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Sam
Cooke with the Soul Stirrers
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Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964 /
Sam Cook Greatest Hits /
16 Most Requested Songs
Mozart: 46 Symphonies
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The Piano Concertos /
Piano Sonatas
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The Marriage of Figaro
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Sam Cooke and
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
By Deborah D. Moseley
This year, 2006, marks the landmark
birthdays of two of music's most celebrated legends:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) his 250th, and Sam
Cooke (1931-1964) his 75th. It may seem a bit
unorthodoxed to juxtapose a classical musician with a
pop/r&b musician, but it's amazing: they were both born
in the first month of the year, January, and died in the
last month of the year, December. They were both in
their early thirties when they died. Even more amazing,
they both had similar musical modus operandi.
They were both precocious boys: The
'wunderkind' Mozart began composing music as early as
age three. He was also an accomplished pianist. His
musical listening skills were impeccable, for he could
listen to a piece of music, then write the entire score
exactly as it was performed. Sam (no disrespect- it's
how we refer to American popular culture icons, i.e.,
when you're really famous your surname isn't necessary.)
began grooming himself for a performing career at the
age of seven.
According to the DVD
Sam Cooke:
Legend, his brother said that Sam would perform
before a make-believe audience, refining his stage
presence, elocution and vocal skills because he just
knew he was going to be a famous singer. At such a
young age, he had the intrinsic knowledge that working
the proverbial nine-to-five job was monetarily vacuous.
Some people really are born with that special knowledge.
They both perfected their music
mentally first. Sam knew exactly how he wanted his
songs arranged and performed before he entered the
recording studio. Mozart's compositions were already
composed before he transferred them to the manuscript
paper. Having done that, they both produced music that
was carefully crafted, refined and balanced. Mozart's
piano technique and Sam's vocal technique were both
pristine, articulate, ethereal and poignantly
expressive, e.g., Sam's "You Send me," "Cupid" and
"Wonderful World" (in my opinion, this is the greatest
song he ever wrote.
As a six year-old, I would get
misty-eyed every time my parents played that record.
Over forty years later, it still has the same effect.),
and Mozart's
Piano Sonatas, K.330 and K.333 in C Major
and B-flat Major respectively. Conversely, they could
also express a more dramatic, intense, aggressive and
audacious persona.
Listen to Sam's 'Live at Harlem
Square'. I didn't know Sam could 'get down' like that.
WOW! No wonder he is credited with inventing soul
music. It definitely foreshadows the raw abrasiveness
of such great soul masters as Otis Redding, Wilson
Pickett and Sam and Dave. Mozart's
Piano Concerto in d
minor, K.466, and
Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 457,
present a somber, tragic and ominous depth of expression
that is not present in his major-key works.
In the historical novel
Sacred and
Profane: A Novel of the Life and Times of Mozart by
David Weiss, a book I bought when I was in high school
and still have, though it is badly worn from repeated
voracious reading, Mozart's father, Leopold, heard the
concerto for the first time and wondered if his son had
really suffered that much. Perhaps Mozart was harboring
a private pain that only his music could express. Music
really is a language.
Both Sam and Mozart could write music
on social issues, yet be subtle about it so as not to be
inflammatory. Sam's "Chain Gang" is a protest song
about the brutality of the capitalistic exploitation of
free prison labor, but it is cleverly masked as a pop
song. Mozart's opera, "The Marriage of Figaro," is
based on a play written by the French playwright Beaumarchais. The play protests the oppression imposed
upon the hopelessly impoverished French masses by Louis
XVI and Marie- Antoinette. The play was banned, but
Mozart managed to persuade Emperor Josef, the brother of
the embattled Marie- Antoinette, to allow him to compose
and produce the opera by omitting the references which
the monarch found objectionable.
Both Sam and Mozart believed that a
musician should be treated and paid as a professional,
not a disdained manservant. The egregious exploitation
of musicians, many of whom were grievously underpaid or
not paid at all, persisted on both sides of the Atlantic
in 18th century Europe and 20th century America.
Regrettably, Mozart never received the financial
compensation he was entitled to from his prolific
genius. Sam, however, fared much better: He signed a
lucrative contract with RCA Records, which gave him
ownership and creative control of all the songs he
wrote. He was also able to own a publishing company and
two record labels to which he signed- on new artists.
He was one of the first artists to realize that the real
wealth in the recording industry lies in ownership.
Both the deaths of Sam and Mozart
generated conspiracy rumors. For years after Mozart's
death, it was rumored that he was killed by his rival,
Salieri, as superbly dramatized in the movie 'Amadeus'.
(It's dismaying that there's no move about Sam after all
these years.) The rumor has long been put to rest, but
the suspicions surrounding Sam's demise have never been
resolved.
Both the music of Sam and Mozart are
timeless and still relevant after all these years, which
makes their music both classical. Their prodigious and
innovative geniuses were compacted into their short
lives: "Not how long, but how well." Of both of them,
it has been said that had they lived longer, they would
have taken music to such levels that stagger the
imagination. We can't have what they might have been,
but we still have what they definitely were, and that is
definitely staggering.
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Deborah D. Moseley
i reside in charleston, s.c.,
where i began my piano study at the age of seven
and have taught music education at the elementary,
middle and high school levels for over 20 years. i
have a bachelor of music degree in piano performance
and a master of arts in teaching degree, both from
winthrop college in rock hill, s.c. currently, after
having neglected playing the piano for over ten
years, i am taking a hiatus from teaching so i can
devote more time to rebuilding my technique and
repertoire. my past performances have
included a solo concert at the college of charleston,
and at the sottile theatre here in charleston i
presented the piano works of the black composers r.
nathaniel dett and samuel coleridge- taylor for a
black history month celebration. as a child, my
parents played a variety of music genres in the
home: jazz, r&b and classical, so i appreciate all
styles of music. however, when it comes to
performing it, i'm partial to classical; it's just
'me'. i developed and interest in writing after i
read 'the autobiography of malcolm x' and when i'm
inspired, i enjoy writing about music, history and
politics. some of my favorite hobbies are reading
and doll collecting. |
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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update 2 March 2012
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