John Fahey, Inventive Guitarist
Courtesy of The Los Angeles Times
Saturday, February 24, 2001 - Salem, Oregon -- John Fahey, an eccentric folk guitarist heralded as a unique alchemist of American roots music and a powerful influence on his peers, died Thursday. He was 61.
Mr. Fahey has been hospitalized since last week in Salem, Ore., after complaining of chest pain and, early this week, underwent a heart bypass that led to kidney failure, according to his close friend, guitarist Leo Kottke. Mr.
Fahey slipped into a coma after a second heart surgery on Thursday and was removed from life support hours later.
Mr. Fahey's music defied tidy categorization, with experimentations that mined the blues of the Mississippi Delta, melodies of the Scottish Highlands or the ragas of India.
Born John Aloysius Fahey in Takoma Park, Md., he spent many days of his youth fishing the waters of Chesapeake Bay or listening to music -- both of his parents were accomplished pianists and they took their son to numerous concerts.
In 1957, he heard a Blind Willie Johnson song that mesmerized him and he began combing the south for old blues recordings that would shape his musical mindset. His own foray into recording would become an instant rarity -- famously, only 95 copies were made of his first album, Blind Joe Death, in 1959.
After earning a bachelor's degree from American University in Washington, D. C., he studied at the University of California at Berkeley before getting his master's degree in folklore and mythology at the UCLA. Mr. Fahey's music career blossomed after college and, eventually, he would put out more than three dozen albums. His music was the backdrop to the film Zabriske Point, but, generally, he defied mainstream success. In recent years, his personal life was marked by medical problems, alcoholism and financial woes.
His most loyal following may have been by other guitarists, and his influence can be traced to rock bands like Sonic Youth and Mazzy Star and -- to his frustration -- many in the ranks of New Age artists. "This New Age music is all background music... I've tried to write some because it sells well, but I'm incapable," Mr. Fahey told the Los Angeles Times in 1989.
Mr. Fahey also mentored Kottke, the noted guitarist whose style is perhaps closest in sensibility to his own. "John created living, generative culture," Kottke said yesterday in a statement. "With his guitar and his spellbound witness, he synthesized all the strains in American music."
John Fahey, Guitarist and an Iconoclast, Dies at 61
By Jon Pareles, courtesy of The New York Times
February 25, 2001 - John Fahey, a guitarist who carved out a private corner of Americana only to see it become a foundation of new age music, died on Thursday at Salem Hospital in Salem, Oregon, after undergoing sextuple heart bypass surgery, said Mitch Greenhill, the president of Folklore Productions and Mr. Fahey's executor. Mr. Fahey was 61 and lived in Salem.
Playing a six-string acoustic guitar, Mr. Fahey used country-blues fingerpicking and hymnlike melodies in stately pieces with classical structures. Wordless and unhurried, his music became a contemplation and an elegy, a stoic invocation of American roots, nameless musicians and ancestral memories. Behind its serene surface, the music was both stubborn and haunted.
"I was creating for myself an imaginary, beautiful world and pretending that I lived there, but I didn't feel beautiful," Mr. Fahey said in an interview with The Wire magazine in 1998. "I was mad but I wasn't aware of it. I was also very sad, afraid and lonely."
From the beginning, he was an iconoclast and a maverick. He started two independent labels. In 1959 he founded Takoma Records, which released his own albums, blues albums and recordings by other guitarists including Leo Kottke. And in 1995, he and his manager started Revenant Records, dedicated to what it called American Primitive music.
Although he didn't sing or write lyrics, Mr. Fahey was a voluble author of liner notes. His albums were crammed with parodies of academic analysis and tales of a fictitious blues guitarist, Blind Joe Death, and his disciple, John Fahey, who purportedly "made his first guitar from a baby's coffin." He shared a Grammy Award for the liner notes to the 1997 "Anthology of American Folk Music" (Smithsonian Folkways).
Mr. Fahey was born in Takoma Park, Md., on Feb. 28, 1939. His father and mother both played piano, and his father also played Irish harp. On Sundays, the family went out to hear bluegrass and country music. Mr. Fahey said that hearing Bill Monroe's version of Jimmie Rodgers's "Blue Yodel No. 7" and Blind Willie Johnson's "Praise God I'm Satisfied" changed his life.
He started teaching himself guitar when he was 12. He also began collecting and trading old 78-r.p.m. recordings of hillbilly songs, blues, gospel and jazz, going door to door in the rural South to find them. A fellow collector, Joe Bussard Jr., recorded Mr. Fahey on 78-r.p.m. discs for his Fonotone label, under the name Blind Thomas. In 1959 Mr. Fahey recorded his first album and pressed 100 copies, the first Takoma Records album. One side of the LP was credited to "Blind Joe Death," the other to "John Fahey."
Mr. Fahey studied philosophy at American University in Washington and then at the University of California in Berkeley, where he played at folk clubs in his first paid engagements. In 1963, he recorded his second album, "Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes." He and his partner in Takoma Records, ED Denson, tracked down two Mississippi bluesmen, Bukka White and Skip James, and recorded them for Takoma, bringing them to new audiences on the folk-revival circuit.
Mr. Fahey entered a graduate program in folklore at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1964, and wrote his master's thesis about the Delta bluesman Charley Patton. After he received his degree, Mr. Fahey turned to music full time.
His compositions expanded, embracing the modalities of raga along with dissonances not found in country or blues; he used unconventional tunings and turned some traditional picking patterns backward. He also experimented with tape collages, often to the annoyance of folk fans. Though hippie listeners may have heard his music as psychedelic, he was a bourbon drinker.
Along with his Takoma releases, Mr. Fahey also made albums for Vanguard and Reprise Records. His pristine 1968 solo album of Christmas songs for Takoma, "The New Possibility," sold 100,000 copies initially and has been perennially reissued. Mr. Fahey spent time at a Hindu monastery in India; a 1973 album of extended solo pieces, "Fare Forward Voyager" (Takoma) is dedicated to a guru. Takoma was sold to Chrysalis Records in the mid-1970's, and in the 1980's Mr. Fahey made albums for the Shanachie and Varrick labels. New age performers like the pianist and guitarist George Winston, who made his first album for Takoma, prospered with a more ingratiating solo-guitar style.
Mr. Fahey suffered setbacks in the late 1980's. He divorced his third wife, Melody, and lost his house. He suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and diabetes. His drinking grew worse. For a time, he lived at the Union Charity Mission in Salem. He often supported himself by scouring flea markets for used classical records to sell to collectors. He sometimes pawned his guitars.
But he was rediscovered in the 1990's. Rhino Records compiled a retrospective, "Return of the Repressed," in 1994, and alternative rockers working on "post-rock" instrumental music sought out Mr. Fahey. He sobered up and restarted his career. In 1996 he released "City of Refuge" (Tim/Kerr), followed by two albums in 1997 and one each in 1998 and 2000. He continued to experiment, playing electric and lap steel guitars and freely using electronic effects.
Last year, he published a book of loosely autobiographical stories, "How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life" (Drag City Press).
"I never considered for a minute that I had talent," he wrote in 1994. "What I did have was divine inspiration and an open subconscious."
Herbert Brun, Early Electronic Music Composer, Dies at 82
By Wolfgang Saxon, courtesy of The New York Times
November 16, 2000 - Herbert Brun, a composer who helped introduce the use of electronics and computers in creating music, died on Nov. 6 in Urbana, Ill. He was 82 and lived in Urbana.
Mr. Brun was a professor emeritus of music composition at the University of Illinois School of Music. He formally retired in 1988 but contined to conduct a seminar in experimental composition until his death.
Born in Berlin, Herbert Julius Brun wrote modern music for various instruments. But he also became a central figure in melding electronics and computer technology with music, and his teaching and writings in English and German influenced that development. He left Germany for Palestine in 1936 and studied piano composition in Tel Aviv and at the Jerusalem Conservatory of Music. He took more music courses at Columbia in the late 1940Ős.
After 1950 he lived in Israel and Germany, writing for the theater, radio and television. His work included lecturing on Bavarian Radio in Munich (where he met his wife, Marianne Kortner), and in summer courses in Darmstadt.
He also conducted research in Paris, Cologne and Munich on the use of electro-acoustic and electronic sound production in composing music, and he repeatedly toured the United States. In 1963 he was offered the professorship at Urbana, which allowed him to expand his study of computer systems as another resource in his work.
While continuing to write pieces for traditional instruments, he used computers to generate sound, which he integrated into his compositions. He wrote widely on the function of computers in music and on the place of music in society and politics.
Last year James Levine and the percussionists of the Metropolitan Opera included an unconducted performance of Mr. BrunŐs More Dust(1977) in a free concert series ofcontemporary works by, among others, Varese and Reich.
In Mr. BrunŐs piece, Allan Kozinn reported in The New York Times, three musicians proceeded from tambourine, cymbal and xylophone to larger drums to instruments emitting a glasslike sound and on to snares. In the music the instruments interacted with one another and with taped electronic sounds, Mr. Kozinn wrote. During the 1970Ős and 80Ős Mr. Brun held guest professorships at universities in the United States and Germany.
In addition to his wife, Professor Brun is survived by two sons, Michael and Stefan, both of Urbana, and a sister, Erika Brun of Haifa, Israel.
Dr. Leonard Mandel, Who Revealed Light's Odd Properties, Dies at 73
By James Glantz, courtesy of The New York Times
February 13, 2001- Dr. Leonard Mandel, a physicist whose experiments with light vividly demonstrated the strange, Alice-in-Wonderland quality of reality at the microscopic level, died Friday at his home in Pittsford, N.Y., a suburb of Rochester. He was 73 and an emeritus professor of physics and optics at the University of Rochester.
In experiments over more than four decades, Dr. Mandel performed some of the clearest demonstrations of what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," or the seemingly paradoxical behavior of particles and waves in the realm of the small. The results he found sometimes surprised even experts in the science of quantum mechanics, whose equations describe that behavior.
"Mandel seemed to be especially adept at doing experiments that were flabbergasting," said Dr. William D. Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for experiments involving lasers and atoms.
"Certainly his work has deepened our understanding of quantum mechanics in a really important way," Dr. Phillips said.
Dr. H. Jeff Kimble, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, said that Dr. Mandel used both experiment and theory to probe the quantum, or particle-like, nature of light. "He tried, through a number of pioneering and what came to be landmark investigations," Dr. Kimble said, "to answer the question `What is light?' "
Using "thought experiments" and pure theory, physicists had known since the 1920's and 1930's that a quantum system should have no definite reality until it is observed, and that a measurement itself changes a system irrevocably. Dr. Mandel did those daydreams one better by showing, in a laboratory, that the mere potential for gaining knowledge about a system perturbs it in a starkly measurable way.
He and colleagues also produced some of the most striking experimental proofs that an unmeasured quantum system resides in a state of pure potentiality and cannot be spoken of as having a solid reality - giving a resoundingly negative answer to a quantum version of the question "If a tree falls alone in the forest, does it make any sound?"
To do those experiments, Dr. Mandel devised a spate of new techniques that redefined his field, said Dr. Michael Horne, a physicist at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass. "It gives us new opportunities to play with quantum magic," Dr. Horne said.
Leonard Mandel was born on May 9, 1927, in Berlin and moved to England with his family as a young boy. He received bachelor's degrees in mathematics and physics at the University of London before being awarded a Ph.D. there in 1951. He became a senior lecturer in physics at Imperial College of the University of London before being recruited to Rochester in 1964.
His early scientific work involved studies of cosmic rays, or high-energy particles from space, a type of research that then required making observations high on mountain slopes, where earth's atmosphere is thin. But he soon became interested in optics and quantum mechanics, and those topics became the main focus of his research career.
"He was convinced, like many physicists, that quantum mechanics is the right theory," said Dr. Emil Wolf, a professor of optical physics at the University of Rochester. He said that Dr. Mandel tried to design experiments to test the theory "in spite of the apparent paradoxes."
In experiments with Dr. Kimble in the late 1970's, Dr. Mandel succeeded in demonstrating the "nonclassical," or quantum, nature of laser light by bouncing it off individual sodium atoms. In the next decade, Dr. Mandel began working with special crystals that produced pairs of photons, or particles of light, linked to each other in a ghostly way - a state called entanglement - and became the acknowledged master of the technique.
A focus of many such experiments was the ability of light to behave sometimes like a particle, sometimes like a wave. Scientists knew that placing a light detector into part of the beam could change that behavior, but in 1991, Dr. Mandel and others found that an experimental setup that merely offered the theoretical possibility of a measurement could bring the change about.
He and colleagues later devised a mind-bending laser experiment vividly demonstrating that photons had no definite characteristics - or even any reality - before being measured by a light detector.
"Mandel became not only one of nonclassical light's greatest apostles but also its greatest demonstrator," Dr. Phillips said.
Dr. Mandel is survived by his wife, Jeanne; a daughter, Karen Hanson of Penfield, NY; a son, Barry, also of Penfield; four grandchildren; and his father, Naftali Mandel of London.
In a 1995 interview, Dr. Mandel said that even though his experiments always seemed to verify the "counterintuitive" predictions of quantum mechanics, it remained as philosophically mysterious as ever.
"It's kind of interesting to show that the strange features of quantum mechanics are actually observed," Dr. Mandel said. "We still don't totally understand what it means."
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