Our song challenge continues, and this week it’s A Song You’d Like Played At Your Wedding. Well, my wedding was twenty-two years ago, so here’s a song that was played at my wedding. The Wife and I danced our first dance to this song. Here are the Righteous Brothers with “Unchained Melody”.
Tone Poem Tuesday
I heard this work on the radio this past Sunday, and I made a note to look up what it was. Sadly I didn’t remember to do that until Monday, when St. Patrick’s Day was already over, because it turns out to be In Ireland, a rhapsody for flute, harp, and orchestra by Sir Herbert Hamilton Harty. Harty was an Irish composer who wrote in the post-Romantic vein, but he had the misfortune to live in a time when Romanticism was well and truly a thing of the past, so as Modernism was taking hold, composers like Harty were often forgotten. This is a pity, because his music is dramatic and picturesque. Not everything can be remembered, but not everything deserves to be forgotten, either.
Here is In Ireland.
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Happy St. Paddy’s Day!
Bad Joke Friday (Ides of March edition)
Something for Thursday
Back at it with our Song Challenge! This time it’s A Song I Like From the 1970s, which is pretty broad, innit? There are a lot of directions I can go here because that’s the decade I was born, so a lot of this stuff is familiar to me on a pretty elemental level. I’ll try not to go overboard, but here are several 1970s-era songs that I like a great deal, starting with one that as a kid I didn’t realize that it’s about…what it’s about. I figured these folks were having an afternoon snack of a piece of candy or something. It wasn’t until I listened to the song anew as a twenty-something (I’m very sure I didn’t hear the song at all between the time I was 5 and the time I was 25) that I realized just what kind of delight these folks were discussing in terms of afternoon enjoyment.
Here’s a wonderful Jim Croce song that has to probably be explained to young listeners hearing it for the first time. Operator? “You can keep the dime”? What’s all that about?
Let’s see…well, we have to have the Bee Gees, and this is my all-time favorite Bee Gees song.
And then there’s John Denver! I think there was a time when I didn’t love John Denver. I think it was however much time elapsed between my birth and the first time I heard John Denver.
Ballads about 1970s events? We’ve got those, too:
And I’ll leave off with this bit of pep by ELO, “Mr. Blue Sky”.
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Pi Day!!!
(NOTE: This is a repost of last year’s Pi Day post. I didn’t get a chance to generate any new content–i.e., shoot a new video in which I get a pie in the face in the midst of a lesson about Pi–this year, but hey, last year’s video is still pretty funny, if I do say so myself!)
It’s Pi Day, everyone!
It is also Albert Einstein’s birthday and, sadly, this year’s edition marks the passing of Stephen Hawking, about which I’ll have more to say later. But for now, let’s celebrate Pi!
NASA’s Pi in the Sky Challenge
A few videos:
(That one’s titled “Pi Day” but the video has nothing to do with Pi so far as I can see, but it’s a cool video anyway, so there it is.)
And finally:
Happy Pi Day, everyone!
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Time for something of a musical homecoming. I’ll be featuring the music of Hector Berlioz a lot over the next few months, as we’ve just past the 150th anniversary of his passing after a 65-year life of struggle and hardship that was too rarely punctuated by triumph. Nevertheless Berlioz produced some of the most remarkable music of the 19th century, music that took well into the 20th century to find its greatest appreciation. And that appreciation is only growing as Berlioz grows in esteem.
Here we have one of the earliest works of his to survive. Berlioz was highly self-critical and thought nothing of destroying early works if he later judged them wanting; thus we actually know little of his most youthful work. This concert overture, based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley, bursts with youthful exuberance and energy, especially in the thrilling allegro section that follows the score’s lyric portion. Scott wrote picturesque novels of adventure and intrigue, and Berlioz tries to capture some of that here. He’s not entirely successful, and the Waverley overture has its awkward moments like many of Berlioz’s works to come. But one can already hear the orchestrally-focused imagination at work, as Berlioz’s was a musical mind unfettered by training on the piano. What wonders would come later, once Berlioz had discovered Shakespeare and Byron and Beethoven!
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Bad Joke Friday
“Execute order….”
Roger Green turns 66 today, and a very happy birthday to him! He also gathers a bit of linkage and factual stuff regarding the number 66, most famously used to identify a once-beloved portion of the United States highway system.
I, of course, am a Star Wars fan, while Roger is not…so maybe he’s not even aware of the most sinister use of sixty-six!
I hope Roger’s birthday is a happier occasion than the Sith’s purge of the Jedi!
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Something for Thursday
Returning to the Song Challenge, it’s a song from my pre-teen years! I wasn’t sure how to define this–after all, a song from 1972, when I was pushing one year old, was definitely “pre-teen”, strictly speaking. But I think they’re referring to the “tweener” category, when you’re 11 or 12. As my tweener period coincides very nicely with the arrival on the scene of MTV, here’s one of the very first songs I ever encountered in “music video” form. (Although we didn’t even have MTV at our house until several years later, because it took our town that long to run cable out that far on the road where we lived. For several years my sole exposure to MTV came during visits and sleepovers at a friend’s house.)
Anyway, here’s the sublimely goofy early 80s icon Adam Ant, with “Goody Two Shoes”.