From "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," by The New Yorker's music critic, Alex Ross:
The story begins, oddly and aptly, with Charles Seeger, the future dogmatician of American Popular Front music, who came out to the University of California at Berkeley in 1912 to start a music department. The idea of teaching music in a university was novel enough that Seeger’s work fell under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. He held classes in a YMCA, in the Hearst Mining Building, and in a “smelly old house” on Bancroft Way. With no curriculum in place, Seeger felt free to introduce unorthodox ideas. He presented his theory of “dissonant counterpoint,” with its anticipations of twelve-tone practice, and also exposed students to early music, folk music, popular music, and non-Western traditions.
Warren Hellman, Cal Class of '55, Alumnus of the Year 2003, died Sunday evening from complications related to leukemia. He was 77. Friends of the man will not be surprised to learn that he took to calling himself Luke Emia as his condition worsened. He seemed to approach everything in life with a mix of intensity and self-deprecating humor.
Hellman was many things to many people: father and husband, investment banker, philanthropist, horseman, skier, banjo-picker. It is in that last role--as a member of old-timey outfit, The Wrongler's--and as the patron of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the annual music festival in Golden Gate Park which he founded in 2001, that he may ultimately be best remembered. Per his wishes, the festival will carry on without him, (he set up an endowment to ensure as much) but it won't be the same without him--him in his Nudie-style suit with the Stars of David emblazoned on the sleeves. "The Rhinestone Jewboy," he jokingly called himself.
CALIFORNIA wrote about Hellman and his festival for last Summer's Music Issue. The article, by Sylvie Simmons, was entitled "Hillbillionaire." In it, Hellman recalled the time he was approached by a promoter who wanted to acquire the event. Hellman said to the man, ‘Why would you want to buy it? It’s free." Just like all the best things in life.
The 2011 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival will be begin on Friday, September 30 and run through the weekend in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. This year's lineup will feature what has become the usual rootsy-eclectic mix--everything from Del McCoury to The Blind Boys of Alabama, Robert Plant to Emmylou Harris. As Sylvie Simmons reported in our Summer Music Issue, it's Harris who put the "hardly" in Hardly Strictly. Warren Hellman, the man who bankrolls the annual fandango, tells it this way:
“Emmylou agreed to come the first year, and I really wanted her to play bluegrass—as you know, she’s pretty catholic in her music—so I thought if I called it Strictly Bluegrass she would be shamed into it. But no. We tried it again the next year: No. So we changed the name to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and as soon as we did, Emmylou started playing bluegrass."
Time now for our Friday musical interlude. This time around we remember Cal alum Lou Gottlieb and the Limeliters, about whom TIME magazine wrote, in 1961:
If the button-down, scrubbed-looking, youthful Kingston Trio are the undergraduates of big-time U.S. folksinging, the Limeliters are the faculty, and the chairman of the department is 37-year-old Lou Gottlieb, who in 1958 took his doctorate in musicology at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, presenting a thesis consisting of previously unpublished 15th century cyclic masses.
That may make the trio sound a bit stuffy, but rest assured the Limeliters, who got their start in San Francisco's famous nightclub, the hungry i, had as much Marx Brothers in them as they did Marxist theory (although there was certainly some of that as well--in 1966 Gottlieb founded the communal Morninstar Ranch in Sonoma). A big part of their schtick was, in fact, sending up academic pretense. Here's a snippet from, as TIME put it, "the surprisingly workable lyrics of Hey Li Lee Li Lee":
It's not that she won't, young man, it's that she has so many unresolved problems in her personality structure that it makes it very difficult for her to achieve a decision in a time of intensified emotional stress.
What was your first concert? The first record you bought? What song or songs would you put on a “Soundtrack of Berkeley”?
For our Summer Music Issue, we sent those questions and more to selected Cal alumni and other folks in the Berkeley community. Respondents include UC President Mark Yudof, Rolling Stone editor Jason Fine, Arhoolie Records founder Chirs Strachwitz, Mystery Train author Greil Marcus, New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, and Cal Performances director Matias Tarnopolsky. We’d love to hear your answers as well. Go here to read the results of our Summer 2011 Music Questionnaire.
Image: Creative Commons license, some rights reserved by Adriano Agulló
The story begins, oddly and aptly, with Charles Seeger, the future dogmatician of American Popular Front music, who came out to the University of California at Berkeley in 1912 to start a music department. The idea of teaching music in a university was novel enough that Seeger’s work fell under the purview of the Department of Agriculture. He held classes in a YMCA, in the Hearst Mining Building, and in a “smelly old house” on Bancroft Way. With no curriculum in place, Seeger felt free to introduce unorthodox ideas. He presented his theory of “dissonant counterpoint,” with its anticipations of twelve-tone practice, and also exposed students to early music, folk music, popular music, and non-Western traditions.
