music Archives - Page 245 of 261 - Ramblin' with Roger

April Rambling

Truth is that I purchased it mostly because I hate it when Mike Sterling cries.

As a friend noted, “If this occurred randomly and naturally, it’s amazing. If it was done with Photoshop, it was inspired.”

‘Cheap flights’ song (and dance)

Rivers of Babylon a capella by Amy Barlow, joined by Kathy Smith and Corrine Crook, at Amy’s gig in my hometown of Binghamton, NY, July 2009.

Star Wars, the complete musical?

Many people use the terms science fiction and fantasy as if they are interchangeable or identical when they are actually related, not the same. Author David Brin illuminates the differences.

Superman: citizen of the world

Re: World Intellectual Property Day and Jack Kirby

As a Presbyterian minister, I believed it was a sin. Then I met people who really understood the stakes: Gay men.

Susan Braig, a 61-year-old Altadena cancer survivor, takes old pharmaceutical pills and tablets and mounts them on costume jewelry to create colorful necklaces, pendants, earrings, and tiaras that she sells. It’s a way to help pay off her medical debt. By Bob Pool, Los Angeles Times, March 29 2011

Jaquandor does a weekly burst of weird and awesome, but this particular collection was more than usual.

I wasn’t a huge Doctor Who fan, but I was touched by the outpouring of emotion over the death from cancer of Elisabeth Sladen, among the most beloved of the Dr. Who companions and star of The Sarah Jane Adventures. A post by Chris Black.

SamuraiFrog on Weird Al and Lady Gaga.

I’m not a huge fan of Mike Peters’ comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm. But you should check out the episodes for April 12 through 16, when he deals with Sesame Street in the age of this Republican Congress. Also, see your favorite arachnid in the April 18 strip.

I bought a new book this month, Write More Good, by a consortium of folks known as The Bureau Chiefs, despite never having followed their meteoric success with their Fake AP Stylebook Twitter feed. I bought it primarily because I was familiar with a number of the Chiefs, even following the blogs of Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin and Dorian Wright’s Postmodern Barney. Truth is that I purchased it mostly because I hate it when Mike Sterling cries. I haven’t read it, but I’ve gotten more than a few laughs when I’ve skimmed it.

Google alert finds: Separating science from attitude By Roger Green. Re: an airplane parts firm: The company folded in 2007 and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is now investigating company officers Roger Green and Victor Brown on a variety of potential charges, including grand theft and racketeering

Finally, from the royal wedding you weren’t invited to.

O is for Occupants of Outer Space

Golden phonograph record designed to “contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them.”

“In March 1953 an organization known as the International Flying Saucer Bureau sent a bulletin to all its members urging them to participate in an experiment termed ‘World Contact Day’ whereby, on March 15 at a predetermined time, they would attempt to collectively send out a telepathic message to visitors from outer space. The message began with the words…’Calling occupants of interplanetary craft!'”

Apparently, no one replied.

But the old news story inspired a Canadian band to form with the peculiar name of Klaatu. The group name came from the science-fiction classic 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in which the immortal phrase “Klaatu Barada Nikto” is uttered to stop the robot Gort from destroying the earth after the humanoid Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is shot and (temporarily) killed. Obviously, Ringo Starr copped the imagery for his 1974 album, which helped fuel the rumor that Klaatu was really the Beatles.

In the mid-1970s, Klaatu wrote and recorded the song Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day), or Calling Occupants on the label. Here’s a verse:

Please come in peace we beseech you
Only a landing will teach them
Our earth may never survive
So do come we beg you
Please interstellar policemen
Won’t you give us a sign
Give us a sign that we’ve reached you

And here’s a link to the single.

The song was covered by the Carpenters(!), who took it to #32 in the US charts in 1977.

Coincidentally, two both Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, each with a golden phonograph record designed to “contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them.”

There are, of course, plenty of movies of visitors from another planet; here’s somebody’s top 10 list. Conversely, the 50th anniversary of an Earth human actually going out into space is this month.

As we know more about the universe, it becomes increasingly doubtful, at least to me, that there isn’t intelligent life SOMEWHERE out there. Although I was a bit distressed by the fact that 1/3 of the Russians and 1/5 of the Americans on THIS planet believe the sun goes around the earth. Oy.

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

Hallelujah

One of the songs on the album was Hallelujah from Christ on the Mount of Olives by Beethoven, and it was amazingly competent for 12- and 13-year-olds.

When I was in high school in Binghamton (upstate NY) in the late 1960s, my sister Leslie, another black teenage girl, and I were invited to visit the classroom of the junior high school in suburban Vestal. The reason, if I’m remembering correctly (and it was over 40 years ago) was that the only black teenagers they saw were ones on television, and in those days, that was mighty few.

Interestingly, the male teacher of this music class was black, who was likely the only one, and therefore one more than there was at the time at Binghamton Central HS.

We sat and talked and answered questions, and the session seemingly did what it was intended to do, i.e., to let the Vestal kids get to know us as people. This was neither the first nor the last time my sister and I were involved in such an ambassadorship.

What was most interesting to me, though, is that they had put out an album of music, pressed onto vinyl. It was mostly classical and public domain folk tunes. The cover, though, was blank. they gave us each a copy and I remember coloring it with a bunch of geometric designs. And while I’m not sure I still have my copy, my sister definitely has hers.

One of the songs on the album was Hallelujah from Christ on the Mount of Olives by Beethoven, and it was amazingly competent for 12- and 13-year-olds. I thought of that today because it’s one of the songs we are performing for Easter this morning.

Here are a few versions:
Piano and choir
With orchestra- soft (crank it up!)
With orchestra
Solo organ
More like we’ll sound like

Song History: You’ll Lose A Good Thing

Barbara’s rendition appears on the Hairspray movie soundtrack, the original movie with Divine.

I’ll admit it; I’ve lost my energy for keeping up with the newest music. But this doesn’t mean I stop learning about music. There is apparently a wealth of older music I don’t know about.

This particular adventure started with the Coverville podcast (#756) about Aretha Franklin. As you may or may not know, Aretha was signed to Columbia Records in 1960, and recorded with the label with only moderate success; her entire output, plus extras, from her years on Columbia Records, is being released in a boxed set in 2011. Though raised in Detroit, Aretha Franklin never recorded with Motown; rather, her greatest success was with Atlantic.

One of the songs on Coverville, covered in this case by Madness, was You’ll Lose A Good Thing. But it wasn’t originally recorded by Aretha. It was written and recorded by Barbara Lynn; it went to #8 on the pop charts and #1 on the soul charts in 1962. Here’s the original recording and here’s a live version – check out Barbara’s nifty guitar playing! Aretha’s version came out in 1964. Incidentally, Barbara’s rendition appears on the Hairspray movie soundtrack, the original movie with Divine, which inspired the Broadway musical, which inspired the Travolta-starring movie.

Interestingly, the song was also covered by Freddy Fender. It went to #1 on the country charts and #32 on the pop charts in 1976. This showed me, once again, how universal music is – pop, soul, country: it’s pretty much all the same.

Not the Bob Dylan You Know

“Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be.”

On March 12, 2011, my wife and I got to see the great percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie perform, with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, a work by Pulitzer, Grammy, and Academy Award winner, composer John Corigliano, performing a piece commissioned by her, Conjurer. It was great.

During the intermission, there were several recordings by Glennie and Corilglano for sale. I thought to buy something by Glennie, but I was intrigued by something called Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (for soprano and orchestra), and I bought that instead. In the program notes for the evening, he echoed what he wrote here:

When Sylvia McNair asked me to write her a major song cycle for Carnegie Hall, she had only one request; to choose an American text… I had no ideas. Except that I had always heard, by reputation, of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs.

One reviewer of the recording found it highly suspect that the composer could never have heard “Blowin’ in the Wind”, but having spoken to him briefly after the concert, when he signed my copy, I find it totally plausible.

So I bought a collection of his texts and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard-and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language. I then contacted Jeff Rosen, his manager, who approached Bob Dylan with the idea of re-setting his poetry to my music. I do not know of an instance in which this has been done before (which was part of what appealed to me), so I needed to explain that these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete. Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art-crossover in the opposite direction, one might say. Dylan granted his permission, and I set to work.

And, musically, it’s not the Dylan you’ve heard before. On first listen, it is mighty jarring, but subsequent hearing, it begins to make its own sense. If you don’t like operatic sopranos, you won’t like this, but there is something about it that eventually appealed to me.

Possibly more immediately accessible is the other piece on the CD, Three Hallucinations (based on the film score to “Altered States”), a movie I saw in theaters three decades ago. The use of religious themes, specifically a variation on Rock of Ages, made this more gratifying on the initial listen.