Suck juice from moose
When I was about 8 years old my dad bought me a copy of Carmina Burana on cassette tape (remember them?). It turns out I didn’t really like anything except for O Fortuna!, that staple of medieval action movie trailers. I do remember being excited by the tightly compressed liner notes, which included both the Latin and English translation of the poems. “Velut Luna” has been what I’ve heard when it plays ever since.
It might have been different if I had seen these lyrics first, instead:
On The Pitch
I wish I could tell what note the ceiling was playing when people in the apartment upstairs make the floor hum:
Ranking Beethoven
Remember that post from Monday where I kindly provided you with a crap-load of Beethoven videos on YouTube? Well since all those videos were posted at around the same time — two years ago, yeah it took naive little ol’ me that long to find them — you can get an angle on how popular each of Beethoven’s symphonies are, relative to one another:
| Rank | Symphony | Views |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | No. 9 | 4426281 |
| 2. | No. 5 | 3914515 |
| 3. | No. 7 | 2769380 |
| 4. | No. 3 | 1292489 |
| 5. | No. 6 | 873106 |
| 6. | No. 4 | 281157 |
| 7. | No. 8 | 265051 |
| 8. | No. 1 | 238895 |
| 9. | No. 2 | 216598 |
Interestingly they seem to divide into three chunks. The big three are 9, 5 and 7, all with comparably high views of 3-4 million. Next come 3 and 7, with large but significantly less views, closer to one million. Rounding it up are the less popular four: 4, 8, 1, 2. All with less than 300,000 views each.
The top five do not surprise me — however the separation between the top three and the next two do. Especially number 6. I would have thought that would be up there with number 7. Maybe that’s because my personal ranking of the top five is: 6, 7, 5, 9, 3.
Also interestingly (but unsurprisingly) there are about four times more views for the first half of No.9 than there are for the second half. Number five is even more pronounced (eight times more!) — perhaps because most viewers just want to hear the famous beginning.
Unbrokenup Beethoven
Now I’m not *exactly* the first to find these — 870,083 happy campers got their noses in before I did — but the novelty of full-length classical music vids has yet to wear thin. Here’s symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’:
And dancey No. 7:
And No. 4:
And the in-betweeney No. 8:
There are also some chopped ones:
And the two everyone kinda ignores:
Hoorah! Beethoven symphonies for everyone!
Terzetto
This was on NPR during one of my beloved musical-accompaniments to falling asleep on top of the duvet a few weeks ago. In the interim period between over-then and over-now it had been sitting around as a note in my phone, quickly keyboarded out before all the sleepiness slipped away. Despite a total wipe of my phone, and a huge amount of hauling and installing furniture, my little nighttime notation managed to shove itself back into attention a couple of days ago: “dvorak terzetto”.
Dvorak I’ve never been crazy about. He seems too suspiciously late romantic. This is sneakily chromatic, though. It’s got some crunchy off-key sections. It reminds me a bit of the late Beethoven quartets. It’s also got a pretty sweet name — turns out a terzetto is like a trio, except instead of the plain-salted violin/viola/cello it’s configured violin/violin/viola. Which is, uhhh, pretty awesome I guess. I was hoping for a definition involving giant metal dinosaurs or something, but two violins is cool too.
The L.A. Phil. have liner notes about the piece here. And there are like ten different version on eMusic.