Show 108: Leftovers and Miscellaneous

[Added on 2015/7/18:  This used to be called Show 8.  I've renumbered the shows, so that this one is Show108.  The July 4th show for this year will be numbered numbered Show201, and so on.  If you didn't figure this out yet, my first show aired the week of July 4th, 2014.]

Part A (Approximately one hour)        Part B (Approximately a gnother ghour.)

1	Introduction	This week, my plan was to do a little cleaning up, by which I mean, play you some left-over tracks I could not squeeze into earlier programs, and play you some additional tunes that you might be wondering about.
2	Bach: Organ fugue in A minor, BWV 543	This is the tune that I use as a theme for the start of the show.  It is an organ fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach, or J. S. Bach to people in the classical music racket, to distinguish him from a couple of other Bachs, whom very few people know about. Around the nineteenth century, people began cataloging the works of composers, for reasons of copyright, mostly, I believe.  Anyway, a neat fellow called Schmeider, that’s like Schneider, except with an M, was the one who took up Bach’s catalog, and he called it the Bach’s Werke Verzeichnis, which is abbreviated to BWV.  So this piece is BWV 543, or sometimes just S 543, for Schmeider.  Here is the fugue, played by Edward Power Biggs, an organist from Britain, who came to the US just about the same time as Virgil Fox, another famous organist.  Believe it or not, Biggs has the lightest registration of most Bach performers, that is, he uses the lightest-sounding selection of pipes.  This is in a slow 6-8 time, but it comes across as triple time, like a minuet, or waltz.  Just a really great piece.
3	Bach: Jesu bleibet meine Freude	This chorale, from BWV 147, cantata 147, is very often the first piece that young people latch onto.  I love it dearly, and when I played a MIDI version of it on the air, my wife was very indignant, and she said, why not play the real thing?  So here is the real thing. The basic chorale is was not composed for this cantata; it was an existing hymn.  This is how it sounds as it was sung in churches in Bach’s area.
4	Pachelbel: Canon in D	Pachelbel’s Kanon, which was played a couple of weeks ago by a string quartet, is for three violins and cello.  Because violins usually sound so alike, and when you have an entire string orchestra playing together, the first violins sound pretty much like the second violins.  So, I wrote it out in MIDI, so that it could be played by four entirely different instruments!  I chose a viola, a flute, a bassoon, and the Cello.  The bassoon plays an octave lower, which makes it sound really weird.
5	Beethoven: Symphony No 5 in C minor	We had a little bit of the famous Beethoven 5th Symphony.  Here’s the whole thing.
7	Mystery Haydnesque Tune	Some of you might have wondered about that little tune that I use during the station break, and at the end.  It is a tune that I heard somewhere when I was a kid, and I always thought it was by Haydn, Joseph Haydn, who wrote lots of tunes like that.  He was in fact credited with writing a lot of short tunes that he did not write. I first made a video of this basic tune, and put it up on YouTube a few years ago, and called for any information on its composer, but nobody responded.  I first played the tune as it was put up, once repeated. Earlier this year (2014) I took this tune, and made a little fantasia out of it, that is, an extended version around the basic tune.
8	Mozart: Symphony No 40 in G minor	For Mozart, also, someone cataloged his works after he died.  The cataloger’s name begins with the letter K, so we give the catalog, or opus, numbers, as K whatever.  Here is the first movement from Mozart’s opus K 550, which is the famous G minor symphony No 40, from which we played a minuet a few weeks ago.
9	Sock!Fight :  Green Cats and Blue Licorice	Uma, a long-time resident of Williamsport, who went to Lycoming, and whose band Episodes is no longer together, has a new band, Sock!Fight, and this is one of their songs:
10	New Broad River Band: Blue Bedbugs Bite	A fairly typical Bluegrass tune by the New Broad River Band.
11	The National Anthem of EU	One of the most wonderful national anthems that I had ready to play was the Anthem of the European Community.  You know it well!
12	Brahms: Symphony No. 1, Finale	Here is the last movement of Johannes Brahms’s Symphony number 1.  Anyone who has attended Lycoming College will know why this one is interesting!
13	Sousa: Liberty Bell march	This is Sousa’s Liberty Bell March.  How amazing that anyone can write so many highly memorable marches!  If you listen closely, there is a bell ringing in the second part.    The march is in binary form: AABB.  This is played by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble.
14	Harry Belafonte: Hold ‘Im Joe	This song, by Harry Belafonte, is about a donkey:  Hold ‘em Joe.
16	Wagner: Overture to Die Meistersinger	Here is the first part of the Overture to Die Meistersinger.  I’ve already played the last part for you.  I fade it out when he starts noodling in the middle, before it goes into the big ending.
17	Dvorak/Kreisler: Hungarian Dance No 2	This one was left over from the episode where I played a lot of Kreisler miniatures.  The original tune was by Dvorak, and this arrangement is largely by Kreisler.  Here it’s played by Itzhak Perlman and Samuel Sanders.
18	Haydn: Benedictus from Nelson Mass	This movement from the Nelson Mass, for all four soloists and chorus, is based on the line from the communion service that goes: “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord ...” One of the loveliest moments in the number is about halfway through, when the alto starts off with Benedictus, and soon afterwards, the Bass enters a note higher, then the Tenor soloist a note higher, and finally the Soprano soloist a note yet higher.  Very effective.
19	Kreisler: Liebesfreud	Liebesfreud means Love’s Joy.  This is one of Kreisler’s best-known compositions, and a frequently requested concert piece.
21	Dvorak: Songs my mother taught me	Perlman plays Dvorak’s well-known song: Songs my Mother Taught Me, probably based on a folk tune.
22	Boris Fomin: Those were the days	Mary Hopkin was one of the earliest singers on the Apple label, and Those were the Days was her first big hit with the label.
24	Saint-Saens: Pianists, from Carnival of the Animals	Saint-Saens pokes fun at pianists.  Narrated by Leonard Bernstein.
25	Flanders and Swann: Mopy Dick, the Whale	Flanders and Swann describe the troubles of a whale with the Flu.
26	Bach: Contrapunctus 1 from Art of Fugue	This next piece is one of the loveliest pieces of music ever written, but it was, correctly, regarded as an exhibition piece, an intellectual exercise.  One of the last pieces Bach published, and it was posthumous, is a collection called The Art of Fugue, and this one is the first one in the collection, and introduces the main musical theme of the entire collection.  Every piece in it has this theme somewhere buried inside it, so you can see what sort of exercise this was.  Contrary to popular belief, scholars are now certain that Bach started work on this collection twenty years earlier, but I don’t think anyone is absolutely certain.  Here’s Contrapunctus 1.
27	The New Broad River Band: Seven Generations	This song, recorded in the studio by the New Broad River Band, sung by David Pinelli, deplores the fact that fracking is overrunning a lot of the Susquehanna Valley.  Sometimes a landowner has little choice, because if your neighbor deals with the gas drilling companies, they can siphon out the gas under your own property.  Gas is a fluid, remember, and could flow along the shale layer.  So your neighbor can get rich by selling the gas that’s under your property.  Anyway, on the one hand, drilling for gas, while it ruins the infrastructure of a region during the drilling phase, once the wells begin to produce, it simply postpones the development of energy sources other than fossil-fuels.  But gas, as a fuel, quite apart from the pollution of the wells, pollutes the air a lot less than coal.  Billtown buses are now many of them powered by gas, and that’s a good thing, at least temporarily.  A lot less diesel fumes around the city.
28	Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony, Movt 2 – At the Brook	Beethoven was a nature lover, did you know?  The Pastoral Symphony, No 6 in F major, is all about the countryside, and his perception of the rural folk, doing their rural, rustic, bucolic thing, quite unlike our own rural folk, who are very hip.  This is a long movement, about hanging out near the creek, and I’m only going to play a few minutes for you.  Remember, this is the favorite movement of a lot of people of your grandparents’ generation.  At the Brook.
29	Free born man	Just in case I left you with the impression that The New Broad River Band did not play any fun songs, here’s one, in which the banjo player, called Judo Aaron Allison takes the lead.  The other members of the band are: Clyde Canton, alias David Pinelli (vocals and guitar), Miss Monique Pinelli, (Vocals and string bass), and Julian Pinelli on Fiddle.  A Free Born Man.