Skip to main content

Watch 1000 Musicians Play the Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel”

In the 1980s, avant-garde composer, guitarist Glenn Branca began writing symphonies for electric guitars — dozens of them, all playing at once, creating unprecedented psychoacoustic effects — sometimes beautiful harmony, sometimes unsettling dissonance — that reduced Branca himself to tears. “I remember one rehearsal where I actually had to stop and cry,” he once said. “I could not believe that I was getting this sound.” Branca brought together hundreds of electric guitarists and percussionists, but he never realized his ambition of bringing together 2,000 guitarists at once in Paris for celebrations of the year 2000, settling for 100.

These numbers pale next to the largest guitar ensemble on record, 6,346 people in Poland in 2009. In 2018, the year of Branca’s death, another record attempt saw 457 guitarists come together in Canberra, Australia to play AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Not exactly Branca’s cup of tea, but he probably had some hand in the inspiration, if only indirectly. Standing amidst those hundreds of ringing guitars while they banged out the song’s famed opening chords surely made many an Angus Young devotee cry that day.

What, then, would it feel like to stand amidst the cacophony of 1000 musicians — drummers, guitarists, bassists, and singers — bashing out a cover of Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly”? Assembled in 2015 in Italy, the Rockin’1000 was originally intended as a one-off project to accomplish “four miracles,” notes the project’s site: “find one thousand musicians, get them to play simultaneously of the biggest Rock show ever, collect enough money to make it real, convince the Foo Fighters to play a gig in Cesena.” (You can see their impassioned plea to Dave Grohl at the video’s end.)

After accomplishing their goals “with a bang” (the Foo Fighters later played a 3-hour concert dedicated to the project), the core team decided to get “the biggest Rock Band on Earth” back together for an entire concert the following year: “17 songs played all together at Manuzzi Stadium.” The full show has been released on CD and vinyl, but I’d hazard that music written for four people and played by 1000 doesn’t sound quite as interesting on record as in person, where the sheer massiveness might make listeners weep. As the bandleaders themselves admit, “without an audience, who’s been a part of the whole process, Rockin’1000 wouldn’t make sense.”

They’ve performed for audiences, in various configurations, every year since their founding until 2020. See them here play Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.” If you sing or play a rock instrument, you can sign up to be a part of Rockin’1000’s next gig, in Paris, in May 2022, here.

With a band composed of 1000 people, the musicians are also the audience, and the musicians can be anyone. What separates Rockin’1000 from some other celebrations of popular music is that it does position itself as a road to fame and fortune or a way to meet celebrities. “No rankings, no prizes, no winners, no losers,” they write: “everyone can be part of this, either an audience or a member of ‘the biggest Rock Band on Earth.’ No barriers here, all emotions are equal, same intensity.” But what emotions do we experience as a virtual audience of the Biggest Band on Earth?

Related Content: 

Watch a Towering Orchestral Tribute to Kate Bush: A 40th Anniversary Celebration of Her First Single, “Wuthering Heights”

Foo Fighters Perform “Back in Black” with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson: When Live Music Returns

Dave: The Best Tribute to David Bowie That You’re Going to See

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Watch 1000 Musicians Play the Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3vko83X
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey , one of Homer's two great epics, narrates Odysseus' long, strange trip home after the Trojan war . During their ten-year journey, Odysseus and his men had to overcome divine and natural forces, from battering storms and winds to difficult encounters with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the cannibalistic Laestrygones, the witch-goddess Circe and the rest. And they took a most circuitous route, bouncing all over the Mediterranean, moving first down to Crete and Tunisia. Next over to Sicily, then off toward Spain, and back to Greece again. If you're looking for an easy way to visualize all of the twists and turns in  The Odyssey , then we'd recommend spending some time with the  interactive map created by Gisèle Mounzer .  "Odysseus' Journey"  breaks down Odysseus' voyage into 14 key scenes and locates them on a modern map designed by Esri, a company that creates GIS mapping software. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the whole concept of ...
Post a Comment
Read more