Another favorite by Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors.
Something for Thursday
I had no idea what to say last week, and I find I still have no idea what to say this week. Yes, I have thoughts on the decision this country made. No, I do not know when–or even if–I will write them up in this space. I’m not sure any of it matters.
In such times I retreat to the greats who produced great human art in times that were objectively worse. In his 41st and last symphony, Mozart produced an astonishingly optimistic and universal view which amazes all the more when I consider that he was already well into the health issues that would shortly kill him at the age of 35.
In times like this I have to remind myself that the world persists, that beauty and wonder are still things, and that humanity is still capable of things better than the statement about itself that this country made last week. Yes, I’ll be posting again soon, if not starting tomorrow…but more likely after the coming weekend. Meanwhile, here is Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, sometimes called the “Jupiter”.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
The other day I featured an instrumental medley of tunes from the Lerner-and-Loewe Broadway show Camelot, and since then I’ve had the music of Camelot on my brain, so I’ve been listening to the songs quite a bit–both from the movie soundtrack and from the Original Broadway Cast recording. As I noted, the songs are much better than the book (in Broadway lingo, “book” is basically the “screenplay”: all the spoken-word stuff that takes place around the songs and creates the dramatic settings for the songs). Some of these songs lodged in my brain as soon as I heard them way back when I first watched the film of Camelot, but a few others had to wait to work their magic. This is one of those.
If you’re familiar with the Arthurian legend, basically King Arthur forms a glorious realm centered on his castle of Camelot, from where he and his Knights of the Round Table keep the peace. But a truly great knight named Lancelot comes along, and Lancelot and Arthur become best friends immediately, forming what we might now call a “bromance”. All should be well, only…Lancelot falls in love with Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere, and she with him. They try to keep from acting on it, but that turns to secret attraction which in turn becomes secret trysts and eventually they can’t hold back anymore, and the exposure of their affair becomes the event that drives a wedge into Camelot and destroys Arthur’s realm forever. (Depending on which version you read, there might be a Quest for the Holy Grail in there, and some stuff about Arthur having children slain, Herod-like, to avoid a prophecy, and evil sorceresses and…it can get complicated.)
In the show, there finally comes a deeply sad song as Guinevere sings to Lancelot about the love that should never have been allowed to flower. It is called “I Loved You Once In Silence”, and it is honestly a heartbreaker of a song. Secret and forbidden love can be ruinous…but that doesn’t mean that revealing the secret and forbidden love can be any the less ruinous, as this song demonstrates.
I’ve posted both the Original Broadway Cast album version of the song and the film version here. It may seem an unfair comparison at first: Broadway had Julie Andrews, after all, and it’s perhaps axiomatic that nobody can sing something better than Julie Andrews. Vanessa Redgrave is cast as Guinevere in the film, and she makes a game effort but nobody is going to confuse her with Julie Andrews, whose voice in her singing days was golden perfection.
But I’m not going to sell Redgrave’s work short. No, she’s not anywhere near the singer Andrews is…but I think she does capture more of Guinevere’s anguish and pain in this song. She genuinely sounds like someone trapped in a horrible emotional situation that offered nothing but suffering at each turn. Andrew’s performance, while gorgeous, sounds to me like a performance. (Now, that’s not to say she performed it like this on stage. Original Cast albums are hardly good vehicles by which to approximate the affect of an actual production.) I conclude that these are both excellent versions of a heartbreaking song, but in very different ways.
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Something for Thursday (Mitzi Gaynor edition)
Actress and singer Mitzi Gaynor has died. She was 93, and she was one of the very last remaining stars with ties to the great era of the Hollywood movie musical. Her biggest role was likely South Pacific, the Rodgers-and-Hammerstein classic (which I may have never actually seen all the way through, it’s not lodged in my memory all that well at all), which is set in–of course!–the islands of the South Pacific during World War II.
This particular song is the one from that show which I know best, though I am abashed to admit that it’s not because of the song but because a teevee commercial for a hair care product used the theme as the basis for its jingle: “I’m gonna wash that gray right out of my hair!” It was some years before I learned the truth.
Here is Mitzi Gaynor singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair” from South Pacific.
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Something for Thursday
Born on this date in 1813: Giuseppe Verdi, one of the greatest of all composers and a titan of the operatic stage. Many composers lived short lives in ill health and little acclaim, but not so Verdi: he lived to be 87 and was such a beloved figure in Italy that when he died, over 300,000 people attended his funeral.
I’m sad to admit that I don’t know Verdi’s operas very well at all, but this particular excerpt is a favorite of mine. Here is the “Triumphal March” from Aida.
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Something for Thursday
The Buffalo AKG Museum right now has an exhibit dedicated to “Op Art”. The museum describes the exhibit thusly:
In the 1960s, electronic media began reformatting the nature of images and how we see. Unlike static paintings or sculptures, video and digital images are dynamic and interactive, made of abstract patterns of information that are manipulated, stored, and shared as electronic signals or numerical bits of data.
At the very same moment, an emerging movement called “Op” (short for “Optical”) took art and popular culture by storm. Op artists use abstract patterns to create optical illusions that are dynamic and interactive, much like the electronic images of the time. Could it be more than coincidental that the curves of Op art resemble electronic video signals, or that its grids suggest pixilated digital pictures? In fact, Op art emerged at the same time as video and digital art, and many Op artists would turn to using these technologies, just as many pioneering video and digital artists turned to Op art for inspiration.
I walked through this exhibit the other day, and it was absolutely fascinating, not just for the art itself, but because it is in many ways representative of the popular art that was culturally prominent when I was a kid. A lot of this stuff was like a time capsule. I already plan to return to that exhibit again. (I took a bunch of photos, but I haven’t edited any of them yet.)
One item was a film by John Whitney Sr. called Matrix III. This was projected on a large screen that was overhanging one of the exhibit rooms. It’s an abstract animation of geometic figures moving around a confined area. Whitney is viewed as one of the pioneers of computer animation, and I have to admit a certain nostalgic feeling for the days of early computer animation, when realism wasn’t even a goal and the whole mechanistic nature of the art was what made it art in the first place.
If you’re local, I strongly recommend this exhibit! It runs until January 27.
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Something for Thursday
Completing my small survey of music from the films of James Cameron, we have a short suite from the score to Avatar, written by James Horner. I like this score a lot, for its suggestion of an alien world that is still deeply beautiful, and the tie the people of that world feel to their surroundings. The film often gets ripped for being “derivative”, but I don’t know…I tend to think most films are “derivative”, and what they bring to the table in terms of creativity is how they blend all of their influences into something new and interesting. That’s how I see it, anyway.
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Something for Thursday
Continuing our little series here of music from the films of James Cameron, who earlier this year turned 70, we have the big one.
Titanic.
Wow, this movie is nearing 30 years old. I remember when it was dominating popular culture, totally and utterly. In 1997 Titanic was just huge. It’s hard to overstate just how big a phenomenon it was. Musically, it was carried by a stunning ballad sung by Celine Dion, one of the biggest hits of my entire life; but there was also its score, which sold a huge number of records all by itself. This was one of the few times a movie was so big that its composer actually entered the zeitgeist–in fact, when had the last one of those been? Probably Star Wars, twenty years earlier, with John Williams. Anyway, Titanic made James Horner a huge name.
Horner had already been a big name in film music for years prior to that. The man paid his dues, first with scoring low-budget Roger Corman flicks before he started getting bigger assignments; his first big break was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, for which he turned in a classic score. My own relationship with Horner’s music was always complicated, but credit where due: A number of my personal desert-island filmscores that I love dearly are by James Horner.
For Titanic he turned in a surprisingly folk-tinged score, eschewing obvious approaches like a nautical sound or some kind of Edwardian-Elgarian sound. While I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Titanic score, I do think it’s very, very good, and concert performances of suites from this score abound. Here is one that I found quite good:
And while I’m discussing Titanic, one cue that is utterly magical in the film and was inexplicably left off the OST album (perhaps intentionally, as an extra enticement for the later Back to Titanic album) was the delicate solo-piano rendition of “My Heart Will Go On”, titled “The Portrait” on the record, which accompanies the scene where Jack draws Rose. If James Horner’s entire musical output had been limited to just this cue, I think his name would still be known, at least a bit.
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Something for Thursday
Continuing music selections from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a brief suite from True Lies. This movie answers the thought experiment of “What if James Cameron directed a James Bond movie?” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an American spy who maintains a boring family life by day (his wife and kid don’t even know he’s a spy) but does dangerous spy-shit by night (well, kind-of, he has a boring job where the “travels a lot”). But as he enters his most dangerous mission ever, his wife and kid suddenly become a part of the story. It’s a fun movie in its first and third acts, but act two is really hard to watch because there’s a weird subplot that has Arnold becoming convinced that his wife is having an affair or something so he sets up a bizarre sting operation to make her think she’s a spy and…it’s all very weird and honestly, not very comfortable to watch, to the point that when the movie’s main villain shows back up after having disappeared for 40 minutes, it’s almost a relief.
The score is by Brad Fiedel, who did the music for the Terminator movies. He’s not my favorite composer ever, but for a certain type of 90s action movie–say, the type directed by James Cameron–he’s fine. Here’s a short suite from True Lies.