A very happy birthday to Miles Davis with one of my personal favorites, “So What” For some reason I keep finding myself trying co come up with lyrics for this but never get farther then a couple of phrases.
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This is another one that probably doesn’t count as a Rhapsody but it does fit most of the criteria: i.e “Irregular in form and improvisational” so I’ll run with it. This is “Seven Angels” by the band Avantasia (Lead singer Michael Kiske) from their Metal Opera collection. (done up as a Justice League fan video)
I’ve enjoyed this piece for some time. My tastes tend to be pretty eclectic. Everything from chamber quartets to Metal. But one thing I tend to lean towards longer and more complex pieces. It’s always great to hear modern music that starts to lean this way. Regrettably most of them tend to be fairly short feeling very much like musical phrases. Snarky remarks about modern attention spans aside I see no reason why they can’t be more ambitious.
Anyway here I think this is one of the better attempts so far. So enjoy.
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Let’s all raise a toast and wish a very happy birthday to the great Duke Ellington. So sit back and enjoy a rare filmed version of his signature piece “Take the A-Train” done in 1943 with a vocal accompaniment by Ella Fitzgerald.
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Today’s Sketch is another statue from the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s collection of Indian sculpture. This one is of two Buddhist monks and the attendants from the Gandhara region.
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Today’s Rhapsodies is… Okay, I confess it’s more Liszt but hear me out. Generally when everybody says Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies what they mean is Rhapsody # 2 (and to a lesser extent 10) Forgetting that there are 19 of them. So with that being said I thought it would be good to start addressing some of these lesser known pieces.
So how about we start at the beginning with the first Hungarian Rhapsody, also known as Rêves et fantaisies.
http://youtu.be/EU0QysGPMPI
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Well last night the neighborhood had the second power outage in a month. Which made the evening interesting to say the least. The worst thing about them is they seem to know when I’m my zone working on something and haven’t saved for the last ten minutes. So therefore along with the aggravation of knowing you won’t get anything done for the next couple of hours there’s the added aggravation of loosing what you’ve been working on.
The first time it happened It caused a bit of a panic attack since it happened in the middle of the day so all I could see going out was the computer so I briefly worried. If it was technical difficulties. After a couple of minutes I realized it was the whole house and,after talking to some of the neighbors, the surrounding two blocks. (If you want a good laugh at sheer irrationality. This is one of the times I really regret having read the “Emberverse” series. Even if it’s something that occurs to you for a whole five seconds suddenly realizing just how dependent on all of your toys gets you where you live)
Anyway the first time I spent the rest of the day trying to work in the library and after that Barnes & Noble. Thanks to Seattle City Light’s Webpage I was able to keep tabs on the progress of the repair job. So was able to go home when it was done and reset all of the clocks not connected to computers.
When it happened last night it wasn’t quite so bad after all this time I had experience so this time It was mostly a nuisance. (also i was working on an InDesign document which unlike Photoshop makes emergency backups. The main downsides was the outage had taken place much later in the day and on a Sunday so I really didn’t have much hopes of the repairs being done before sunset. So it was a matter of waiting for it to be late enough to go to sleep.
I hope this will be the last time… but since the outage occurred in nearly the exact same place in two weeks I’m not getting my hopes up.
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