Your days of leeching off your Galtian overlord, Dumbo, are at an end. There will be no musical entitlement program today! Did you think you could tax me to death without sapping me of my will to post? It's time you all got a job, you collectivist suckers at the commonweal tit. I'm the Job Creator(tm). And your job, today, is to POST MUSIC OFTHE APOCALYPSE! To make things even more anarchic, we won't be restricted today to classical music, either -- feel free to post apocalyptic rock or film music. (And I'll give a refresher course on how to post Youtube embeds below).
But maybe I should give you an example of what I mean by apocalyptic music. Not that I'm going to do your job for you (No, a capitalist chick has to hatch its own shell or its a freeloader!) but a few demonstrations might help start things. Like this, the model for almost all apocalyptic music, the finale of Richard Wagner's opera Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods), in which we see the last children of the gods leap into the flames (with their poor dumb horses, sigh) as Valhalla crumbles into ashes, taking western traditions of tonal music down with it. You can see why this was Hitler's favorite opera. (It's not really a Christian apocalypse, but we're not that picky today.
... And that's literally where the phrase, "It's not over until the fat lady sings," comes from, although our lovely fighting Valkyrie was slender, this time. To avoid being accused of Godwinizing my diaries, I'll be fair and point out that Wagner was also Jimmy Carter's and Stephen Hawking's favorite composer.
Dumbo interrupts with a brief refresher course on how to post Youtube embeds.
1. First, you need to find a clip you like, and it has to be on the Youtube site. You can't do it from another embed.
2. Click the [SHARE] button below the clip.
3. Click the [EMBED] button.
4. A text box full of HTML gobbledygook text will open up, already highlighted.
5. Right click on that text and copy it to your clipboard.
6. Copy it into your post. You can do that with right-click PASTE, or just type control-V.
And I really don't care what clips you post. Post your baby's birthday party if you want.
Back to our diary. Ahem...
The inspiration for this week's diary comes from two sources: 1) I'm lazy and 2) Erratic's Community Spotlighted diary, Apocalypse Literature, which I recommend.
From my reply in that diary to somebody who recommended Yes's Close to the Edge as an example of apocalyptic music:
By the way, if you want apocalyptic music, (1+ / 0-)
listen to some Gustav Mahler. I know, you're probably into rock, but late romantic classical music is often very apocalyptic and overblown with massive orchestras and the sound of worlds crashing.
For instance, the final movement of Mahler's Symphony #2, "Resurrection," which is based on the Apocalypse. The final movement of his Symphony #6, which isn't theoretically about anything, but it's grim, violent, 3d, special-effects movie type Apocalypse material. Or Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration. Or for something much shorter, Mars, Bringer of War, from Gustav Holst's The Planets. And there's the end of Richard Wagner's opera, Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods) [...]
Did I mention Mahler's Symphony #2, the Resurrection Symphony? Yup, and I've posted it many times before, usually the ending, the last vision of heaven. But I think, if we're REALLY going apocalyptic today, I'd rather go with the more violent middle of the final movement. And here's Michael Tilson Thomas doing just that, and doing a very good job at it, too.
And if we want to talk about Apocalyptic composers, there's probably no more apocalyptic composer than Russia's Alexander Scriabin. From Wikipedia:
In 1909 he returned to Russia permanently, where he continued to compose, working on increasingly grandiose projects. For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work to be performed in the Himalayas Mountains, that would cause a so-called "armageddon", "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world".
Here's part of that (mostly) unfinished work, the Mysterium.
If you're more of a film fanatic than a Bible fanatic, when you hear the word Apocalypse, your mind immediately runs to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse The two most notable musical pieces Coppola chose for the film were Wagner's (of course) Ride of the Valkyries and The Doors' The End.
Dumbo! You're posting rock! We hate you, now! Well, post your own favorites in the comments. I happen to like The Doors, and this is a rare excuse for me to post some.
Of course, when talking about The End, there are multiple LIVE versions of it of different lengths with different acid-intoxicated Jim Morrison extemporaneous lyrics. I prefer the Hollywood Bowl version, myself.
Jim Morrison wants to meet you all at the back of the Blue Bus.
When it comes to apocalyptic film music, there are quite a few bombastic pieces out there to choose from. I prefer most, though, the music by Ernest Gold for On the Beach(1959), the story of the end of the world as seen by the last survivors of World War III, the people of Australia, waiting for the radioactive fallout to reach them.
Of the many different approaches to take to musical apocalypse, Gold chose to go nostalgic. Almost all musical themes of On the Beach are based on variations of the Australian song, Waltzing Matilda, giving it different flavors, tones, and emotional readings.
I can't find my favorite scene from the movie. I should upload it some time. In it, American submarine commander Gregory Peck, viewing the remains of San Francisco, orders down periscope and orders the submarine back to Australia to wait for the end. And in the very next shot, we see Ava Gardner in jeans in a beautiful pasture, holding out an apple to a vibrantly alive horse with its ears perked up, running to eat the apple from her hand. And in the score, we hear Waltzing Matilda again, heart-breakingly beautiful in a string crescendo.
Well... It's all up to you now. Post something! Show us the spirit of free enterprise! Remember, as George Bush once said, the problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.