I have some wonderful, interesting friends on FaceBook, almost all of them students or family members, or former colleagues. They put in a lot of effort into keeping themselves cheerful and occupied at home (and keeping their kids from wrecking their homes), and cheering up their other friends on Fb; a laudable task.
One thing I'm seeing often is this sort of Chain Letter:
Day [n]: Xxxx [the name of the poster's buddy] has challenged me to post 10 albums that have influenced my musical taste, one record a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the cover. And each day I am to nominate someone to do the same. Today I nominate Arch!
Well, this sort of thing is easier for those whose musical tastes tend towards pop and rock, but for a classical music aficionado, this is not easy. Furthermore, I could not think of 10 people who would be interested in responding to such a challenge. So I came back with:
Day 1: [xxxx] has challenged me to post 10 albums that have influenced my musical taste, one record a day for 10 days. No explanation, no review, just the cover.
Well, I'm changing the rules.
Post at least 5, and if you must, give a _brief_ intro in the comments. (Most of my friends are academics, and cannot just post covers.)
And each day I am to nominate someone to do the same. Today I nominate [name of my first victim]!
(Post in as Hi-Res as possible, so we can read the text.)
Well, this is a blog, so I'm going to post all ten (or however many) all at once. I may go on to blog on each album on subsequent days, but I'm going to put the list up right away.
I had a friend, Mano Singham,
who had been hired to spend a few hours a week to talk English with a
Japanese Buddhist monk who was spending a year in Sri Lanka. I joined
him for one of these meetings, and we had a great old time! This monk
later sent me an LP, and it was the very first in my collection.
I had already been introduced to the Brandenburgs, and I'm struggling to recall where. One of my episodes on Archie's Archives on the actual radio show had a little sub-episode about the Brandenburgs.
The Bach Orchestral Suites
There are stories to tell about these suites, and particular dances in the suites, which I will put in a different post!
I have to say Menuhin was a handsome man! And by all accounts, an excellent conductor.
These, too, I discovered in the Hillman Library.
I can honestly say only that I remember all the tunes of the very first Trio Sonata in E Flat; the other ones will be familiar if I play them, but I don't know them as well as I should!!
Now, all this makes it looks as though I like nothing except Bach. That isn't strictly true, but it strikes uncomfortably close to the mark, unfortunately. Heh-heh.
Violin Concertos
I learned a lot about classical music via the wonderful Book Of The Month Club series on Music Appreciation, and one of the best chapters was on the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, played on the Music Appreciation record by Fredell Lack, who has sadly passed from being in the eye of the public for several decades. This is not a real album cover; it is a fake that I made out of the portraits of the composers, because I did not want to dedicate a different one of these bullets to each concerto. When it comes to the so-called 'Great' violin concertos, most teams do them justice, so it doesn't greatly matter which performance you buy.
The concertos that influenced my tastes early on are:
Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Bach (3), Mozart (5), Sibelius, Bruch.
This is a little out of sequence. But I'm going to put this here; after all, COVID, you know. I can't be perfect.
I didn't really get to know and love Pete Seeger until I had learned to play the guitar. That road was long and hard, but I got there in the end!
Now we have to go look at some of the pop and rock music that I learned to love. If we talk about albums, specifically then we must talk about The Beatles.
The Beatles did not really influence me via an album except somewhat later. The first songs I sat up and paid attention came from A Hard Day's Night. The first album I got hooked on was Help. I went on to Rubber Soul, and then to Sgt Pepper's, though it was many years later that I could actually afford these.
Soon after I started grad school, and began to earn a stipend, I began to acquire Beatles recordings with a vengeance. The first two were the Blue Album, and the Red Album. Those only contained remastered versions from the Beatles existing discography.
Then, one amazing day, I saw the movie Let It Be, which was amazing, and I was in love yet again! I won't include that one, though it was arguably as great an influence as the others, or almost as great.
My dad picked up one of the Whiffenpoofs annual albums while he was at Yale. (The Whiffenpoofs are the Yale men's glee club; I don't know whether they still exist, or whether they have morphed into a mixed glee club, which is perfectly reasonable.)
The 1962 recording was just absolutely perfect, and we played it repeatedly. Unfortunately, we lost this record---or rather, one of our friends stole it!---but apparently they're available second-hand, and I must buy one, or I shall be very sad.
I love this album to pieces. It was discovered just about the time that I had gotten moderately skilled at the guitar, and these songs were just the best ones to try out on the new 12-string guitar that I bought a few years later.
There's barely a dud among them; they constitute a sort of greatest hits for PP&M, whose arrangements of many amazing songs from many amazing songwriters were---unbelievably---often more commercial than the originals, and actually just plain better. Cases in point: Leaving on a Jet Plane, by John Denver; I suspect that not many even know that John Denver wrote that one, and Don't Think Twice, it's alright, by Bob Dylan. And let's not forget Early Morning Rain, written by Gordon Lightfoot, a total winner!
This album influenced me strongly in my college days, but it was owned by someone else. The one I bought was Greatest Hits; I strongly advise buying greatest hits whenever possible.
The songs were perfect for a rebellious 19-year-old, but very soon after I got familiar with this album, I began to think that the poetry was a little overwrought. And furthermore, Mrs. Robinson wasn't in this album, and Bridge over Troubled Water.
OK, I must rest now; this post is taking over my life.
Well, dragged myself back, I have. Continue I must; the force, pushes me, it does.
This one is a good all-round recording; two others there are, which I will also find and put here.
It is done.
Well, not so fast!
I reflected on why I was so reluctant to take up this challenge, as it was initially issued. Then I realized that there were two problems to this challenge.
Problem 1: to find 10 albums that influenced my musical tastes. Are there 10 such albums? Are there not that many, or are there far more?
Problem 2: and this is the more difficult one. Do I have 10 friends on Facebook on whom I can lay this challenge? These people will now have to dig up 10 albums...
As I was putting up these albums here, on my Blog—on one of my two blogs—I began to realize that, not only did I have more than ten albums that have strongly influenced my musical tastes, but I was feeling quite evangelical about putting them before my blogging audience. Honestly, they have influenced me to the extent that I can ascribe my sanity in this time of distancing and lockdown directly to them. I still listen to them; not all of them, because some of them I have listened to almost weekly for decades.
Just this morning, I remembered yet another influential album—and this one was definitely an album; I can still remember the principal of the school I attended between grades K-10 carefully removing the LP from the sleeve—and I posted this album as my 5th and last challenge, and tagged my wife.
Kathleen Ferrier was an untrained singer, with a beautiful alto voice, who lived during the WWII in Britain. She was a telephone operator, and an amateur pianist, and quite a comic among her friends. She would play and sing funny songs, and one day her husband entered her name in a contest, as a pianist. She also entered as a singer, and she won!
This brought her to the attention of serious musicians, and after a series of stints on the recital stage, she came to record under the baton of one of the most famous conductors of the times: Bruno Walter. She was soon one of the contralto voices most in demand, both for recitals, and for opera and oratorio.
She was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1952, but kept up with her singing and acting commitments. Soon after this album was recorded in 1952, she collapsed with a broken femur, of all things, and died a few days later.
I love every single cut on this album—a total of only 8—and played them often, in the months after I had managed to acquire the CD for myself. (Until then, I only had the memory of these pieces from my school days, on the LP.) But the CD is in Mono; in that time, Stereo was just getting to be commonplace, and the conductor, Sir Adrian Boult, having conducted these wonderful tracks for recording in Mono by Decca, heard that Kathleen Ferrier had died. He was stunned and aggrieved, and dismayed that he hadn't had the forethought to record them in stereo. In desperation, he re-recorded them, with the same orchestra, in stereo, but with Ms. Ferrier's voice coming out through a speaker placed in the middle of the orchestra.
This fake stereo version was sold for many years, but stereo afficionados hated it, and urged the return to the authentic mono version. However, with today's technology, it is easily possible to mate the orchestral portion of the stereo recording with the mono version of Ms. Ferrier's voice, if they wanted to spend the time and the effort. However, this has not been done, to the best of my knowledge.
Archie
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