Image via Wikipedia
The Chair of the UCLA School of Music attended a practice and game performance of the UCLA marching band, for the first time in twenty years. This might have been predicted since I believe the chair also blogs and posts YouTube videos.
Although there is not much to say about yesterday's game itself against USC (boo), Roger did point out the appropriate musical programming:
For the record, I should point out the local-spouse was a drummer in the Stanford Band (aka the Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band). However, we don't talk about it much in polite company since after the great Band Shak vandalism scandal several years ago, the band was discredited or disbanded or repudiated or exonerated or something. Although, I like this endorsement from Rolling Stone:
It's hard for anyone raised on rock to imagine that a band could sound this loud without thousands of watts of amplification.
Wikipedia also has this to say:
The band prides itself on its vast song selection, never playing the same song twice in one day, and has a library of over one thousand songs at its disposal, nearly one hundred of which are in active rotation.
Not to delve too deeply into this but I should point out the Stanford Band has a long history of humorous ableit albeit rogue behavior and is best known for its inadvertent participation in "The Play:"
Image via Wikipedia
I sat and mused on words, and the decline of language. Love, Peace, War. So overused we barely know what they mean anymore; like love: Is love a concept from the Gospels, from Plato, or that impossibly repetitive word in any pop song? “All you need is love, love, love...” Meaningless. Religion: are we talking about prayer, charity, faith, or militant fundamentalism? Enemy: that old word we can’t live without. We can all conceive of a personal enemy; a jealous lover, a bitter rival, and so on; but that big-concept word—THE ENEMY—is it not invented and constantly re-invented to give us something against which to fight? Could we have a thriving economy, or even a modest affluent society, without this perennial reason to build our arsenals? Would we be in space without an enemy to beat there?
Leonard Bernstein -- Truth in a Time of War.
Robert Hurwitt in the SF Chronicle reminds us 2007 is the 50th anniversary of the stage version of West Side Story and maybe the 400th anniversary of a Shakespeare play.
wikipedia: west side story coriolanus timon of athens
Via Playbill, the Leonard Bernstein Peter Pan CD debuts on the classical music charts:
The CD restores music that was discarded from the musical when it ran on Broadway in 1950 and '51. It features musical theater veteran Linda Eder and baritone Daniel Narducci. Alexander Frey is the conductor.
In the 1950 production, Jean Arthur was Peter Pan and Boris Karloff Captain Hook. Ok, given Jean Arthur's voice, I'd really like to hear her sing; less so, Boris Karloff.
Update: A cursory check of iTunes, Rhapsody, and singingfish didn't turn up any Jean Arthur MP3s.
In today's SF Chronicle, Robert Hurwitt has a capsule review of the CD and says the work is "smart and vigorously tuneful." He also describes how much of the Bernstein score and half of the songs had to be dropped because Arthur and Karloff couldn't sing.
Film composer Dmitri Tiomkin (Giant, High Noon, Rawhide TV theme song) on writing for certain actors' voices:
Jimmie Stewart is another actor for whom it is a delight to write music. Paradoxically, his speaking voice is not “musical.” But it has a slightly nasal quality and occasionally “cracks” in a way that is easy to complement. Jean Arthur's voice is somewhat similar. Just why this type of voice should be easy to write for, I don't know. One might speculate that since these voices have little colour in themselves, the complementary musical backdrop doesn't bump into or fall over the dialogue. The mere fact that such voices are unmusical gives them an additional definition.
