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heathenwilliamduke

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Not typical of my music tastes, but it's interesting to learn that a mystery regarding a background song on The X-Files has finally been solved after 25 years.  I remember the episode, but hadn't the slightest idea that a background song in a bar scene was specifically composed for the episode.  Or that it had an ET theme (the second video, at the end of the article, has the full track minus bar noise).

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/13/1219137444/x-files-missing-song-mystery-music-lost-media

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On 12/14/2023 at 7:10 AM, TheVat said:

Not typical of my music tastes, but it's interesting to learn that a mystery regarding a background song on The X-Files has finally been solved after 25 years.  I remember the episode, but hadn't the slightest idea that a background song in a bar scene was specifically composed for the episode.  Or that it had an ET theme (the second video, at the end of the article, has the full track minus bar noise).

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/13/1219137444/x-files-missing-song-mystery-music-lost-media

Thanks for posting that.  I'm sure I saw every episode of X-Files, I just don't remember that part.  But good to hear it.  Dan Marfisi and vocal by Glenn Jordan "Staring At The Stars"

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just today have learned of the passing last week of Peter Schickele, musical humorist without peer.  Am starting with Iphigenia in Brooklyn, then perhaps Oedipus Tex, and then all week sampling from the oeuvre of PDQ Bach, the last and least of Bach's children.  

and Iphigenia found herself within a market place and all around her fish were dying, and yet their stench did live on....

He will be missed.  I don't know how well known he was overseas but I imagine our UK members who liked, say, Anna Russell, Dudley Moore, or Spike Jones, would find Prof. Schickele to their taste.

A snip from the Washington Post obituary...

Jokes meant for experts on composition were intertwined with gags that required only a cursory knowledge of music — the interruption of a serene baroque adagio with a few bars of boogie-woogie, for example, or an overlay of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” on a J.S. Bach prelude.

The works of P.D.Q. Bach often parodied the titles of popular classics. Among them were “The Seasonings” (after Haydn’s “The Seasons”), the “Sanka Cantata” (after J.S. Bach’s “Coffee Cantata”), “Oedipus Tex” (after the Sophocles fable, but set in the Wild West, with Billie Jo Casta and Madame Peep among the characters) and “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice” (a conflation of the Humperdinck opera and filmmaker Paul Mazursky’s satire about swingers).

 

P.D.Q. Bach’s instrumentation offered twists of its own. Although pieces such as the “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons” used commonplace objects not typically heard in an orchestral context, others required Mr. Schickele to build instruments of his own.

 

When he conceived the early “Concerto for Horn and Hardart,” for example, he knew the title — which alludes to a then-popular (but now defunct) chain of self-service restaurants — would only work if there were a “hardart” to play alongside the horn. So he made a nine-foot gizmo loaded with cartoonish wind instruments (kazoos and ocarinas), zany percussion (buzzers, bells and mixing bowls, as well as exploding balloons), a set of automat-style coin-operated windows and a coffee spigot.

For his P.D.Q. Bach shows, Mr. Schickele adopted an alter ego, Professor Peter Schickele, head of the Department of Musical Pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. Typically, he arrived late and with maximum commotion, his shirt untucked, his tuxedo in disarray, and wearing work boots. Until the early 1980s, his entrances often involved swinging to the stage from the balcony on a rope, knocking over as many music stands and chairs as possible; in later years, he would run down an aisle and belly flop onto the stage, or be lowered in a basket....

(end snip)

I will always treasure the memory of attending one of his concerts (in that concert hall, he rappelled down a wall, iirc), which included such masterpieces as Throw the Yule Log On Uncle John, My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth, and Only He Who is Running Knows.  There was also a piece that incorporated somewhat unconventional symphonic instruments, one of which was called a wind-breaker....yes, pretty much what you'd think.  

RIP.  Or even better, having some big laughs with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and all the other classical musicians he loved to satirize.

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  • 4 weeks later...

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