No matter where you are in the world, if you want to make a statement about your seriousness and refined taste—the soundtrack is Bach. We even put Bach on the first record we sent out of our solar system.
And this makes me very happy. As a very strictly raised preacher's kid (no movies, rock music, cards or games of chance, dancing, etc.) I left home about the most un-cool person to walk the planet. But I did have music. My mother loved the opera and listened faithfully on Saturday afternoons, my sister played the pipe organ so well she played for a wedding in 5th grade and had a teacher-student genealogy that went back to Bach, and I was in so many choirs I finally made it to the Minnesota Bach Society—got to sing St. Matthew's Passion, the B minor Mass, the Magnificat, etc. Even today, whenever I believe the forces of evil and stupidity are winning, the best way to revive my spirits is to put on some Bach.
The piece in this commercial was chosen by my mother to march down the aisle of her wedding to my father. I'll bet I have heard it 500 times on everything including kazoos. But this was especially sweet—the Japanese do Bach extremely well and this was a remarkable tribute.
I'm glad you liked it. I thought it was really cool.
You may have been the most un-cool person to walk the planet, but I was close. As for refinement and knowledge of classical music, you are light years ahead of me.
I showed my dad the video, and he commented that the music sounded vaguely like an Alka-Seltzer jingle. I only found out it was Bach when the video ended, and one of the youtube videos was labeled Bach Played on Forest Xylophone. We're not very classically inclined.
I would suspect that your lack of classical inclination was due to your Catholic upbringing—except for one thing. In St. Paul, MN, they have a beautiful Austrian-looking Catholic Church named St. Agnes. The neighborhood is run-down and the church was losing its base when their priest decided to take advantage of the church's great acoustics by staging (on a regular basis—like almost every Sunday) the great masses written by guys like Mozart and Haydn. Formed their own chorus and orchestra. They're very good. Now folks drive long distances to go to church at St. Agnes and they are now so flush with funds, they hired some Austrian monk to paint the ceiling of the nave—took him five years.
Borrowed your idea for my blog. If you want to know how the Bach sounds when performed as written, click on the bottom embedded video. http://real-economics.blogspot.com/2011/11/winter-is-almost-here.html
Actually, we just weren't very high brow. We watched the Simpsons short sketches on the Tracy Ullman Show, and loved them. We were early viewers of Married With Children. Hee Haw was regular Saturday evening fare. You get the picture.
I grew up in southwestern Minnesota and northwestern North Dakota. At least half of the members of my dad's churches were real, live, climb-on-their-tractors farmers. 75% of the kids in my grade school went home to their chores.
Fact #1. There were always some farm kids on there way to 36 ACT scores. There may have been dumb farm kids somewhere, but not where I grew up. By national standards, all of them were actually above average—just like Keillor claims for Lake Wobegon.
Fact #2. In every tiny little church, my mother managed to find an opera lover. In one church, the only tenor in the choir would sing along to the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera from his tractor—you could actually hear him over that two-cylinder putt-putt John Deere.
If you weren't exposed to the musical good stuff, the reasons obviously were not intelligence or access. That pretty much leaves culture. See, that just another problem of a celibate clergy—you don't get the benefits of a preacher's wife like my mother.
In her old age, my mother would watch the Christmas Eve Mass from the Vatican. It was beautiful—sets by Michelangelo, costumes by Armani, and if you believe such things, script by God. After about 45 minutes of this, she turned to me in sadness after another butchered attempt at music and said, "It's a shame that they would ruin such a beautiful production because they won't learn how to sing in their churches. I don't understand—the Italians can sure sing in their opera houses."
No matter where you are in the world, if you want to make a statement about your seriousness and refined taste—the soundtrack is Bach. We even put Bach on the first record we sent out of our solar system.
ReplyDeleteAnd this makes me very happy. As a very strictly raised preacher's kid (no movies, rock music, cards or games of chance, dancing, etc.) I left home about the most un-cool person to walk the planet. But I did have music. My mother loved the opera and listened faithfully on Saturday afternoons, my sister played the pipe organ so well she played for a wedding in 5th grade and had a teacher-student genealogy that went back to Bach, and I was in so many choirs I finally made it to the Minnesota Bach Society—got to sing St. Matthew's Passion, the B minor Mass, the Magnificat, etc. Even today, whenever I believe the forces of evil and stupidity are winning, the best way to revive my spirits is to put on some Bach.
The piece in this commercial was chosen by my mother to march down the aisle of her wedding to my father. I'll bet I have heard it 500 times on everything including kazoos. But this was especially sweet—the Japanese do Bach extremely well and this was a remarkable tribute.
I'm glad you liked it. I thought it was really cool.
ReplyDeleteYou may have been the most un-cool person to walk the planet, but I was close. As for refinement and knowledge of classical music, you are light years ahead of me.
I showed my dad the video, and he commented that the music sounded vaguely like an Alka-Seltzer jingle. I only found out it was Bach when the video ended, and one of the youtube videos was labeled Bach Played on Forest Xylophone. We're not very classically inclined.
I would suspect that your lack of classical inclination was due to your Catholic upbringing—except for one thing. In St. Paul, MN, they have a beautiful Austrian-looking Catholic Church named St. Agnes. The neighborhood is run-down and the church was losing its base when their priest decided to take advantage of the church's great acoustics by staging (on a regular basis—like almost every Sunday) the great masses written by guys like Mozart and Haydn. Formed their own chorus and orchestra. They're very good. Now folks drive long distances to go to church at St. Agnes and they are now so flush with funds, they hired some Austrian monk to paint the ceiling of the nave—took him five years.
ReplyDeleteBorrowed your idea for my blog. If you want to know how the Bach sounds when performed as written, click on the bottom embedded video.
http://real-economics.blogspot.com/2011/11/winter-is-almost-here.html
Actually, we just weren't very high brow. We watched the Simpsons short sketches on the Tracy Ullman Show, and loved them. We were early viewers of Married With Children. Hee Haw was regular Saturday evening fare. You get the picture.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in southwestern Minnesota and northwestern North Dakota. At least half of the members of my dad's churches were real, live, climb-on-their-tractors farmers. 75% of the kids in my grade school went home to their chores.
ReplyDeleteFact #1. There were always some farm kids on there way to 36 ACT scores. There may have been dumb farm kids somewhere, but not where I grew up. By national standards, all of them were actually above average—just like Keillor claims for Lake Wobegon.
Fact #2. In every tiny little church, my mother managed to find an opera lover. In one church, the only tenor in the choir would sing along to the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera from his tractor—you could actually hear him over that two-cylinder putt-putt John Deere.
If you weren't exposed to the musical good stuff, the reasons obviously were not intelligence or access. That pretty much leaves culture. See, that just another problem of a celibate clergy—you don't get the benefits of a preacher's wife like my mother.
In her old age, my mother would watch the Christmas Eve Mass from the Vatican. It was beautiful—sets by Michelangelo, costumes by Armani, and if you believe such things, script by God. After about 45 minutes of this, she turned to me in sadness after another butchered attempt at music and said, "It's a shame that they would ruin such a beautiful production because they won't learn how to sing in their churches. I don't understand—the Italians can sure sing in their opera houses."