The Sounds of Musics

Recently I watched The Sound of Music with my kids (we watched it in crazy collages style, jumping around to all the "singy" parts and skipping the damned Nazis). The 4-year-old loved it, esp the group kid songs. I thought:

1. I like how even though they're supposed to be singing in German, the most famous song, "Doe, a deer...", totally depends upon being sung in English for its puns and rhymes.

2. I also didn't know that it is a true story. They all ended up in Vermont.

3. The best was near the end when the father uses a song, "Edelweiss", as a weapon against the Nazis, invoking the audience's Austrian spirit. They can't do anything except remember and hold onto what they are but it's still a powerful and inspiring moment.

Finally, here's a bunch of music I've been listening to, mostly found through Mark Weidenbaum's excellent and (to me, now) indispensible Disquiet.

Quiet American

Pause netlabel

8-bit daily

8-bit collective

J. Arthur Keenes band

Koushik

Mike Hallenbeck

We Are Smug

Woodland art creatures and hidden tunez

DC artist Truly Herbert has spent the past weeks at the Penland School in North Carolina and sent me this lovely thing she made while in the woods. Here's another:



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Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland has some hidden tunez:

Rosslyn Chapel holds a musical mystery in its architecture and design. At one end of the chapel, on the ceiling are 4 cross-sections of arches containing elaborate symbolic designs on each array of cubes (in actual fact they are rectangles mostly). The 'cubes' are attached to the arches in a musically sequential way. And to confirm this, at the ends of each arch there is an angel playing a musical instrument of a different kind. After 27 years of study and research by Stuart's father Thomas.J.Mitchell, we believe he has found the pitches and tonality that match the symbols on each cube, revealing its melodic and harmonic progressions.