April 2011 - Page 4 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Mozart -Dies irae

Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is a famous thirteenth century Latin hymn, thought to be written by Thomas of Celano.

I’ve sung the Mozart Requiem in choirs at least twice, perhaps thrice, and I love it. The coolest piece is the Dies Irae. And it occurred to me that this is one of those pieces that gets used A LOT in commercials and movie trailers. I heard it most recently in a trailer for the VERY DARK – don’t say I didn’t warn you – Japanese movie called Battle Royale, along with the Verdi requiem that also appears in the film.

I wondered if anyone put together a list of the music’s appearances. Here’s a roster of Mozart in the movies which lists six appearances of Requiem, but only one, Incredible True Story of Two Girls in Love, which I’ve never seen, where the Dies Irae is specified. About.com notes three films, X-Men 2, Duplex, and The Incredibles DVD: Jack-Jack Attacks; I saw only the former.

My request: where have YOU heard this music before – I know you have – outside of a performance of the Requiem itself, besides in the movie Amadeus?

Incidentally, Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) is a famous thirteenth-century Latin hymn thought to be written by Thomas of Celano. The Mozart Requiem was completed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr; there is a controversy about “how much of the piece was completed by Mozart before his death. The autograph manuscript shows the finished and orchestrated introit in Mozart’s hand, as well as detailed sketches of the Kyrie and the sequence, Dies irae.”

Apocalypse Now QUESTION

…how Matthew 24:6-7, “And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars…” has been misinterpreted, which I found oddly comforting.

I was noting to someone – probably Arthur, right after the Christchurch earthquake in February, that I’m not much of a believer in the apocalypse, as portrayed in some religious literature. Then the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan helped generate this Newsweek cover. Still don’t believe it, though if the world destroys itself, it’d more likely be at our own hand.

Then I came across this article about how Matthew 24:6-7, “And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars…” has been misinterpreted, which I found oddly comforting.

Do you believe either in Biblical end times or the possibility that we, through being a poor tenant of this earth, are bringing to pass our own destruction? Ah, a good Lenten question.

And do uncertain times make the notion of superheroes more attractive?

Beatles Island Songs, 3-1

He’s utterly transfixed by the backwards tape, the chanting.

Before discussing my final three picks, I decided to rank the albums by adding up the ordinal values, then dividing by the number of tracks on the album; the lower the number, the better. I know this is particularly unfair to Abbey Road since those brief tracks didn’t make the cut, but the suite would have fared far better, and the album still did quite well. And comparing ordinals, with no other weights, is bad math. Whatever.

These are the British albums, so these are the British release dates:

# Title Release date

1 Please Please Me 1963, March 22 -137/125.86 (14)
2 With the Beatles 1963, November 22 – 126 (14)
3 A Hard Day’s Night 1964, July 10 – 62.54 (13)
4 Beatles for Sale 1964, December 4 – 136.29 (14)
5 Help! 1965, August 6 – 86.64 (14)
6 Rubber Soul 1965, December 3 – 87.64 (14)
7 Revolver 1966, August 5 – 59.57 (14)
9 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 1967, June 1 – 92.54(13)
17 Magical Mystery Tour 1976, November 18 – 96.91 (11)
10 The Beatles 1968, November 22 – 123.5 (30)
11 Yellow Submarine 1969, January 17 – 141 (4)
12 Abbey Road 1969, September 26 – 118.47 (17)
13 Let It Be 170.33/155 (12)
28 The Beatles Past Masters, Volume One 1988, March 7 – 107.89 (18)
29 The Beatles Past Masters, Volume Two 1988, March 7 – 96.13/88.6 (15)

My affection for Revolver is well known to me, but A Hard Day’s Night did amazingly well. I prefer Rubber Soul to Help! as an album, but I was feeling burned out at the time over some of the better tracks on RS (In My Life, Norwegian Wood, Michelle). And unsurprisingly, Let It Be did poorly.

Notes: Magical Mystery Tour was released in the US in 1967, but it wasn’t considered as part of the canon in the UK until nine years later.
Wow: With the Beatles, the album that spawned many of the songs from the US Meet the Beatles was released on the day of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The sociological implications…
The albums with two numbers involved me substituting a different version of the same song; all the second versions ended up at end of the list.
Album #8 is A Collection of the Beatles Oldies (But Goldies), 1966, December 10, which essentially served the same function as Past Masters 1 did years later.
***

The rules of engagement

213-204
203-194
193-184
183-174
173-164
163-154
153-144
143-134
133-124
123-114
113-104
103-94
93-84
83-74
73-64
63-54
53-44
43-34
33-24
23-14
13-4

***
3 Help! from Help! A little after 09/09/09, my daughter and I watched the movie Help!, her for the first time, me for the first time since watching a quadruple feature of A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Yellow Submarine and the ever depressing Let It Be in the early 1970s. Help!, which I also saw when it first came out in 1965, was less good than I remembered it. But I fell in love with the music all over again. This specific song my daughter knows all the lyrics to, without either encouragement or prompting from me. Moreover, I connect with the notion of Lennon actually making the song a cry for help, overwhelmed by making records and movies, touring, et al. Also, if one were on an island, needing help seems quite appropriate.
2 Got To Get You Into My Life from Revolver. Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy home alone in the late 1960s playing a great album. This McCartney song comes on, and he’s enjoying it well enough. But as it gets to the final chorus, he starts slowly increasing the volume, making the horn so resplendent in his ears and down his spinal column that he practically weeps for joy.
1 Tomorrow Never Knows from Revolver. So the stereo is pretty loud when the last song, by Lennon, comes on, and he’s utterly transfixed by the backward tape, the chanting. Totally mesmerizing. Ultimately, the bass/drum section could be applied to any number of Beatles songs. Try singing A Hard Day’s Night or any number of other songs to it; it works. I realized this when I heard the LOVE album, and the mashup of Within You Without You with Tomorrow Never Knows really elevated my appreciation of the former, and in doing so, stoked my appreciation for the latter. Heck, it even goes with Jingle Bells. Some background on one of the most audacious recordings the Beatles would ever attempt.

Well, that was fun. Or something.

LaMBS is 55

At some point, around 2:30-2:45 a.m. on what was by then her actual natal day, everyone had left the office except Lynn (who fell asleep on some furniture), a Vietnam vet who was in love with Lynn and kept staring at her, and me who kept watching him.

When I was in college, I was co-editor of a thrice-weekly newsletter, inexplicably called the Wind Sun News, sponsored by the Student Government. They instituted this publication in no small measure because the editors of The Oracle, the student newspaper, decided that political issues such as American involvement in overthrowing Chile’s Allende in favor of Pinochet was more important to cover than the prosaic issue of college politics.

I had a very good friend then, who I’ll call Lynn, mostly because it was her name. She had been kvetching about turning 20. It was a Wind Sun News night, when a bunch of us would work from 8 or 9 p.m. until around 2 a.m., and occasionally later. Normally, Lynn would be there, but her friend Pam convinced her to go out to dinner with her because she “needed” to talk to Lynn about her relationship with her boyfriend. It was an effective ruse because Pam apparently DID talk to her about the beau.

Lynn came back to the office just before midnight, glum because the staff was still all around, which she assumed meant the newsletter wasn’t done. Except that it WAS done, since the other co-editor, Kevin, and I had hustled to do so, largely that afternoon. The staffers were all there to put together and celebrate Lynn’s birthday.

At some point, around 2:30-2:45 a.m. on what was by then her actual natal day, everyone had left the office except Lynn (who fell asleep on some furniture), a Vietnam vet I’ll call Paul, who was in love with Lynn and kept staring at her, and me who kept watching him. Finally c. 4 a.m., he left. I locked the door and slept on a chair or sofa.

About 7 a.m., Lynn wakes up and says, “Roger?” (It’s pitch-black in the room – no windows – so one can’t see anything). I must be half-awake & say “Yes?” We take the newsletter to the printer, go out and eat breakfast at the Plaza Dinner – not unusual – then later pick up the newsletter to distribute. Lynn was one of my best friends in college, then we lost touch for a good long while. But we’ve been in e-mail contact for the last couple of years. I always remember her birthday because it’s an arithmetic sentence: 4X14=56.

So happy birthday, Lynn, 35 years after that night still stuck in my memory.

The graphic is a blend of two different iterations of the WSN.

Sidney Lumet

Lumet “directed seventeen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances… Four of them won for those Lumet-supervised performances.”

There’s an IMDB filmography for film director Sidney Lumet, who died last week at the age of 86. I thought I’d note the movies I saw, or wish I had.

12 Angry Men (1957) – A great cast, led by Henry Fonda. I must have seen this on TV originally, but it was so impactful, the whole notion of whether things are the way we thought, in a great courtroom drama, that I’ve gotten it on DVD.

Serpico (1973) – Found this movie about the one honest cop riveting, intense and rather sad by its (appropriate) cynicism.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – I’ve meant to see this. Actually came across the first 10 minutes on YouTube fairly recently.

Network (1976) – By far, the best movie of 1976, Rocky’s Academy Award win notwithstanding. In fact, it’s #64 on AFI’s top 100 movies. Also, Evanier tells a great story about a screening he attended. I remember the Oscars for that year quite well, when Peter Finch’s widow picked up his well-deserved award for Best Actor.

The Wiz (1978) – Definitely did NOT view this in the theater, though I’ve seen scenes on TV.

The Verdict (1982)– I’ve been a sucker for both law dramas and movies about redemption. This movie starring Paul Newman, as a lush of a lawyer I recall really enjoying when I saw it in the theater, though I haven’t viewed it since.

I probably also ought to see Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Equus and Running on Empty.

Evanier notes that Lumet “directed seventeen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Katharine Hepburn, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Chris Sarandon, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight, William Holden, Ned Beatty, Peter Firth, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, James Mason, Jane Fonda and River Phoenix. Four of them won for those Lumet-supervised performances. A pretty impressive record.” Kevin Marshall wrote a nice piece about Lumet.