The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Here’s a rarity that I didn’t even know existed. It’s not the best quality recording, because it’s taken from a live show more than forty years ago, but the worst recording of Freddie Mercury is still a recording of Freddie Mercury.
Here’s Queen, leading a live crowd in “White Christmas”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLkaxd985qA
Since I’m doing all this James Bond content of late, here’s a Christmas song from the James Bond Christmas movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service! (Yes, it’s a Christmas movie, but yes, that ending…sob….anyway….) This song is heard in the movie in the background when Bond is evading bad guys in a Swiss village at Christmastime. And yes, I rather like the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZewG-NUJ7M
I’m going to put Something for Thursday on hiatus as well until after Christmas, again for the same reasons: my available time for blogging and listening to music is going to take a bit of a hit in a week or so, and I’d really rather not pressure myself to post stuff out of obligation.
But speaking of obligation, I feel that I should observe the passing of a giant, Stephen Sondheim.
I am by no means an expert on Sondheim’s work, unfortunately. He’s another on a long list of names of artists whose work I need desperately to engage. But I’m familiar with some of his work, no doubt! The lyrics to West Side Story, for example…and this song, which is one of those classics that might feel like it has become something of a cliche by this point. But often you go back and listen to songs that have become cliche, and you realize why they ever lasted long enough to become that way: because they’re great.
Here is Frank Sinatra, singing Stephen Sondheim’s “Send In the Clowns”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWshC8PaL1o
Thanks for the body of work, Stephen Sondheim! I’m going to listen to more of you, I promise.
“Something for Thursday” will return in several weeks!
It’s December 1! If you’re new to my blogging game, this is something I’ve been doing every December for…a while, anyway. I did it every year at Byzantium’s Shores, and I’m doing it here. Every day from December 1 to Christmas Day, I’ll post a bit of Christmas-related content. It’s usually music, but there might be something else along the way. (I often have no idea what I’m posting each day until I post it, but this year for several reasons that will become clear I have to actually pre-schedule a lot of these.)
Anyway, welcome to December! Joy to the World!
Here is the last Tone Poem Tuesday until after Christmas! I’m putting this feature on a brief hiatus for reasons that will become clear in a few weeks. Nothing bad, but time for posting will be a crunch for quite a bit of December. I’m scheduling a bunch of posts ahead of time for the month, but this particular feature requires time for me to listen to the works I post before I write about them, and that amount of time may be tough to come by for much of the month. So, it’s easiest to put the Tone Poem Tuesday feature on hiatus until the Tuesday after Christmas.
Onto this week’s feature!
This work, by Arnold Bax, is appropriate for today: it is called November Woods, and it is a surprisingly turbulent and unsettled take on the emotional fabric of autumn. Bax is not conveying the feel of early or mid-autumn here, with cool days and trees aflame with wonderful color; here it feels like Bax is meditating on, well, the cold forests of late November, when the breeze cuts through the leafless trees like a knife and when everything is ice and rock and stone and cold, cold ground.
Apparently Bax’s personal life was a scene of upheaval when he wrote this piece–his marriage was failing and he was having an affair–so it’s clear why he didn’t compose a gentle meditation on fall, but rather a the stormy and windswept feel of a forest in late November. As I write this I’m looking out my back door at just such a scene: it’s snowing and the trees are waving back and forth in the stiff breeze. This piece fits.
Some weeks I expend effort to engage my curiosity and find a work that I’ve never heard before and try to craft a good essay about a piece that’s new to me.
Other weeks, I figure that old favorites exist for a reason and sometimes that reason is to just throw an old favorite up here and say, “Here, listen to this. Enjoy!”
It’s one of the latter weeks. Lots going on! Much to do! But still…make room for music, would you?
Here’s the Overture to Prince Igor, by Alexander Borodin.
Here’s something weird: a cosmic-rock power ballad by a brother-sister duo known more for their soft-rock love songs, which is actually a cover of a song by a Canadian band named for the hero of one of the most famous pre-Star Wars science fiction movies. Intrigued? Naturally!
This began the other day whilst The Wife and I were driving around doing errands. We have Sirius XM in her car, and we usually tune to one of several classic rock stations, a 70s station, and an 80s station, depending on what’s on where. (The Wife, not being a fan of The Doors, is likely to change the station if they come on. Ditto me for various other groups that don’t trip my trigger.) On this particular morning we were on the 70s station, which in turn on Saturdays will play old episodes of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.
This is always an entertaining listen. It’s an obvious time capsule, a very specific snapshot of the state of pop and rock in a single week, usually around 40 years ago. You get to hear Casem say things like “Rising up the charts this week is the newest song from that hit machine, the Steve Miller Band!” or “Still holding their place atop the Albums charts, it’s Fleetwood Mac with Rumours, now at week number 20 in the top spot!” It’s fun to remember that the hits that are now the indelible soundtrack of decades of our lives were once vibrant new songs that were still being heard for the first time.
But also fascinating are the songs that hit the Top 40 back then, hung around for a while, and then disappeared back into the rockiferous aether; songs that aren’t remembered except by superfans of these particular artists, or if it’s an artist that only had that one hit, might even be virtually forgotten today. We joke about “one hit wonders” all the time, but for every one-hit wonder we remember–Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit In The Sky”, or maybe “Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations–there are probably a dozen one-hit wonders whose hits aren’t remembered much at all. It’s nice to listen to the old American Top 40 shows and be reminded of these once-vital, once-new songs that only had one moment in time.
There’s yet another category of song you hear on old Top 40 broadcasts, though: hits by groups we know and remember for other, bigger hits, but which now are pretty obscure, having retreated from their original hit status to the hallowed title of “deep cuts”. This is one of those. I had never ever ever heard this song before I heard it the other day, and it’s just so, so weird!
The song? It’s by The Carpenters, that duo known for “Top of the World” and others, and who are heard each year on all the Christmas stations (their wonderful rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” would be nearly perfect if it didn’t use the wrong lyrics, but more on that in December). This song is called “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day)”.
If you’re used to The Carpenters’ general sound of guitars and a soft drum, this is a bit mind-blowing as it includes a full rock band, a chorus doing background vocals, and a full orchestra. This is one of those big 70s tracks with oddly-long running time, an intro from a fake radio station broadcast in which aliens call a radio stations to make a request, and a very dense sound courtesy some obviously-intense work by the sound engineers.
“Calling Occupants” was a cover, though. It was written and recorded first in 1976 by a Canadian band called Klaatu. I’ve heard of this band, but I honestly couldn’t tell you when I’ve heard their work, or what of their work I’ve heard. They were around for a while (1973 to 1982, with several reunions since then), and according to Wikipedia, they were even occasionally called “The Canadian Beatles”. Ha! Suck it, Rush! (Unfair, I guess, since Rush was probably the Canadian Led Zeppelin.)
Klaatu was named for the hero of the great 1950s sci-fi thriller The Day The Earth Stood Still; Klaatu is the alien visitor who comes to basically tell humans to cut the shit regarding nuclear armaments. (He also has a robot guardian who, once unleashed, can only be commanded to stand down via the world “Klaatu barada nikto”.)
“Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” is obviously rooted in 70s-era UFO mysticism, in which our putative alien visitors were seen as wise and enlightened beings of higher consciousness. Looking back at UFO culture of that period it’s pretty easy to see the influence of certain consciousness-altering substances of horticultural origin, but from this vantage point there’s a rather endearing innocence to it all. This song obviously comes from the same headspace that informs the most enduring classic from this particular subculture, Steven Spielberg’s great 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and, to a lesser extent, his ET: The Extra-Terrestrial five years later). The era was rife with this sort of thing, though: for more “the aliens are benevolent beings”, see Escape to Witch Mountain, or a little-seen movie called Earthbound! For non-UFO related “heightened consciousness” stuff, many people my age might remember an after-school special or a book called The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon.
All of this is precursor to the various kinds of “New Age” thinking that would later blend UFO lore with all manner of mysticism and parapsychology stuff. It’s all fun to think about and these ways of thinking definitely led to pop culture artifacts that are invariably fascinating to behold, many of which still influence the creative work of my generation (including me–look at all the “mystical powers of dodecahedrons” in my Forgotten Stars books!). So here are The Carpenters, with “Calling Occupants of Planetary Craft”. Sit back, turn the lights down, light a candle (or something else–ahem), and enjoy!
I found this piece quite randomly. The other day I wanted to listen to the famed Adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus, and while doing a quick YouTube look-up I happened upon the same composer’s Symphony No. 3, which is subtitled “Symphony-poem”. It’s a single movement work that supplements an already large orchestra with about a dozen extra trumpets and a pipe organ. It’s about twenty-four minutes long, and since I had about twenty-five minutes left on my lunch period at work that day, I listened to it in its entirety.
And to be quite blunt, this may be the single most insane piece of classical music I have ever heard.
This work is colossally strange in ways that almost defy description. Here’s what I read about this work on Wikipedia:
Originally conceived as a symphonic poem, it is a single movement symphony featuring an organ solo and fifteen trumpets conceived as a hymn of praise of the Soviet Union, with Khachaturian saying that he “wanted this work to express the Soviet people’s joy and pride in their great and mighty country”.
That’s…something.
As you might expect from a work intended to inspire patriotic fervor–which the Soviets often went well out of their way to do–Khachaturian’s Symphony No. 3 opens with a big, brassy intro. But the thing is, the work stays big and brassy for almost the entirety of its duration. It’s fanfare upon fanfare upon fanfare, flourish upon flourish upon flourish, just a constant upping of the ante that will more than once have you thinking that Khachaturian’s just got to be almost finished, and then you check and see how much time is left on the video and you realize he’s nowhere near being done.
I really can’t assess this work in terms of quality. I’m sure it rewards multiple listens and there’s a lot going on in it, but for now I can simply say this: Any time anyone claims that classical music is dull, safe, quiet music for old farts, cue up this thing. This whole work is the ultimate musical expression of the word “Yikes”.
Here it is. Yikes, indeed.