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What 🎶music are you listening to at this moment?

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Hollywood has given us some great movies, but is as subject to Sturgeon's Law as every other human endeavor! :D
I Wikepdiad that! OK:
"Sturgeon's revelation (as expounded by Theodore Sturgeon), referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap.""
Concerning Hollywood, I must confess that I do (occasionally) have a soft spot in my heart for hopeless optimists - maybe he didn't watch many Hollywood films … 90% is too low.
Preceding the Dunning–Kruger effect by several decades.
Combining the two, one might have a hypothesis why so much of the 90% as per Sturgeon still ends up as blockbusters …
 
*Groan*
Disco. One of those "needle in a haystack" genres for me! And the picture immediately made me think of one of the generic songs, Penny McLean's "Lady Bump".
Need to post a couple of those needles ...



And then a song from the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), Germany's last winner, which smashed to former East Bloc's late-disco-droning.
Lena ain't an operatic singer, but this is funk!


Thinking of ESC was not good. Not disco, not Lena, but the Finnish answer to Kiss, I think. They had to get through one of two semifinals to the ESC, and mopped the floor with the competition there. Then they proceeded to mop the floor with the competition in the main event. Highest win in the history of the ESC. I mentioned Kiss. Sufficient health warning!


Gad, they make some of the Orcs in PJ's films look lacking prosthetics! Kiss just did makeup! How did Lordi ever play their instruments? But against the disco scourge I only thought YO!!!!!

ESC again. A female Serbian singer (singing in Serbian!). Found it. I think "dumpy" is the term the media executives (that pile of variable animal droppings) would have called her.

But what a VOICE!!!!!
Serbia won that year (otherwise I would have volunteered for a settlement of Mars … or something like that ...)


End of message!
 
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Another "classical" piece:


By Siegfried Wagner (son of Richard), who, though he composed 18 operas, and a number of other pieces, almost qualifies as an "unknown" composer. Unlike his father, he preferred to take fairy- and folktales as subjects, for the most part. Of possible Tolkien-related interest, his first opera, "Der Barenhauter" ("Bearskin") adapted a tale collected by the Grimms. I've not seen an influence on Beorn mentioned anywhere, as far as I recall, but he must have had a wife at some point -- otherwise, no Beornings. I wonder if Tolkien might have written a "Beauty and the Beast" tale, had he'd had time and inclination.

Siegfried's last opera, completed shortly before his death in 1930, contained criticism of the Nazis, and was suppressed by his family, especially by his widow, as it would have been an embarrassment for a woman whose goal was to become Mrs. Adolf Hitler.

The suppression extended to all of Siegfried's works, at least until her death in 1980; as a result, he has been effectively a forgotten composer. With very few exceptions, only in the last few decades have his works come to be revived and recorded, and those mostly by orchestras and conductors that, to put it charitably, are not of the first class. The selection above is an example, but here's a longer piece, by better performers:


Sorry for the long post here, but I find his music interesting. Here's hoping he'll become better-known in the future.
 
A favorite of mine, too! Written as "a composer's response to justified criticism" (allegedly his own words), it marked his "return to the fold" of official approbation, after the denunciations of 1936, yet the irony and bitterness is evident, particularly in the march.

The solo violin theme reminds me very much of another favorite piece, the First Violin Concerto, written a decade later, at the beginning of another period on the outs for the composer, and not performed until 1955, after Stalin's death. Here's the Passacaglia movement:


Kaler's tone could be considered a little light, or not biting enough, but in contrast to the interpretation by the work's first performer, Oistrakh, for whom it was composed, and which emphasizes the jagged, "modernist" aspects, Kaler brings out the lyrical qualities that I think argue for the work's place in the Neo-Romantic tradition of the 20th century -- like the Barber, which, BTW, I also love!

The image that came into my mind on first hearing this was of a bird soaring over a bombed-out city.
 
Sorry, guys. I'm definitely not in a classical mood today (but wouldn't what you're posting rather belong in the "romantic" drawer? Neither is a genre I can actually recognize …)

A really hard 'n' heavy rock riff from my earliest days of getting acquainted with popular music. Led Zeppelin. Whole Lotta Love. Heard LOUD (beginning of my tinnitus?)
Um. This live version ... a shorter-than-studio-album-version ... unusual

 
Sorry, guys. I'm definitely not in a classical mood today (but wouldn't what you're posting rather belong in the "romantic" drawer? Neither is a genre I can actually recognize …)

A really hard 'n' heavy rock riff from my earliest days of getting acquainted with popular music. Led Zeppelin. Whole Lotta Love. Heard LOUD (beginning of my tinnitus?)
Um. This live version ... a shorter-than-studio-album-version ... unusual

Yeah. I bought their first two when they came out.

Then, a decade later, when it had all turned into bloated arena rock, this:

 
Yeah. I bought their first two when they came out.
Then, a decade later, when it had all turned into bloated arena rock, this:

Oh right, the three-chord rebellion.

I started late with Zeppelin (or actually anything pre about 1973/1974), so the only two or three albums I bought when they actually came out would be "Physical Graffiti" (1975, 6th) and "Presence" (1976, 7th); and the 1976 soundtrack "The song remains the same". So I have the first seven plus the soundtrack.
 

No clue whether I posted them already, but whatever...
Okay, guys, after THAT HM one-two punch, even I could do with some classical music (or some Peter, Paul and Mary …) ;)
And I must confess that some of the "sects" in that confused tangle of criss-crossing influences that is HM just lose me.
My first reaction sometimes goes "oh *droppings*, I think my amp has just blown a fuse or something!".
Like Techno makes me grumble "not another construction site with heavy-duty jackhammers!"

But then I'm also probably quite guilty of sending some people to join Miguel "under a blankie" with some of my posts (Awks! my last one had five links!) :eek:
 
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