(Now, I originally conceived this little exercise as a playlist for our wedding reception if The Wife and I were getting married now, or renewing vows, or just having an anniversary party, which is why there’s one song on here that doesn’t match the theme…well, it kind-of does, if you know some of the history and backstory of the song, but really, it’s just a great dance tune which is why it’s there.)
The playlist has some obvious selections as well as some more obscure stuff, though if you’re a long-time reader here you’ve likely heard most of these. Enjoy!
Burt Bacharach has died. He was one of those ultra-prolific songwriters (along with frequent partner Hal David) who, for every song you knew he wrote, there’s probably two songs you know well that you did not know he had a hand in.
For me, this was one. I perused a list of Bacharach songs and discovered that this was one of them. I never knew he wrote it.
Here’s “I Say A Little Prayer”.
(UPDATE: I feel like I should write something more about Bacharach and his legacy, but I’m really not the best person to do that. If anyone sees any particularly good tribute pieces on him, let me know and I’ll link them.)
I don’t have anything else to post today, so I’ll offer up a random song: “Scythe Song” by Dougie Maclean. This wonderful song is about the relationship between master and student, and how true mastery often involves repeated practice in the master’s presence.
There’s a frankly ghastly anti-smoking ad that seems to be showing up on teevee a bit of late; I’ve seen it nearly every day during visits to my parents. I’m not embedding the damned thing here, but if you MUST watch it, here it is. The ad features a kid singing a broken, increasingly guilt-ridden version of “My Darling Clementine” as his mom gets sicker and sicker from smoking.
(No, I am not defending smoking, but this particular ad is some depressing shit.)
So, as a possible antidote, here’s Bobby Darin’s swinging (and oh, so very fatphobic) version.
Sheila O’Malley has a typically lovely post about Frank Sinatra, whose birthday is today. I started composing a comment on her site, but then I realized that my thoughts were getting away from me, so I decided to bring it over here. Sinatra has been a part of my universe for as long as I can remember; my parents owned a bunch of his records, which were on constant rotation in my childhood. I remember his distinctive sound, sometimes clear and sometimes with just a hint of rasp (depending on what he wanted to express), his sense of rhythm (he could make a song swing without any assisting percussion at all), his lyricism, and his unfailing sense of how to land the emotional beats of a song. This last gift is rare indeed, and it’s interesting to me that I’m featuring two singers so highly gifted in that regard on the same day (scroll down to today’s Daily Dose of Christmas post). And of course he wasn’t just a singer; Sinatra was also a very fine actor with a lot of range. He was in a lot of movies and he won an Oscar along the way and he still might be underrated as such.
The earliest of his roles that I’ve seen is Anchors Aweigh, in which he plays a Navy sailor who is very young and naive, who has to be instructed by his older buddy Gene Kelly in the ways of the world (meaning, how to flirt without seeming weird about it…in the late-1940s meaning of ‘flirting’). Somehow he pulls this off without getting blown off the screen by Kelly; in fact, the two men have a partnership in that movie that elevates it. Anchors Aweigh isn’t quite one of the immortal musicals–it’s no Singin’ in the Rain–but it’s damned close.
Just eight years later Sinatra put his dramatic skills on display in a dark turn as Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity, a movie that hit me between the eyes when I watched it in high school. I was channel-flipping lazily, and I happened to land on the opening credits; next thing I knew it was two hours later and the movie was over and I hadn’t touched the remote the entire time. Sinatra plays the cocky, arrogant young hothead whose actions end up costing him everything. There are some weird stories–legends, actually–about how Sinatra got the role in the first place, but it doesn’t really matter how he got it. The man ended up winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it, and there’s a reason for that. Last time I watched From Here to Eternity I found it every bit as gripping as I did when I accidentally watched it as a sixteen-year-old.
Sinatra would bounce in and out of musicals a lot, and his dramatic turns always seemed to be in the crime genre. There was a teevee movie in the 70s called Contract on Cherry Street that I remember, and there’s his amazing performance in The Manchurian Candidate. He even turned up in the 1980s in an episode of Magnum PI, a show that often leavened its generally light-hearted tone with detours into espionage thrillers and, in the case of Sinatra’s episode, pure noir.
Maybe it’s easy to discount Frank Sinatra a little because of the genres in which he worked or the popular forms he pursued, but for my money, you can’t tell the story of American art in the 20th century without talking about Frank Sinatra.
Sheila starts her post with this quote (possibly aprocryphal) by Bing Crosby: “Frank is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in mine?” I can’t read that quote without thinking of High Society, a movie that was also a favorite of both my parents. It’s a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, with Crosby as C.K. Dexter Haven (the romantic lead who is pining for Grace Kelly), and Sinatra as Mike Connor, the gossip rag reporter sent to cover Kelly’s impending nuptials. (Those roles were originated by Cary Grant and James Stewart, with Katherine Hepburn in the later-Grace Kelly part.) High Society is a fun movie, though this story is really better told in the original, as parts of the script had to be set aside to make room for the musical numbers, and…well, I have to agree with my sister, who once said on a Christmas Eve when one of Crosby’s Christmas movies was on and we’d all taken in a few beers, “Whoever thought to cast Bing Crosby as a romantic lead was out of their mind.”
Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s always struck me as very strange that this movie has Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra together, and it gives them exactly one number together…and that number had to be added at the last minute when the producers suddenly realized that they had Crosby and Sinatra in the same movie with no shared numbers. Astonishing! Can you imagine such a thing? Almost making an entire movie with two of the 20th century’s greatest American singers in it and only realizing near the end that you’ve given them zero duets? That’s like having Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle on the same team, but benching one of them at all times. Luckily for High Society, that one number is a hell of a number:
Of course, I can’t write about Sinatra without discussing his singing a little bit. Many years ago I read an interview with one of my personal musical heroes, the great Chicago Symphony orchestra trumpet player Adolph Herseht, in which among many other things he recommended that young trumpet players (among others) listen to great vocalists like Frank Sinatra, on the basis that all music, even for instrumentalists, starts with the human voice, and I remember Herseth citing Sinatra for always telling a story with his singing. That is absolutely true.
I’ll close this with my favorite track from my favorite Sinatra album, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Just listen to Sinatra’s absolute control in this song! He fades away at the end, fading fading fading (“Answer, echoes, dying dying dying,” Tennyson might write), but his pitch never wavers, which is something that requires enormous technical skill: singing (or playing, if you’re on an instrument) a note correctly, and making it sound full, while also making it piano or pianissimo is a skill that many musicians don’t realize they need until well into their careers. And I’ll have to write sometime about my father’s favorite Sinatra song…but that needs a post of its own.
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.
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!
Film music today! It suddenly occurred to me the other day that I haven’t heard anything by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek in a long time, so I gave a bit of his music another listen. My introduction to him was the gentle lyricism of his score to Finding Neverland, a wonderful movie you don’t hear much about anymore. Kaczmarek won the Best Score Oscar for this score, and he won it the year after The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won that honor, so in two years you had polar opposites winning the Oscar: a gigantic epic score of enormous complexity and orchestral grandiosity, and a quiet chamber work of delicate intimacy.
Finding Neverland tells a fantasized version of the story of J.M. Barrie and his creation of Peter Pan. The film abounds with dream-like sequences and flights of imagination, and these passages have a gossamer quality that is well served by Kaczmarek’s orchestral clarity. I love this score and hearing it again after a number of years was a delight. It’s always a pleasure to return to favorite works we’ve not visited in a long time, isn’t it?
I looked for a suite from this score, but the few that I found don’t feature the passages that I love most, so I decided to simply go with this: the entire score album presented at once. Plenty of tone poems are an hour long, so why not?
Here is Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s score to Finding Neverland. If you can, listen to this someplace where you think there might be some magic lurking in the corners.
A look at the unbelievably fascist document that is the official platform of the Texas Republican Party:
The fundamentalist religious fervor perhaps extends most strongly to gay rights and others of alternative sexual lifestyles. The platform directly declares that “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice” and that “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” §§ 143–144 (p. 21). The Republican platform seeks to ban gay marriage.
And that’s just one example of the awfulness therein.
The press does not want to have a direct conversation with you about what’s really at the heart of Republican messaging. As a former Republican who now consistently votes for the Democratic Party in US elections, I will. When I came to realize what the true message of the Republican Party was, I was out, and have been voting Democratic ever since.
Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
They can tell people what to do.
You cannot tell them what to do.
This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (we will discuss this later in the piece), but this is the basic formula.
By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).
Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.
It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked.
I don’t see the path out. Even if we were able to pack the Courts with jurists who believe in now outdated concepts like stare decisis all that would mean would be that we would be acknowledging that the Supreme Court is an unelected super-legislature. It actually always has been, but before this there were recognized limits on how far the Court could go. That’s gone now.
Increasingly we’re in a place where the only way to really fix things is to blow it all up and start over with an all-new Constitution, and when you consider how the one we have was a messy document full of compromises and good-enough’s that none of the rich white men who wrote it even liked very much, well, what are our chances of getting it right?
This has been an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold the last month or so: a song by 80s singer Kate Bush featured prominently in an episode of the new season of Stranger Things, which has in turn led to an enormous resurgence of interest in Bush herself. The Internet and social media have exploded with discussions of Bush and her songs. I am always happy to see older cultural material get another crack at the limelight; we are too focused on the new-and-shiny as a culture, and it depresses me that lots of good things disappear if they don’t have their Big Moment quickly enough when they’re new.
In my particular case this is helpful because somehow I managed to completely miss Kate Bush in the 80s. I have no memory of her music at all, none whatsoever. I don’t know how this came to happen, but I have a few suspicions, and it had to do with (a) the music I was consuming in 1985 or so, and (b) how I was consuming it. I liked rock and pop a great deal back then! I spent too many hours in front of MTV, and I owned a lot of rock and pop records. But even so, most of my music listening around that point focused strongly on classical, and that didn’t let up until…well, it hasn’t, actually, though I’ve added other genres along the way.
My consumption of rock and pop had nothing at all to do with the usual way of hearing such music, the radio; in the Southern Tier there wasn’t all that much radio at all other than what was powerful enough to reach that far from Buffalo, and when we were driving around, my father asserted the “Driver chooses the music!” rule, which meant country music a lot of the time. So as far as pop and rock went, if I didn’t hear them on MTV, I didn’t hear them at all. I don’t know if Kate Bush made music videos, but I don’t recall seeing them much, if she did.
And that just means I have something new to explore!
Since July 4th is a time when many enjoy fireworks, here is this image of a supernova that looks a lot like a fireworks explosion. Explosions of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, and deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2015, astronomers have studied one particular explosion that may provide clues to the dynamics of other, much larger stellar eruptions. This is an image of GK Persei, an object that became a sensation in the astronomical world in 1901 when it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days.
