Emmaus Road Worshipers

For episode 6 of Man and His Music, “Vocal Styles,” Dad and his producers came up with the idea of casting the content in terms of a talk show, the likes of which were as popular then as they are now, if a bit less caffeinated.  The model used was the shows of Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin, whereby guests engaged in serious dialogue on subjects from time to time and weren’t merely peddling their latest wares (movies, books, albums, etc.).  Hence, the experience was often (not always) more intellectually stimulating than what we get today with the offerings from Kelly Ripa and less political than what we get from The View.  Politics weren’t off limits–far from it–but they were discussed, by and large, respectfully and without the vitriol with which so much of our current political conversation is laced.

The host of the “show” here is Cincinnati media maven Rob Reider, who played the cheery sidekick to the older and more mature Bob Braun on the local daily noontime The Bob Braun Show.  (George Clooney’s uncle, Nick, had a rival show that aired around the same time on a different local channel.)  Reider had a marvelous singing voice, so his serving in this role would have made sense to Cincinnatians.  He also fancied himself the comedian, which we see here throughout the episode.  His continual mispronouncing of Dad’s name I’m pretty sure was an ad lib.  Dad seems caught off guard initially but soon settles into the schtick and rolls with the punches like the pro he was.  It would not have been unlike Reider to throw this into the mix at the last minute to spice things up a bit, and, in fact, it does add an edge to what would have started to become a bit predictable by the halfway point of the show.

Along the way, as always, we get great listening examples from the world of music to illuminate Dad’s content.  After the farcical cold opening (hello, Saturday Night Live), in which a legit soprano incongruously intones Loggins & Messina’s “Your Mama Don’t Dance, and Your Daddy Don’t Rock ‘n’ Roll,” we settle into a catalog of vocal styles featuring the recorded likes of Sherrill Milnes, the English countertenor Alfred Deller, Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Acuff, Mick Jagger, and many more.

We also hear from University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music vocal students (one for each part, SATB) singing classical fare and illustrating various aspects of their abilities beyond the differences in their range.  The slide-down-a-chair-to-allow-the-newest-guest-the-prime-real-estate efforts were a staple of these shows, particulary Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show (as opposed to many shows now, where the first guest does his/her thing and then exits, allowing the host to pay full attention to the next one).  We also have some beautiful period fashion examples, vintage 70’s, including Reider’s bell-bottom slacks and every guy’s lapels.  Quite the sartorial showcase.

Thanks for reading.  (Get more backstory, if interested, from previous posts.)  Here’s Man and His Music, episode 6, “Vocal Styles.”

Episode 5 of Man and His Music, “Instrumental Forms,” covers material for which creative pedagogy is hard to come by.  When you’re considering the structure of your basic piece of string quartet music, it is what it is what it is.  Still, Dad brings some lightheartedness and fun to what would be, in the hands of most professors, a rather dull exercise.  In this episode, for example, we get

• Dad playing the recorder on two different versions of “Take Me out to the Ballgame,” one in duple (2/4) meter and one in triple (3/4) meter to illustrate Renaissance dance structures
• brief piano excerpts of “Sweet Sue,” “Tenderly,” and “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em down on the Farm” to illustrate disparate individual elements of a collective suite
• a lighthearted admission that there are too many different uses in classical music for the word sonata (“The trouble is the word sonata is used a half a dozen times in different ways, and you simply have to learn to thread your way through the labyrinth; there’s just no other way.  Extrasensory Perception is what you need”)
• a bit of vocalese added to the primary themes of the first and fourth movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor: “Mozart’s in the closet (let him out, let him out, let him out)” and “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Mozart!” respectively.

Along the way, of course, there is a lot of meat, and Dad, having entertained his students as best he possibly could given the material with which he was working, expected all those athletes, accountants, and engineers–who had been hoping for the easy A his classes were rumored to proffer–to muster up the self-discipline to sit respectfully through a legit musical offering when the time came (in this case, the entire fourth movement of a Haydn string quartet, nicely rendered by some conservatory students here).

Thanks for reading.  I hope you enjoy Man and His Music, episode 5, “Instrumental Forms.”

Happy 4th of July! I plan to return next week to cover episode 5 of Man and His Music, “Instrumental Forms.”

Let me at the onset state what becomes obvious very quickly early in the viewing of espisode 4 of Man and His Music, the public television show my father recorded as part of some of the first distance-learning efforts undertaken at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music: Dad’s not on top of his game here.  The show was recorded–the time stamp/clapboard material shown at the beginning indicates–on March 20, 1973, which was four days after my ninth birthday.  (Short pause here so that you can do the math.)  Perhaps there had been a traumatic incident at a birthday party.  UC was on trimesters at the time, and perhaps he was cranking out final exams for the winter term that week and couldn’t prep quite as much as would have been nice.  Whatever, this episode doesn’t sparkle (one of his favorite words of exhortation for the volunteer choirs he directed for 40 years) quite like most of the others.

Still, there are moments here that will bring a smile to those who knew Dad as professor, choir director, or friend over the years before his dementia started kicking in hard around 2008 or so.  How many times did I see that closed-eye, “What did I say that for?” look (at the 00:46 mark), rendered here when he starts titling the specific episode with the name used for the series itself?  And, oh, how often he poked fun at his baldness, which showed up pretty early in his life, here (12:10) contrasting the full-headed mane of Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s conductor, Thomas Schippers, with his lack of the same, and blaming this sad condition for keeping him out of the ranks of the great symphony orchestra conductors . . . all while smiling that captivating smile and giving his audience that familiar twinkle in his eye.

And there are bits and pieces presented here for all kinds of music lovers: clips of Leonard (Dad always called him “Lenny”) Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic Strings, some vintage photos of early Moog synthesizers (note the correct pronunciation: “MOH-g,” not “MOO-g,” despite the spelling), and another classic Dad moment (22:15) where he struggles to remember the most quintessential of all bluegrass instruments, the banjo.  Indeed, there are more gaffes in this episode than most, and in today’s world, they’d be re-recorded quickly and polished to a fine sheen, the same way the make-up folks polished Dad’s head for the cameras.

But like the producers of any good Dylan album–from Tom Wilson, to Bob Johnston, to Jack Frost, Dylan’s alias for all his self-produced 21st-century albums–Dad and the folks at WCET-TV left all these glitches in.  Dylan did so because he wanted the music to be raw and rough around the edges; Dad and PBS-Cincinnati did so because they had no budget to chase after perfection.  But the end result is the same, and in this age of Auto-Tune-d this and Photoshop-ped that, I’m glad for the results, warts and all, in these TV shows.  Happy viewing: https://youtu.be/k3HedrHezkM

Thanks for joining me on a trip down what Robin Williams always referred to as Amnesia Lane via the half-hour episodes of my father’s distance-learning TV shows Man and His Music and Pop Music, U.S.A., the former of which aired 50 years ago on public television in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Dad’s in full performance mode here, singing “You Are My Sunshine” and other songs from his adolescence (in the picture, Dad’s the second from the right in the barbershop quartet), backed by a quartet of colleagues from the University of Cincinnati and the city’s vibrant jazz scene.  The overarching structure for this episode features several allusions to The Tonight Show, hosted at the time (and for over 30 years) by the comedian Johnny Carson (the same show now hosted by Jimmy Fallon).  The references most folks at the time would have caught, Carson’s show being as popular as it was, include drummer Larry Brown acting as studio sidekick Ed McMachon, who began each show with a prolonged “Here’s Johnny!”; the fact that this episode was recorded in front of what would have been called at the time a “studio audience,” small though it was; and Dad mimicking Carson’s trademark golf swing, which he usually did at the end of his opening monologue.

I hope you enjoy “Musical Designs in Western Culture.”

Lea and I are traveling this week, and so I will plan to post the third episode of Dr. Simon Anderson’s Man and His Music TV program, “Musical Designs in Western Culture,” next week at this time.  Have a blessed week!

Last week I returned to the blogosphere by linking to the first of 10 half-hour episodes of my father’s TV show, Man and His Music, which debuted 50 years ago on Cincinnati’s PBS affiliate, WCET, TV-48. This week, in the second espisode, Dad dives into a lecture on the six common components of music, material that eventually wound up in his first book, The Musical Imperative.  His ability to break down concepts into language understandable by the average Joe and Jane is on display here, as he, for example, compares music to science when discussing the elements of tone and when he likens ovearching structure in music to the building blocks of language (a note = a syllable; a motive = a word; a theme = a clause; etc.).

We also see Dad absolutely in his element, utilizing all genres of music to illustrate particular aspects of melody, harmony, and rhythm.  So while we do hear listening examples from Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Dvorak, and Beethoven, we also here from Buck Owens, Joni Mitchell, John Philip Sousa, Simon & Garfunkel, Janis Joplin, Dave Brubeck, a Gregorian chant choir, a Dixieland jazz band, and the cast of Jesus Christ, Superstar.  Other highlights include a brief lesson in the French pronunciation of the word timbre and a lip-synched rendition of a Rudy Vallée song, both done with the characteristic twinkle in his eye.

If you have the time to watch, I hope you enjoy Man and His Music, episode two, “Common Components of Music.”

The time stamp indicates it’s been two years since I last conveyed thoughts via this blog, and life circumstances seem to suggest it would be OK to try to resume the activity. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

I’m motivated by a number of things (e.g., I’ve missed writing on topics about which I feel passionately), not the least of which is the 50th anniversary this year of my father’s TV show, Man and His Music, which aired on Cincinnati’s PBS affiliate, WCET. Dad taught a host of music classes for over 40 years at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, but his Music Appreciation and History of Jazz and Popular Music were his bread-and-butter classes, often featuring as many as 600 students enrolled each trimester. Those classes became popular quickly, earning the top “5 Cakes” rating from the campus paper one year (an easy class that was well worth taking), and athletes in particular gravitated to them; Dad taught a number of future NBA players over the years, including Pat Cummings, Nick Van Exel, and Kenyon Martin, among several others. At the time of Dad’s retirement, the University honored him by endowing an award to be given each year to the faculty member who most demonstrated support for the academic endeavors of student athletes. (I’m glad to see the Dr. Simon Anderson Faculty Award is still being offered at UC. Congrats to Prof. Evan Griffin, this year’s recipient.)

To broaden his classes’ appeal, Dad connected with the producers at WCET and came up with what amounted to an initial foray into distance learning, a concept just getting off the ground at the time, one which now manifests itself as online education. Back then, the students had to watch the half-hour TV show, listen to music examples provided by the campus radio station, and attend a final exam in Wilson Auditorium, pictured early in the show, where I took the class when I was a student at UC. (Wilson has since been demolished.)

Over the course of the summer and into the fall, I plan to feature each of the 10 episodes of Man and His Music and the 10 from the follow-up program, Pop Music, U.S.A. In these shows, you get a glimpse of what made Dad such a hit with students, his unbridled enthusiasm for his subject as played out in numerous academically sound but thoroughly entertaining ways. Fifty years is a long time, so the production values are often a hoot, with Pong-like graphics and other MST3K-type lo-fi examples of what was cutting edge at the time. Cultural values have certainly changed, too, in 50 years; were he alive today and embarking on such an endeavor, Dad would no doubt phrase some things a bit differently in his presentations. Be that as it may, these shows are snap shots of an era in time that set my father’s academic career on a new trajectory and, by extension as I reflected back on that time, shaped wide swaths of my approach to higher education in the process.

Episode one of Man and His Music, “Magnificant Varieties of Music,” encapsulates so much of Dad’s approach to music appreciation. We hear him discuss three new perspectives that help open up new worlds for folks beginning to think about the role music plays in our lives. If you take the time to watch, note the following gems:

• The new anthropolgical perspective: Dad’s look at the uniqueness of Western harmony and how rhythm in American popular music is rooted in our particular understanding of time
• The new sociological perspective: His deeming the NBA America’s true ballet and likening TV ads to hieroglyphics (by the way, I’m the eight-year-old son he mentions in this section)
• The new aesthetic perspective: His description of the typical American dream scenario, whereby the eager wannabe business tycoon moves up the ladder from success to success to success to . . . “coronary thrombosis . . . death.”

Just watching this first episode again (I’ve seen each of the shows a few times before, of course) brought back so many wonderful memories.  About two-thirds of the way through this episode, when he sits down to play “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” to illustrate climax-and-release elements at work in pop songs derived from Broadway, I couldn’t help but tear up a bit.  His discussing of what’s going on in the piece and then, especially, his popping off the high E-flat (“ho-o-o-o-o-me to you”) at the song’s moment of truth, head back and arms outstretched, are sweet reminders of so much of his instruction to me (and thousands of UC students) over the years.

I hope you enjoy these blasts from the past. Thanks to so many who have kept Dad’s voice alive over the years, but especially to Dr. Gerard Aloisio, at Minnesota State University-Mankato, and Drs. Josh Jones and Robert Kania, at Judson University (Elgin, Ill.), for using his material for so many years. Thanks also to my my sister and brother-in-law, Dr. Karin Anderson Abrell and Dan Abrell, for running Dad’s publishing company, Clifton Hills Press, for the past several years, and publishing his two books, The Musical Imperative and Pop Music, U.S.A. Additional thanks to Prof. Tim May, Judson University, for his assistance in making these TV shows blog-ready.  

Without further ado, “The Magnificent Varieties of Music.”