What are you listening to right now?

[TheVat]

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

[Airbrush]

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"

 

[AIkonoklazt]

 

[geordief]

"You can't catch me"

Nobody's fool.

[joigus]

The Bongo Song

Author: Safri Duo

Drum cover: El Estepario Siberiano

Last 1.5 min are promotional material

[zapatos]

2 hours ago, joigus said:

The Bongo Song

Author: Safri Duo

Drum cover: El Estepario Siberiano

Last 1.5 min are promotional material

Wow!! That was awesome!! 😃

[joigus]

1 hour ago, zapatos said:

Wow!! That was awesome!! 😃

Thanks for the reaction. Yeah, I found out about this guy a couple of days ago on the Rick Beato channel, and I was blown away. 

[Airbrush]

 

 

[Moontanman]

 

[Airbrush]

 

[TheVat]

Two SF Ballet dancers perform this wonderful George Harrison classic:

 

 

 

[npts2020]

 

[TheVat]

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.

[AIkonoklazt]

 

[Airbrush]

 

[Moontanman]

 

Put that hotdog in my bun! 

 

[Airbrush]

 

[toucana]

Part of the soundtrack to the film  'Perfect Days' (2023) by Wim Wenders.

 

 

[Moontanman]

 

[exchemist]

Just come across this Flashmob video from Lausanne, in the course of revising the bass line in my favourite chorus from Bach's St. John Passion:

The cellist plays part of one of Bach's Cello Suites and ends on a (baroque pitch) G, from which the basses can get the C they need to start the fugue. The conductor pretends to be a waiter delivering beer to the next table, until the moment arrives. 

They sing it very well, especially given the acoustics of a busy restaurant. Pretty cool, I thought. 

This chorus is in 3/4, with real JSB swing, syncopation and drive. Fantastic music.

[sethoflagos]

RIP Dickey Betts

 

[joigus]

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

Fantastic music.

Fantastic indeed. Thank you. The Suite muffled by the voices was great for setting the mood. 

I've long felt that all music gravitates towards Bach... or emanates from it. Or something like that.

I feel that music before Bach is a preamble to Bach.

And music after Bach is a corollary to Bach.

Even atonal music seems like an attempt to break the shackles of Bach while still doing music. Like 'how little Bach can one get without making just noise?'

I'm very partial about Bach, you see. I'm very Bach-centred.

So thank you.

[exchemist]

8 hours ago, joigus said:

Fantastic indeed. Thank you. The Suite muffled by the voices was great for setting the mood. 

I've long felt that all music gravitates towards Bach... or emanates from it. Or something like that.

I feel that music before Bach is a preamble to Bach.

And music after Bach is a corollary to Bach.

Even atonal music seems like an attempt to break the shackles of Bach while still doing music. Like 'how little Bach can one get without making just noise?'

I'm very partial about Bach, you see. I'm very Bach-centred.

So thank you.

Yes Bach seems to be a great inflexion point in the evolution of Western music. All the pros play Bach, even rock musicians. I remember once talking to a Thai pianist, playing jazzy hotel stuff in a hotel bar in Bangkok. My colleague asked him what music he played for pleasure at home and he replied "Bach". I tried to persuade him to play some for me, as he was taking requests, but he said the hotel management wouldn't like it (!) and I could not convince him.

I also recall once listening to an organ performance of the Art of Fugue in my room in Oxford, when a fellow chemist came in who was a jazz clarinettist (He had been a member of the Kent Youth Orchestra before coming up). One of the weirder fugues was playing and he couldn't make it what it was. He thought it sounded so edgy it must be some c.20th composer - Messiaen or something. He was amazed when I told him.

But if you liked what I posted, this  (opening chorus, 1st 7 mins) is another of my all time favourites as a choral singer, from Part V of the Christmas Oratorio (apologies if I've posted this one before at some point): 

You have to click the "watch on YouTube" link to see it.

This is also in 3/4. My impression is Bach does not often use that time signature and when he does, he often thinks it's time for some gaiety. In the video you can actually see the musicians enjoying it. They are making eye contact with each other and smiling.

 

Edited May 2 by exchemist

[TheVat]

Great stuff.  Bach innovated in so many ways, counterpoint, modulation, four part harmony, use of dissonant chords, even in stepping back to Dorian mode and others.  Always a fan.  And provider of Bach jokes....

Why did Bach have 20 children?

Because there were no stops in his organ.

 

 

[exchemist]

39 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Great stuff.  Bach innovated in so many ways, counterpoint, modulation, four part harmony, use of dissonant chords, even in stepping back to Dorian mode and others.  Always a fan.  And provider of Bach jokes....

Why did Bach have 20 children?

Because there were no stops in his organ.

 

 

Arf arf. 

To be fair I think all these techniques were already in existence by Bach's time, but he was the apotheosis of them all in combination. So much so that everyone wanted to go back to a simpler texture after he died and almost nobody played him for a century. There were even people of my grandparents' generation who referred to JSB as "Bach's father". I believe we have principally Mendelssohn to thank for bringing him back to the concert hall. 

When we were rehearsing the B Minor Mass, our director spent some time in one number on getting the tenors and altos to be aware of the interplay between their parts, so he got the accompanist to play just those two lines on the piano, for us to listen. We were mesmerised. I remember thinking people would pay good money to hear that played in a piano recital. And it was just 2 parts - and the inner parts at that! So the full 4 part harmony was pretty rich, dense stuff.  One can see why people wanted a change.

But Bach is an inexhaustible pleasure to sing. There's always something you hadn't spotted. He seems to write from the bass up, so the bass parts are always terrific and somehow very virile - provided you can do octave jumps easily and have three lungs. (Unlike Handel, he takes no prisoners where voices are concerned and you have to follow a line that could have been written for a string instrument or the keyboard.)