Dec 4 2024 - Carol of the Bells

 

Our choir songs are overwhelmingly Christian carols/hymns or mid-twentieth century songs.  And then there's the Solstice Song - Carol of the Bells.   There are 10,000 songs on the subject of Christmas.  And seasonal songs like Jingle Bells aren't considered Christmas songs.   When it comes to religious songs, it seems to me that the Manger is the focal point.    Christian Christmas songs are known as hymns - "song of praise".  The "Hymnal" is organized by season.  One has to look through an index at the back to find out which page a song is on.  Lyrics are formal and paraphrase Scripture or quote the Bible.    In the wider context, Christmas songs have more diverse themes.  Here's someone who did some analysis of Christmas songs: "After examining the top 78 holiday songs on Spotify, Bennett found the most common themes included: Home (family, gifts under the tree), Love (finding that special someone at Christmas), Lost love (feeling lonely at Christmas), Parties (dancing, mistletoe), Santa (and his reindeer), Snow (snowmen, sleighs, cold winters), Religion (Nativity story), and Peace on Earth."  Quite the array for Christmas.  I guess that in part accounts for why there are so many concerts at this time of year. Lots to choose from. A person can stay at home:  turn on the perpetual fire burning in the fireplace television station/youtube video and the perpetual Christmas music radio station.  This display of wreaths and urns at the Watering Can is from a few years ago.  This year, the volume is astonishing.

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Dec 8 2023 - Christmas Songs

 

There are almost 10,000 Christmas Songs.   As far as music statistics go, there are over 900,000 Christmas tracks representing over 180,000 songs by over 60,000 artists.  Who is the number 1 artist for highest count of songs?  Bing Crosby, next is Frank Sinatra, then Elvis Presley, and Nat King Cole.  Finally, in position 5 comes Johann Sebastian Bach.  Then the list returns to artists of the 20th century and all American.  Maybe not Mario Lanza.   Bing Crosby's White Christmas has nearly a million Christmas tracks with just over 2,000 being the actual Bing Crosby classic.  That's 2,000 different albums that contain Bing's version of White Christmas.  What is the next highest released Christmas track?  Earth Kitt's Santa Baby at around 1200. What about those Christmas carols?  Silent Night has almost 20,000 recordings.  And what would be next? White Christmas is next at almost 16,000 recordings.  And if we all love to sing Christmas carols, then Karaoke Christmas songs contribute to the list.  Over 23,000 tracks of them. Perhaps my generation is allowed to be a little weary of Christmas and its music.  Or maybe we are the generation that keeps it going so strong.  All those nostalgic hits from the early to mid 20th century. Here's a different version of White Christmas.  It seems a bit eerie.

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Aug 20 2023 - Summer Songs

 

There are definitely songs that make us think of summer.  And the second half of the 20th century brought us a lot of them.  There are a quite a few lists that tell us the favourites.  I picked out these: (Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding Under the Boardwalk by the Drifters Summer in the City  by the Lovin’ Spoonful  Summertime by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong California Girls by the The Beach Boys The Summer Wind by Wayne Newton  There are more, lots more.  Every genre has them. There are classical music summertime songs. They all seem to have "summer" in the name, like Vivaldi's Summer. Summer is the great season.  It deserves all this musical attention. It makes me realize that with the rise of radio, popular and jazz music has come to define a society's experience of summer, not just a person's.  That "collective unconscious" has been growing.  Do we know what that signifies?  Not me.  It seems a mystery. Today we have some summer leaves.

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May 30 2022 - Heardle

 

First came Wordle, and now comes Heardle.  I sometimes think I am so slow at finding new things.  this came out March 2022 right after Wordle. Here is the Economic Times (of India) with its Heardle puzzle today.  "The new Heardle puzzle is out today and it is an interesting song! If you are someone who is yet to figure out the song of the day of 30th May, 2022, here are our hints and clues to help you with the answer!  For those of you not familiar with it, the goal of the game is to guess the song of the day in six attempts or less.  Here is how Heardle is played: You're going to hear the first few seconds of a fairly well-known tune. Next, you have the option of guessing the artist and title or skipping your turn. By skipping or guessing incorrectly, you will hear more of the song. By the final guess, total of16 seconds of the track will be played, followed by the sixth and final guess.  There are chances that you might have some difficulty with today’s song, which is an Eclectic selection If that is the case, here  are few clues to help you out.  This song is a popular hard rock song. The song was released in 1980. This number was ranked 37 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. The title track to the second most successful album of all time. This is from the album by AC/DC It was AC/DC’s seventh studio album to be released." Check out their Heardle puzzles HERE.  This is another Chanticleer image. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

April 23 2022 - A Rasputin Kind of Song

 

Jazz Fm played a clip yesterday of Joni Mitchell describing her first meeting with Charles Mingus.  She described one of the songs as a Rasputin kind of song.  What is a Rasputin song?  I'd never imagined such a thing.  I wondered if it was a metaphor or a reference.  I assume now that it was a reference to a 1978 song by Boney M. The description says: "Boney M's song 'Rasputin' was a mini-history lesson about Grigori Rasputin, a holy man who got rather close to the family of Russia's Nicholas II, and who met a grisly end." "It was highly popular and 'Rasputin' topped the charts in Australia, Germany and Austria, and went to number two in the UK and Switzerland." "Although it was written and performed in English, with a few German and Russian words thrown in, it was a big success in the Soviet Union, and was even credited with reviving the fame of Rasputin in the country." While it was an international hit when it first came out, the track gained new prominence in the late 2000s because of the video game Just Dance. The game featured an elaborate, often absurd dance routine set to the track. And then the TIKTOK 2021 compilation version came along.  It is on Youtube  HERE. This is full of young people with silly costumes and/or lots of muscles showing them off while dancing. I listened to Rasputin, and can't imagine a connection to Charles Mingus musically.  So I read through the interview with Crowe as that was likely was the source of the quote.  But alas, no mention of Rasputin in the transcript, vs the recording on JazzFM yesterday.  So I guess  the trail has "gone cold" unless one of you has the reference.. Some nostalgia today with a model railroad layout.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Sep 6 2021 - September Songs

 

How many September songs are there? Spinditty says there are more than 60 songs about September. The list is HERE.  My attention is attracted to Frank Sinatra's album September of My Years, made for his 50th birthday in December 1965. Sinatra recorded "It Was a Very Good Year" for the album live on a Walter Cronkite CBS News Special on Frank Sinatra in the spring - it was broadcast closer to his birthday - in November.   A year of celebration of Frank Sinatra is how I think of that album, and it was rereleased in 1986. Considering all the many September songs there are, I want to give a name to this subject category.  And what came to my mind was  "Septemberism" - where great reminiscing and nostalgia are the main themes. This name was taken - but long ago.  I find out that this was the name of a Portuguese political movement in the 1830s and the name of the insurgents in a Bulgaria uprising in 1923.  There are lots of September uprisings in history.  Unlike songs with September where there are lots of lists, there really aren't any lists of uprisings by month. So who is to know if September of the most popular uprising month.  It might be Spring. While Frank Sinatra's songs were reminiscent and nostalgic, our own experience of September this is is one of apprehension because of the fourth wave of COVID.  In amongst the many September jokes, I found these two COVID jokes: I just got off the phone with a researcher in China. He says it's not worth getting the Covid-19 now, as they are expecting the Covid-20 PRO to be released in September.   Please, don't get Covid-19 They are releasing Covid-20 in September and it's much better. Little did we think there would be a yearly release - and Covid-21 is available anywhere near the unvaccinated now. September 20th is a Full Harvest Moon this year - names for September's full moon are: Autumn Moon (Cree) Falling Leaves Moon (Ojibwe) Leaves Turning Moon (Anishinaabe) Moon of Brown Leaves (Lakota) Yellow Leaf Moon (Assiniboine) Here's one of my moon rising interpretations.

Feb 5 2021 - D Flat Major

 

Would you consider D flat major a key to write in? You can find a few on Spotify:  Sweet Child O'Mine, Appetite for Destruction.  There's a long list of compositions on Wikipedia  (vs songs).  Concertos, scherzos, Waltzes, String quartets and then the lovely Clair De Lune by Claude Debussy.  That fun Minute Waltz is in D flat major.  Chopin liked D flat major. There is Body and Soul. The Girl from Ipanema is another. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square was sung in this key by Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. The analysis of 30 million songs reveals that G major, C major, D major and A major account for one third of all songs.  You can see the pie chart distribution of keys of all music on Spotify in the article HERE.  It looks like D flat major doesn't show up on the chart.  But what if there are D flat major (or minor) jokes.  I did not find any, but there is a constantly repeating A flat minor joke: What happens when you drop a piano down a mineshaft? A flat minor And then we can find a lot of action in the extended version of the C E flat and G go into a bar joke: C, E-flat, and G go into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, but we don't serve minors." So E-flat leaves, and C and G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished, and G is out flat. F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough. D comes in and heads for the bathroom, saying, "Excuse me; I'll just be a second." Then A comes in, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor. Then the bartender notices B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and says, "Get out! You're the seventh minor I've found in this bar tonight." E-flat comes back the next night in a three-piece suit with nicely shined shoes. The bartender says, "You're looking sharp tonight. Come on in, this could be a major development." Sure enough, E-flat soon takes off his suit and everything else, and is au natural. Eventually C sobers up and realizes in horror that he's under a rest. C is brought to trial, found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of D.S. without Coda at an upscale correctional facility.   Time for a train day - these from Sacramento in 2019.  I've given the layout "Blue Skies" - written in C Minor. Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Nov 24 2020 - Christmas Sounds

 

What is the most popular Christmas song of all time as of a year ago?  Mariah Carey's 1994 hit  "All I Want for Christmas is You".  Last year it achieved the record for highest-charting holiday song on the Billboard U.S. Hot 100 by a solo artist.  It is the most-streamed track on Spotify in 24 hours by a female artist with almost 11,000,000 streams in December 2018 and most weeks in the U.. singles top 109 chart for a Christmas song.  These made it to the 2020 Guinnesss World Records There's a children's book in which the Mariah-type little girl's greatest wish for Christmas is a puppy.   The song has received much analytical attention.   "Writing at Slate, Adam Ragusea undertook an extensive analysis of the harmony behind “All I Want for Christmas,” counting at least 13 distinct chords in the song, including a minor subdominant chord, which is also found — crucially — in Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” In short, “All I Want” is, despite its presumed simplicity, a relatively sophisticated piece of pop songwriting that has more in common with the Great American Songbook than it does with any of its peers on the charts in 1994. " Today's picture continues my attempts to learn the new Topaz Studio software.  They've replaced my favourite individual plug-ins with an integrated 'studio' and it seems to have lost most of the functionality I'd used.   These are gym balls at the Y, turned to abstracts.

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March 25 - The Song is Ending

CBC interviewed REM band member Mike Mills on the weekend.  The hit End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) came out in 1987 and became a satiric and defiant anthem.  So 30 years on, it has come back into the social consciousness and is being played again. What did I find most compelling in the interview?  He and Michael Stipe wrote the music first, then gave it to Peter Buck to write the lyrics, and this is what he came up with. They had no idea this music was going to say this much.   So while this song is about the 'ending', I started to wonder about how songs conclude.  What kind of endings are there? Some of the songs we were singing in the choir have a little 'hmm', 'ooh' or 'ahh' to signal the end, a sort of fade out.  And some come to a leaping big chord and just stop.  These are pretty fun to sing.  We're singing a sort of Celtic orientation/religious/inspirational set of songs. What comes to my mind on the thumping last chord songs? Oscar Peterson and his big endings.  I found this description of his version of West Side Story's Tonight (1962): "Tonight swings mightily right from the downbeat. Peterson twists the melody and trades lines with bassist Ray Brown as drummer Ed Thigpen lightly stabs and jostles the duo with his sympathetic brush work. And then there’s the big pay-off — chorus after chorus of burning swing, round after round of exuberantly shouted choruses, and finally, a stop-time ending." What are the most famous and enduring song endings? In our time, it is an easy answer: the Beatles ending for A Day in the Life.  "Following the second crescendo, the song ends with a sustained chord, played on several keyboards, that rings for over forty seconds. " This ending is considered to have made history and is the  #1  popular song endings.  For classical songs, the #1 ending is Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3 – IV. I haven't looked at the most interesting song ending lyrics, or the songs with long endings.  There likely are more variants on endings - that's for another day.  We likely have lots ahead. Yesterday's weather was too cold for me to garden, so I created spring with some spring flower photo processing.

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Mar 7 2020 - How Many Songs?

How many songs are published?   Answering how many books in the world is easy - pops up right away - around 130,000,000 books, although that's an estimate. Books have always been at the centre of our intellectual universe. Songs, it turns out,  are in many libraries - streaming service libraries. For example, Gracenote is a company that stores and organizes songs.  It says it has 2,451 genres, 438 style descriptors, 480 languages.  It has a database of approximately 100 million tracks.  But it isn't the biggest - there is Discogs and their database is 151,200,000 tracks.  There are 40,000 tracks per day added to Spotify. Here are the streaming music service library sizes are: Apple - 45 million tracks Spotify - 35 million tracks Amazon Prime Music - 16 million tracks Google Play - 40 million tracks Pandora - 30 million tracks Tidal - 50 million tracks We could go to the Choral Public Domain Library, founded in 1998.  It is focused on choral and vocal music in the public domain.  There are 34,152 scores by more than 3,419 composers. Sometimes Quora has the answer.  It has interesting answers that show creative perspectives, but it has silly posts too.  I guess these guys are having fun and making money.  So who should complain?  Here are some of their posts: Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth is 70.5 which means you will have 25,732.5 (70.5 × 365 ) days to enjoy your songs, which means you will have 617,580 (25,732.5 × 24) hours to enjoy all your songs, which means you will have 37,054,800 (617,580 × 60) minutes to enjoy your songs. assuming a song to be average of 4 minutes totally, you will have the exact time to hear 92,63,700 songs in your lifetime. so friend i cannot say exactly how many songs are there in this world but what seems more relevant question is to how many songs can you hear in your lifetime. I can't say the exact digits. But Lets think like this. There is roughly 7,000,000,000 people in Earth. (just googled). So lets think 5% are musicians (assumption). Then the answer is 350,000,000. Now lets assume they have release an avg of 250 songs. Then it would be 87,500,000,000 songs. Could be more and I only considered the recent time period. According to what I was able to research, as of 1/5/2011 there have been 623,162,727 songs written with a new song being written every two minutes. So plus that number every 2 minutes that passes by... We move to Daylight Savings at 3:00am on March 8th, so we're celebrating spring with some tulips today.

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Enery The VIII

What inspired Herman's Hermits in the 1960's to sing "I am Henry the VIII, I am" on the Ed Sullivan Show? This is a 1910 British music hall song. There is an original recording of the music hall star Harry Champion singing it in 1911.  It is a delightful celebration of the British character - history, satire, and fun combined.  What inspired them was the pop hit that British star Joe Brown had in 1961.  They followed in 1965.  The song got Herman's Hermits to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.  Who did they knock from number one?  "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones.   Isn't that a telling statement of the diversity of popular music in the 1960's. There are numerous versions of the spelling - Henery, Henry, Enery, etc. and there are more verses than this.  Herman's Hermits are known for the one verse version. 'm 'Enery the Eighth, I am, 'Enery the Eighth I am, I am! I got married to the widow next door, She's been married seven times before And every one was an 'Enery She wouldn't have a Willie nor a Sam I'm her eighth old man named 'Enery 'Enery the Eighth, I am! The British music hall performers produced thousands of songs.  Between 1900 and 1910 a single publishing company, Francis, Day and Hunter, published between forty and fifty British music hall songs each month. Most of them were comic in nature - the notables are at Wikipedia HERE. I remember that the tradition was taken up by the Goon Show with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe developing titles such as "I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas" "Tales of Men's Shirts" and on on. So our picture today is a good distraction.  There's nothing like a bit of Lilycrest Garden's lily images on a snow day. The snow came to Grimsby in the evening yesterday. It 'skirted' around us during the day and bestowed a snowfall record on Toronto.  It closed down Toronto and surrounding areas. The weather network this morning says that the overachieving snowfall is not giving up just yet.

There's a Yes In There

The song "Here's to Life" is written by Phyllis Molinary and became Shirley Horn's signature song.  JazzFM plays it regularly, and the station played it as a dedication to Jack Layton when he died.  In it are the lyrics "there's no yes in yesterday". There are many words with yes in them, but finding the yes in there seems illusive to me compared to these lyrics.   As a scrabble player, you are visualizing the words and not pronouncing them. So finding all the yeses would be much easier.  Scrabble sites that let us know all of the yeses to be found.  And interestingly, so many of them contain 'eyes' as in pinkeyes and shuteyes and frogeyes.    So we're back to the famous music composed by Johnny Mandel, released in 1992, with Winton Marsalis as the trumpet soloist.   Here is the verse: There is no yes in yesterday And who knows what tomorrow brings or takes away As long as I'm still in the game I want to play For last, for life, for love