Mark Likes Music

Salon.com listed their 50 dorkiest songs (that we secretly love) earlier this week; it's a great list, but I think they missed a few. How about this, for one: Judson Spence's album was cringeworthy, but for the Hammond B-3 alone, his only hit was worth listening to when it came out in 1988.

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 ...

Pretty well everyone has heard the Hallelujah Chorus: It's a Christmas staple, on its own or as part of Handel's Messiah ; it's also become one of those pieces that people love to make their own. Since 1993, Marin Alsop has been performing a gospel version of Messiah , conceived with Bob Christianson and Gary Anderson, called Too Hot to Handel , with a particularly swinging Hallelujah Chorus: H ere's a "mildly cynical update"  by Edward Current and Steven Clark from the UK (only Brits would find this "mildly cynical"): And only Canadians would find a Hallelujah Chorus flash mob cool :

On every January 1 since 1939, the Vienna Philharmonic has been waltzing in the new year at the Musikverein. In all of these concerts, Johann Strauss Jr.'s music is the most prominent musical fixture. Although it was his father, along with Josef Lanner, who popularized Austria's indigenous 3/4 dance music, Johann Strauss Jr. was the true "Waltz King"; by the time he passed in 1899, his music was beloved worldwide, from Bosnia to Boston. Most people are familiar with his "Blue Danube" Waltz; the Vienna Phil plays it on every New Year's Day concert--and of course, it's part of the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack: As respected for his dance music as he was in his time--Brahms was but one noted admirer and friend--and as historically important as he is for it today, Strauss was also a successful stage composer. He wrote a ballet based on Cinderella, and provided competition to Offenbach with operettas such as his Die Fledermaus (1874): This year...

The Seattle Symphony is performing a cheesy-music favorite tonight and Saturday. They have a sound clip and program notes on their website . They're also playing, with Elisa Barston, Philip Glass's First Violin Concerto: Here's a challenge: how many copyright infringements can you find in this video?

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...

Now that the World Series is over, it's time to start thinking about the Super Bowl--and the ads that'll be on the Super Bowl broadcast. During the third quarter of last season's game, Coke ran an ad that used Ravel's Bolero , a piece that even the composer might concede is among the cheesiest music ever written. The ad, by advertising company Wieden & Kennedy, was set in Africa, but the music is based on the distinctive Spanish dance rhythm. Ravel's mother was Basque, and although he didn't make his first trip to Spain until 1924 when he was almost 50, he used the sounds of the country in early pieces like  Rapsodie espagnol e suite (completed in 1908) and his opera L'Heure espagnole (composed at around the same time, and premiered in Paris in 1911). In the same year Ravel sat down to write Bolero , he made a triumphant tour of North America. Everywhere he went--from Houston to Montreal--people greeted him as a star. Ravel was overwhelmed: ...

Stereogum pointed out just how often that Train song "Hey Soul Sister" has been used in commercials .

Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings has been repeatedly popping into popular consciousness to signify tragic loss since its auspicious 1938 premiere on an NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast with Arturo Toscanini ( which you can hear courtesy of NPR.org ). Originally composed as part of Barber's second string quartet, the Adagio for Strings was heard on the radio when FDR died. Barber arranged it in 1967 for choir as an Agnus Dei. Adagio for Strings is part of the soundtracks for 1980s classics The Elephant Man and Platoon . On September 15, 2001, Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra closed London's annual Proms concerts with the piece. Barber's centenary is this March (the composer died in 1981), so now is a perfect time to get to know (again) his most famous music , a work that has become an almost universal musical symbol for catharsis in the face of loss.

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...

As a kid, I first came across classical music in a commercial that ran on TV for one of those compilations that promised to send you on a journey to an enchanted land filled with enduring musical wonders.  Most of the music came off to me as pretty well all the same, but there was one piece that stuck out from the rest.   The opening of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, with the pianist pounding out the beat behind the thick syrup-pour of strings, seemed at once completely out of place with the other "relaxing classics" and their epitome.  While other pieces whispered apologetically, Tchaikovsky's concerto yelled, You are going to listen to some beautiful classical music now!  It was unashamedly, flamboyantly, cheesy music.  It's a staple of the repertoire today--a favorite piece of classical-music cheese--but when Tchaikovsky's concerto premiered in Boston back in 1875, reviewers were, at their most forgiving, skeptical of its staying power and, at their mo...