OUR SCENE: A large suburban grocery store, where Your Humble Narrator is working to hang decorative string-lights above one of the departments. Along comes a HAPPY COWORKER WHO LIKES TO MAKE HAPPY JOKES.
HAPPY COWORKER: [grinning widely] Hey! You light up my life!
YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR: [returns smile] Hey! I get that reference!
HAPPY COWORKER: [still grinning, but a bit quizzically now] Reference?
YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR: [smile starts getting nervous] The song?
HAPPY COWORKER: [somehow still grinning, even though she has completely no idea what YHN is talking about] Song?
YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR: [look of shell-shocked defeat] Nothing….
The HAPPY COWORKER goes off in search of more amusement, leaving YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR to diminish and fade into the West….
First time I’ve thought about this song since I was a kid, I’m guessing….
I have many associations with this piece, and one of them is my mother. When I was a teenager and getting into classical music in a big way, I discovered the New Year’s From Vienna concerts, and she made them a part of her New Year’s traditions as well. Eventually she even undertook a river cruise on the Danube, many years later, so she saw some of the vistas that are exhibited in this video.
I think of many things when I hear On the Beautiful Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II; Mom was already one of them…and so she’ll be forever, now.
Yesterday was really busy, hence nothing but a short post about voting (by the way, nice work, America!). Today we have a piece by Aaron Copland, but the occasion is the passing of Donald Hunsberger.
Hunsberger was, for many years, a professor at the Eastman School of Music, where his main post was director of the Eastman Wind Ensemble. In that position, Hunsberger did a lot of important work to advance not just that college’s Wind Ensemble, but wind ensembles in general (and their larger cousin groups, the symphonic or concert band), as ensembles for serious music. Wind ensemble music has for many years had a “student music” stigma, or been mostly limited to marches and orchestral transcriptions. People like Donald Hunsberger, though, made a more serious approach to music making for large wind groups.
Hunsberger died the other day, aged 91, after a long life of conducting, composition, arranging, teaching, and recording.
This piece, Quiet City by Aaron Copland, is a suite culled from incidental music Copland wrote for a play of the same title by Irwin Shaw. The play, about a man who has renounced his dreams and is beginning to go mad, was apparently a flop in 1939 and is pretty much only remembered now for being the inspiration of this Copland piece. One scene involves the hero imagining hearing a trumpet playing in the distance as he wanders the lonely city, and it’s that sound which Copland captures so well here. To me, Quiet City sounds like the musical equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting.
Donald Hunsberger arranged Copland’s work, originally for orchestra, for the Eastman Wind Ensemble and recorded it with Wynton Marsalis playing the solo trumpet part. It’s as curiously austere and effective as the original work. Donald Hunsberger was a great musician, and if his name seems obscure, that’s only because for some reason our classical music culture has long undervalued the wind-only ensembles in performance.
From The Muppet Show. This is one of my very favorite songs from that show; there’s just something about this that’s so pleasing…maybe it’s the simplicity of the song, combined with its lovely backing vocal, that gets me. The song was featured twice on The Muppet Show, once by Danny Kaye and this, by Charles Azvanour. I like this one better, with the kids in the schoolhouse singing the “two and two are four” bit in silhouette. I don’t think The Muppet Show always gets the credit it deserves for introducing sheer beauty to the world.
It’s late, I know, but it’s still Tuesday and it’s still Halloween! Here is the Original Soundtrack album presentation–on vinyl!–of one of my favorite horror film scores of all time, Dracula by John Williams. Enjoy, and don’t eat too much candy!
Netflix released a trailer for the upcoming movie Maestro today, and let me tell you…I am well-and-truly excited to see this movie. It will be on Netflix in late December, right in time for my Christmastime vacation. I’ve watched this trailer three times, and not only does it make me want to listen to Mahler’s Second, it also leaves me honestly astonished at how deeply Bradley Cooper seems to have disappeared into Leonard Bernstein. There are times in this trailer when the artifice is so convincing I can barely spot it.
Leonard Bernstein is one of my musical heroes–and my writing heroes, come to that–and I have the highest possible hopes for this film.
Here’s a suite from one of the more effective horror film scores I’ve heard. I never saw the movie, which was not well-received, but the music is superb, and in an especially nice touch, the composer, Christopher Young, arranged the score into a sequence of suites for a more cohesive listening experience on the OST album back when it came out. Always a fave this time of year, here’s the suite from Bless the Child.
