to a friend unknown

Track Listings

1. turning the earth
2. american town
3. freeway
4. hard bargain
5. #7
6. anyway
7. vertigo
8. the long walk
9. there you go
10. busride
11. hurry
12. did you hope

Editorial Reviews
From the Label
From Desert Desolation to Brooklyn Blight, Robert Becker Takes a Hard Road

Wasting by the roadside like tire treads torn from life passing by are the remnants of relationships Robert Becker explores in his self-released To A Friend Unknown. Becker knows a thing or two about the waste wrought of devastating endings, the freshest of which was the recent dissolution of the Gin Blossoms, whom with he had recorded.

Becker's songs read like pages off of a road trip diary of love getting lost on the way home to Brooklyn from the Arizona desert via a bad patch in Omaha. The title, To A Friend Unknown is amplified and darkened in its subtitle: 'For all the friends found & lost; known and unknown'. Still, one song offers promise of new friends yet to be found and this is Robert Becker's on-ramp to explore new territory.

Becker is best known for his piano fills on the Gin Blossoms' hit, "Until I Fall Away" written by Robin Wilson and recorded on "New Miserable Experience". On To A Friend Unknown, he sings and plays acoustic guitar and keyboards, accompanied by Whiskeytown's Mike Daly on lap steel, organ and electric guitar, Kenneth Schalk on percussion and five-string fretless bass, and Mike Bearle on dobro. Now touring behind the release, he is accompanied by Alex Tobias on fiddle.

Becker's vocal qualities have been likened to those of Gordon Lightfoot, and he refers to himself as a folk singer. This record, though, has more in common with Son Volt's cryptic twilight allusions and the production qualities of a Tom Petty record stripped to primary colors and bleached by the sun.

Becker previously has played and recorded on "Personality Crisis", with Arizona rockers The Luminarios (Houses In Motion 1992), the Omaha band Shovelhead, and Brooklyn pop outfit The Quandaries. He has also recorded some piano work for the recently released Sand Rubies' CD, "Return Of The Living Dead". Recent tour dates have presented him with such acts as Richard Buckner, 6 String Drag, and Sean Lennon among others

About the Artist
native brooklynite robert becker grew up playing piano as well as a variety of instruments. after high school he headed west to the fertile musical ground of northern california, working in several seminal outfits as a keyboardist until hooking up with the gin blossoms from tempe, az in 1991. his piano work found its way onto their multi platinum `new miserable experience' release (A&M records, 1992) as well as the luminarios' `personality crisis' (houses in motion, 1992)on which he also cowrote... read more

Album Description
emerging folk/alternative singer songwriter. gray matte packaging with handwritten text and design and layout by c.o.m.a. graphics

to a friend unknown

to a friend unknown, Music, Robert Becker

Average customer rating: A Timely Performance Outstanding; a soon to be classic Uninspired tedium Holocaust Cantata: A Five Star Work of Art An excerpt from my liner notes...

Holocaust Cantata Manufacturer: Albany Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music Similar Items: Composers of the Holocaust: Ghetto Songs & Instrumental Works MUSIC FROM THE HOLOCAUST Rossini: Petite Messe solennelle Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford Historical Monographs) Forbidden Music: Music from Theresienstadt ASIN: B000031VRF Release Date: 1999-11-23

Tracks:

1. The Prisoner Rises
2. Singing Saved My Life
3. Song Of The Polish Prisoners
4. The Execution Of The Twelve
5. In Buchenwald
6. A State Of Seperation
7. The Train
8. Singing From Birth To Death
9. The Striped Ones
10. There's No Life Like Life At Auschwitz
11. Tempo di Tango
12. Letter To Mom
13. Song Of Days Now Gone
14. Passacaille For Cello And Piano
15. Even When God Is Silent
16. A Child's Journey: An Accidental Meeting
17. A Child's Journey: I Once Had A Friend
18. A Child's Journey: There Are No Stars In The Sky
19. Is Not A Flower A Mystery?
20. We Remember Them

Album Description

McCullough discovered the material within the vast Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection in the museum's archives. Kulisiewicz himself had performed as a kind of camp troubador during his own incarceration at Sachsenhausen, and, after the war, spent several years interviewing fellow survivors about music in the camps, gathering together the scattered remnants of this music.

As McCullough painstakingly sifted through this material-much of which was uncatalogued-the arresting melodies and compelling testimonies that make up the Holocaust Cantata gradually began to emerge. "I wanted the Cantata to speak with a sense of immediacy," says McCullough, explaining his decision to set the choral texts and spoken testimonies in English, and his hope is that the piece may "transform statistics into people in the minds of the Cantata's listeners, and perhaps be a part of making it more difficult for such a horror ever to occur again." The Washington Post, reviewing the world premiere in March 1998, called it "an experience that should linger long in the audience's memory and should be regularly revived."

Customer Reviews:

A Timely Performance.......2001-11-18

Outstanding; a soon to be classic.......2000-05-04

Uninspired tedium.......2000-04-28

Holocaust Cantata: A Five Star Work of Art.......2000-01-07

An excerpt from my liner notes..........1999-11-25

Notes on the Music

It is well-known that during the Holocaust inmates wrote music while incarcerated in concentration camps. Much of it has since been recorded. At Theresienstadt, for instance-the infamous "Paradise Ghetto"-the Nazis organized an orchestra made up of young musicians who had studied under such luminaries as Leos Janacek and Arnold Schoenberg. Most of these musicians, among them such promising students as Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann, perished during the Holocaust, leaving behind but a few pieces, composed under duress and co-opted by the Nazis for their own propaganda purposes. What might they have eventually accomplished had they survived? Such classical music-beautiful as it is-was the product of formally trained musicians. What about the music of the common man-music embraced by the whole community and passed secretly by aural transmission-music that carried with it powerful words revealing different aspects of camp life, or expressing the inmates' innermost feelings, of mourning, or resistance, or patriotism? Was there other Holocaust music, akin to the spirituals that sprang from slavery in America, that spoke with the same startling immediacy to express the agony of the victims of the Nazi regime?...

McCullough's [quest to answer this question] began with a call to Bret Werb, musicologist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who revealed the existence of the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection in the museum archives. Kulisiewicz had traveled about Europe during the postwar period collecting and preserving what he could of the music that had emerged from the Holocaust concentration camps, but little was known about the music itself.

McCullough's first task, then, was to immerse himself in the collection, playing through the hundreds of tunes. He was encouraged to find that they contained some compelling melodies, and for the first time he began to wonder whether a choral cantata-perhaps reflecting the role of music in the camps or evoking the daily lives of these people-might emerge from the material. But he still had no idea what lay within the accompanying text.

At some point, someone had added a rough, English-language index to the collection, but the materials themselves were mostly in Polish. Marcin Zmudzki, a young Pole, was engaged to sift through the mountain of texts. McCullough told the translator that he was interested in anything that had to do with camp life, especially as it related to music. As he recalls, "It was my good fortune that not only was Marcin an excellent translator, but also he had a sense for poetry and thus grasped, very quickly, the type of material I was seeking."

In addition to music, Kulisiewicz also collected interviews, articles, and letters that had anything to do with camp life. With this wealth of material, McCullough decided to place between each musical arrangement readings that also spoke of life in the camps. After considering and rejecting literally hundreds of documents, he finally decided that he had what he needed from the archives. But in a sense, the real work was just beginning. "Because I wanted the Cantata to speak with a sense of immediacy," says McCullough, "I thought it should be sung in English. But before I could arrange a single note of it, I needed to have singable translations. Here I employed the talents of lyricist Denny Clark, who at first worked with Marcin, getting a word by word translation. Knowing which words appear on which notes is important in keeping the overall impact of the song." A trained singer himself, Clark was able to make transliterations to ensure that the best vowels for singing fell on the proper notes, all while remaining faithful to the original text. It was an immensely complicated task....

A few words about the structure of the Cantata. As you listen you should not look for a plot, as such. Because each song and reading represents a different person, a different place, and a different time in the Holocaust experience, you should be wary about viewing the entire piece as a streaming narrative. Nonetheless, certain common truths will begin to emerge, and no doubt others will come to you with each successive hearing. Among these is the certainty that these are nakedly honest responses to the most unthinkable of acts. Sometimes the responses are jarring; who could find humor amid such horror? And yet humor-albeit dark in nature-undoubtedly exists within this work. Nevertheless the inmates' responses never sink to the level of triteness. For them, music functioned as something much more than just a light in the darkness; its very existence was a form of spiritual resistance in an environment where such resistance risked instant extermination.

McCullough's hope is that this work may "transform statistics into people in the minds of the Cantata's listeners, and perhaps be a part of making it more difficult for such a horror ever to occur again." In the end, for me, the work flows inexorably back to its source: it is the voice of humanity, crying out to be heard.

Average customer rating:

More Songs My Father Taught Me Manufacturer: Hyperion UK ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD All Works by Sullivan | Sullivan, Arthur | ( S ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Vocal & Song | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General Contemporary | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Romantic (c.1820-1910) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Vocal & Song | Romantic (c.1820-1910) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Allen, Thomas | ( A ) | Featured Performers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Folk | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Modern & 20th Century | Historical Periods | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Folk Songs | Songs & Lieder | Vocal Non-Opera | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Classical | Imports | Stores | Music Similar Items: Songs My Father Taught Me Sir Thomas Allen sings Selected Songs On the Idle Hill of Summer: Song Cycles & Songs by Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Quilter, Peel Songs We Forgot to Remember A Treasury of English Song ASIN: B00009L817 Release Date: 2003-08-12

Tracks:

1. Water O' Tyne
2. I Heard You Singing
3. Will You Go With Me?
4. A Cradle Song
5. A Song Of Sleep
6. The Green Hills O' Somerset
7. Mountain Lovers
8. I'll Sing Thee Songs of Araby
9. Mother Machree
10. Roses Of Picardy
11. There's A Long, Long Trail A-Winding
12. The Old Brigade
13. Yes! Let Me Like A Soldier Fall
14. Because
15. Love's Old Sweet Song
16. Star Of God
17. Friend O' Mine
18. Simon The Cellarer
19. Time To Go
20. Echo
21. The Songs Of Today
22. Just A-Wearyin' For You
23. Down By The Sally Gardens
24. Orpheus With His Lute
25. Kashmiri Song
26. In The Gloaming
27. The Star Of The County Down
28. A Perfect Day
29. She Moved Thro' The Fair

Average customer rating:

Greatest Voices of Bolshoi Manufacturer: Melodiya ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD All Works by Borodin | Borodin, Alexander | ( B ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music General | Delibes, Léo | ( D ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Glinka | Glinka, Mikhail | ( G ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Massenet | Massenet, Jules | ( M ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Mussorgsky | Mussorgsky, Modest | ( M ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music General | Saint-Saëns, Camille | ( S ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Tchaikovsky | Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich | ( T ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Verdi | Verdi, Giuseppe | ( V ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Wagner | Wagner, Richard | ( W ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General Contemporary | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Vocal & Song | Romantic (c.1820-1910) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music Romances | Classical (c.1770-1830) | Historical Periods | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Romantic (c.1820-1910) | Historical Periods | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music French | Languages | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music German | Languages | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Italian | Languages | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Russian | Languages | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music ASIN: B000001HDN Release Date: 1996-11-12

Average customer rating:

To a Friend Unknown Robert Becker Manufacturer: China Grade ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music General | Rock | Styles | Music ASIN: B00005YLM9 Release Date: 1999-09-07

Tracks:

1. Turning the Earth
2. American Town
3. Freeway
4. Hard Bargain
5. #7
6. Anyway
7. Vertigo
8. Long Walk
9. There You Go
10. Busride
11. Hurry
12. Did You Hope

Average customer rating: A Glimpse of the Celestial Excellent debut by Passionate American

to a friend unknown Robert Becker Manufacturer: China Grade ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music General | Folk | Styles | Music General | Folk | Indie Music | Stores | Music ASIN: B00000JB9R Release Date: 1999-06-01

Tracks:

1. turning the earth
2. american town
3. freeway
4. hard bargain
5. #7
6. anyway
7. vertigo
8. the long walk
9. there you go
10. busride
11. hurry
12. did you hope

Album Description

Customer Reviews:

A Glimpse of the Celestial.......1999-11-24

Excellent debut by Passionate American.......1999-06-28

Average customer rating:

The Holy City: Favorite Inspirational Hymns and Songs Manufacturer: Heritage Recordings ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD All Works by Gounod | Gounod, Charles | ( G ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music All Works by Handel | Handel, George Frideric | ( H ) | Featured Composers, A-Z | Classical | Styles | Music General | Baroque (c.1600-1750) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Chamber Music | Forms & Genres | Romantic (c.1820-1910) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music Vocal & Song | Romantic (c.1820-1910) | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Baroque (c.1600-1750) | Historical Periods | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Italian | Languages | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Oratorios | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Oratorios | Vocal Non-Opera | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music Christian Contemporary Music | Christian & Gospel | Styles | Music ASIN: B000009MH7 Release Date: 1997-12-16

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