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Attilio Mineo: “Gayway to Heaven”
From the album Man in Space with Sounds (1962)
From the depths of the space age comes this remarkable album recorded on the occasion of the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. Visitors were regaled with spoken introductions to the fair’s various exhibits and the decidedly “futuristic” music of Brooklyn-born bandleader and composer Attilio Mineo while being shuttled about in an orb-shaped, transparent vehicle called the “Bubbleator.”
What’s strange about this album is the clash between the buoyant futurist message of the spoken narration and the tone of the music, which ranges from mildly dramatic dissonance to bad-trip cacophony. (Although Mineo’s music can sound kitschy and superficial to our jaded ears, it was likely the most far-out thing that most of the visitors of the fair had ever heard. The music is all the more impressive considering it was written in the early 1950s, making it contemporary with some of the earliest experiments in electronic music.) This ironic contrast between manifest verbal content and latent musical message runs through the entire album.
The track featured here, entitled “Gayway to Heaven,” features the following introduction:
“Our first stop: the gayway to heaven that spins you skyward on the great space wheel: the fabulous gayway, where you guide your own rocket and taxi to tomorrow.”
Priceless! But the ominous music that follows, which hits all the film-music conventions for signaling fear and tension, suggests that the gayway is not all fun and games. Other tracks follow a similar pattern. “Man Seeks the Future” announces that “we look to a new century in which science will scale the heights of creative imagination,” but the music, with dissonant string ostinati, minatory brass bursts, and spacey percussion drenched in tape-delay echo effects, foreshadows the man-made nightmares of Vietnam and Chernobyl. “Boeing Spacearium” is a fitting tribute to a company that would ascend to the top of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned of in 1961. “Century 21” features a somewhat less disturbing soundtrack that might pass for a mildly demented Henry Mancini tune, but still the effect is hardly to instill confidence in the shining future of consumer capitalism. The entire musical span of Man in Space with Sounds is a grim vision of technological dystopia the likes of which may never before have been expressed in such a popularly accessible format.
Played 80 time(s).
June 15, 2011, 4:03pm
