The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Been a few weeks, owing to the holidays…but here is a small snippet of Howard Shore’s towering Lord of the Rings music: “The Road Goes Ever On, part two” from The Fellowship of the Ring.
The Road Goes Ever On… Pt. 2 – Featuring “In Dreams” – Howard
I always get in the mood for those movies around this time of year…maybe the New Year makes me feel like the Dawning of an Age or something….
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Ralph Vaughan Williams, played by Hilary Hahn. Pure magic. Here’s The Lark Ascending (it’s in two parts):
The first time I heard this work was at a performance in Buffalo by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I went to that concert because they were going to be playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, after this thing by RVW that I’d never heard before. This piece rocked my world, though. I think I held my breath for the entire work, for fear that my respiration would break the gossamer tapestry the violinist and the orchestra were creating that night….
And time to resurrect this weekly feature.
Older readers will know that I have some respect for the old disco sound, even if an awful lot of disco was crap and generally speaking the disco sound couldn’t really lead anywhere other than where it was when it started. It always was a musical dead end, and a lot of its tropes are easily mocked, but I will go to my grave believing that the disco era, brief as it was, really did produce some good songs. And this is one of my very favorites. This song just makes me all happy inside.
Here’s Donna Summer, singing “Last Dance”.
Dance with me!
Last week’s post here was a cover of a Beatles song, and here I have another one. It’s the Beatles song I never thought I’d like — I mean, for years, I’ve hated this song. But then I watched the movie Across the Universe (which, frankly, blew my mind in a lot of ways). This movie is a musical whose songs are all Beatles songs, almost all of them seamlessly worked into the story in logical ways, and this one comes toward the end, at one of those “movie romance” moments when all hope seems lost.
Here’s “Hey Jude”, from Across the Universe. (The dark-haired fellow is Jude; singing to him, from across the Atlantic, is his American friend Max.)
OK, John and Paul. You win. I give.
For years I thought I hated the Beatles, until I realized that a bunch of songs that I’ve always loved are actually Beatles songs, and I thus concluded that while I don’t care for the Beatles as performers, I think they were brilliant songwriters. I love the Beatles, it turns out. It’s just that I love them when somebody else is singing their songs.
Here’s my favorite of all Beatles songs, “In My Life”, sung by Canadian singer-songwriter Alison Crowe.
Alison Crowe’s website is here; I reviewed a couple of her CDs for GMR a while back, here and here. I like Ms. Crowe’s work immensely, but I must admit that due to my own tendency to be forgetful about things I discover, I forgot about her — and I’ve got an unlistened CD of hers sitting around here somewhere. I’ve got work to do….
This is one of the most achingly beautiful settings of a traditional song I have ever heard. It is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Shenandoah”. It was used in the end credits of the movie Nixon, but I first heard this setting my freshman year of college when our choir did it.
Try and find something wrong with the world after listening to that.
