Category: Uncategorized

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.

Bily Corgan, Wrestling, Furniture–And Star Wars Too

I was going to write about Aaron Copland tonight, but instead I’m posting this:

Furniture, professional wrestling, Smashing Pumpkins: three things from my (sort of) youth to which I am distinctly ambivalent. They all together quite nicely here.

Resistance Pro Wrestling is but one of the many (sort of) business ventures Billy Corgan’s been involved with lately. I’m not seeing any tour events posted on Resistance Pro Wrestling’s site, but there are a bunch of videos, if you’re interested. Here’s an article on its founding and Corgan’s involvement.

Walter E. Smith is a Chicago-area furniture store that clearly takes pride in its commercials, including this piece of Star Wars promotional fan fiction:

Troops, it ain’t:

The Problem with Glorifying Rural Life

According to an article on the Poverty Reference Bureau website based on the work of William O’Hare, rural poverty is more prevalent than urban poverty; just under 24% of children in rural areas live in poverty (as of 2007), compared with around 18% in urban areas. Rural poverty is also tenacious:

… while many people move in and out of poverty as their circumstances change, spells of poverty last longer for rural children. They are the “forgotten fifth” of poor children because most programs and policies to help the poor are focused on urban areas. 

Appalachian Spring, listening to “Flyover State,” that farmer ad on the Super Bowl: all help us feel a little bit better about the reality of this situation. They tell us that it’s OK, that the grit and ingenuity of these (white, they mostly are white) people will carry the day, that they’ll lift themselves out of the rut, carry themselves through hard times.

The Times Are Changing

On Monday, the Royal Canadian Mint stopped making pennies, and today we find out that we will no longer be able to slide an iron around the Monopoly board. The game piece has been replaced by a cat (LOL).

With its duck dollars, polar bear-emblazoned toonies, and flammable bills, Canada has been messing around with its currency for decades, so the decision on the penny is no real surprise (it’s been planned for a while).

But it’s harder to understand the decision to axe the iron. Monopoly’s been around forever; the references to real places or things are now lost on players; the game is, in essence, a closed system. Messing with it upsets the balance, destroys the illusion of its timelessness, the sense that when you play, you are in a world all its own: Monopolyland.

And to put a cat in there, well that’s just stupid.

Erich Leinsdorf’s Birthday Was Yesterday

Supercilious and exacting, Erich Leinsdorf had a reputation for being a difficult conductor. He believed that there was an ideal interpretation out there for every piece, and the only way to realize it was to follow the score with exacting precision. The quixotic approach didn’t win him many friends.

It’s partly because of his prickly reputation that this clip of Leinsdorf announcing to a Boston Symphony audience that John F. Kennedy had died is so poignant:

WQXR recounted the concert in an article commemorating Leinsdorf’s birthday; yesterday, he would have been 100.

His tenure at the BSO from 1962-1969 made Leinsdorf famous to US audiences, but he also spent eight seasons with the Rochester Philharmonic. No fan of Smugtown, Leinsdorf nonetheless led them in a handful of recordings on Columbia, including Beethoven’s “Eroica,” whose funeral march Leinsdorf and the BSO performed on that fateful day in 1963.

Random Classics has a transfer of the RPO version available to download for free.

Snopes.com: The Easy Way to Save Face on Facebook

I finally became acquainted with Snopes.com over the Thanksgiving weekend. I hope every single person I follow on Facebook gets to know it too, and starts using it too.

Yesterday, a guy I follow on Facebook posted a news report from years ago out of Canada that heralded dichloroacetate as a miracle drug for cancer. The report blamed “the big pharmaceutical companies” for keeping it from the public, and to my Facebook friend, this was another example of “american (sic) capitalist bullshit.”

Checking the story out with a quick Google search, I came across Snopes.com, which set things straight.

And then today, a bevy of Facebook friends posted the same boilerplate statement to declare their ownership over their own content; within minutes, others were posting the Snopes.com entry that explained why this so-called legal talisman was useless.

The next time you’re tempted to post a knee-jerk reaction to something you read on the internet, do yourself a favor and check out Snopes.com first. There’s a fine line between moral outrage and ignorance (and then there’s this, which is all to real).

The New York Times has written about this myth-debunking website, and mention a number of other fact-checking sources.

They Only Sound Like Bumbling Goofs

It never pays to be cranky and sarcastic on social media (unless you’re writing about Chad Kroeger or Justin Bieber; then, all bets are off), which is why I enjoyed reading in the Democrat and Chronicle about what Vidler’s 5 & 10 in East Aurora, NY is doing with its YouTube channel. Here’s a seasonal sampling:
Given the lack of blog activity, it looks as if the store is using its channel as its primary content marketing tool, blasting out awareness through Facebook and good ol’ fashioned PR. This makes perfectly good sense: with limited resources, it pays to focus on one social media outlet, commit to it with regular updates, and make the content distinctive enough so that it is of real value and interest to people.

These videos are wildly entertaining, but even if you find them hokey, you’ll at least get some good product ideas.

Vidler’s are stone-cold social-media ninjas.