music

“A Trip to the Moon” is now available on YouTube

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This morning I saw that my video of Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) is no longer blocked on YouTube. Its status now says “Visibility restrictions are lifted until the dispute is resolved.” That means it could disappear again.

Again, the is the complete version, with a celebration at the end, and the accompaniment is my original, improvised music. I did a better job this time than in my earlier public performances.
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Tom Lehrer as composer 3

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A couple of days ago I was saddened but not surprised to learn that Tom Lehrer had died. He was 97 years old, after all. He remarked many years ago that “It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year,” but he went on to surpass the lifespans of nearly every well-known writer of music. Irving Berlin and Elliott Carter broke the century mark, but that’s about it. His songwriting career was only a short interlude in a long academic career, but his fans know nearly all of his thirty or so songs.

The lyrics of those songs are widely quoted and discussed, but not as much is said about his music. He set his satirical lyrics to tunes that are inventive, catchy, and full of solid musicianship. I’d like to say a few things about that music, to restore a bit of balance.
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The General on YouTube

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After figuring out (I hope) what was wrong with the music I provided for Buster Keaton’s 1926 film The General at the Plaistow Library, I did the music over and recorded a new version for YouTube. That means there are no audience sounds, but in this case that’s an advantage. Besides, the music was recorded directly to a computer, so it has better sound quality than the recording I made at the library.

I’ve already discussed the movie here and my approach to accompanying it here, so I’ll just say that I hope you enjoy it.
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A silent movie failure

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I failed terribly last night when showing The General. I don’t know what I did wrong.

As I’ve said before and told the audience before the showing, The General is a complex movie. It’s a comedy, but it’s also a war movie. A train collapses into a gorge. Soldiers die on screen. I expect people to laugh at the funny parts. I don’t expect them to laugh at the deaths. I tried to underscore the mood of each scene, as I always do. It didn’t work.
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Coming to Plaistow July 22: The General

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It’s just two weeks till my next live silent movie show at the Plaistow Library: The General, made by and starring Buster Keaton. I know most of you aren’t local, but if you can spread the word among silent movie fans, it will help. This is the first time I’ll be presenting an evening show, and getting eight sign-ups so early is encouraging.
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Yearning to Breathe Free

This entry was posted in History Music and tagged history immigration music YouTube on by

In my latest YouTube video, Yearning to Breathe Free, I try something new. Rather than accompanying an existing silent film, I’ve created a ten-minute history of immigration to the US in still images and added my improvised accompaniment. It’s been a learning experience in a lot of ways. First was the selection of images to combine into a coherent story. It consists of several sequences, each covering a different historical period from 1607 to the present. The first version didn’t make the structure nearly clear enough. Thanks to Virginia Taylor for catching this problem. I thought about inserting a summary before each segment and adding captions and ended up doing both. Then there was the timing. Before adding the music, the pacing felt slow, yet some images hold a lot of text, and test viewers didn’t always spot the important parts in time. I lengthened the time for some images and drew visual attention to the important text in one image.
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Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon

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The 1929 film, Frau im Mond or Woman in the Moon, was the first feature film to present space travel realistically. I’m amazed at how much it got right, considering Fritz Lang released it 40 years before the first human stepped on the Moon. Of course, it has some errors that are obvious today, but a lot of modern space movies don’t do as well.

The best part is the trip to the Moon, which occupies about 40 minutes of a film which is 2 3/4 hours long. Once the hatch opens and the travelers step out onto the Moon, the science goes bonkers. So I’ve created a video with my accompaniment of that sequence. It starts with the call to stations 50 minutes before launch and ends when the hatch is opened on the lunar surface. The video contains German intertitles with English translations below them.
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When music became copyrightable 1

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Classical music lovers know that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, composers shifted from seeking patrons to support them to becoming freelance composers and performers of their own work. This was partially because of cultural changes, but I learned recently that legal factors also played a role. A key decision in British law was Bach v Longman, where judge Lord Mansfield ruled in 1777 that printed music was protected by copyright.
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Accompanying Buster Keaton films 1

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This post is for the Buster Keaton Blogathon run from the Silent-ology blog.

I accompany silent movies. Four times a year, I accompany one for a live audience at the Plaistow, NH Library. In addition, I post public domain silent films with my accompaniment on YouTube. In just a few days I’ll accompany One Week as part of the library’s 25th anniversary in its present building. In July I’ll be accompanying The General at the library. In 2023 I accompanied Steamboat Bill, Jr.
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Spohr’s string quartets 31-36

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After a long gap, Spohr wrote six final string quartets. The numbering gets confusing because he withdrew the last two, having rewritten one of them in a different key. There’s a detailed discussion by Keith Warsop of these quartets on the Spohr Society’s website.

Important composers are generally expected to produce some of their best work, or at least their most adventurous, toward the end of their lives. Spohr had done his best writing long before. He even lost confidence in his own writing, withdrawing or abandoning several pieces, including the Requiem and the Tenth Symphony. He may have seen himself as a relic. When he died in 1859, Brahms wrote that he was “probably the last of those who still belonged to an artistic period more satisfying than the one through which we now suffer.”

But he wasn’t completely finished! These quartets explore new directions and are less exhibitionistic, and some are rewarding to listen to.
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