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:

Here’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 Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Day concert is broadcast in over 70 countries, and you can watch it on PBS. Just try not to think too hard about who was in Vienna in 1939 when this tradition all started, and what it might have meant back then.

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 Ravel for life financially. It’s hard to believe that the composer didn’t know he had a crowd pleaser on his hands, but he did express doubts that no one would want to hear it as anything more than ballet music. For Ravel, it was a chance to show off his chops as an orchestrator, an “experiment in a very special and limited direction.”

Some critics didn’t care for the piece in the few years after its 1928 premiere. Writing for the American Mercury in 1932, Edward Robinson called the piece “the most insolent monstrosity ever perpetrated in the history of music” that sounds like “the wail of an obstreperous back-alley cat.” Even today, a lot of critics look down on the piece, and programmers tend to consider it to be fluff. Fortunately, lots of orchestras still play it.

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 espagnole 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: “You know, this doesn’t happen to me in Paris,” commented the composer after a Carnegie Hall performance of his orchestral music that was met with roaring applause and a standing ovation.

Flush with good ol’ American style fame, Ravel returned to the City of Lights; one of his first duties was to fulfill his promise to dance impresario Ida Rubinstein to write ballet music for her. The result, of course, was Bolero, which received its premiere at the end of the year, in November 1928 at the Paris Opera.

What’s all this got to do with the Super Bowl? Not much, beyond the aforementioned ad. But with its Spanish groove and colorful orchestration, Bolero is worth getting to know better.

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

If classical music is dead, how can it so spectacularly capture the magnificence that is the mixture of peanut butter and chocolate?  

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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.