• Warmed up the system to various Pink Floyd

soundtracks

• The closing credits suites from Pirates 3
• "Obliviate" - the opening music from Harry Potter 7.1 (painful scene, that...)
• Abduction of Barry - Close Encounters
• The Conversation - Close Encounters

...started late as traffic was horrible getting out of Tysons.  Got in just in time for 6 kids...hope I didn't miss everybody else...

This year I'm going to shuffle up a bit more (having put together an ipod mix)

• The Gathering - Herbal Movement
• Stick Men - The Firebird Suite (yes, Stravinsky played on a Chapman Stick, a specially made Touch Guitar ( Read more... )

it is very interesting to compare the background music for various Yosemite Valley (or Grand Canyon or Yellowstone) documentaries over the years, the type they would show or sell at the visitors center. Each generation assumed it was creating a soundtrack to last, yet each sounds pretty well dated and is more a distraction than a support to the ( Read more... )

J Edgar Hoover warned Richard Nixon not to attend the premiere of Bernstein's Mass (at the Kennedy Center), implying that it wouldn't look good for the President to be seen hearing an anti-war statement in a Latin* text ( Read more... )

started 6:15, ended by 7:45.  Not even 30 kids (and for a moment, with 2 "rushes" of 8-10 kids, I was worried we'd run out of stuff...).  Totally a classic rock evening this year...

• soundchecked to Pink Floyd (Dogs, Welcome to the Machine, One of these Days, Careful with that Axe Eugene)
• Alan Parsons (Tales of Mystery and Imagination)
• Sting's I Burn ( Read more... )

Bill Bruford:Arnold Schoenberg allegedly offered the notion that all composition is just very slow improvisation, and I accept the corollary to be true, that improvisation is extremely fast composition. Things sound best to me when the composed sounds improvised and the improvised sounds composed. I was always most comfortable in the cracks between ( Read more... )

Abstract? - Sandow:Often people say that classical music -- instrumental music -- is abstract, and therefore not easy to understand. Thus, as one commenter said a few days ago, it can't be compared to baseball and movies, which aren't abstract, and therefore are things that people can readily understand. To understand classical music, by contrast, ( Read more... )

Why my criteria matter - Sandow:Why should it matter, to measure orchestra quality in such detail ( Read more... )

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: World War II Music:[Strauss and Orff's] surrender to Nazi overtures is an ineradicable stain on the biography of each; but the music itself commits no sins simply by being and remaining popular. That “Carmina Burana” has appeared in hundreds of films and television commercials is proof that it contains no diabolical ( Read more... )