Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Posted on December 4, 2022 by ksedinger

Today, a suite from an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov! The opera is called Christmas Eve, and its plot involves a scheme by the Devil to steal the moon. Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas have suffered an unusual curse: they are well-loved and highly regarded by those who know them, but because they’re in Russian, a language that most singers don’t learn (and because singing operas in translation is out of fashion), they remain shrouded in obscurity, only known if at all through orchestral suites and excerpts like this.

David Dubal writes, in The Essential Canon of Classical Music:

Some of the best of Rimsky-Korsakov is contained in his fifteen operas, with their supernatural, pan-Slavic, mythological, and pantheistic symbolism. Unfortunately these operas remain unfamiliar to the vast majority of music lovers. They form an encyclopedic source of a lost, legendary, wild, and exotic Russia. According to the writer V.V. Yastrebsev, Rimsky-Korsakov confided, “You would scarcely find anyone in the world who believes less in everything supernatural, fantastic, or lying beyond the boundaries of death than I do. Yet as an artist, I love this sort of thing above all else. And religious ceremony? What could be more intolerable? But with what love have I expressed such ceremonial customs in music! No, I am actually of the opinion that art is essentially the most enchanting, intoxicating lie.”

It does surprise me that Rimsky-Korsakov, with his often beguiling melodies, magnficient orchestrations (few composers have ever wielded the full palate of the modern orchestra like Rimsky-Korsakov), and enchanting subject matter in many of his compositions nevertheless does not command a stronger position in the classical canon. I always enjoy listening to him, whether it’s something less familiar to me or a return to Scheherazade, one of my favorite classical works of all time.

So here’s a bit of Russian Christmas lore, depicted in the music of one of Russia’s great masters.

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Posted on December 3, 2022 by ksedinger

Hey, it’s morning and I’m getting the Daily Dose out! See, I told you I’d get on track with this.

In 1994, a remake of the 1947 classic movie Miracle on 34th Street came out. If I recall correctly, it did OK and then mostly disappeared. I’m sure it’s streaming someplace and is beloved by a few, but like most remakes it does not seem to have supplanted the original in any way. [ASIDE: Hmmm, it now occurs to me that I quite literally have not seen the original since a day in 2nd or 3rd grade when I walked in on my mother watching it on teevee and decided to stick around.] The remake stars Richard Attenborough as the is-he-or-isn’t-he department-store Santa, and Mara Wilson as the cute-as-a-button kid who makes wishes.

While I haven’t seen that movie, I have heard quite a bit of the movie’s score, written by Bruce Broughton. Broughton is a composer who wrote quite a few really really good filmscores in the 80s and 90s; film music fans tend to view his work on Silverado, Young Sherlock Holmes, The Rescuers Down Under, and Tombstone as particularly fine scores. Broughton’s work is often redolent of the scoring styles of older composers from film music’s so-called “Golden Age”, and it’s just really good stuff, a lot of the time. I’m not sure why Broughton never really “broke through”, but he has enjoyed a long and productive career and he has produced a lot of fine music…which includes his work on the Miracle on 34th Street remake.

Here is a suite of Broughton’s music from that film. Enjoy!

 

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Posted on December 2, 2022 by ksedinger

It’s Day 2! I generally try to not be this late in the day with this feature, but sometimes that’s just the way the ball bounces. Anyway:

“Carol of the Bells” isn’t really my favorite bit of Christmas music, though I do find myself warming to it more over the last few years. I think for a while it got overplayed when I was younger…I strongly remember it figuring in Christmas commercial after commercial after commercial, to the point of distraction.

But this year I learned something new: “Carol of the Bells” is of Ukrainian origin. The composer and lyricist–Mykola Leontovych and Peter J. Wilhousky–were both Ukrainian or of Ukrainian descent, and the melody is based on a Ukrainian folk chant. Since I am in full support of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in this time of war, I therefore share what might be one of the most famous pieces of Ukrainian music ever written.

 

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Posted on December 1, 2022 by ksedinger

It’s December! And as is my tradition, I will now spend the next twenty-five days featuring Christmas music. This is one of the most beloved traditions of this blog*, and I always look forward to doing it. I hope you all enjoy it as well!

I’m starting off a bit less cheerfully than usual, because…well, 2022 has been a slog much of the time for me. Nevertheless, I look to the Holiday Season for a return to good cheer, and a reminder that the world can be beautiful and that we humans can make it so. Too much of the crappiness of the world arises from our choices, so let’s just choose better, OK? Choose better.

Let’s get started….

* Mainly by me.

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Something for Thursday

Posted on December 1, 2022 by ksedinger

We have Muzak at work, constantly piping music into The Store. I usually don’t pay a great deal of attention to it, though I do rather like our current “classic rock/hits of the 70s and 80s” mix that we have going on. I never thought that I’d hear “Come On Eileen”, the official pop anthem of overalls-wearers like myself, on a daily basis, but there it is.

Yesterday, though, I had to stop and listen, because it was a song I hadn’t heard in many years. I’m still stunned that this song turned up on our Muzak mix. It’s never, to my knowledge, been a hit. It comes from one of the goofiest musical movies ever made: Xanadu, which was supposed to be a big star vehicle for Olivia Newton John. Somehow, when they made this movie–about a roller-disco dance club called Xanadu–they managed to entice Gene Kelly to appear in it. I remember reading later that Kelly was disillusioned by the production and the filmmakers’ lack of knowledge of what went into making musicals; I suspect that Kelly, who was in his late 60s at the time, was hoping for a throwback to his beloved genre. Alas.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever watched Xanadu all the way through, but I suspect that nowadays it would inhabit the same kind of space as flicks like Battle Beyond the Stars: movies that aren’t really good, but are better than their reputations for being bad. I know that Xanadu has become a kind of cult classic, and that the soundtrack (which included ELO, one of my favorite bands and a major source of listening in recent years) produced some well-known songs that were huge hits on the European charts. But even so, I don’t recall the title song ever getting much by way of airplay at all…and yet, there it was, playing away in a retail grocery store in 2022. What a world.

Here’s the movie’s last number. The actual Olivia Newton John song starts about 3:30 in this video, but those first three minutes are worth watching just for the sheer goofiness of it all. Enjoy!

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Post 10 comes to town!!!

Posted on November 30, 2022 by ksedinger

Have I mentioned Post 10 here before? Hang on, let me go look…here’s some 70s-quiz show music while I look through the archives….

OK, it does not appear that I’ve mentioned Post 10 yet! Or if I have, I’ve just linked or embedded one of his videos…anyway Post 10 is a YouTuber from New England who has a lot of varying and somewhat obscure, offbeat interests. He’s very knowledgeable about municipal water systems and water flow management, and he likes to strike out “into the field” to find what he might, and even deal with issues as he finds them. This is the very first video of his I ever watched, in which he addresses an impressively-flooded roadway armed only with a rake. More recently he’s done a lot of investigating drainage culverts in wilderness areas, clearing out beaver dams and the like; one time he actually camped inside a drainage culvert for 36 hours straight, just to see if he could do it. He also goes exploring in interesting backwoods areas, and he’s just generally the type of person who points at things very few people think about and says, “Isn’t that interesting!”

In short, Post 10 is a delight and more people should watch him.

Well, apparently last week he decided that he just had to come to Western New York from his New England stomping grounds to see what an apparent seven feet of snow on the ground looked like, and here’s his resulting video as he drives around Buffalo and the Southtowns! It’s fun listening to his commentary as he drives many streets and roads that I know; in fact, at several points in this video he’s very close to my own house. If I’d known, I would have rolled out the red carpet, or put up a banner reading “THE 716 WELCOMES POST-10!!!” or some such thing. Or, I could have given him some pointers to go see some cool stuff…but in the video he alludes to coming back next time, and if there’s one thing I can promise, there will be a next time. Sometime.

Hopefully not for a while, but sometime.

It’s nice to hear some outside perspective on our lovely region…particularly when he’s driving through Buffalo proper and notes with approval the city’s snow-removal efforts. Now that‘s something you don’t hear often!

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on November 29, 2022 by ksedinger

Here’s a suite of Max Steiner’s music from Casablanca, one of the most accidentally-great works of art ever made. The movie went into production without a finished script, the ending was only determined as the need to film it came near, and even then the ending was almost undone by editing mistakes. Also, the film’s score had to revolve around a song called “As Time Goes By”, which composer Max Steiner hated and wanted to replace with a song of his own. Only the fact that Ingrid Bergman had moved on to her next movie, and cut her hair to do it, made the reshoots that would have been necessary to change the song impossible.

That’s one of my favorite “Golden Age of Hollywood” anecdotes. The Casablanca score really demonstrates the professionalism of those great composers: Max Steiner wrote one of the great movie scores of all time, centered on a tune he didn’t like and didn’t want to use.

Anyway, here’s the suite. Note the conductor’s dress coat; he looks like a monk.

 

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Seventeen years

Posted on November 28, 2022 by ksedinger

Gone this day, 2005.

I will always wonder what kind of person he might have been.

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Goodbye, snow!

Posted on November 27, 2022 by ksedinger

A week after our epic snowstorm ended, much of it is finally gone! Of course, we got so much that much of it remains, but what’s left is slowly going away, and I expect we’ll be snowless again within a few days–possibly by the end of the week. After the snow finally stopped falling last Saturday (or was it Sunday?), we saw a quick warm-up where every day has been in the upper 40s, and today we had some heavy rain as well, which only helped melt the stuff away.

Also, the town got in on the act, sending front-loaders and dump trucks around to literally scoop the snowbanks lining the streets back several feet; the sum total of this is that my street–which was one lane for the first few days after the storm, and was later one-and-a-half lanes–is now two lanes again.

Here you see one of the dump trucks, escorting the snow to…somewhere. I don’t care where, actually. It just isn’t here.

If the prevailing weather holds up, we’ll all be wondering if we’re going to have a white Christmas, huh?

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Have some links before you hit the stores!!!

Posted on November 25, 2022 by ksedinger

Our Thanksgiving table. The VAST majority of the food was on various sideboards.

Desserts: Apple crisp with French vanilla ice cream, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Yay!

Good morning, y’all! It’s Black Friday! Yes, I’ll be going out later. Briefly. I do like getting out of the house a little on Black Friday, but generally the extent of my tolerance of the crowds is a quick jaunt to Barnes&Noble. Gotta start shopping sometime, right?

I hope you all had the very best Thanksgiving possible. Most people I follow online seem to have done all right by their Thanksgiving holidays, though I did see a brief discussion about meal times. When do you all eat Thanksgiving dinner, anyway? In my family, it’s always been an evening meal, sometimes hitting the table on the early side (between 4 and 5) or more regularly between 5 and 6; last night’s was around 6:15. It’s dinner, after all! I remember the first Thanksgiving I spent with The Wife’s family members (not her immediate family, who were too far away, but relatives who lived in Iowa) when we were first dating, and that aunt of hers had dinner on the table at noon. I didn’t know how to process this. It was a fine meal, though. I’m guessing this is why the “post-Thanksgiving meal nap” has never been much of a thing in my world.

A pre-meal nap is a thing, though: that lull in the action when the cooking prep is on hold while things bake, roast, or simmer. Also oddly, as much as I cook at home, I generally have little role in the Thanksgiving meal prep beyond lifting heavy items like the turkey itself. I’m not sure why it’s evolved thusly, but I can do other useful things, like walk the dog while others are cooking.

And now for some open-tab clearance:

::  I meant to link Roger’s list of songs about thankfulness earlier in the week, and then I forgot to. Hey, I had stuff on my mind! Who has time to be thankful when you’re digging out your house from 80 inches of snow! (OK, that’s the last time I’ll use that lame-o excuse.)

Anyway, I’m not one to complain much about Christmas music showing up before Thanksgiving (related post on that forthcoming), but it does seem to me that making more space for songs about being specifically thankful wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

::  What state is “Take Me Home, Country Roads” actually referencing? Apparently it’s not actually clear, even though the song actually specifically name-checks West Virginia! (I was going to link a piece from Defector.com here, but that site is aggressively obnoxious about paywalling its content, and I, for one, am getting very tired of everything being paywalled.) “Country Roads” is more than just a favorite song of mine; it’s one of the songs of my life. I literally do not recall a time when that song was not part of my personal musical soundscape.

::  Wine coolers are making a comeback! I remember wine coolers with…well, maybe fondness is a bit of a stretch, but in the late 80s, they were my main introduction to the world of, well, drinking. Especially in college, when I took my time transitioning to beer. I always figured that wine coolers were a fad product that vanished when the fad died, thus explaining their disappearance from the market…but it turns out that Congress played a big role in killing them. Interesting.

I’ve little to no plan to start sampling wine coolers again, but never say never, you know?

::  Cory Doctorow on the American right-wing’s new focus on killing libraries. You want to get me marching in the streets? Trying to kill my library might do it.

::  Toss your copies of Gibbon, folks: they’re worthless now! (No, not really, but it’s always amazing to me to see how many lives are notable in their time and are then lost to memory for centuries until a random coin or two show up someplace…and then those very coins are deemed fakes…and then those same coins are deemed genuine….)

OK, that’s all I got for right now. Enjoy your shopping or your staying home or even your days at work, folks!

 

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