Victor Coelho is Professor of Music at Boston University, and from 2007 to 2011, was Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education. He is a graduate of Berkeley (BA) and UCLA (PhD), and a Fellow of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. It's possible to purchase college research papers on our site in case you need a project done.
As musicologist and performer he works primarily in the areas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian music, as well as popular music, media, and technology. As a specialist on popular music, he is interested in blues, rock history, improvisation, and performance issues, and has appeared on HBO, the CBC, WGBH, and MTV as a specialist on the music of the Rolling Stones and the blues. His books include Music and Science in the Age of Galileo (Kluwer), The Manuscript Sources of 17th-Century Italian Lute Music (Garland), Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela (Cambridge), and The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar. Current projects include (with Keith Polk) a history of Renaissance instrumental music, and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones.
As a lutenist he has performed extensively throughout N. America and Europe, he is co-director of the group Il Furioso, which specializes in Italian music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In 2000 he received the Noah Greenberg Award given by the American Musicological Society for outstanding contributions to the performance of early music. His recordings as lutenist and director appear on the Stradivarius and Toccata Classics labels, and he is also the founder and guitarist in the Rooster Blues Band, which has released two albums, Come on in my Kitchen and Bluestoons on the UCM label, and tours regularly with Chicago blues singer Lou Pride.
For fifty years, the Rolling Stones have symbolized the elemental and subversive side of rock, but it is the manner in which the group has been interpreted by filmmakers—more than their recordings—that has drawn the familiar sketch of the Stones as licentious Romantics, scarred cultural critics, and poetic, but road-weary, troubadours. Many filmmakers have reified these images, including Godard, Lindsey-Hogg, Woodhead, the Maysles, Frank, Ashby, Puicouyoul, and, Scorsese. And while their work spans the history of the group, the official image remains the earliest one, succeeding representations being variations on a master narrative: an exilic, protean quality derived from the migratory aspects of the blues; a revolutionary stance that is neither political nor constituent; a sharp intuition about the uncharted sexual and gender boundaries of the day; and a deep–seated subversion powered by their identification with the raw music of American blues and country.
As the first filmmaker of the Stones from 1965 to 1973, Peter Whitehead is responsible for embedding these themes deeply and durably, creating the foundational image of the band. Whitehead used the group to provide a commentary of a destabilized modern culture in Britain emerging in the 1960s, which he extended through other cinema verité projects involving Allan Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix, and Syd Barrett. Using unpublished correspondence between Whitehead, Mick Jagger, and the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, I will examine the history of the first film of the Stones, Whitehead’s Charlie is My Darling, chronicling the group’s tour to Ireland in 1965. The documents provide an insider’s tale of music mediated by the new commercialism of pop culture, of Whitehead’s idealized notion of pop music confronting the reality of its economics, and above all, Whitehead’s interest in the power of cinema verité as the means to capture a rapidly emerging rock aesthetic.
