Longer form - from Rex Spaulding, High school All-State Honor Band 3 out of 4 years, guitar hobbyist.
Contributed 29 Nov 2016.
I wanted to answer classical guitar.
But then I thought of a homeless guy with nothing to his name but his old cello, and man… he made that sing.
Then I thought of the guy who played tenor sax on the street (made me decide to start with saxophone when I was a kid).
And next I thought of numerous concert pianists who can make a piano sound like something more than just a piano.
Then I got to thinking about a jazz trombonist who made his trombone sound like both a French horn and a trumpet, at the same time, while retaining his trombone tonality.
Then I began to recall the violin solo that choked me up.
Finally, I remember a harp - a simple harp, but it sounded like dancing fairies (or something crazy like that).
There is no simple answer - the instrument wasn’t the source of my emotions… it was the musician, every time.
It’s easy enough for any old Joe to pick up a saxophone and make it squawk like a dying bird. Or drag a bow across a violin and make it sound like nails on a chalkboard. Or just sit a (non-gifted, untalented) kid in front of any instrument…
None. The person is delivering the message of emotion through the instrument.
Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. Charlie Parker.
Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter – to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.
Albert Schweitzer.
I play until my fingers are blue and stiff from the cold, and then I keep on playing. Until I’m lost in the music. Until I am the music – notes and chords, the melody and harmony. It hurts, but it’s okay because when I’m the music, I’m not me. Not sad. Not afraid. Not desperate. Not guilty.
Jennifer Donnelly.
Written by teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem and published in 1937, it protested American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had reached a peak in the South at the turn of the century, but continued there and in other regions of the United States. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 1,953 Americans were murdered by lynching, about three quarters of them black. The lyrics are an extended metaphor linking a tree’s fruit with lynching victims. Meeropol set it to music and, with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan, performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden.
Lyrics are here:The first song of Scott Walker’s seminal album, Tilt. With a mixture of haunting vocals and orchestral music, Walker chilling envisions Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death. ... "Farmer in the City"
"Farmer in the City", is subtitled "Remembering Pasolini". A few of the lyrics are appropriated from Norman Macafee's English translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's poem, "Uno dei Tanti Epiloghi" ("One of the Many Epilogs"), which was written in 1969 for Pasolini's friend and protégé, the scruffy young nonprofessional actor, Ninetto Davoli. Throughout the song, Walker's chant of "Do I hear 21, 21, 21...? I'll give you 21, 21, 21...", may be a reference to Davoli's age when he was drafted into (and subsequently deserted from) the Italian army. (Wikipedia)
The song was written and recorded by fron-tman Mark Foster while he was working as a commercial jingle writer. Contrasting with the upbeat musical composition, the lyrics describe the homicidal thoughts of a troubled youth.
The lyrics to "Pumped Up Kicks" are written from the perspective of a troubled and delusional youth with homicidal thoughts. The lines in the chorus warn potential victims to "outrun my gun" and that they "better run, better run, faster than my bullet."
Foster said in a statement to CNN.com, "I wrote 'Pumped Up Kicks' when I began to read about the growing trend in teenage mental illness. I wanted to understand the psychology behind it because it was foreign to me. It was terrifying how mental illness among youth had skyrocketed in the last decade. I was scared to see where the pattern was headed if we didn't start changing the way we were bringing up the next generation." In writing the song, Foster wanted to "get inside the head of an isolated, psychotic kid" and "bring awareness" to the issue of gun violence among youth, which he feels is an epidemic perpetuated by "lack of family, lack of love, and isolation " The song's title refers to shoes that the narrator's peers wear as a status symbol.
The issue of youth violence is a matter close to the group. Foster was bullied in high school, while bassist Cubbie Fink has a cousin who survived the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.
The issue of youth violence is a matter close to the group. Foster was bullied in high school, while bassist Cubbie Fink has a cousin who survived the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. (Wikipedia)
Joe South - I remember him only from a hit song he wrote from the late 1960s, with its interesting and ever-relevant lyrics: The Games People Play. The song's title was taken from a book by Eric Berne, a bestseller on the psychology of human relationships.
The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and their mixed-race band members, faced a painful dilemma: how could they represent a country that still practiced Jim Crow segregation?
[From IMDb]
"And ye, who have met with Adversity's blast,
And been bow'd to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass'd
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury -
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen."
(by Thomas Hood)
Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
(Hal Borland).
Ione Shannon Bolin was born in the small town of Spencer, South Dakota, on Jan. 1, 1917. Her parents were Gracie Elsie Bolin and Harry Bolin, a hotel owner who raised horses during the Depression. In an interview she said her father named her Ione “because I was born on the first of January, which is 1-1, or 1-one. That’s South Dakota humor for you.”
At age 20, she headed to the East Coast to pursue a career as a singer. In Washington, D.C., Bolin worked for CBS Radio and during World War II she became the host of her own musical program. She auditioned in 1944 in New York for the New Opera Company and won a place in the ensemble.
Bolin portrayed Meg Boyd in both the original Broadway production and the film version of Damn Yankees.
Another version of the song, not mentioned above, but drawn to my attention by my husband, was by Homer and Jethro, a comic version with silly replacement lines such as : "I'll take your hair your hat looks swell"...."I'll hold your hands they're just like feet". TSK!Baby, It's Cold Outside" is a popular song written by Frank Loesser in 1944. It is a call and response duet in which a host, usually performed by a male voice, tries to convince a guest, usually performed by a female voice, that she should stay the evening because the weather is cold and the trip home would be difficult. While the lyrics make no mention of any holiday, it is popularly regarded as a Christmas song due to its winter theme.
Loesser wrote the song for his wife and himself to perform at parties. He sold the song to MGM, which used it for the 1949 film Neptune's Daughter. It was sung by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalbán and won the Academy Award. Since 1949 it has been covered by many singers, including Ray Charles, Michael Bublé, Sir Tom Jones, and Dolly Parton.
She was down our local pub the other night (Ye Olde Twilight Zone) and put a pound in the juke box. Her musical tastes weren’t popular with everybody, and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands complained bitterly about Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” blasting out. The Queen just had her footman, Gloria, fish out another pound coin, and thrust it in Maxima’s face, saying “whose head’s on there, girlfriend? Yeah. Suck it up! Now bop out to Britney, sweetcheeks!”
You can get away with that sort of thing when you’re the Queen. Anyway, we don’t think Britney’s magnum opus was her favourite. She played “Bat Out of Hell” three times and did an air guitar and pretended to rev-up a motorbike, so we think that’s the front-runner.
“Like a bat out of hell one will be gone when the morning comes”.
Shame we never thought to video it and put it on YouTube.
That’s my OBE gone west now, then!
:P
