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+--- Thread: the best songs ever (/thread-160.html)
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-07-2018
(09-19-2016, 01:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: You are in my area. To be sure, many of the Big Band hits are not songs, strictly speaking.
This was highly-polished music... tuneful, tasteful, and even fun.
In a way, Mozart was a 'Big Band' composer. True greatness in any cultural expression depends upon fitting several levels of esthetic delight at once. Most works of classical music (most works by Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert are immediately accessible) are acquired tastes. If you find Bach's fugues or Beethoven's late string quartets among the apices of musical expression you may have your justification -- but you also have rare sophistication in music because you have had adequate leisure at some point in your life. You haven't had to work ten hours a day at one job consistently or work two jobs just to survive as is becoming the American way of life.
... The Big Band musicians in at least one instance (Let's Dance) made an improvement over a classical work, Carl Maria von Weber's rambling Invitation to the Dance. Let's Dance is superior to the original to the work whence it is derived in the one aspect that defines classical music from practically everything else: a tight formal structure.
Benny Goodman, Let's Dance (1935)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Dance_(radio)
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-29-2018
I Got Rhythm, 1930: instrumental version by George Gershwin
from An American in Paris (1951)
https://youtu.be/LvglHa_P9BA
From Crazy for You (1930)
https://youtu.be/m94SxmkohvQ
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-29-2018
Forty-Second Street (1932)
https://youtu.be/S_SeoB8Jz_w
Artist
John Lesko
Writers
Harry Warren, Al Dubin
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-20-2019
Best rock song ever:
The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (1971)
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-20-2019
Best organ work, and best music ever:
J.S. Bach - Toccata in F BWV 540, performed by Dan Campolieta
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-20-2019
Best symphonic movement ever:
Mozart, Symphony 41, Allegro Molto, (1788) performed by Leonard Bernstein, NY Philharmonic
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-20-2019
Best classical music ever:
Beethoven, Symphony #9 (1823) Chicago Symphony, Muti
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-20-2019
Best new age/electronica work ever:
Klaus Schulze, Totem (1972)
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-20-2019
Best pop, big band or musical song ever:
Somewhere Over the Rainbow, by Judy Garland, Arlen/Harburg (1939)
http://philosopherswheel.com/faveslist.html
RE: the best songs ever - pbrower2a - 05-21-2019
And one of the cleverest and wittiest settings of poetry as a literal song in classical music:
also suited to a female voice:
One of my favorite symphonic movements in which counterpoint that even Bach would have appreciated and whose clever variations suggest Beethoven-- could anyone other than Mahler meld the two? depends on the trick of showing that completing the phrase is anticlimax. Gustav Mahler, Rondo-Burleske, final movement of his fifth symphony:
RE: the best songs ever - pbrower2a - 05-22-2019
Arguably the greatest symphonic slow movement ever, the adagio of the seventh symphony of Anton Bruckner. This recording is by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1942 -- yes, from the sickest cesspool of gangster rule in inhuman history, Nazi Germany. Evil people can love great music, too -- just a warning.
This was the official mourning music for the Demons' Reich, playing on the radio after such events as the final surrender of German forces at Stalingrad, the formal surrender of the Third Reich to the Allies, and above all the death of Adolf Hitler. In a way this piece of music (and this may be the recording) might be more for celebration. It's old, so the brasses may not have full power, but the strings and winds are exactly what one would expect of the Berlin Philharmonic in better times for Germany.
RE: the best songs ever - pbrower2a - 05-22-2019
The greatest work ever for solo harpsichord:
Some deride the style is excessively mechanical -- Bach being played on a sewing machine, as I have seen it described. But is pure music for JS Bach's conception, completely unsuited for Romantic rumination.
-----------------
It can also come off well on a solo piano. Glenn Gould gets harpsichord-like textures out of a piano. Bach seemed to not like the pianofortes to which he was introduced (tuning problems? The temptation to play music in ways that Bach didn't like his works played? OK, Liszt's sonata for piano would not come off well on a harpsichord.
Old JSB would have probably liked Gould's 1955 performance for not adding affections that Bach never intended.
Oh, do I now regret not getting to learn how to play a keyboard instrument as a child!
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 05-22-2019
I like the string trio version, especially this performance of the final variation by Matt Haimovitz, Jonathan Crow & Douglas Mcnabney, #30 (track 31). This version was arranged by Dmitry Sitkovetsky, and has been performed by many string trios.
Complete version playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVgKu3QPFso&list=OLAK5uy_kggCc6im_Y36AF_vj7Q7i45S7ssj_nW0I
RE: the best songs ever - pbrower2a - 05-22-2019
(05-22-2019, 04:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I like the string trio version, especially this performance of the final variation by Matt Haimovitz, Jonathan Crow & Douglas Mcnabney, #30 (track 31). This version was arranged by Dmitry Sitkovetsky, and has been performed by many string trios.
Complete version playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVgKu3QPFso&list=OLAK5uy_kggCc6im_Y36AF_vj7Q7i45S7ssj_nW0I
I have heard that delightful and not-so-obvious arrangement. Then there is the glorious Art of Fugue, probably the longest non-choral, non-operatic work other than some ballets, Mahler symphonies, and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations that I can listen to in one sitting (allowance for bathroom breaks may be necessary).
RE: the best songs ever - pbrower2a - 05-22-2019
There is a near-excess of string quartets from which to choose for the greatest (Haydn to Shostakovich by way of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Smetana, Brahms, Dvorak, Debussy, Ives, Ravel, Schoenberg, Prokofiev, and Bartok), but not so with works for string trio. Mozart modestly calls this work , the trio in E-flat major (K 563) with an uncanny modesty a divertimento, literally an 'entertainment'. For an 'entertainment' it offers a depth of feeling that I would not expect of something light-hearted.
Few composers ever write even one such work, and it is remarkable that Mozart could write this one.... and call it an 'entertainment'.
Some "entertainment"! A bit deep for such a description, but well worth the listen.
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 06-10-2019
Not claiming this video is correct, but it might fill some holes we still have from before the 1920s.
RE: the best songs ever - Eric the Green - 06-12-2020
We've been dipping into classical music at the end of this thread, which generally has moved backwards in time, but now it's in no particular temporal order. So I guess I can stick in this video of myself playing one of my favorite Baroque fugues for organ. This will be the oldest best "song" ever posted here so far. I recorded this on my phone, but not with live video; I just put some pictures up as the music goes along.
This Fugue in F is the perfect baroque fugue; concise and bouyant like the spirit of the age. Dietrich Buxtehude was J.S. Bach's hero; he vacated his early job as an organist at Arnstadt to walk to Hamburg in order to hear him play and study with him in his last days. I have practiced this piece a lot and finally felt confident enough to record it on my own home organ with my new android phone. I also wanted to record it because there are few if any versions of it on you tube that bring out its full beauty. So actually I think I have the best version now on you tube, but it does not include the preceding Toccata (which is actually easier to play)
RE: the best songs ever - John J. Xenakis - 06-13-2020
An apocalyptic, Fourth Turning Crisis Era love song:
RE: the best songs ever - pbrower2a - 06-19-2020
Just to remind us all -- Dame Vera Lynn, who made endearing renditions of "We'll Meet Again" for adults and the lullaby for scared children, "The White Cliffs of Dover" that gave hope and humanity to people during the Blitz, has passed away at the age 103.
RE: the best songs ever - beechnut79 - 06-19-2020
(06-13-2020, 07:37 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: An apocalyptic, Fourth Turning Crisis Era love song:
Trying to get the connection here, especially since this song's heyday was smack dab in the middle of a 2T.