Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Fanfare for the Common Man

-
In 1977, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer recorded their own, nine-minute blues-jam version of what is probably Aaron Copland's single most famous piece. The cover was a big hit--perhaps also the nadir of art rock--and CBS used it as the opening theme for its Saturday-afternoon sports show, CBS Sports Spectacular, a low-rent version of Wide World of Sports:

Outside of the concert hall, this is how most people (at least those of a certain baby-boomer age) have come to know Fanfare for the Common Man; that's a shame, because inside of the concert hall, its distinctive, sweeping opening always exhorts goosebumps.
Copland wrote the piece on commission in 1942 from Eugene Goosens, who at the time was the music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Goosens contacted 18 composers to write fanfares that would be "stirring and significant contributions to the war effort" (this was only shortly after Pearl Harbor). He ended up using nine of them for Cincinnati's 1942-43 season, including Copland's, which is pretty well the only one still heard today.

A few years later, Copland used Fanfare for the Common Man in the finale of his Third Symphony, which you can hear here.

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe Michael Kaiser Just Isn't Looking in the Right Places

-
On Sequenza21, Armondo Bayalo claims that Michael Kaiser is "just plain wrong about the state of the art"--and then proceeds to tell us all the reasons why he's right. Bayalo's real point isn't that Kaiser is wrong, but that he is only right within his own big-arts frame of reference. He doesn't see all the great stuff that's going in "smaller, leaner operations" than the Kennedy Center: Fair enough, but part of the problem is that the funders and fundraisers who hold the purse strings aren't willing to invest in those grass-roots groups so that they can grow.
Read more

Louisville Orchestra Restructuring Slog

-
The dreary business of the Louisville Orchestra's restructuring is going forward, with the CEO threatening to close up shop if he has to pay the band. Today, a US Bankruptcy Court judge ruled that the organization can't cut its budget by voiding its contract with its musicians ,who will now get cheques until April as a result, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. In testimony prior to the ruling , the board president, Chuck Maisch, said that the orchestra could only honor the contract by dipping into its endowment; the orchestra's CEO, Robert Birman, said that the orchestra would simply have to liquidate assets. It looks as if that  the proceedings start up again in Louisville on January 6 .
Read more

Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Ravel's Bolero (Part II)

-
Here's what Uncle Fred had to say about Ravel's Bolero : "It's the most descriptive sex music ever written." According to his niece-in-law Jenny, played by Bo Derek in 10 , "he proved it." To anyone with qualms about pedophilia (I'm firmly in this camp), Jenny's little story, meant to seduce poor hapless George (Dudley Moore), is uncomfortable, to say the least. (The whole movie gives me the creeps.) Although he was an incestuous cad, Uncle Fred had a point about Bolero . As mentioned in an earlier post , the piece opens with the snare drum playing the distinctive rhythmic pattern of the Spanish dance it's named after. The seductive flute melody that enters shortly after sets in motion a gradual blossoming to a climactic finale; as that rhythm pulses below, the melody repeats, the orchestration expands, and the music becomes ever more incessant and powerful. It's hard not to get all worked up when you listen to it. Bolero set Rav...
Read more