Just a reminder that I am set on playing my entire music collection before 6 February 2008. I would be progressing well if it wasn't for distractions. Distractions such as overwhelming desire to play something out of my carefully designed sequence. Or the need to play certain records twice. Yesterday it was Billy Bragg (I have a post currently in draft). Or The Essential Music of America, which is out of print.
As a teenager I declared that all the decent classical music of the Twentieth Century was written by Americans. Of course, that is pretty much tosh. But still, there's some jolly good music on this. I have long been sort-of a fan of Aaron Copland. Sort-of as in, I have quite a few of his works, although I know very little about him, and I often forget how much I really like his stuff. This is a two-CD set, with plenty of Copland, Gershwin and Bernstein. I have played the first disc twice. The highlight has to be Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. West Side Story is truly a masterpiece, anyway, but what I like about this is the amazing contrast between the dissonant syncopation of the early section with the haunting lyricism of 'Somewhere'. (So now I shall have to play my West Side Story highlights completely out of sequence...)
And I do love the marches of Sousa - on this compilation we have Stars and Stripes Forever and Washington Post. At Primary School Mr Unsworth used to have us walking into assembly to Stars and Stripes Forever (when he wasn't subversively playing us the theme from Monty Python).
I also love Moross's theme from The Big Country. Although I have never seen the film and haven't a clue what it's about, the music suggests to me extraordinarily open countryside. Prairies, perhaps, although I have never seen a prairie in my life. I am actually on a horse at this precise moment sweeping through the long grass of the prairie, the wind in my hair, and freedom...
Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is an all-time classic. My friend Mike declared that he would have it played at his funeral. So I was kind of disappointed when he had George Michael instead. Although I really don't like Jazz, I do like the way Gershwin uses the jazz idiom to create sublime music, that sounds fresh and modern eighty years after it was written. I especially love the brass con sordino, and the rhythm that just for a moment makes me think that I can dance other than as an Eighties Pop Tart.
The second disc, which isn't as good as the first, finishes with three traditional songs from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir - down by the Riverside, When the Saints, and Battle Hymn of the Republic. These are best listened to in dim lights, but are just fab anytime - fantastic harmonies and syncopations.
I went on a night-time of Washington DC - going from memorial to memorial. I particularly like the Lincoln Memorial - although I haven't been to the FDR, which, reportedly, is the only one of the memorials with proper disabled access (ought to have, really...!) - it wasn't built on my first visit, and it didn't cross our minds on our second visit.
Anyway, the coach driver played an equally haunting version of Battle Hymn of the Republic, which was particularly evocative as we were driving away from the Lincoln Memorial. I was the expert on American Political history, much to the puzzlement of my many American companions. I kept shtum that I had just completed a Politics degree under an America-obsessed Prof.
The Gettysburg address, one of the greatest pieces of writing in the English language, is remarkable for its brevity. And supreme irony:
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here
The only known photo of Abraham Lincoln
