Went to a event where there’s lights that sync to music, they had some nice choices but also randomly played Indiana jones and… motherfucking Blue Danube.
I can only share one video but the first time we heard it in the loop my dads wonderful commentary:
Guilty pleasure: I like it sometimes when people put completely contrasting songs for fictional characters
You have a brooding 40-year old man who despises the world and would go through hell to get off of the planet? He’s listening to Britney Spears in his off time/during his journey
The rules have been made and are stamped for approval can’t change them now
You know how in classical music, it'll get so quiet that you have to turn it all the way up just to hear it, but then all the brass instruments in the universe start playing as loud as physically possible? I'm looking at you, Tchaikovsky.
The Natyashastra, an essential text on performing arts in ancient India, lists 8 sthayibhavas or stable emotions.
I found reading about them very interesting and wish to take you through them with a few moodboards, of these moods essential for every Indian art form.
fun reminder that Erik Satie was said to take his pet lobster out for walks
and of course he wrote a lobster-themed piece. Embryons desséchés is a short suite from 1913, and is probably my favorite example of musical humor.
Cucumbers. Three years earlier, Debussy had written his first book of Preludes. The Sunken Cathedral tries to depict the mythic underwater city of Ys. Satie though this was too Romantic, and said he wanted to write something "he had seen with his own eyes". We also get a lot of salon patterns, and a melody of a famous song he probably had to play a thousand nights at Montmartre. This opening piece ends with a Romantic coda where I repeats longer than it needs to.
Edriophthalma (now called "Arthropods", like a giant underwater isopod). A little funeral march, parody of Chopin. In the score, he writes "Citation de la célèbre mazurka de SCHUBERT". I do like his simplified version of the original Nocturne-style middle section, and it's silly ending.
Decapoda (like smaller crabs and lobsters with 10 legs). This movement has a nod to classical hunting-horn fanfares. 'Hunting' sea creatures? Probably got that idea from Jules Vierne. The piece is only about a minute and a half long, but the last thirty seconds is an "obligatory cadenza" that's probably a nod to Beethoven's use of the same joke.