09-19-2016, 02:02 AM
(09-19-2016, 12:20 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: What is it with this era and trains?
Duke Ellington
The song was first recorded on January 15, 1941 as a standard transcription for radio broadcast. The first (and most famous) commercial recording was made on February 15, 1941.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_the_%22A%22_Train
That's how musicians got around. Not aircraft or motor-coaches as they now do. Not horse-drawn carriages as they might have four decades earlier. Not by gondola (inspiring the many barcarolles) in the canals of Venice. Not steamships on the Mississippi River. Take the A Train refers to an elevated train... to Harlem?
Horses offered the clip-clop that one often hears in Strauss waltzes. Jet aircraft might offer some monotonous sound not suggesting any music at all. I can't imagine anyone getting musical inspiration from a jet engine. A motorcycle? No sonic charm. Space craft? Submarines? Ludicrous. Trains? The regular chugging of the locomotives and the irregular whistles make some musical suggestions.
This is a 1944 recording of a work with some very different culture behind it... It is definitely inspired by the sounds of a locomotive.
Were I a composer I might think of a toy train with stations in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Monterrey. There has never been such a railroad, but no child is ever going to let that reality squelch such an imagination. There would be a chugging locomotive (eight to the bar, as for the Chattanooga Choo-Choo). (Would you rather have South Bend, Kokomo, and Indianapolis, where there really was a train route and probably is one now?)
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.