Mark Likes Music

Over the last couple of years, there's been a steady trickle of articles proclaiming the internet to be the last great hope of classical music. Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal contributed it's drop in the bucket with a piece that focused on the recently rejuvenated Classical Archives website started 15 years ago by entrepreneur John Jurgensen.

If classical music is dead, how can it so spectacularly capture the magnificence that is the mixture of peanut butter and chocolate?   And if we can have a chocolate bar named after an entire galaxy, why can't we also compare one to the largest planet in our solar system?   The music that accompanies this quick-and-painless Reese's ad is "Jupiter" from British composer Gustav Holst's orchestral work The Planets , another cheesy piece of classical music that everyone really should know.    Holst wrote The Planets  in 1916.  A collection of seven short musical character studies meant to depict the personalities of the gods each planet in the solar system is named after, it's by far the composer's most popular work, and lives on through references in (commercials, of course, as well as) the soundtracks to such movies as The Right Stuff and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit , as well as on The Simpsons and other TV shows.  So grab some candy and