“American Ledger no. 1” sounds different each time.

That’s by design, MacArthur fellow Raven Chacon told Zócalo before a performance of his ambitious sound and visual retelling of the nation was staged at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles. The event concluded Zócalo’s 2023 public programs season.

Aside from the abstract shapes that appear on the score and the notes Chacon provides to the conductor and musicians, the musical expression is left up to interpretation. Some sounds and actions occur regularly: throwing coins when a bunch of dots show up. Lighting a match when you see an eighth note with a flame. But other elements vary widely, from the instruments used to other ways sound is conveyed. (For example, because the ASU California Center does not allow axes, the performers last night had to get creative when the score suggested chopping wood.)

“I’m very open to what somebody might bring to this, as long as they are trying to tell the very serious and violent history of the United States,” Chacon said.

The special evening of music, co-presented with L.A.-based music collective wasteLAnd, ASU Gammage, and GRoW Annenberg, began in the historic lobby of the Herald Examiner building, with another Chacon creation, the call-and-response duet “Echo Contest.” As the audience followed the music into the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Event Center, performers embedded in the audience to create a blanketing—yet assertive—effect.

A voiceover from Chacon explained what each line of the score for “American Ledger no. 1,” rendered in the shape of the American flag and supersized on the screen so the audience could follow along, represented.

First, there is a blank space: a time before humans, and maybe animals, “where we don’t remember what existed here on this land.” Topography—stars, mountains, landscape—follows. A continuation of this “uninterrupted lineage of this worldview” is only offset by ships being built from the other side of the world, coming closer and closer. The following lines continue the story: Colonies are built, humans are labeled not five-fifths but three-fifths of a person, the economy grows, and commerce expands; all the while, a steady beat of inequality drums on. By the sixth line, things are either speeding up or slowing down—maybe there’s revolt or protest or assassination, Chacon suggests.

The final line is open-ended: “We don’t know what happens,” he says.

After the show concluded, the audience enjoyed refreshments and tamales from Mama’s Tamales, and Tacos, Too.

“The coins—line four, line five—that was actually the best sounds for me,” an audience member, Andrew Choate, said while chatting with one of the ensemble members, William Roper (who played the helicon, a brass instrument in the tuba family), after the performance.

But Choate said that he had to plug his ears during the police whistles: “That was too harsh.”

“It was harsh,” Roper agreed, “but we live in a harsh land.”

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One of my best friends died recently.

It still doesn’t feel real. The last time I saw her was the day after the Fourth of July. Her smile always lit up the room, but that night, the joy seemed to seep out of her, so much so that even the person who took our order at dinner commented on it.

Life was coming together. She’d gone back to school to become a speech-language pathology assistant and was on track to complete her program in the fall. Unfailingly patient, positive, and compassionate, her teachers said she had everything it took to excel in the field. She’d just become an aunt for the first time, too, and made the four-hour drive from Ventura to San Diego whenever she could to get to know this three-month-old with a gummy smile and a pompadour, who was now a part of her. And she’d recently fallen in love, with a guy from Missouri, whose Hinge profile she’d shown me last Thanksgiving. They were talking about moving in together after she graduated. Our high school friend group had yet to meet him, but she promised we would soon.

We never got the chance before she left us. It was a prolonged sinus infection that progressed into fatal meningitis. A “perfect storm” of events, a nurse later said. Everything went so wrong so fast that she was still wearing the magnetic eyelashes she’d put on to see the Barbie movie when she was brought to the hospital.

Perhaps inescapably, because we met in the 2000s, when social media was just taking off and phones had become cameras (and vice versa), the grief has taken on a digital dimension. To stop myself from being consumed by the questions around her death, the hows and whys of what happened, I’ve been trying to focus on remembering her life through these memories preserved in pixelated resin.

There is an overwhelming number of them to choose from, but I can’t help but feel what is missing. The Facebook replies I can no longer access because I deleted my account. The texts and videos I never backed up on the cloud. Obsolete media whose formats are no longer supported today. Underlying this sense of absence, of course, is the knowledge that as much as there is, there won’t be more coming.

Much of the digital ephemera I’ve come across so far I remember, even if the memories of what we were doing or where we were when we made them are just glimmers. But going through our old texts the other day, I found a few unopened voice messages I must have forgotten to play. Because I’d waded through so much of the annals of our lives at that point, I thought I was prepared for anything. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to those recordings yet.

I think it’s because the medium feels like it picks up a conversation in real time. It’s the message in the bottle of the digital age. You share a thought without knowing when, where, or in what time zone it will find its recipient. In that way, voice messages feel alive in a way that video or a photo—where a haircut, a t-shirt, or a setting betrays its time stamp—does not.

Voice messages are relatively new. WeChat, the Chinese instant message and social media app, introduced them in 2011, and they have been available on Apple’s iMessage since June 2014. Over the past decade, the technology, which allows you to send voice recordings over messenger apps, has rapidly gained popularity. According to a recent YouGov poll for Vox, 62% of Americans say they’ve sent a voice message (or voice memo or voice note), and around 30% communicate this way “weekly, daily, or multiple times a day.”

But the basic idea behind the technology has arguably been with us since the mid-1800s when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first machine to document sound. This soon gave way to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, which allowed people to record and playback sound on cylinders, opening up the commercial possibilities of the audio medium.

It doesn’t surprise me that once people could get their hands on the phonograph, they instantly saw its potential for preserving the voices of loved ones beyond the grave.

“The phonograph was linked with death from the very beginning,” according to Jonathan Scott’s Into the Groove: The Story of Sound From Tin Foil to Vinyl, which notes that the “idea of the preservation of a voice after death was a common trope in the phonograph’s advertising copy.” Most famously, the iconic trademark and logo of Victor Talking Machine Company, later RCA Victor, seemingly depicts a dog listening to a recording of his late owner.

Nipper, the dog gazing at the brass horn of a phonograph in English artist Francis Barraud’s painting “His Master’s Voice,” was the real-life companion of the artist’s recently departed brother, Mark Henry. While it’s been debunked that Nipper was actually listening to Mark’s recorded voice in Francis’ original rendering, recording the “last words” of dying individuals was a real trend, as detailed in newspaper accounts, like this 1889 piece in the San Francisco Examiner about a family who took a phonograph to the hospital to “cheer their mother on during her long illness and also to preserve the tones of her voice to comfort them after her death.”

It makes sense that Victorians embraced a technology for preserving the voices of the departed. The culture was steeped in death due to high mortality rates, and from funerals to fashion, Victorians came up with a dizzying number of ways to commemorate those who had passed (what historian James Steven Curl has characterized as a “celebration of death”).

Rapid scientific advancement during the era, which comingled with a burgeoning spiritualist movement, seemingly made the Great Beyond more tangible to mourners. The invention of X-ray machines made the invisible visible. Modern camera techniques like double exposure allowed for “spirit photographs,” which hinted at a world beyond this one. The phonograph presented just another way to thin the veil between the living and the dead, to help those grieving find new ways to connect with those who were gone.

Historian of sound John M. Picker has also made the case that because the phonograph was the first technology that let people record sound at home, its embrace by Victorians was “inherently more personal and interactive” than consumer responses to audio technology that followed (such as the gramophone, which allowed playback only).

We’ve come a long way from that initial liberation of the voice from the constraints of time and space. But holding my iPhone in 2023, the distance to these earliest phonographic recordings feels closer.

Like the Victorians, and many, many people since, I share that same human want that drove us to record sound from the beginning: to hold on to those we’ve loved and lost and miss.

The post Her Voice Memos and My Grief appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Clark had it all wrong: This was exactly the kind of music people played in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Sound, which influenced musicians from Janet Jackson to Sheila E., has come to be practically synonymous with Prince, thanks to his classic songs such as “Little Red Corvette,” “Erotic City,” and “Kiss.” But although Prince was its high priest, he was not its author. The Minneapolis Sound was bigger than one diminutive, enigmatic, driven-genius kid from the city’s north side. It was the offspring of ambitious school-based music training put in place by polka-loving European settlers, and the prodigious talents of a small group of black musicians who migrated to the area during the first half of the 20th century. It had been brewing in the small, easily-forgotten black section of a vanilla city for decades. It was the result of a cultural accommodation that was characteristic of the Twin Cities’ unusual ethno-musical heritage, a mix of styles that its vastly outnumbered black musicians—Prince and others—turned to spectacular advantage.

The story began with the region’s first outsiders: Europeans from Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and whites from northeastern U.S. states who poured into St. Paul and Minneapolis in the middle of the 19th century. They were pulled by cheap land and milling jobs on the banks of the Mississippi River, and they displaced the native peoples in the area. By the close of the 19th century, Minneapolis had grown into a sizable city of more than 200,000, one New Deal-era study of the region estimated.

White Minnesotans loved polka music, which borrowed from European folk traditions. Pennsylvania governor and 1964 presidential hopeful William Scranton and his wife courted Republican delegates from the state by dancing the polka. Photo by Paul Vathis/Associated Press.

These Europeans who settled in Minneapolis brought their folk music traditions with them. The musical migration could not have happened at a better time, or in a better place. Early Minnesotans had always placed a high value on music. Ethnic folk music, orchestras, early ragtime, minstrels, brass bands, and vaudeville all were part of Minneapolis’s early music tradition. By the turn of the 20th century, the city had the state’s first symphony orchestra, and boasted numerous music venues that attracted performances by the country’s best musicians.

Polka made its appearance during this time. A combination of different European folk musical traditions, polka or “pulka,” which is Czech for “half-step,” originated in eastern and central Europe in the 1820s, spreading throughout the continent by the 1830s and then, with migration, into the United States. It took hold in northeastern cities and in the upper midwest, as European migrants moved west (the “Polka Belt”), taking up regional variations along the way. Americans loved polka’s energy and vitality, and the ways it connected them to the Old World they missed.

The music thrived in Minneapolis—and inspired a strong commitment to musical education. Around the turn of the 20th century, city leaders institutionalized the town’s love of music through its schools. All public school students in Minneapolis were trained in voice, instrumentation, and music reading. The Minneapolis board of education said the intent was to increase “participation and appreciation of music,” and to provide poor and working class immigrants and their children with the tools to play, read, and write music. This had the effect of keeping alive the folk music traditions that Europeans had brought with them to the state, and would breathe life into the growing polka scene.

The Minneapolis Sound, which Prince and his band The Revolution popularized in the 1980s, was a blend of white and black musical styles. Here, in 1985, the musicians accepted the American Music Award for best single for “When Doves Cry,” in Los Angeles. Photo by Doug Pizac/Associated Press.

But it wasn’t just polka that benefited: Free music education also helped young Prince to lay the groundwork for the Minneapolis Sound. His family, like the European immigrants who invented polka, didn’t have the money to pay for musical instruments or lessons. But with the public schools providing these resources, Prince spent every second he could in his high school’s music room, practicing multiple instruments, honing his sound, and making demos.

Minneapolis’s polka love provided a perfect entry point for wildly creative black musicians like Prince in another way, too: by forcing them to mix with white culture in ways their brethren in other cities never had to. Black people have lived in Minnesota since before the state was founded. Blacks from Canada traded with Native Americans in the 19th century, and slaves (both slaves and escaped former slaves) also were a presence in the state. The first free black settlement in Minnesota was founded along the banks of the Mississippi in 1857, and in the years after abolition, migration increased. Minnesota’s growing liberalism and the state’s willingness to enfranchise black men sent a signal to many that they would be treated fairly in the northern metropolis.

Still, there were never very many black people in the area. Between 1880 and 1930, the black population in Minnesota grew from a negligible 362 to a still tiny 4,276. African Americans made up just 1 percent of the population in 1930; even when Prince was born, in 1958, the percentage of the state’s black population remained in the single digits. (It’s no wonder that the comedian Chris Rock joked in the 1990s that only two black people lived in Minnesota: Prince and Hall of Fame baseball player Kirby Puckett.)

But their small numbers didn’t diminish the impact that blacks had on the music scene—rather, it may have amplified it. While white Minnesotans played their polkas, black music migrated up the Mississippi, with minstrel shows, ragtime, jazz, and the blues all gaining enthusiastic, if small, followings in Minneapolis. Black musicians started thinking of the city as a place where they could live and thrive. Early black musical migrants included Lester “Pres” Young, the talented tenor saxophonist, and the jazz pianist James Samuel “Cornbread” Harris, II (whose son, Jimmy “Jam” Harris, became a well-known R&B songwriter and producer and an important figure in the popularization of the Minneapolis Sound).

Prince’s Yellow Cloud Electric Guitar, 1989. Image courtesy of the Division of Culture and the Arts, National Museum of American History.

Others followed. The parents of producer Terry Lewis (Jimmy “Jam”s’ musical partner), and those of guitarist Dez Dickerson (who played with Prince’s band, the Revolution), migrated to the Twin Cities during this same period. Prince’s parents made the journey too: Mattie Shaw, a singer, and John R. Nelson, a composer and pianist, both moved up from Louisiana in the 1940s. They met through Minneapolis’s small but vibrant black music scene, also known as the “chitterling circuit,” in the 1950s. Like many black migrants, they landed in North Minneapolis, a formerly Jewish area, where Prince was born and raised.

Because the black music scene in Minneapolis was so tiny, black musicians who hoped to make a living by performing played for white audiences whenever possible. Segregation reinforced the musical color line, with most white audiences wanting to hear classical music, jazz standards, polka, or pop music. Black musicians learned to accommodate them, and developed a vast musical range. Cornbread Harris, for example, learned to play “polkas, mambas, salsas, and calypsos,” says Prince biographer Dave Hill. Black musicians’ virtuosity expanded their own community’s musical vocabulary, melding a new family of sounds into the jazz, blues, and R&B they played for black listeners.

Prince’s generation followed the pattern. In the early 1970s, when Prince was a teenager, the numbers of black people in Minneapolis were still “small enough to be ignored,” according to Hill, and white pop music continued to dominate. Prince was schooled in black musical forms like R&B, funk, and soul, but there was still only one small, low-frequency black radio station, so he and his contemporaries also listened to rock and folk artists such as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.

Lester Young, 1958. Photo by Herman Leonard. Courtesy of Herman Leonard Photographs, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

Prince’s unique virtuosity made it possible for him to forge a new style from the wide variety of white and black genres that he and his city loved. Even as a high school student, he could hear a song in his head and translate it to sound. He played several instruments by ear, including guitar, piano, drums, and bass guitar. He coolly mimicked masters like Carlos Santana note for note. Folk influences like Dylan and Mitchell course through Prince’s work with his first band, Grand Central, which played rock-tinged funk and soul. By the mid-’70s, punk, indie rock, and New Wave—the music that floated around the “vanilla market” in the city at the time—had filtered into his recordings, too. This musical collage is apparent on Prince’s first album, For You, which was less a commercial release and more a statement of what the young musician could do: Minneapolis Sound lite, with flares of the sexually provocative lyrics for which he would become famous.

By the time Prince recorded his third album, 1980’s Dirty Mind, he had refined the sound. Instead of showcasing his ability to play multiple instruments and diverse musical tastes, as his first release had, Dirty Mind showed Prince’s ability to blend his influences to create an entirely new sound. It was a giant leap creatively. Hailed by critics as a landmark, Dirty Mind put Prince and the Minneapolis Sound on the map. Songs like “when you were mine,” “Partyup,” and “Uptown” (an ode to the bohemian Minneapolis neighborhood that Prince identified with), were punk-funk music, incorporating heavy New Wave and rock overtures smoothed out with R&B. Erotically-charged songs like “Head,” “Dirty Mind,” and “Sister” shocked—and delighted—listeners and critics alike. Rolling Stone said the album was “a pop record of Rabelaisian achievement,” and music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it a “stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock” that “set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early ’80s.”

The press anointed Prince the next Jimi Hendrix—the new black rock royalty for the ’80s. In fact, he was more than that. Mining the sounds that reverberated in his unique corner of America, from polka to punk, Prince forged a style that was just right—in spite of, or perhaps because of, its oddball roots in black and white culture. Over the next three decades, Prince released dozens of albums and stored away enough recordings to release two or more albums a year for a century. His was a singular talent, of a sort we’re unlikely to see again. But without Minneapolis’s crazy musical mixture in his past, he might have remained only a prince, instead of becoming an emperor.

The post How Prince Introduced Us to the “Minneapolis Sound” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

All winter, frogs crouch hidden in the leaves, their outsides frozen so hard they’d make a “clink” if you dropped them. They survive because the interior of their cells are propped up by a sugary antifreeze peculiar to frogs. As the weather warms up, they unfreeze and reanimate, like something from a fairy tale. And then they find themselves a nice muddy spot and begin singing.

Frog songs are meepy and beepy, some clattery, others deep. If you have a big enough collection of frogs, the puddles around you will vibrate with a whole froggy symphony, heavy on the percussion. There’s a pond near my house in Maine that fills with spring peepers, whose high-pitched chirps make a loud cacophony that sometimes organizes, for a few seconds, into something like a pattern, before separating. I wonder whether the frogs really sync up, or whether my brain is working overtime to organize the sound. The racket at the pond seems to hijack my brain—thoughts of grocery lists, taxes, and politics are replaced by the seething urgency of frog talk.

Scientists have counted about 7,000 species of frogs worldwide, but modern life is tough on them. Since 1995, 168 species have gone extinct and nearly 2,500 species’ populations are in decline. Frogs respond to small environmental changes: They are sensitive to chemical pollution in water and noise pollution near their breeding puddles. Invasive bullfrogs eat up tasty smaller frogs, the chytrid fungus has devastated frogs in the West, and a parasite that lives in snails has caused deformed frogs. And there is climate change. There are many reasons to mourn the frogs (and even more reasons to save them!) but what I appreciate about them is that their songs give us one of the clearest experiences of what it’s like not to be human. Stop and listen to the choruses in the spring and you get an infusion of froggy priorities: the mad biological cycle of mating, egging, morphing, and frogging.

One winter evening about five years ago, my boyfriend played me his CD of New England frogs. The first songs on the recording were the spring peepers. Then we heard the mournful foghorn of the bullfrogs, the duck-like chuckle of wood frogs, the implosive green frog, the dreamlike trill of the American toad. Listening revealed two things.

First, frogs sing for a purpose. The peepers’ song serves almost like a puffy profile on a dating website: “Here I am! I’m big! My genes are excellent.” When a female hears this call from her species, she’ll hop or swim in that direction. When the male senses a female in front of him, he will give her a big long hug from behind, and try to transfer that package of genes. At this point, the female may realize she’s being hugged by the wrong species of frog and she’ll shout a call that says, “Whoops! Wrong Frog. Release me.” Males who suddenly find themselves hugged by another male also have a “Release me” call. If you grab a frog in a suggestive way with your fingers, the croak you’ll hear is “release me.” If you’re a halfway decent frog, you’ll let that one go. Frogs are often confused, but they aren’t boorish.

Secondly, frog songs make an excellent date night soundtrack. We still put the froggy “mix tape” on and sit side by side on the couch, holding hands. After 300 million years, it’s no surprise that frogs have game.

I called the maker of the CD, frog listener Lang Eliott. He started recording frog songs in southern Missouri in the early 1970s using the same kind of massive reel-to-reel tape recorder that Nixon used for the Watergate tapes. Since then, recording equipment has gotten much smaller, but Elliot has continued to stand up to his neck in swamps both warm and cold to get close to his singers.

Observation is what he does (his master’s thesis was on chipmunk behavior) but observation also possesses him. In 1988, he realized that recording soundscapes of frogs and birds was his calling. “I’m not doing them for scientific or documentary purposes but for their effect on the human psyche. Which is something you get immersed in, hypnotic, relaxing.” He wants listeners to “dissolve” when they put on headphones.

Elliot makes all of his best recordings at night, when there are no planes overhead, no cars in the vicinity, and it’s dark. “It’s a fabulous time to experience in part because you don’t get distracted by seeing. The soundscape is most poignant,” he says. He describes weeks in Florida where he sleeps by day and works in the swamps by night, alone with the sounds. Sometimes, at dusk or at dawn, the birds will sing against the background of the frogs.

The best way to sneak up on a frog, Elliott says, is to avoid getting in the water—frogs sense wavelets. A small frog chorus will immediately get quiet if you come near. (One reason for frog declines is road noise, which discourages frog courtship.) But a really big frog chorus, at the height of breeding season, in an otherwise quiet area, simply cannot be stopped. At that time, you can find specific frogs in the pond by bringing a friend and two flashlights. If you stand at different places and aim your flashlights towards the croak, the spot where your beams cross is where the frog is. Alternatively, you can look for the reflection of their white neck pouch on the water that seems to go in time with the calls.

I asked Elliot if frogs sing in sync. He acknowledged that our brains are always looking for patterns, but explained that frog songs are basically random, though every frog is on a similar rhythmic schedule. In musical terms, they’re not trying to play in unison but they wait the same number of beats between croaks. As a result, they sometimes fall into sync and then fall out again. In addition, some frogs do counter-singing, and some seem to follow each other. Elliot says that if you can sing like a frog you can sometimes get them to follow your lead.

Elliott hasn’t seen signs of the big changes happening with frogs around the world in the mostly eastern frogs he records. Still, climate is having an impact: A study from upstate New York found that the first song of the spring peepers is now 11 days earlier than it was in 1949.

Life as the frog listener has changed Elliot so that his seasonal rhythms skew amphibian. He describes himself as “spring centric.” “I live for it. My mind is planted there.” The spring is the most intense time for him, as he listens as the frogs and birds get louder, “blooming with sound,” and then taper off to the buzz of bugs in the summer. He now sees the entire year as part of spring. “You know what’s a good sign of spring? The first frost.” The first frost starts the winter bird breeding, which leads, inevitably, to spring.

We spend most of our days driving past lovelorn frogs at 65 miles per hour. Spring offers a chance to listen to that great organizing principle of nature—chance: the thin, teeming boundary between the survival of one’s genes and the end of them. In the syncing and separating of the frog symphonies, in their chorus of “pick me” and “release me,” you can hear the combination of randomness and striving that is the history of everything.

The post When Frogs Sing Their Evening Song, Listen for Nature’s Greatest Lesson appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.