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I watched the Blue Origin flight yesterday, in which William Shatner joined three others in the very short up-and-back-again space shot yesterday in Jeff Bezos’s interestingly-shaped spacecraft. I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism as I’ve watched the breathless reactions in recent years to the achievements of a tiny handful of ultra-wealthy white men who have apparently decided that the best thing to do with their vast sums of money, sums that it seems to me a sane society would make it impossible to accumulate in the first place, is to replicate things that the United StatesDown the rabbit hole….

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A few weeks ago we finally introduced Richard Strauss to this ongoing feature, and now we continue! When I wrote about Eine Alpensinfonie, I noted that I came to Strauss at the end of his tone-poem career: though he composed a great deal of music after that work in the thirty years or so he had left, he never wrote another tone poem. Now we’re rolling things back to the beginning of Strauss’s tone-poem career, with a work that, like Eine Alpensinfonie, is generally not ranked among his great masterpieces of the genre. But unlike that work, this one is seen as showingDown the rabbit hole….

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Compilation-arrangements that gather selections from Broadway musicals are a long-time staple of “pops” concerts everywhere, and for good reason: when they are done well, there’s a certain kind of charm to these compilations in their own right. Robert Russell Bennett wrote a number of these arrangements, and his were some of the very best. This is because Bennett was a fine composer on his own, and it’s also because Bennett worked closely with many of the great Broadway composers in the first place. He wasn’t a composer who decided to try his hand at arranging these songs; he was the originalDown the rabbit hole….

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I used this piece as part of my 2020 exploration of Beethoven over on Byzantium’s Shores, but it’s a cracking good piece and it even feels appropriate, given my shift to this space as my primary blogging home now. Beethoven wrote this piece on commission for the opening of a new theater in Vienna, a theater that is still operating and is in fact the current oldest operating theater in that city! I would hope that a theater that opened to the strains of a new concert overture by Ludwig van Beethoven would still be a going concern. He was Beethoven, after all!Down the rabbit hole….

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Composer James Horner died the other day when the airplane he was piloting crashed. He was the sole passenger. This is, quite simply, the worst news to hit the film music world since Michael Kamen, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein all died within a year of each other. For me, though, the hit is more directly personal. Although my relationship with Horner’s music has been rather complicated over the years, he still wrote a fair number of my favorite filmscores of all time, and when a score of his connected, it connected. He had the ability to hone in onDown the rabbit hole….