I guess the title says it all, huh? I bought some books, and here I unpack them. Because unpacking books is a blast! Everybody should unpack books!
Tone Poem Tuesday
French composer Charles Gounod is probably the closest thing Hector Berlioz had to a successor in the musical world; Berlioz was too much the iconoclast to really found a “school” of composition reflective of his own thought. Gounod, however, counted Berlioz among his influences. Gounod was prolific and wrote a great deal of fine music, especially his operas–but for the most part, except for his operas Faust and Romeo et Juliette, Gounod is not much heard anymore. The apotheosis of French music was to come not in late Romanticism but in Impressionism.
When I was in high school, our band briefly toyed with the Grand March from Gounod’s opera The Queen of Sheba. Operatic grand marches are a particular delight, and this one is as grand as any. If memory serves we ended up putting this piece aside when the band director, Mr. Roosa, resigned suddenly mid-year and we ended up being rudderless as a band until a fresh face out of college, Mr. Fancher, arrived to take over in the last few months of my high school career. I remember that this Grand March was not much to his liking, and out it went. Pity, that…the trumpets have some really fun things to do in this piece.
Here’s the Grand March from The Queen of Sheba.
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What to put on your next hot dog
Something for Thursday
There was news this week on the TRON front: Jeff Bridges is returning to the franchise for the third film that is apparently getting made soon. I’m a longtime TRON fan, all the way back to the original film in 1982, and I enjoyed the eventual follow-up, TRON LEGACY, which doesn’t seem to have been received terribly well, but who cares about those people, anyway.
The 1982 film featured a “futuristic” (for 1982) score, dominated by synthesizers, by composer Wendy Carlos. Carlos is a noted pioneer of electronic and synth music, and her work for TRON at this point in time sounds both groundbreaking in its approach to scoring a mainstream film with electronic music, and dated because of the state of the electronic gear at the time. But never mind the dated qualities; Carlos did an amazing job at suggesting the otherworldly nature of the World Inside the Computer, but she also composed music of genuine wonder and excitement.
I’ve just read that most of Carlos’s recorded music is unavailable for listening, in any format. This seems to me something of a cultural crime.
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“The personality of the photographer, his approach, is really more important than his technical genius.” –Lee Miller
Sheila O’Malley has a typically amazing post about photographer Lee Miller, about whom I need to learn more because she is fascinating and because of photography:
Much of her history was erased through decades of obscurity and a total and shameful lack of a proper archive where her accomplishments get proper credit. Her son discovered a treasure trove of over 60,000 photos and negatives, and slowly but surely Miller is taking her proper place. More work needs to be done. There are biographies out now, and art books featuring her photos, and there have been a couple of very prominent exhibitions, heavily covered in the press.
Sheila outlines much of Miller’s life, and all of it is fascinating. I keep wondering: Why is this woman not a more household name? She was in Hitler’s apartment hours after his suicide. Her clothes were still spattered with mud from Dachau, and she wiped her feet on Hitler’s bath towels and took a bath in his own tub. Why had I never heard this?
Well, I’ve heard it now, and another name goes on my “Photographers to Study” list.
