Interesting (but disturbing) musical trivia item of the week

Posted on May 15, 2013 by The organ player

I’m currently reading Dickens’ “Oliver Twist”, having fairly recently come into the possession of a Kindle e-reader, thanks to my oldest daughter who gave it to me as a Christmas gift.  Any books I can get on it for free are always welcome, and many of the classics are no longer under copyright protection and can be had, in many cases, for the low, low price of zero dollars and zero cents.  You can’t pass up a bargain like that.

Anyway, prior to reading the book (I’m only about a third of the way through it now), my only other exposure to the story was through the 1968 movie musical version of the story, titled just plain “Oliver!”, exclamation point and all.

Just went to IMDB.com to check out the details on the film, and I’m always a sucker for the  ”trivia” section, and I learned this about Lionel Bart, the composer of the score for the play and the movie:

“Amazingly, the composer of this highly respected score, Lionel Bart, could not read music himself. From his earliest days in theater, he would sing his melodies to a trained pianist, who would then set the tunes down on sheet music and orchestrate them.”

Wow.  Amazing.

Unfortunately, despite early success with “Oliver!”, to finance a later musical based on the Robin Hood legends, he ended up signing away his rights to “Oliver!”, and “Twang!!” (yes, two exclamation points) flopped badly.  Eventually he filed for bankruptcy, became a heavy drinker, developed diabetes, destroyed 1/3 of his liver and then finally died at age 68 in 1999 of cancer.

And there’s your music tragedy trivia for the week.  Or the day.  Maybe the month.  (Gotta get back to doing this more regularly.)

P.S.  Here’s the truly frightening bit of trivia about the movie:

Dick Van Dyke was considered to play Fagin.

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Live lullabyes help premature babies

Posted on April 16, 2013 by The organ player

The power of music comes through again.

According to an article at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/ (the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics)

The informed, intentional therapeutic use of live sound and parent-preferred lullabies applied by a certified music therapist can influence cardiac and respiratory function. Entrained with a premature infant’s observed vital signs, sound and lullaby may improve feeding behaviors and sucking patterns and may increase prolonged periods of quiet–alert states. Parent-preferred lullabies, sung live, can enhance bonding, thus decreasing the stress parents associate with premature infant care.

The important thing, apparently, is that the music has to be a live performance; recorded music isn’t capable of making adjustments to match the infants’ body rhythms.

Not only is this good for babies in intensive care units, it also helps parents to better bond with their kids in circumstances that are less than ideal.

I don’t know how many pop songs with baby in the title there are, but some of them have got to be excellent candidates for lullabyes.  Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby” from 1991 gets one vote from me.

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The ol’ Mars and Venus thing

Posted on April 4, 2013 by The organ player

Don’t know how I missed this npr.org cartoon (Jan. 04, 2013), but it’s a musical translation of a familiar trope:cartoon_menwomen

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This just in: at least one sea lion in the world has rhythm!

Posted on April 2, 2013 by The organ player

Back in December, I posted a link to a story at theatlantic.com where scientists have shown that rhesus monkeys were shown to be incapable of detecting and anticipating drum rhythms.

According to businessinsider.com, researchers at the University of Santa Cruz have got themselves a sea lion by the name of Ronan who apparently has a feel for rhythm:

Scientists used a simple repeating sound to teach Ronan to keep beats by moving her body. But when they played more complex sounds, they found that Ronan was still able to find and keep the basic underlying rhythm without any additional training.

Cool!

My only questions are: is Ronan named after the Stargate Atlantis character?  Is Ronan a unisex name, like “Chris” or “Leslie”?  If Ronan is female, wouldn’t this make her a sea lioness?

The reporting devil is always in the details.

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Eyelashes on cars?

Posted on March 29, 2013 by The organ player

From the you-see-something-new-every-once-in-a-while department:

I had to drop off a package at the post office this morning, and because I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t in the correct lane to get to the normal post office of choice on the way to work, so instead I drove to the post office in Rancho Cordova.  The USPS actually told me that the big, fat, honkin’ envelope full of Easter stickers my wife wanted to send to our honorary grandkids living in Maryland could get the 1-day cross-country delivery service deal for a mere $19.95, which was a little more than I wanted to pay, but what the heck: it’s payday and I’m feeling extravagant.  So I went for the deal.

Having concluded my business with the USPS, I got back into my car and continued the journey to my regular workplace.  I made a right turn on Folsom Boulevard, heading east under the freeway overpass, and as I looked in my outside mirror, there was a white SUV in the lane to my left, and by golly, this car had eyelashes on the headlights.  Had I gone to the regularly scheduled post office, I would have missed this entirely, so I guess there’s something to be said for letting the mind wander a bit while driving.  Continue reading →

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There’s more to performance than just the performers

Posted on March 8, 2013 by The organ player

I just kind of stumbled across this article over at npr.com about the Sound City music studio in the San Fernando Valley back in the 1970′s.  The point of the article is that the soundboard they used there for over 20 years had as much to do with the sounds that the studio put out over the years by artists such as Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine and others as it did with the musicians themselves.

Dave Grohl was a member of Nirvana who recorded there and gave an interesting description of the Neve 8028 soundboard that was used there:

The late ’60s and the ’70s, a lot of this really beautiful equipment was being made and installed into studios around the world and the Neve boards were considered like the Cadillacs of recording consoles. They’re these really big, behemoth-looking recording desks; they kind of look like they’re from the Enterprise in Star Trek or something like that. They’re like a grayish color, sort of like an old Army tank with lots of knobs, and to any studio geek or gear enthusiast it’s like the coolest toy in the world. But they’re pretty simple. They’re not filled with miles and miles of cable and wires — they’re pretty simple. And what you get when you record on a Neve desk is this really big, warm representation of whatever comes into it. What’s going to come out the other end is this bigger, better version of you. And so it makes you sound real, but it makes you sound really good. Continue reading →

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I just deleted 126 unviewable posts

Posted on February 28, 2013 by The organ player

People, people, people: please help me restore my faith in the human race.  This will be something very easy to do.  Here goes:

Are you responding to my posts with replies full of links to other sites, usually about drugs like viagra for sale at your website?

Don’t bother.  Your post will never see the light of day here.  You’re wasting your time and mine.

Are you complimenting me on what a wonderful site I’ve created here, and how my posts are just chock full of amazing wisdom, and that you’re looking forward to seeing what I have to say in my next post without ever really addressing the subject of the post you’re responding to?

Don’t bother.

Are you here to evangelize Zune music players?

Don’t bother.

Are you responding in Russian?

Don’t bother.

Are you pushing Louis Vuitton bags?

Don’t bother.

Are your responses written in French?

While this appeals to the ex-French missionary in me, don’t bother.

Are you here for any purpose whatsoever that has nothing to do with having any kind of intelligent conversation with me with regard to the topics I’ve posted on?

Don’t bother.

Have a nice day, but please, take your spam posts elsewhere.  The spam filtering software built into the WordPress site here prevents your replies from ever being seen by anyone but me.  Your links to other sites remain invisible to the world, and, more importantly, they are not being seen by Google spiders looking to index anything and everything they can.  You are wasting your time here.

So, in the glorious words of Mike Teevee from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971), “Am I coming in clear?”

I hope so.  Now, don’t get me wrong; the time you spend here does look nice on my webstats when it counts up unique visitors and hits and pages and all that stuff, but that’s about the only thrill to be had from your postings here.  Unfortunately, there’s no reciprocity: nobody will see your replies, and they end up benefitting you in absolutely no way.

So, I urge you: find another line of work.  Something that actually pays off in some way.  This ain’t it.

Be seeing you.

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This is one dedicated street musician

Posted on February 28, 2013 by The organ player

It’s one thing to be a street musician who plays a harmonica, or a violin, or a trumpet, or a cello; it’s another thing altogether to be a street musician who has to bring a baby grand piano with you every day you show up at the local park in the hopes of entertaining the folks.

The following video I found at theatlantic.com, but it’s main place of residence is at NYorkers.com, which tells the stories of various residents of New York, in a manner not unlike the LDS “I’m A Mormon” campaign.

In order to get his piano to the park every day, well, you just have to see what he does by watching the video.  I’ll just say this much: no piano moving truck is involved.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

 

If one is going to succeed as a professional musician, then one does what one has to.

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Thanks to recycling, Maxwell Smart lives!

Posted on February 6, 2013 by The organ player

The fine folks at O2, which is the UK arm of communications company Telefonica, has taken old cell phone parts (the ones “that people might be embarrassed to be seen with”) and have created shoe-phones that Maxwell Smart would be proud to wear.

Max was Agent 86 on NBC’s “Get Smart” back in the 60′s, and Steve Carrell did a nice job of playing Max in a reboot (ha!) a few years back (and, for my money, Anne Hathaway did an even better job of playing “99″; you could really hear Barbara Feldon’s inflections in some of her lines).

Max’s old shoe-phones really have no excuse for continuting to exist in a world with smartphones (I guess the new O2 creations are Smart-phones!), but in a world that was obsessed with James Bond and Goldfinger and Oddjob, shoe-phones were the perfect comedy response to the universe that gave us 007 and all of his gadgets.

I guess they’re really just part of an ad campaign to promote recycling.  And the more I think about it, Max probably wouldn’t want anything to do with these shoes.  A REAL shoe-phone comes with a dial, not push-buttons.

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No one likes a frowning face, change it for a smile!

Posted on January 31, 2013 by The organ player

As the Beatles said all those years ago:

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.

And the fine folks at Major Scaled TV are doing just that by taking songs written in a minor key and altering them so you can hear them as if they were written to be played in a major scale.

Some might call this an abomination, others see it as a hoot.

I don’t know if they’ve attempted to do this with “Dust In the Wind”, one of the more depressing minor-key songs ever written, but you can click the link above and scroll down to hear what “Riders on the Storm” by The Doors sounds like in a major key.  Of course, when you make it sound all happy, you have to change the title, so their version is called “Riders on the Rainbow”.

Makes you want to rush right out and go find a Rainbow Brite video to watch.

Apparently, they’re bi-lingual: they also take major key songs, and turn them into minor key songs.  Click here for ABBA’s “Waterloo” in a minor key.

I would have to put these guys in the “inevitable” category.  Someone was bound to do this sooner or later.

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