Tag: Something For Thursday

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Something for Thursday

Two days ago marked the 270th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart was one of those miraculous artists whose talent eclipsed the perceived limits of human ability. Mozart produced work of effortless profundity, in perfect proportion, in all genres and for nearly every instrument that existed in his time. Not one musical form was not elevated by his having touched it. Mozart stands among the very greatest artists in all of human history…and to think, his life nearly overlapped that of JS Bach and did overlap that of Ludwig van Beethoven.

Were I forced to name one favorite work by Mozart, I suspect I would name this one more often than any other. The Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra, K. 364, never fails to amaze me with its elegance and its natural lyricism. Nothing in it ever sounds out of place; every single note seems the natural and necessary logical result of the one before. A sinfonia concertante is something of a mix between a symphony and a concerto, an odd genre that really only flowered briefly during the Classical period. This one is probably the grandest exemplar of this under-utilized form. Just listen to the way the soloists exchange phrases back and forth, like they are in conversation! And just listen to how the orchestra, limited to strings, two oboes, and two horns, sounds much larger than it actually is. I could go on…but I won’t.

Here is the Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra, K. 364, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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Something for Thursday

Here’s a movement from a Bach partita for solo violin. But what is a partita? It is simply a suite for solo instrument or voices, usually in several movements. Hey, why should everything have a complex definition?

This particular movement, the third from Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin, is pretty well known, and it could be even more well-known across the universe as the centuries pass: this movement is one of the selections on the Voyager record. Cool, huh?

Here it is played by Hillary Hahn.

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Something for Thursday

It’s always amazing to me what random stuff people will suddenly be talking about on social media. The last few days I’ve seen chatter as millennials and GenZers discover “Schoolhouse Rock”, those wonderful animated shorts with memorable songs that taught us things back when we were otherwise watching cartoons on Saturday morning and flooding our bodies with sugary cereal. Ahhh, those were the days.

Anyway, this isn’t even the first batch of “Schoolhouse Rock” nostalgia that I can remember! The first wave came in the mid-90s, when Gen X rediscovered all those old cartoons and songs. There was a CD boxed set of them all, made to look and feel like a school binder that we all remember, and there was a separate disc that I did buy of popular bands of the time doing covers of the most popular Schoolhouse Rock songs. I probably still have that disc sitting in a box someplace…and it was actually a fun album! Hearing all those familiar old catchy-as-hell educational tunes done through the prism of 90s alt-rock? Good times, those.

Here is Better Than Ezra with “Conjunction Junction”. (The sound takes a bit to start up.)

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Something for Thursday

I know I said the other day that I’ve always had difficulty with the music of Claude Debussy, but that doesn’t apply to everything he wrote. There’s a piano miniature of his that I have always loved, called “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”. Here it is, played by a cello quintet, because hey, why not.

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Something for Thursday (Thanksgiving edition)

Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this morning is one of our very rare forays into commercial television each year. We have become such infrequent viewers of commercial television that it’s always something of a shock to us to have to endure all the advertising. We’re always like, “We just watched four minutes of teevee! Now we have to sit through another six minutes of commercials?!”

I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about the common practice of using old songs on commercials. On the one hand, it does at times feel a bit…dirty. But on the other hand, there are a lot of songs I actually end up hearing because they get used in a commercial here or there. (Well, maybe not a lot, since we rarely watch commercials, but the number isn’t non-zero either.) This is one such song: a duet of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, called “Girl From the North Country”. If I’ve heard this before, I don’t remember it…but I heard it a bunch this morning on an ad that was repeated quite a bit during the Macy’s Parade. (What was it advertising? I’ve no idea!)

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Something for Thursday

We all have those movies, don’t we? They’re the movies where we’ll be going about our day, doing stuff that we’ve planned out and intended to get done…but then we’ll see that one of those movies is on teevee or something, and that’s that, screw the To Do List, we’re watching that movie again!

One of those movies for me is The Hunt for Red October, that wonderful submarine thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel. (I never read that particular Clancy book. I read a couple other ones and honestly, I wasn’t super-impressed beyond an appreciation for his plotting. My drug-of-choice for late-80s-early-90s spy fiction was Robert Ludlum.) Hunt came out in spring 1990, and I remember a bunch of friends and I in college going to see it. The movie rocked my world even then, and it has never declined in my estimation. It really is a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned; it sets up every single plot twist in advance but doesn’t do so in such an obvious way that you can see the foreshadowing as it happens. It’s incredibly well-acted and superbly paced, and for an action adventure thriller, it has some absolutely crackling dialog. I just love it.

The music is also great, by the wonderful Basil Poledouris. Its main melodic material is distinctly Russian, and he makes extensive use of choir throughout, along with some techno material in the tense parts of the film. Here is a suite culled together from the soundtrack.

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Something for Thursday

We’ve been rewatching Mad About You lately.

Mad About You is a sitcom that aired in the 1990s for seven seasons. It was about the day-to-day life of a young couple in New York City, Paul and Jamie Buchman, played by Paul Reiser* and Helen Hunt. The show tended to be very down-to-earth in its concerns, almost mundane; in a way, Mad About You was better at being a “show about nothing” than Seinfeld was. We loved Mad About You when it first aired. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) discovered it before I did, but it quickly became a bonding thing for us during the ten or so months after I graduated college that we were doing a long-distance thing. Mad About You, at its best, had a lot of wonderful things to say about love and marriage…and I’ll have done there, as I want to write a longer piece about the show and What It Meant To Me, probably for the upcoming newsletter relaunch.

So, instead of a music selection, here’s a comedic sequence from Mad About You. This is from the show’s second season, when it really hit its stride; its best seasons were probably its second and third. To understand what’s happening here, all you need know is that Paul Buchman is a documentary filmmaker by trade who often finds himself doing film work he finds “beneath” himself (but he grits his teeth and does it because he knows he has to eat). Here he’s been working on a film called A Day At the Zoo. The rest of this should be easy to understand. This scene never comes out and says what’s on “the tape”, but we know, don’t we? And the comedic timing here is just amazing. Reiser and Hunt had the kind of chemistry together that many actors playing parts of fictional partnerships dream of achieving.

(Oh, and this scene ends at the episode’s first commercial break. The complications pile up after this.)

* By the way, what was up with sitcoms in the 90s featuring standup comedians in the lead playing dudes with the same first name as themselves? In Mad About You Paul Reiser plays Paul Buchman. In Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld plays…another version of Jerry Seinfeld. Jonathan Silverman starred in The Single Guy, as Jonathan Eliot.

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