It’s quite a jolt when you’re watching a marathon of The Office and you catch the last three episodes and then it goes right back to Season One, Episode One.
Another observation: I’ve no idea how people deal with commercials on teevee. Lord, commercials suck.
The birthday of the great Jerry Goldsmith was the other day, on the 10th. And honestly, Goldsmith deserves a more poetic tribute than I’ve got in me right now, because it’s late in the work week and I’m tired and as I write this I have already consumed half of a beverage, if you take my meaning. So I’ll just let a selection of his music speak for itself. Luckily, Jerry Goldsmith was one of the greats of 20th century music (not just film music, but music in general!), and this is probably my favorite score of his. Here is a suite from The Wind and the Lion.
By the way, The Wind and the Lion is a good entry in the “What movie has the best closing line?” sweepstakes: “Is there not one thing in your life that is worth losing everything for?”
Nkeiru Okoye was born in New York City in 1972 to a Nigerian father and an African-American mother. She graduated from Oberlin in 1993, which is the same year I graduated Wartburg College. Okoye is almost entirely contemporary with me. I am less than a year older than she is. According to the bio on her website, Okoye has had an already-amazing career as a composer…and I only heard a piece of hers for the first time yesterday.
Sigh. There is so much wonderful music out there to hear! Would that I could do just that, and nothing else. Well, writing too. And photography. And….
I found this piece almost entirely accidentally on YouTube, and I listened to it over my lunch break yesterday. It’s one of the most refreshing things I’ve ever heard, containing a mixture of styles and genres and techniques that blend together into something wonderfully old and new. Looking up Okoye’s work and trying to learn what her compositional style is, I found this profile which includes this:
With an output containing a plethora of orchestral, band, choral, and chamber works as well as operas composed over a career spanning nearly 30 years, Dr. Okoye has written across nearly every musical medium. Her genre-bending compositions draw from Classical, Gospel, Folk, Jazz, R&B, and African diasporic music, and are often infused with African American improvisatory techniques.
I don’t know how much of this piece is improvisatory, but you can certainly hear all of those influences in this piece’s pages. I thought this was wonderful, and I hope you will, too.
Here we go again! No, I’m not watching. I haven’t actually watched a Super Bowl since Seahawks-Broncos, and that was eleven years ago. (And I doubt I’d have watched had the Bills made it, in all honesty. That would be way too stressful!) Anyway, here’s some random trivia if you want to show off to your friends at your Super Bowl party.
The highest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 75 points, in Super Bowl XXIX (49ers 49, Chargers 26).
The lowest combined point total in a Super Bowl is 16 points, in SB LIII (Patriots 13, Rams 3).
The Patriots scored the fewest points to win a Super Bowl in SB LIII, with 13.
The Eagles scored the most points in losing a Super Bowl in SB LVII, with 35.
The oldest existing venue to have hosted a Super Bowl is the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. The oldest existing still-used NFL stadium to host a Super Bowl is the Superdome in New Orleans (which is hosting today’s game, as luck would have it!)
The Rose Bowl is the last stadium to be played in a stadium that was not home to an NFL team.
The Rose Bowl is also the only one of the four venues still standing from the Buffalo Bills’ run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances.
According to The Simpsons, Homer grew up rooting for the Denver Broncos.
The Baltimore Ravens and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the only teams undefeated in multiple Super Bowl appearances, at 2-0 each.
The other unbeaten teams in the Super Bowl are the Jets and Saints, both 1-0.
The current longest period between one team’s multiple Super Bowl victories is 50 years, by the Chiefs (wins in SB IV and then LIV).
The Jets have gone the longest since their last Super Bowl appearance, at 56 years and counting (last appearance, SB III).
The 2024 Chiefs enter today’s game as the only two-time defending Super Bowl champion to ever reach a third consecutive Super Bowl. If they win they will be the first-ever “three-peat” champion.
Before the Chiefs this year, the 1990 49ers and the 1994 Cowboys are the closest any team has come to pulling off the elusive three-peat. Both those teams reached the NFC Championship before losing.
The Eagles become just the fifth team to reach the Super Bowl with the NFL’s leading rusher (Saquon Barkley) on the roster. The others were the Cowboys in XXVII and XXVIII (Emmitt Smith), the Denver Broncos in XXXIII (Terrell Davis), and the Seattle Seahawks in XL (Shaun Alexander).
In possible bad news for the Chiefs, teams winning 15 or more regular season games are only 2-5 in ending the season with a Super Bowl win.
In possible bad news for the Eagles, only one team has reached the Super Bowl scoring 50 or more points in the Conference Championships, the 1990 Bills who won the AFC Championship Game that season 51-3. They proceeded to lose the Super Bowl to the Giants, 20-19. The Eagles scored 55 points in this year’s NFC Championship.
Super Bowl XLI (Indianapolis Colts versus Chicago Bears) featured the matchup whose two cities were closest together.
Last year’s Super Bowl, LVIII, played at Allegiant Stadium near Las Vegas, had the lowest in-game attendance in Super Bowl history, at a reported 61, 629 people, other than SB LV, played under COVID restrictions at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa (Buccaneers 31, Chiefs 9).
Not one of the 14 highest-scoring single-season teams in NFL history has gone on to win the Super Bowl that season.
As of today, prior to kickoff of SB LIX, there has never been a punt returned for a touchdown in a Super Bowl.
Only the Dolphins (SB VI), Rams (SB LIII), and Chiefs (SB LV) have failed to score a touchdown in the Super Bowl.
There has never been a shutout in the Super Bowl.
By the NFL’s quarterback rating system. Ben Roethlisberger has the worst rating by a Super Bowl winning quarterback in history, when he won SB XL for the Steelers despite a rating of 22.6.
Matt Ryan’s rating of 144.1 in SB LI is the best performance by the losing quarterback in Super Bowl history (Patriots 34, Falcons 28).
Buffalo invented the single best food to watch football with, so why the NFL continues to refuse to grease their path to a Super Bowl victory is beyond me. (This one may not be an actual trivia item.)
That’s all! Enjoy the game, or whatever you end up watching instead of the game!
Today John Williams turns 93. His music stands as one of the undisputed bright spots and creative forces behind my own life; to recall a time in my life when I was not keenly aware of his music I have to dig back to memories that are mostly hazy and almost sepia-tinged. I don’t remember when exactly my sister took me to see Star Wars–it wasn’t in May of that year, it was later, probably sometime in the summer, when it came out we were still living out our one year in Wisconsin and then we moved to Oregon, which is where we saw it–but I’m pretty sure it was well before my late-September birthday, so I was still 5 years old when I first got my serious exposure to John Williams. And he’s been there ever since. It sometimes feels like I’ve kind of let him down as a fan, since I haven’t heard a lot of his post-2000 work beyond snippets here and there, but then I stop and re-cast that as seeing it as a gift to myself: I have many hours of new John Williams music to hear.
Below is the text of the post I wrote on this date a year ago, when Williams’s birthday coincided with Thursday so I was able to use it as the genesis of my weekly Something For Thursday music post. I’m reposting it now, because Williams is great on ANY day of the week!
Here is a wonderful tribute by the author of a forthcoming biography of Maestro Williams, and here below is my post from a year ago.
John Williams turns 93 today…and he’s still working.
In his honor, let’s listen to some of his work!
Williams won a Grammy just the other night for this: “Helena’s Theme” from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s a typically gorgeous theme that manages to evoke Marion’s Theme from all the way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark without echoing it or quoting it.
Here’s something that vexed film music fans for years: the unavailability of the End Credits music that actually was heard in the film of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The suite that appeared on the album was nice enough, but the film version is longer, quoting several of the movie’s themes as the last scene in the Indian village plays out. And when we finally go to credits and the Raiders March fires up, it actually fades out in the repeat (at the 3:32 mark) so that we can here a brief quote of Short Round’s Theme. Williams’s ability to put seemingly disparate themes together into an actually cohesive whole is always amazing.
Going back even farther, here’s one of Williams’s earliest contributions to film music: his score to the law-school drama The Paper Chase. Yes, it sounds a bit dated, but you can absolutely hear the fingerprints of the Williams-to-come in this cue, the End Credits suite from that movie:
It’s the lot of most film composers to have to turn in really good work for movies that…aren’t. Hook is, for me, one of the few misfires in Steven Spielberg’s output; it fell in that weird late 80s-early 90s era when Spielberg hadn’t really transitioned into the finer drama work that was to come, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t entirely in the magic-and-fantasy flicks he was still doing. But along comes Williams with this amazing score, and this almost perfect tone-poem-in-miniature:
When Williams’s score to 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrived, a lot of people were a bit befuddled by that score’s mix of darkness and lyrical love music. One person quipped on some message board or someplace, “It sounds like Nixon on a date.” That was pretty funny, but it seemed to highlight the fact that Williams’s score to Oliver Stone’s Nixon has never been particularly beloved. And that interests me, because I have always found it one of his most fascinating scores. He brings just the right blend of paranoid darkness and throwback Americana to Stone’s film (which I consider a masterpiece). Nixon has some of Williams’s most powerful and most overlooked music.
I do have to make an admission: I’m not always a big fan of Williams when he is scoring comedies or really light movies. For whatever reason, I always feel better when there’s a tinge of darkness in Williams’s music. (I can live quite happily without hearing Home Alone again, to be honest.) But in this wonderful march for Spielberg’s early big-budget misfire 1941, you can tell that John Williams has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. This is absolutely delightful.
I’ve never seen Seven Years in Tibet. I couldn’t even tell you right now what it’s about without Googling it, other than…a guy is in Tibet for seven years. But I love this theme:
Finally–and I’m only ending this here because let’s be honest, I could go on a lot longer about John Williams and how much he’s meant to me and to my creative life throughout my years, but I actually have to eat dinner tonight–here’s a suite of another of what seems to me an underrated score, which is all the more surprising to me because every time I listen to it, I’m dazzled anew by how new this sounds, even for a throwback score. It’s Catch Me If You Can.
Buddy Holly died February 3, 1959, 66 years ago. That’s an entire lifetime, almost…possibly several lifetimes. Had he lived to this day, he would be 88 years old, certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
And he didn’t die alone. Richie Valens, born just three months before my mother, would be 83 now. The Big Bopper was the “old man” of the group who got on that plane; he’d be 94 now had he lived.
I went to college just an hour or so’s drive from Clear Lake, IA, where those three men boarded a small plane to make the journey to their next tour stop, and where the plane crashed in a field just a short distance away. The lore surrounding the crash–Valens “winning” his seat on the plane in a coil-flip, bandmate Waylon Jennings wisecracking to Holly about the plane crashing (a comment that would haunt him the rest of his life)–has taken on a life of its own over the years, especially the sense of what rock music history might have been had those three artists continued.
Certainly popular culture has never forgotten that moment. The sense of a world shifting informs all of George Lucas’s amazing American Graffiti, a world shifting when it had never settled in the first place. A biopic of Valens, La Bamba, came along in the 80s, introducing the world to Lou Diamond Philips and giving the band Los Lobos its biggest hit, a cover of the Valens title tune. (I remember the film’s rather heavy-handed plane-crash imagery throughout, which led Roger Ebert to note that the film’s version of Valens would have been surprised to not die in a plane crash.)
I never made it out to the crash location, which is like many such places a pilgrimage spot. I know that since it’s in the middle of a field you can’t just drive up to it; you have to park and then walk in. It’s a corn field, though, so it’s all straight lines. Just east of the crash site, Interstate 35 lies. I don’t know if you can see the site from that road, but I’ve driven by it quite a few times. It’s quite a thing, isn’t it–one of the most somber moments in the history of popular music is now the kind of place where a roadside historical marker stands.
The biggest cultural artifact of that awful day in Clear Lake, IA, is probably the eight-minute long masterpiece of impressionistic lyric energy that Don McLean penned about it. I don’t know if McLean coined the phrase “the day the music died” to refer to the February 3 crash, but that phrase has certainly come to mean that horrible event. The song unfurls in a wave of impressionistic verse that has had people scrambling to figure out the inner meanings ever since the thing came out in October 1971 (making it probably the first significant work of art of my lifetime!). McLean has resisted confirming any specific meanings for the various persons or events referenced in the song, though he has admitted some of the symbolic meanings contained within. The song is lyrically dense and eternally fascinating. It’s been present pretty much my entire life, and I honestly don’t remember a time when I wasn’t at least passingly familiar with this tune about the guys in the Chevy down by the levee, drinking whiskey and rye. It wasn’t until the 90s that I really started to dig into the song and learn its words. I’ve always resisted all the “meanings”, including the insistence in the late 90s and early 00s, bolstered by an email chain letter (remember those?) that the plane was actually named “American Pie”. It was not.
I even have my own personal “mondegreen” with “American Pie”: late in the song McLean sings, “As the flames climbed high into the night, to light the sacrificial rite….” I have always heard that as “As the planes climbed high into the night”, and you know what? I think that works. I’m gonna stick with it.
I’ve been very good about not buying lots of books over the last year, preferring to actually read through my personal library and supplementing with stuff from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.
Yup, that’s what we’re calling this series now: Tuesday Tones, because it’s still going to be a music focus series, but it won’t just be tone poems. Not that it was before, really, because if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s put up boundaries for myself and then immediately break them, because boundaries are only fun when you’re breaking them, right? (I’m still going to use the “Tone Poem Tuesday” post tag, because my tags on this site are already out of control and adding new ones isn’t a great idea unless I really need to.)
Anyway, let’s listen to some music.
Wood Notes by William Grant Still is an orchestral suite of four movements: “Singing River”, “Autumn Night”, “Moon Dusk”, and “Whippoorwill’s Shoes”. The work was apparently inspired by poems by one Joseph Mitchell Pilcher, though I have as yet been unable to track down his actual poetry. The naturalistic writing in Wood Notes calls to mind similar approaches to depicting nature in music as Smetana’s Die Moldau, though the musical language here is pure Still, mingling the sound of spirituals with a decidedly American idiom.