You know what? You look like you could use a half hour of Mozart. So here.
(And if you don’t think you could use a half hour of Mozart? Shut up and listen to a half hour of Mozart.)
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
I really love the movie Catch Me If You Can. One reason is John Williams’s wonderful score, with its mix of caper-jazz and its wistful tone depicting Frank Abagnale’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) unspoken wish for some kind of normal life. Williams edited his masterful score, one of his most underrated gems, into this suite.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Friday
Sorry I didn’t get around to posting yesterday, but here is a bit of film music from a movie that is one of the better ones out there at depicting the sense of wonder and grandeur in the universe that science can illuminate. The film is Contact, and I offer this in memory of Stephen Hawking, who died the day before yesterday (on Pi Day, and Albert Einstein’s birthday, for a couple of odd synchronicities). Hawking was a complicated person, as most are, but his contributions to science cannot be diminished. He is now one of the “Giants” upon whose shoulders future generations will stand.
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Something for Thursday
In honor of Roger’s birthday, in which he turned 65, here is Camille Saint-Saens’s Septet for piano, trumpet, and strings. Why this piece? Because it’s Saint-Saens’s Opus 65!
Happy birthday, Roger!
(It was actually yesterday, but I couldn’t do Something for Thursday on Wednesday. That’s just not done.)
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Something for Thursday
Play enough marches in band in high school and college and they get into your blood. I heard this one on the radio yesterday, and while I’ve known it for years via recordings, I never played it that I can recall. It’s The Florentiner March by Julius Fucik, a Czech composer who is best known for his marches, and in the United States for one march in particular, Entry of the Gladiators, which was appropriated by circuses throughout the country. Florentiner is the one I prefer, though. Fucik’s output of waltzes, marches, galops, and polkas makes him something of a Czech answer to Vienna’s Strauss family, and his concentration on the brass and wind bands in his compositions makes him something of a Czech answer to John Philip Sousa.
Florentiner is interesting in its structure: it starts out full military brass pomp, complete with opening fanfare and then two strains of pleasing martial tunes. But when we get to the trio, the march takes a deeply lyrical turn, and by the end it’s pretty much singing its heart out.
Here is the Florentiner March by Julius Fucik.
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Something for Thursday
So if you remember the pop music of the 1980s, you remember a band called a-ha, which had one giant hit in the US called “Take On Me”. They followed that up with a couple of less-successful singles (including the theme song for the 1987 James Bond movie The Living Daylights), and then as far as US music fans might recall, they disappeared, so it’s not uncommon to hear a-ha referred to as a “one-hit wonder”. Thing is, they weren’t. a-ha was very successful in Europe (particularly their home country of Norway), and was a major act over there until the 2010s, when they broke up for a time. They have since come back together a few times to perform as a-ha, so they’re not really gone.
Anyway, here’s the song with its original, ground-breaking video (for reference)…
And here’s the reason for this post: this cover of the song by an incredibly talented group of young musicians.
This is all occasioned by the appearance, very briefly, of an orchestrated version of the song in the latest trailer for the upcoming movie Ready Player One. Hopefully that version arises at some point or other.
(By the way, if you like the happy ending of the original video for “Take On Me”, don’t look up the video of the next single from a-ha, “The Sun Always Shines On TV”. Trust me on this.)
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Something for Thursday
Composer Johann Johannsson died the other day. I am not terribly familiar with his music, but I have liked what I’ve heard. He seems to do a lot of atmospheric work that relies on repetition of motifs and long, slow builds–not unlike, say, Vangelis.
Here are several samples of Johannsson’s work. I’m glad he leaves such music behind, but I’m sorry that he won’t be able to create more of it.