Thomas Andrew Lehrer (born April 9, 1928) is a retired American musician, singer-songwriter, satyrist, and mathematician. He has taught mathematics and musical theater. He is famous for the pithy and funny songs he recorded in the 1950s and 1960s.
Lehrer's work often parodies popular song forms, though he usually creates original melodies while doing so. The notable exception is the The Elements , in which he specifies the names of chemical elements for Major-General's song from Gilbert and Sullivan Pirates of Penzance . Lehrer's early work is usually handled with non-topical subject matter and is famous for his black humor in songs like Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. In the 1960s, he produced a number of songs that dealt with social and political issues that day, especially when he wrote for the US version of the TV show That Was the Week That Was . Regardless of their topical subjects and references, the popularity of these songs has survived; Lehrer quotes a friend's explanation: "Always predict the worst and you will be praised as a prophet."
In the early 1970s, he mostly retired from public performances to spend his time teaching mathematics and music theater at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Video Tom Lehrer
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Tom Lehrer was born in 1928 from a secular Jewish family and grew up on the Upper East Side of New York City. He began studying classical piano at the age of seven, but more interested in popular music of the era. Finally, his mother also sent him to a popular music piano teacher. At this early age, he began writing performance songs, which eventually helped him as a satirical composer and writer in his lecture years at Harvard University, noting the influence of one of his professors Irving Kaplansky, and later at another university.
Lehrer attended Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. He also attended Camp Androscoggin, both as a camper and counselor. Lehrer is considered a child prodigy and entered Harvard College at the age of 15 years after graduating from Loomis Chaffee School. As a graduate student of mathematics at Harvard College, he began writing comic songs to entertain his friends, including "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" (1945). The songs were later named The Physical Revue , a joking reference to the leading scientific journal, The Physical Review .
Maps Tom Lehrer
Academic and military career
Lehrer earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics (magni cum laude) from Harvard University in 1946. He received his MA in the following year, and was sworn in to Phi Beta Kappa. He teaches at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and University of California, Santa Cruz.
He has remained in the Harvard doctoral program for several years, taking time for his music career and working as a researcher at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He was recruited into the US Army from 1955 to 1957, working at the NSA. (Lehrer has declared that he created Jell-O Shot during this time, as a means of avoiding limiting liquor.) This experience became a bait for songs, for example, Wild West Is Where I Want be Be and That Made Friends Being Proud of Being a Warrior . Interestingly, it had been years before Lehrer publicly disclosed it had been assigned to the NSA, because only the 'facts-of' existence were classified at the time: this left him in an implicitly attractive position using nuclear weapons working as a cover story. for something more sensitive.
Despite holding a master's degree in an era when American conscription often lacked a high school diploma, Lehrer served as an enlisted army, achieving the rank of Specialist Third Class (later entitled "Specialist-4" and currently "Specialist"), whom he described as "corporal without a portfolio. " In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time study at Harvard, but in 1965 succumbed to his mathematical dissertation on the subject of fashion in statistics, after working intermittently for 15 years.
From 1962, he taught at the department of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1972, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, teaching an introductory course entitled The Nature of Mathematics to the liberal arts department - "mathematics for tenure," according to Lehrer. He also teaches classes at musical theater. He sometimes carries songs in his lectures, especially those related to the topic.
In 2001, Lehrer taught his last math class (on unlimited topics) and retired from the academic world. He remained in the area, and in 2003 said he was still "hanging out" around the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Mathematical publications
The American Mathematical Society database lists it as the author of two papers:
R. E. Fagen; T. A. Lehrer (March 1958). "Random walk with retaining barrier as applied to biased binary counter". Journal of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics . 6 (1): 1-14. doi: 10.1137/0106001. JSTORÃ, 2098858. MRÃ, 0094856.
T. Austin; R. Fagen; T. Lehrer; W. Penney (1957). "Distribusi jumlah elemen maksimal lokal dalam sampel acak". Sejarah Statistik Matematika . 28 (3): 786-790. doi: 10.1214/aoms/1177706893. MRÂ 0091251.
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Lehrer is mainly influenced by musical theater. According to Gerald Nachman's Serious Funny , Broadway Musicals Let's Face It! (by Cole Porter) makes an initial and lasting impression on him. The Lehrer style consists of parodying various popular song forms. For example, his appreciation of the playlist made him write The Elements , which lists the chemical elements of Gilbert and Sullivan's song Major-General Song .
In the autobiographical volume of the two authors Isaac Asimov In Joy Still Felt, he recounts seeing Lehrer performing at the Boston nightclub on October 9, 1954. Lehrer sang cunningly about Jim taking it from Louise, and Sally from Jim, "... and after a while you collect 'it' is a venereal disease [the song may be I Got It From Sally (in later versions of 'Agnes') ]. you realize he's sneering at every known deviation without using a single mischievous phrase.It is definitely indispensable (in those days) outside the nightclub. "Asimov also recalled a song related to Boston's subway system, station headed to the city from Harvard, observing that the local subjects made the song useless for public distribution. Lehrer was later granted Asimov permission to print the lyrics to a subway song in his book. "I do not often go to nightclubs," said Asimov, "but from all the time I spent, on this occasion I was by far the best time."
Recordings
In 1953, inspired by the success of his performance, Lehrer paid $ 15 for some studio time to record Song by Tom Lehrer . The initial emphasis was 400 copies. At that time, the radio station would not air Lehrer's song because of its controversial subject. He sold his album on campus at Harvard for $ 3 (equivalent to $ 27.00 today), while "some stores near the Harvard campus sold it for $ 3.50, only took minimal markup as a kind of community service. for the same price. " After one summer, he began receiving mail orders from all parts of the country (as far as San Francisco, after The Chronicle wrote an article on the record). Interest in the recording spread from mouth to mouth. Friends and supporters play their recordings for friends, who then also want a copy. Lehrer later recalled, "Since there is no exposure in the media, my song is spreading slowly, like herpes, rather than ebola."
Album - which includes macabre I Hold Your Hand in My Mine , somewhat somewhat obscene... Be Prepared , and Lobachevsky (about tracing mathematicians) - became a successful sect of word of mouth, though self-published and without promotion. Lehrer started a series of concert tours, and recorded a second album in 1959. He released a second album in two versions: the songs were the same, but More than Tom Lehrer was recorded in the studio while
Tour
Lehrer's major breakthrough in England came with honoris causa music doctor, whose University of London conferred with Princess Margaret on December 4, 1957 "in full knowledge," as public orator Professor JR Sutherland stated, "that the Princess is a music connoisseur and a skill performer and differences, her tastes become Catholic, from Mozart to Calypso and from opera to Miss Beatrice's song Lillie and Tom Lehrer. "This encourages significant interest in Lehrer's work and helps secure distributors for his material in the UK. It was there that his music achieved real popularity, as a result of the proliferation of university newspapers referring to the material, and the willingness of the BBC to play its songs on radio (something rare in the United States). By the late 1950s, Lehrer had sold 370,000 records.
It's That Week
In 1960, Lehrer basically retired from a tour in the US. In the early 1960s, he was hired as a resident songwriter for the US The Was That Week That Was (TW3), a satirical television show. The increase in the proportion of its output becomes political, or at least topics, on subjects like education ("New Mathematics"), Vatican Council II ( The Vatican Rag , some people say based on 1910 Spaghetti Rag by Lyons and Yosco), race relationships ( National Brotherhood Week), air and water pollution ( Pollution ) , American militarism ( Submit Marines ), "pre-nostalgia" World War III ( So Long, Mom , aired by Steve Allen), and nuclear proliferation ( Who's Next? and MLL Lullaby ). He also wrote a song that mocks the alleged amorality of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who worked for Nazi Germany before working for the United States. ("As the rocket goes up, who cares where they go down? It's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.) Lehrer does not appear on television - a female vocalist, Nancy Ames, performs his songs, Lehrer then performed the songs on the album That Was The Year That Was (1965) so that, in his words, people could hear the song as they wished.In 1966, the program BBC television from David Frost The Frost Report invites Lehrer to donate some of his classic compositions. The Frost Report is transmitted live, and he records all of his segments at one gig, even though Lehrer is not shown in each edition, the songs are displayed in the appropriate section of each performance.At least two of the offers are songs that are not included in one of his records: reworking Noa  «Coward's That's the End of ari News (with some new lyrics) and a comic explanation of how the UK might adapt to the coming of the decimal currency.
In the spring of 1960, Lehrer toured Australia and New Zealand, performing a total of 33 concerts to earn great praise. But this happened during the time in which he was "banned, censored, mentioned in some parliamentary houses and threatened with arrest," after which he said that it was "the peak of his life." In particular, Be Prepared pulled the brickbats forward in Brisbane from the police chief, who he sang, sparked outrage in Adelaide where he signed the petition that he would not sing five songs in the region. Nevertheless, Lehrer debuted several unreleased songs in Australia including The Masochism Tango that can not be banned.
In 1967, Lehrer was persuaded to do a short tour in Norway and Denmark, where he performed several songs from television programs. The show in Oslo, Norway, on September 10 was recorded on the video tape and aired locally that fall; the program was released on DVD about 40 years later. On the tour, a concert at Studentsforeningen (student association) in Copenhagen, Denmark, where prominent international guests are invited every year, also aired on television; Lehrer commented on stage that he might be the "American revenge for Victor Borge."
In the summer of 1967, Lehrer composed and performed on piano original songs in the Dodge car industry film which was distributed mainly to car dealers and featured on promotional events. Set in a fictional American wild west city, the full title is The Dodge Rebellion Theater presents Ballads For '67 .
Working with Joe Raposo, Lehrer attempted to adapt Sweeney Todd as a Broadway musical to star in Jerry Colonna. They started some songs, but, as Lehrer notes, "Nothing happened, and of course twenty years later Stephen Sondheim beat me."
The record deal with Reprise Records for the album That Was The Year That Was also provided the distribution rights of Reprise for the previous recording, as Lehrer wanted to end his own track record. The Reprise of Songs by Tom Lehrer is a re-stereo recording. This version was not released on the CD, but the songs were published on the live Tom Lehrer Revisited CD. [Live] recordings include the bonus tracks LY and Silent E , two of ten songs written by Lehrer for the children's education series PBS The Electric Company . Lehrer later commented that worldwide record sales under Reprise exceeded 1.8 million units in 1996. That same year, the album Departure from the music world
In the 1970s, Lehrer concentrated on teaching mathematics and musical theater, although he also wrote ten songs for the children's educational television show The Electric Company . His last public performance took place in 1972, on a fundraising tour for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.
There was an urban legend Lehrer surrendered to political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He commented that the gift for Kissinger made an outdated political satire, but denied that he stopped creating satire as a form of protest, insisting that he had quit several years previous. Another false belief is that he was sued for defamation by Wernher von Braun, the subject of one of his songs, and forced to release royalties to von Braun. Lehrer denied this in a 2003 interview.
When asked about the reason for leaving his music career in an interview in a book that accompanied his CD box (released in 2000), he mentioned the lack of interest, dislike for the tour, and boredom by repeating the same song over and over again. He observes that when he is moved to write and perform songs, he does so, and when he does not, he does not, and that after a while he just loses interest. Although Lehrer was "an anti-nuclear hero, the remaining civil rights," and masked his political issues in many of his songs, and although he shared the New Left opposition to the Vietnam war, he disliked the aesthetics of captivity in the 1960s. and stops performing as the movement gains momentum.
Lehrer's music career is short. He shows that he has done just 109 shows and wrote 37 songs for 20 years. Nevertheless, he developed significant followings in the United States and abroad.
Resurrection and re-discography
In 1980 Tom Foolery , a release of his songs made and produced by Cameron Mackintosh, became a hit on the London stage. Though not his instigator, Lehrer finally gave his full support to the stage and updated some of his lyrics for the show (such as Who's Next , where Neiman-Marcus [or in San Francisco, JC Penney] production, not Alabama get the bomb). Tom Foolery contains 27 tracks and produces over 200 productions, including Off-Broadway production in Village Gate, which was screened for 120 shows in 1981.
In conjunction with Tom Foolery's premiere of 1980 at the Criterion Theater in London, Lehrer made rare TV appearances at the BBC Parkinson show, where he sang â € Å"I Got It from Agnes ".
In 1993, Lehrer wrote that Math for closing credits to a Mathematical Sciences Research Institute magazine celebrating proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
On 7 and 8 June 1998, Lehrer appeared publicly for the first time in 25 years at the Lyceum Theater in London as part of a gigantic show Hey, Mr. Producer! celebrating the impresario career of Cameron Mackintosh, who was once the producer of Tom Foolery . The June 8 show was his only performance to date prior to Queen Elizabeth II. Lehrer sings Pigeons Poison in the Park and the latest version of the nuclear proliferation song " Who's Next? . DVD show includes the previous song.
In 2000 a set of CDs in the box, The Remains of Tom Lehrer , released by Rhino Entertainment. This includes the live and studio versions of his first two albums, The Was That Year That Was, songs he wrote for The Electric Company, and some material that had never before been released. It was accompanied by a small book containing the introduction by Dr. Demento and lyrics for all the songs.
In 2010, Shout! The factory launched a reissue campaign, making an old album that is not available digitally. They also took out a CD/DVD combo called The Tom Lehrer Collection , which included the songs he loved the most, plus a DVD featuring a Oslo concert.
Music legacy
The composer, Randy Newman, said of Lehrer, "He is one of the great American songwriters with no doubt, there with everyone, the top people, as a lyricist, and already in the last half of the 20th century. " The singer and comedian Dillie Keane has acknowledged Lehrer's influence on his work.
Lehrer was praised by Dr. Demento as "the best music satiris of the 20th century." Other artists who cite Lehrer as influences include "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose work generally addresses more popular and less technical or political subjects, and educator and scientist H. Paul Shuch, who toured under the stage named Dr. SETI and calls himself "a cross between Carl Sagan and Tom Lehrer: he sings like Sagan and lectures like Lehrer."
Lehrer has commented that he doubts his songs have a real effect on those who have not been critical of the stance: "I do not think this kind of thing affects the unconverted, frankly, this does not even preach to converts; repent... I like to quote Peter Cook, who spoke of the satirical Berlin cabaret in the 1930s, which greatly stopped the rise of Hitler and prevented World War II. "
In 2003 he commented that his political satire was more difficult in the modern world: "Real issues I do not think most people can touch.Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that and not about the important stuff. like the fact that he will not ban landmines... I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush I do not know what kind of song I'm going to write.That's the problem: I do not "I do not want to analyze George Bush and his mastermind, I want to vaporize it. "
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post interviewed Lehrer from a note in a February 2008 phone call. When Weingarten asked if there was anything he could print for the record, Lehrer replied, "Just tell the people that I voted for Obama. "
The game of Lehrer's Letters by Richard Greenblatt from Canada was performed by him at CanStage in Toronto, from January 16 to February 25, 2006. It follows Lehrer's music career, the meaning of several songs, the politics of the time, and Greenblatt own experience with Lehrer music, while playing some Lehrer songs. There are currently no plans for more shows, although low quality audio recordings already exist on the internet.
Styled influences appear to include American political satirist Mark Russell, Canadian comedian and songwriter Randy Vancourt and the English Kit duo and The Widow. British medical satirist Amateur Transplants acknowledged their debt to Lehrer behind their first album, Fitness to Practice . Their songs The Menstrual Rag and The Drugs Song are Lehrer's songs
In 1967, Swedish actor Lars Ekborg, outside Sweden best known for his role in Ingmar Bergman Summer with Monika made an album titled I Tom Lehrers vackra vÃÆ'¤rld (" In the beautiful world of Tom Lehrer "), with 12 Lehrer songs interpreted in Swedish. Lehrer wrote in a letter to producer Per-Anders Boquist that, "Not knowing Swedish, I'm certainly not equipped to judge, but it sounds to me as if Mr. Ekborg is perfect for the songs," along with further praise for Lei Asp pianist for additional unexpected development.
In 1971, Argentine singer Nacha Guevara sang a Spanish version of some of Lehrer's songs for live performances/albums. Este es el aÃÆ' Â ± o que es .
Lehrer's song The Old Dope Peddler was sampled in rapper 2 Chainz's song Dope Peddler in his debut album, Under T.R.U. Story. The following year, Lehrer said he was "very proud" to take a song sample "sixty years after I recorded it." Lehrer went on to describe his official response to the request to use his song: "As the sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I give you motherfuckers permission to do this.Please greet Mr. Chainz, or can I call him 2?"
Lehrer has said about his musical career, "If, after hearing my songs, only one human being is inspired to say something bad to a friend, or maybe to attack a loved one, it will all be worth the time."
Discography
- Studio album The songs by Tom Lehrer (1953), re-recorded in 1966
- Compilation album
- Tom Lehrer Finding Australia (And Vice Versa) (1960; Australia Only)
- Tom Lehrer in Concert (1994: British Compilation)
- Songs & amp; More Songs by Tom Lehrer (1997, US compilation of his first two studio albums with additional tracks)
- The Remains of Tom Lehrer (2000)
- The Tom Lehrer Collection (2010)
Many songs were performed (but not by Lehrer) at It's The Week (Radiola LP, 1981)
The music sheet of many songs was published in Tom Lehrer's Songs Book (Crown Publishers Inc., 1954) Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 54-12068 and Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer: with not enough pictures by Ronald Searle (Pantheon, 1981, ISBNÃ, 0-394-74930-8; Methuen, 1999, ISBNÃ,® 978-0-413-74230-8). Second song, Tom Lehrer's Second Book , not printed, ISBN 978-0517502167.
Lehrer wrote The SAC Song , which was sung in the 1963 A Gathering of Eagles movie.
See also
- Anti-war song list
- Topical tracks
References
External links
- Tom Lehrer's Web site
- Tom Lehrer's Page on The Demented Music Database - including biographies; Song lyrics; discography (and tiring) ; and other miscellanea
- Tom Lehrer's Annotated Song Lyrics, many with MIDI files, collected by Graeme Cree
- "Bob Claster's Funny Stuff" radio program 59 minutes from 1983, with a telephone interview with Tom Lehrer, with a 10 minute follow-up 1989. From KCRW.
- Conversation with Tom Lehrer by Paul D. Lehrman on September 7, 1997
- Little love Tom Lehrer - while the article focuses on music reviews 'Viva La Lehrer', it also discusses Lehrer's hatred towards publicity
- Long-Lost Interview/Web Chat? - provided a brief interview from an interview on January 17, 1999 in which Lehrer rhymed both 'nostrils' and 'orange' (not one another,) and a full interview from June 17, 1997.
- Tom Lehrer's Music Community
- "Tom Lehrer is almost 28 Today" - including some links to YouTube videos
- Tom Lehrer Interview on BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs , July 18, 1980
- Tom Lehrer's Wisdom Channel on YouTube
- Nature April 4, 2018 Tom Lehrer on 90
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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