The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Little Quinn would have been six today. He should be getting ready for first grade and listening to me complain about the expense of school supplies for two kids. Instead….
Here is “This Is Neverland”, from Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s score to Finding Neverland:
For various reasons, I strongly associate the music of this film with Quinn. I can barely hear a bar of this score without thinking of him.
In memory of Bill Roosa’s passing, here is one of the best marches we ever played under his baton in high school. It’s the Washington Grays March, written by Claudio Grafulla. (Ignore the Union Jack in the video. It’s an American march, dating from the early years of the Civil War.)
Here’s another piece we played, the Post Horn Galop for band and a bugle-like instrument called the Post Horn. We had a special soloist with us for this particular concert, but I don’t remember his name for the life of me.
Here are the last few minutes of a movie I like a lot, Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It. The film adapts Norman Maclean’s novella about growing up with his brother in Montana, along a beautiful river with a father who was a pastor and an avid fly-fisherman. I don’t think this clip really gives anything away, spoiler-wise.
I love John Denver, and to paraphrase Ron Burgundy, if anyone has a problem with that, I will fight you.
I was trying to decide which John Denver song to use this week, and I figured, there’s no rule that I can only present a single one. So, first, here’s “Looking for Space”:
Here’s “Calypso”:
And finally: this song may have become almost a cliche over the years, but this song is one of my earliest musical memories. I remember listening to this when I was very little, and being happy when it would come ’round in the parents’ record rotation when Dad would put four or five LPs on the stereo. (Remember those record players that would hold a few LPs at the top of a three-inch spindle, and use a mechanism to lift the needle at the end of a record, swing it back out of the way, drop the next LP onto the turntable, drop the needle, and start playing the new record? I was always fascinated by the coordination of the record changing.) Anyway, here’s “Country Roads”.
[Sorry, folks, but I had an unplanned hiatus from blogging, just because it’s hot and unpleasant and I just didn’t feel much like blogging.]
[Oh, and now I’ve edited the post after originally posting it. Sorry.]
I’ve mentioned the music camp I attended as a high school student, and was later employed by as a counselor. There were a number of ensembles for students: a full orchestra, a string orchestra, a small vocal group, a full chorus, two jazz bands, and two concert bands (one for junior high kids and one for high schoolers). Being there for two weeks was always a heady time — you’re away from home without parents, for possibly the first time in your life, and you’re working very hard on music, probably harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. And…well, there are girls there. Yes, I had a few crushes there myself. No, I won’t tell you about them! (Let’s just say that in high school, my skills with the Fairer of the Genders were, shall we say, less than smooth. Luckily, I got to college and perfected my powers of hypnosis, which is how I managed to convince a certain girl there that I wasn’t totally crazy. By the time she figured this out, it was too late! We were already married! HA!)
I had some passing familiarity with music camps from my sister’s experiences with them when she’d been in high school some years before. Her music camps were always in college settings; campers stayed in dorms and performed in auditoriums. My camp, however — called the Bristol Hills Music Camp — was your canonical summer camp, located out in the woods. The land and the buildings were owned by the 4-H people. The camp was located in the hills above Canandaigua Lake, south of Rochester, NY. We lived in cabins, and were cautioned each year to make sure our bags of chips and candy bars and whatnot were secured lest the raccoons get them. The concerts were given in the main lodge, and outside the front door of the main lodge was this view. You know those stereotypical summer camp bonfires where the campers all gather to sing “Kumbaya”? We did that. For real. Sounds cheesy, but when you actually do it, it’s awesome. And each night ended with an hour-long “mixer”, at which there were games, refreshments, and dancing. The big thing there was doing the “Time Warp”, from Rocky Horror. Everybody came sprinting for the dance floor when that came over the speakers.
Another memory? They’d get a couple of local bands once or twice each year to play a full-fledged dance. One band was awful — those guys never came again — but there was another band that played every year, fronted by one of the camp’s actual faculty members and featuring a lead singer who looked like she belonged behind the counter at a truck stop diner. Her voice was lower than mine, but man, that crusty broad rocked. (I know, “crusty broad” isn’t a flattering term, but it’s what she was, and she was totally proud of it.) One year, they brought in a different band to play, and they were actually pretty good — except that on this night, there was a total lunar eclipse that nobody had known was going to happen beforehand. As the moon faded from view, every camper ditched the band inside to watch the moon outside. I always felt a little bit bad for that band — I hope somebody told them what was going on and that the kids weren’t exiting the hall because they sucked. (I was actually the first person to notice the little brown spot on the edge of the moon that heralds the beginning of an eclipse, huzzah!)
Oh, and for some reason, I spent two years at that camp wearing a fedora. I have no idea why. Overalls, no. Fedora? Yup.
But the music? We played some amazing music there. The first time I sat down in my seat for the first concert band rehearsal, I was in something of a state of awe. It was the biggest ensemble I’d ever been part of. I’d never been a part of a group capable of producing that much sound before. It was just amazing. Over two weeks, we’d prepare one fifteen-minute-long program each week, to be performed at the concert at the end of the week. (I think the camp only operates one week now, which is a shame. Those two-week-long camps were extraordinary.) Each week would be under the direction of one of two different conductors; the first tended to gorgeous, Romantic works full of lots of melody, while the second tended to more cerebral — but equally awesome — works. (This second guy would, after a few years, start bringing in his own compositions, which I always enjoyed playing.) Music-making at a summer camp in the woods was just amazing; who else but a bunch of music geeks would, while rehearsing Sousa’s Liberty Bell March, would discover that the steel pillars supporting the ceiling of the Main Lodge produced a perfect B-flat, and thus decide to station a percussion player right by that pole, armed with a mallet?
I wish I could remember every piece we played there, but sadly I can’t. But several have stuck with me, including this set of variations on “Simple Gifts”. Here’s Chorale and Shaker Dance by John Zdechlik.
I’ve long had something of a love-hate relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera.
The show came out sometime in the late 1980s, and ten years would pass before I’d see it on stage myself. But for a time, the songs of Phantom were…how to put this…ubiquitous. That music was everywhere, and after a short while, I was Phantom‘d out.
Late in my senior year of high school, an amateur chorus in a neighboring town was looking for brass players for a concert they were doing…of Phantom songs. Then, at my summer music camp, we played an arrangement of Phantom‘s songs in the band, and then the very next year, in the chorus, we did a choral arrangement of the same Phantom songs. In college, my orchestra did yet another arrangement of Phantom songs.
Every year, my college had a music competition/festival thing in which high school students from all over Iowa and vicinity would come to play with college musicians and compete for scholarships. Those students vying for vocal scholarships would perform solos at the main concert. One year, no fewer than three young baritones did “The Music of the Night”.
And nearly every student at school had Phantom in their CD collections. Most had the single-disc “highlights” record, but the hard-cores had the “Complete show” double-CD edition. And you’d often hear those discs blasting out windows and open doors, during that pounding motif on the organ — you know the one — that practically demanded to be played at Max Volume.
For two to three years of my life, it was Phantom, Phantom, Phantom. I got sick of the whole damned thing without ever seeing it. (And I wasn’t disposed to dislike Andrew Lloyd Webber on principle, either — I’d seen Cats with my family and loved it.)
Phantom fever finally died off a bit, as all things do, and I pretty much forgot about it, until 1999, when Shea’s Buffalo Theater underwent some major refurbishment, the focus of which was expanding the stage so the theater could host the major touring productions of the day. This meant that Phantom of the Opera could finally play in Buffalo. Naturally, The Wife and I went. It was May 18, 1999; I remember that date because the next day we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on its opening day. We’ve always referred to that as “Phantom Weekend” ever since.
Seeing the show was quite the production, and it was nice to at last hear all those songs I’d been sick of for years in their proper context, as well as others that I did not know so well. In 2004, a movie version came out, and as I recall, it was reviewed pretty harshly, and we didn’t see it — until last week, that is, when I saw the DVD at the library and thought, “Well, why not? How bad can it be?”
And it turned out, not very bad at all. In fact, I thought it a fine production overall, well-sung and well-acted. The voice of Gerard Butler, who played the Phantom himself, took a small bit of getting used to, but I thought he was generally excellent, and the film puts the gorgeous spectacle of the stage show front and center, with lots of sweeping camera shots through that magnificent Parisian opera house. (Although I did think that the Phantom’s lair, deep in the sewers and catacombs beneath the Opera, looked a bit too clean.) What was really cool, though, was the degree to which The Daughter loved the movie. She’s watched it a couple additional times since, asked me to track down the music for her MP3 player, and, when she thinks no one is listening, she’s been singing songs from the show. I find that awesome.
Anyway, as this is a Something for Thursday post, I need to put something musical here, to wrap up. I know that Michael Crawford is generally seen as the canonical Phantom, but I always found something slightly “off” about his voice, so I’ve never had the problem of comparing Phantoms to Crawford in my head. Colm Wilkinson’s voice is much more to my liking, and it’s his I’ll feature now. Here’s Colm Wilkinson, singing “The Music of the Night”.
Alex North’s score to the film Spartacus is considered one of the greatest of all film scores, and in film music fan circles, a nearly mythical quality has accrued around it, owing partly to the score’s lack of a great recording. In this day and age of nearly every great score being remastered and released, Spartacus has stubbornly remained unavailable except in a single-disc, truncated CD release or a bootleg recording.
Until now, that is. Varese Sarabande is releasing Spartacus on CD, via an incredibly elaborate release that involves 6 CDs, one DVD, and a hardcover book. The package is massive, and it commands a hefty price tag (it’s over $100), so I doubt I’ll be buying this. But it’s amazing news that it’s coming out at last.
In honor of that, here’s one of the finest love themes in all film music, Alex North’s love theme from Spartacus.
This song dates from the 1970s, and it has loopy lyrics to match, but the instrumental playing makes it one of the most infectious songs I’ve ever heard. We played a shortened version once at music camp — mainly shortened in omitting a verse and the soprano sax solo — and it was a blast. This is…well, it’s the kind of song Dick Clark was talking about when he referred to a song’s beat. The rhythm of this thing will keep you going for hours.
It’s in two parts because of YouTube’s time limits, but the person who did this picked a perfect spot for the break. Here’s Chuck Mangione and friends with “Land of Make Believe”. During the bigger passages, listen for quotes from children’s songs, like “Old McDonald” and “The Farmer in the Dell”.
