Tag: Something For Thursday

A longer selection today: the Butterfly Lovers Concerto by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao. This piece of program music was written in 1959, but don’t let the date of composition fool you: this is pure lyric Romanticism, using several Chinese folk melodies in musically depicting the events of the legend of the butterfly lovers. This isn’t particularly deep music, but it’s achingly beautiful and evocative.

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I’ve used this song before, but I like it, and it’s been a few years, so here’s John Denver and “Looking for Space”.

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Here’s Adele, singing the title song for Skyfall. What do you think? I like it a little more each time I hear it, and I liked it a lot at first. It stands in the fine tradition of sultry Bond songs, with its slow, torchsong melody sung by a big-voiced woman, and I like how it incorporates the James Bond Theme and manages to get the film’s title into the lyrics (in typically not-entirely-making-sense Bond song fashion).

Opine, folks!

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For obvious reasons pertaining to my reading of Stephen King’s 11-22-63, I’ve had the John Williams score from Oliver Stone’s JFK on my mind. Here are two selections: the Prelude and “Arlington”.

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From the John Willaims score to Superman, here is “Leaving Home”. The eerie music at the beginning comes just after Pa Kent’s funeral, when young Clark Kent finds the remnants of his ship from Krypton hidden in the barn cellar; this is followed by some of the most gorgeous Americana Williams ever wrote as Clark bids farewell to Ma Kent before heading north. Williams’s gift for melody in this phase of his career was so prolific that the wonderful theme that dominates the second half of this cue is heard in this one scene, and this one scene only.

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I feel like some Eurythmics today…so here they are! I love me some Annie Lennox, and I especially love how they always embraced the idea of music videos as a place to indulge their impulse for sheer WTF weirdness. Here’s “There Must Be An Angel”.

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Apparently ‘reboot fever’, in which old properties are exhumed dusted off dragged from the archives for the purpose of maintaining rights ownership revisited for a new generation, has struck the folks at Disney, who are developing a new Rocketeer project. Originally a comic book, The Rocketeer was already made into a movie in the early 1990s. It’s the story of a depression-era airplane mechanic who finds a rocket jet-pack (complete with cool art-deco helmet whose flanges act as rudders for steering), and his adventures thereof as dastardly folk try to get hold of the jet pack for military purposes. (There’s even a Nazi propaganda movie showing an immense armada of Nazi soldiers flying across the Atlantic with their jet-packs to conquer the USA, which prompted Roger Ebert to wonder if they pack sandwiches for the trip.)

The Rocketeer was a fun movie, if memory serves; I only saw it once. It’s genial and entertaining and well-made (if a bit slow in the pacing area), but it didn’t really strike me as something that needed revisiting. Little did I know. Anyway, here is a suite of James Horner’s music from The Rocketeer, which features one of his more endearing melodies. (Speaking of which, at around 40 seconds in, you can hear the first of several instances of one of Horner’s favorite compositional tricks, which I call “the James Horner Rolling Chord of Melodic Punctuation”).

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One of my favorite little things in The Music Man is the way Prof. Harold Hill is able to continually distract the School Board from investigating his background by tricking them into singing. Here’s one such example, which combines with another lovely song being sung by Marian Paroo across town: “Lida Rose” and “Will I Ever Tell You”.

(Note to self: Wow, it’s been a lot of years since you’ve watched The Music Man. What’s up with that?)

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