image courtesy of wikimedia.org

Hey, Johann Strauss II! That is an *excellent* mustache/beard/overgrowth combo you have going there. Serious hipster action! Welcome to the year 2012, where to this day, peeps rock out to your music at their New Years celebrations. Specifically, people in Austria. More specifically, people reveling at the Vienna Royal Orchestra’s New Year Concert extravaganza.

Johann Strauss II was the son of (you guessed it!) Johann Strauss I, who was the leader of the Strauss Orchestra. Young Strauss grew up listening to the waltzes performed by the orchestra, so it is no small wonder that he followed in his father’s footsteps and composed waltzes as an adult. Strauss II was known as “The Waltz King” and was a mean waltz-writing machine. He was so dedicated and awesome that he commemorated nearly all major events in Vienna that occurred during his adult life.

If the Austrians ring in the new year with Strauss II’s music, so can we! Here is the Vienna Blood Waltz:

Image courtesy of www.bbc.co.uk

Top 5 Ways You Can Be Like Franz Liszt,
the Ultimate Stud

Franz Liszt. Legendary virtuosic pianist. Fabulous composer, despite the current debate over whether his work was any good or not. And oh, how the women swooned. They threw their handkerchiefs at him in appreciation of his talent and physical beauty. This phenomenon is referred to as Lisztomania.

And now fast forward to the 21st century. French pop band Phoenix writes the song “Lisztomania.”

Oh, to be a stud like Liszt! YOU CAN BE.
Here’s how:

1. Be an excellent pianist. (Yeah, that may be a lot to ask.)
2. Write incredibly virtuosic works that others struggle to perform correctly. (A lofty task, I am well aware.)
3. Have someone make a wide-release movie about you or write what will be come a very popular song about you. (Maybe??)
4. Be a philanthropist. Franz Liszt taught over 400 students in a 40 year period and never charged for a lesson. And by the time he was in his mid-40s, Liszt started giving most of his performance earnings to numerous organizations he felt were worthy of his financial support.

   This one is easy! Contribute to Salon97 for our annual fundraiser to help keep our programming alive. We only ask for donations once per year! It’s easy to donate.

Greetings, lovely folks.

Our annual fundraiser is in full swing and we need your help! Here at Salon97 we only fundraise once a year, yet 99% of our events are completely free of charge. Please support the cause and help us keep these gatherings as accessible to all as they are now!

Donate today!

Bernard Herrmann: The Composer as Co-Author
by Justin Stewart, The L Magazine
We know and love him for his scores to many a Hitchcock film, but Bernard Herrmann was so much more than a composer.

Opera’s Unsung Pit Heros
by Colin Eatock, The Globe and Mail
Wherein we get an inside peak at what it’s like to be a pit musician.

Copyright Battle: Who Are You Calling “Big Money”?
by Mark MacNamara, San Francisco Classical Voice
Yes, folks. It’s a tough world for most musicians. Including composers.

Demystifying #OccupyWallStreet’s Arts and Culture Meetings
by Liza Eliano, Hyperallergic
Yes, there are arts and culture meetings within OWS.

It is highly probable that you haven’t yet considered the similarities between Michael Jackson and Mozart. A few hundred years will do that. However, both were incredibly prolific, died far too young, and are discussed worldwide every day. But wait, there’s more.

Top 10 Reasons Why Mozart is the Michael Jackson of 17th Century (or MJ is the Mozart of the 21st Century):

1. Both were the 7th child in their respective families.
2. Both had overbearing fathers who wanted more than anything for their youngest sons to be famous.
3. Both worked as touring musicians by age 8.
4. Both dealt with illness throughout their lives.
5. Hype, anyone?
6. Both had unique and easily identifiable styles that are second to none.

Below are clips from Mozart’s Dies Irae and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Can you hear the similarities?

Location isn’t usually important in film comedies the way say, Los Angels is vital to dramas like Chinatown or Chicago to action-thrillers like The Fugitive. Comedies trade in laughs and laughs come from people and situations and animals with digestive ailments. Places don’t crack us up.

Then why do I never forget that one of my favorite comedies–Trading Places (1983)–takes place in Philadelphia? We can thank its unforgettable opening flipbook of the city’s icons next to images of ordinary people going to work and the city’s poor not having any. The montage is set to Mozart’s ‘Overture to the Mariage of Figarro,‘ which we’ve heard a million times but never quite like this–as an argument for the artistry of comedy rather than an affirmation of its frivolity. Listening to Mozart does not make you smarter. But in Trading Places, Director John Landis and his composer (the legendary Elmer Bernstein) use Mozart as a shorthand reminder that comedies need not make you dumber either.

The plot of Trading Places has been called a modern update of Mark Twain’s “Prince and the Pauper.” A rich stuffed shirt (Dan Aykroyd) and a street hustler (Eddie Murphy) are made to switch social places by Ackroyd’s conniving uncles who like to conduct social experiments of such things. When the two uncover the uncles’ sneaky plan to game the commodities market, they strike first, beating them at their own scam and getting rich in the process. It being the early 1980s, defeating old, inherited money through fleet footed stock trading was seen as the rebellion of youth, blows against the empire, a victory for tweed over eh, tweed.

Trading Places did great with critics and has endured mostly because its a fantastic silly comedy (SNL veterans Ackroyd and Murphy and a sequence with a horny gorilla made sure of that) that doesn’t scrimp on the fundamentals. The supporting cast bench–Jamie Lee Curtis, Ralph Bellmany, Don Ameche and Denholm Elliott–is embarrassingly deep. The script has nary a wasted line. And hiring Elmer Bernstein to score a summer comedy is like hiring Steve Jobs to oversee the launch of a lemonade stand.

It’s in his choice of Mozart to open the film that we see that Landis is up to more than talent overkill. Once you’ve seen the film (and have a modest knowledge of opera) the choice of ‘Overture’ is a cheap gold star for the viewer. ‘Figarro’ is a comic morality play about a servant outwitting an aristocrat, a nod at Trading Places’s gentle theme of money not equalling intelligence or even refinement. But one level deeper is Landis’s bigger goal: an unsmiling reminder that comedy has as gloried a cultural history as classical music and the grandparents of Trading Places are not pratfall artists and music hall crass but  great cinematic comedians like Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch from a generation before.

Of John Landis’s first 10 films (1977-1988) 6 can fairly be called classics. One (National Lampoon’s Animal House) is in the Library of Congress, an honor also held by his contemporary Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day). Throw in the best work of Ivan Reitman from that time (Stripes, Ghostbusters) and you have a body of comedy movies that not only crack you up but used legendary composers who created memorable themes, made room for 40-year veterans in the supporting cast and had stars that later were nominated for Oscars and had 20-30-year careers ahead of them.

This was broad comedy given the time, care and resources of high art. I’ve no idea if in hindsight we’ll regard contemporary laugh factories like the work of Judd Apatow and the Frat Pack the same. I tend to doubt it.

Musically speaking Trading Places starts big with an iconic Mozart piece. Afterward, Bernstein’s score is restrained and sober. There’s no lining the atmosphere with pop songs that would dominate the later years of the decade and few memorable musical passages beyond the opening. Mozart is what we’re supposed to remember, its inclusion a wink without a smile. Its as though opening a comedy with more than enough fart jokes and gratuitious nudity with the ultimate icon of high culture was a way of saying “Pay attention. What we’re doing here has the same craftmansmenship and dedication as when young Wolfgang sat down at the piano.”

The Longest Serving Orchestra Musician?
by Norman Lebrecht, Slipped Disc
Sixty-four years. WOW, people.

For Liszt, experimentation was a form of greatness.
by Anthony Tommasini, NY Times
Liszt was completely amazing, both as a performer and a composer. But you knew that, right?

What did Beethoven hear when he composed music?
by Deb Anderson, The Age
An interesting interpretation of the meaning behind Beethoven’s life and works.

A beginner’s guide to contemporary classical music.
by Anne Midgette, Washington Post
This is an excellent guide to help you get started with modern classical music. There’s a lot of great stuff out there!

J.S. Bach, image courtesy of Wikipedia

This week’s trivia SMS informed that J.S. Bach was imprisoned in 1717. What could he possibly have done wrong? Oh, he just got a new job, that’s all. His soon-to-be-former employer, the Duke of Weimar wanted nothing of it and tossed Bach in the slammer. Bach made good use of the time, however–he spent the month imprisoned working on Book One of the Well-tempered Clavier.

Here’s a segment of Well-tempered Clavier, Book 1, No. 2 in c minor:

Should phones be turned on at classical concerts?
by Kevin Berger, LA Times
Some say yes, some say no. The yay-sayers want to be able to learn more on what their seeing and hearing instantly. The nay-sayers want the usual concert experience unchanged.

Latin musicians sue over the GRAMMYs
by Ben Sisario, NY Times
The Recording Academy dropped a bunch of categories this year and people are angry. And now, a law suit. Drama! Will more categories follow? Can classical stay out of it?

BBC Proms 2011: Gabriel Prokofiev interviewed for ‘Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra’
by Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph
Gabriel Prokofiev livened things up at Proms this year. Here’s what he had to say about it.

The artists’ artist: modern composers
Interviews by Anna Tims
Five composers picked their favorite composer and explained what is awesome about them. Cool article!

Mozart, image via opera.stanford.edu

This week’s self esteem-busting trivia text message chronicled the fact that Mozart wrote over 30 symphonies between the age of 8 and 19. Crazy talk, right? Right.

Another fun fact. His birth name was super long! Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Yup.

Below is an excerpt from Mozart’s Symphony No. 1, written at the age of 8.

To receive our free weekly trivia text messages, add your information to the red box in the right hand sidebar.