Celtic Tiger” of tech and speculation romped through Ireland, but in the ‘08 melt-down the Tiger emigrated, too.

But suddenly another uprising—an emphatic vote for gay marriage, a pushback to the domination of Irish culture by the Catholic Church, and an emotional attack on structures of injustice—all expressed at the level of sentences, Tweets, performances, and songs.

We rely on a handful of charming and incisive writers to dissect the global dynamics of this exciting Irish moment, from Toíbín to Belinda McKeon and Mary O’Donoghue and the dark-minded Westerners, Colin Barrett and Lisa McInerney.

You can hear the full version of Tom French’s poem, “1916,” below:

April 22, 2016

Our Borders, Our Selves

What makes a border in 2016? And how is it, on an earth supposedly flattened by free markets and liberal values, that the walls around us seem higher than ever before? From the big-data border of the EU to Donald Trump’s (proposed) Great Wall, the ...

What makes a border in 2016? And how is it, on an earth supposedly flattened by free markets and liberal values, that the walls around us seem higher than ever before?

From the big-data border of the EU to Donald Trump’s (proposed) Great Wall, the fences of our world are increasingly patrolled, scanned, militarized, surveilled, droned, and fortified. It’s less neoliberalism than neofeudalism. “This medieval modernism is born of a fatal resolve to keep the outsider out,” our guest, Frances Stonor Saunders, writes in the London Review of Books.

In her borders essay, Saunders is meditating on the relationship between identity, migration, and political power. “We construct borders,” she writes, “to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who we might become. They are philosophies of space, credibility contests, latitudes of neurosis, signatures to the social contract, soothing containments, scars.”

This week we’re doing something a little new, in partnership with our friends at the LRB, presenting Saunders’s piece, “Where on Earth Are You?”, recorded in front of a live audience at the British Museum. You can subscribe to the excellent London Review Podcasts here.

April 8, 2016

John Luther Adams: Music at the End of the World

John Luther Adams is our gentle wood thrush in this conversation. He’s bracing us with the mystery that humbled him on first hearing the ecstatic songster (Thoreau’s “Shakespeare among birds”) in Georgia, once upon a ...

John Luther Adams is our gentle wood thrush in this conversation. He’s bracing us with the mystery that humbled him on first hearing the ecstatic songster (Thoreau’s “Shakespeare among birds”) in Georgia, once upon a time. Where in heaven or on earth does this music come from?

Listening with John Luther Adams to his famously oceanic (and at the same time minimalist) orchestrations, all manner of associations pop into your head – mine anyway. All the water music you half-remember from Ravel and Debussy, but also the Lord’s voice questioning Job: “Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder…”

In conversation I tell Adams that I’m seeing the giant blobs and blurs of indeterminate color in Rothko’s wall-scale paintings. In the opening of Adams’ “The Farthest Place,” I wonder if I’m actually hearing Miles Davis’ “All Blues.” Then he’s evoking McCoy Tyner holding steady on a rich piano voicing of a single chord. Finally I mention Schubert’s posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, and Adams breaks from bemused silence into humble laughter. “Aw, well, that’s some of the most sublime music ever – from an unknown place.”

John Luther Adams gave us a long gabby afternoon last winter in his tidy, stripped-down condo apartment in South Harlem. I hadn’t expected to see the stacked pages of an autobiography-in-progress on his desk – a small surprise from someone whose vast musical structures seem to encompass everything but the self-expressive ego (“It’s about the music, it’s not about me,” he insists).

Second inevitable twist: that the man who tunes his music to birdsong and the wind got his start in performance as a rock drummer. Third little reversal: that Adams, who found his voice as a composer in the Alaskan wilderness, feels so at home in the city, amid the howling sirens at street level and the subway screech below. Like John Cage, one his great experimental influences and models, John Luther Adams is devoted about equally to silence and ambient sound.

We are ranging over the environmental preoccupations of so much of Adams’ music – in the outdoor pieces like “Inuksuit” or “Sila“; and in the concert-hall works – typically lush symphonic walls of coruscating color, slow-moving symphonies tuned to the deep music of nature—like the Pulitzer-winning piece that made him famous in 2014, Become Ocean. Alex Ross in The New Yorker called it “the loveliest Apocalypse in musical history.”

Strong in his own words, Adams pictures his music moving across the room like the changes of natural light.

The music doesn’t go anywhere in conventional terms of linear development. But what I hope is that the experience of listening to those moments—those long suspended moments in my music—is like sitting in a place and feeling the weather change, feeling the air change, watching the light change. And I think the longer we stay in one place, the more we notice change, and the more we notice change, the more we understand where we are and what it means to be there, how we fit in, and ultimately who we are.

We’re getting a broad course in listening here, a sense of how a minimalist composer maxes out on sound, and how we, too, might make the most of the age of the earbud.

Music From The Show

Podcast • November 9, 2015

John Summers on Real Estate and Innovation

The contrarian John Summers, editor-in-chief of The Baffler magazine, calls the funky old railroad back of MIT “The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan,” alluding to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. (Zuck has reopened offices here, near Google and ...

The contrarian John Summers, editor-in-chief of The Baffler magazine, calls the funky old railroad back of MIT “The People’s Republic of Zuckerstan,” alluding to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. (Zuck has reopened offices here, near Google and Microsoft. It’s “clustering,” they tell us.) On the occasion of our own show on data-driven cities, we’re out in the field with John, looking at the boom in building and jobs around Kendall and Central Squares, and he’s telling us: you wouldn’t want all this in your neighborhood.

Stay till the end (spoiler alert), when a security guard may or may not kick Chris and John out of one of Novartis’s beautiful office parks, where this conversation was recorded.

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Podcast • August 25, 2015

Renata Adler on Sadness, Selfies, and Losing

Consider Renata Adler one of the defiantly smart women of the age. She was a star of the culture pages of the New York Times in the mid-60s then for decades at The New Yorker. These ...

Consider Renata Adler one of the defiantly smart women of the age.

She was a star of the culture pages of the New York Times in the mid-60s then for decades at The New Yorker. These days, her tart, tweet-ready epigrams are a hit with millennials and 30-somethings hooked on language and the wide world. We link her to dauntless, independent spirits like Joan Didion, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, and Julia Child. She’s a match also for Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal—all of them readers, stylists, and watchers open to surprise.

David Foster Wallace was a Renata Adler fan (who spoke of her as an influence, too). So, on the occasion of our hour about DFW and the air of personal and social sadness that lingers around him, we poured Renata a scotch and sat together for a wide-ranging conversation about American life. What’s been going on, we asked, with our nation’s mood and history since the Vietnam War? In the age of the selfie, how should we be telling our country’s story?