Ah yes. I'm slacking off. I'm putting MY burden on YOU, today! I entreat you to entertain us by posting your favorite musical Youtubes in the comments today.
Oh, but Dumbo, that's so lazy of you. Shouldn't you be posting something for us? The natural order of things is upturned! We suckle at your wisdom like Romulus and Remus at a she-wolf's tits!
Dumbo's depiction of his normal relationship to his readers.
Yes, this is true. However, my FIOS cable-modem died this week, so I spent much of it without access to the Intertubes, so I didn't have time to fully prep a diary analyzing anything. So consider this a rainy-day session.
Fortunately, I've been gifted with very fast fingers and a glib tongue, and I have no problem spewing out barely connected sentences in mass quantities. So this won't be an empty diary, just a less educational one.
It's 3:55. I just put my DVR on record for the last hour of Young Victoria starring Emily Blunt so that I can get this posted in time. More about that in a moment.
But first, let me give you a primer on HOW to post embedded Youtubes and Vimeos, because I've seen that some people really didn't know. I only learned how to properly embed Vimeo clips a couple of weeks ago, so there is no shame, I hope, in needing a primer.
POSTING YOUTUBE CLIPS IS EASY!
Step 1: Find a youtube you like. Obviously. You can go to youtube.com and search for your favorite composers or performers or titles until you find something you like. You can also find them through Google by clicking the "Video" link at the top before your search.
Step 2. Click through to the actual Youtube site, if you aren't already there, because you can't do this from another embed. Once you have found a vid you want to embed, WHILE AT THE YOUTUBE SITE, click the "EMBED" button. It's at the bottom right just beneath the video. A little frame will pop up beneath it with some HTML code highlighted.
Step 4. Right-click on the highlighted code and choose to copy it.
Step 5. Start a comment here. When you are ready to insert the video, just press Control-V. The HTML code for the video will be inserted right there into your post.
Step 6. Preview your post when you are done. If you did the embed right, it should show up in the preview. If not, hey, there's nothing wrong with asking for help.
HOW TO EMBED VIMEO CLIPS
Vimeo is simple too. Vimeo is another video clip site, with longer and better quality videos than Youtube. However, they have tighter controls over what gets posted there, and there are fewer videos. You can still find a lot of great stuff, like the Schubert Quintet series I posted here the last two weeks.
Step 1. As before, with Youtube, when you have located a video you want at the Vimeo.com site, Click on the Embed button. In this case, the "EMBED" button will be on the right side of the video.
Step 2. A new screen opens up that says EMBED THIS VIDEO. There is some code below that. DO NOT USE THAT CODE! It won't work. If you read the fine print above that code, though, you will see the words: "NEW! This is our new embed code which supports iPad, iPhone, Flash and beyond. Don't like change? Use the old embed code instead." Indeed, we don't like change; Dailykos's editor in particular doesn't. So click on the words "old embed code."
Step 3. The HTML code in the little box will change to code that will work on DailyKos. Right-click and copy the highlighted HTML code in the box.
Step 4. Post a comment and hit Control-V wherever you want to copy your embedded video.
Step 5. Preview your post and then Post it.
One more comment about Vimeo: You'll get better search results for Vimeo clips if you search directly on Vimeo rather than trusting Google. However, Youtube is much more fertile clip hunting territory.
Most of the clips on Youtube are from amateurs, and many of the performances are by amateurs. Amateur performances can actually be quite endearing, actually. For instance, take this clip. It's the theme from 2001, performed by a high school band/orchestra. I promise you, you've never heard it like this before.
It's also good manners to click on the "Like" button if you like a video. The video above got 1705 likes and 94 Thumbs Down. Compare that to the three or four likes that some of the more professional clips I link to get.
I wish I were handier with video editing software. I wonder what the ape-jawbone-smashing scene from 2001 would look like with that clip above as audio.
Back to the movie I just almost finished watching, Young Victoria, before waltzing in here to dash out a last minute slacker diary. (4:27 PM now). It's the story of young Queen Victoria, the godmother of the Victorian era, her youth and marriage and early days.
Her beloved, Albert, shares with Victoria that he, like her, loves the music of Schubert, in particular Schubert's Serenade, the "Swan Song." It becomes one of the themes of the film. Rather than post a pro performance, here's one of the amateur performances from Youtube that a quick search brings up.
Of course, there are so many performances to choose from, it can be dizzying. Things pop up on the right side of the screen that surprise you. Like, did you know that the Platters covered Swan Song, using their own lyrics? How cool! It's hard to resist clicking it just to see how they did.
By the way, while you listen to all the above, recall how I said last week that Schubert's big "thang" was unexpected mixing of major and minor. You can hear some of that in his Serenade.
Another piece of classical music generously used in the Young Victoria soundtrack was Dvorak's Serenade for Strings. Which is quite an anachonism, because I'm sure it wasn't composed before Victoria was queen, Dvorak being most active in the later decades of the nineteenth century. In particular, they stole this piece, the second movement, a waltz movement.
Beautiful stuff. I'd love it even more, but I've heard it too many times. I have an old LP in my garage somewhere that has the grooves worn out from my playing it to death back in the 70s. It's nice to hear it again.
And speaking of Dvorak, very stream-of-consciously... Last week I mentioned we might do a diary about the Dvorak Symphony #7. Well, we can scratch that. I searched high and low for decent clips of the Dvorak Seventh, and without much luck. If we ever do it, I'll have to upload something myself.
The problem with posting any Dvorak symphony is that you MUST be able to hear the woodwinds. If and when you ever hear a Dvorak symphony live, you'll hear what I am talking about. Dvorak uses woodwinds in a masterful way to bring color to his symphonies. And, unfortunately, there are no recordings of Dvorak's 7th that properly showcase the woodwinds.
Except...
Well, I did find one! However, there's a problem with it. It's a performance by a Turkish orchestra, the Cukurova State Symphony Orchestra. The conducting is good, but I'm reluctant to judge the overall perfomance because the recording was made very amateurishly with poor placement of the microphones. In fact, what they seem to have done is place the microphones directly next to the woodwind section.
You can most definitely hear the woodwinds in this recording, below! Here's the first movement of the Dvorak Symphony #7, which we may do a diary properly on some day. Love those woodwinds! "
... Ah, well, it was inevitable. On a day when I'm trying to encourage you to post Youtubes, telling you how easy it is, I find one that DailyKos won't let me embed. I'll dick around with that after I get my coffee.
The direct link to the Turkish Dvorak clip is here:
http://www.youtube.com/...
Well, 5:01 pm. I'm going to turn it over to you guys now. Post some shit.
Next Week: Probably the Brahms Symphony 4. Some people lobbied rather fervently that I do this symphony, so, hey, what the hell. We'll do the Brahm's fourth, if everything stays copacetic and then I anticipate moving on to some music lessons to prep us for Wagner and Debussy.
I'm still listening to the Turkish performance of Dvorak's seventh as I type this. I prefer this clip to a host of more polished performances. Much more fun. But I've heard Dvorak's 7th so many times that I already have the image of what it USUALLY sounds like in my head, so it has a special appeal to me.