I have always had a great enthusiasm for musical jokes.
(Which reminds me, I must brush up my Great Gig in the Sky/Imagine/Bohemian Rhapsody medley again. I leave identification of the points where I graft them together as an exercise for the reader, until I get around to making an MP3.)
If a musical joke involves a pipe organ, so much the better.
Herewith, therefore, I present you with the soundtrack of a swingin' cocktail party for all fifty million inhabitants of a Culture GSV!
Anyone with some experience of organ music will now, of course, know what the inevitable soundtrack will be, when unfortunate events later force the GSV to offload its population and convert most of its mass into engines and weapons...
19 June 2012 at 2:00 pm
That second video is fascinating--I've never seen one manual (that's a set of keys) slaved to another before.
I play a little organ (enough for basic four-part hymns, including the pedals). A couple months ago I was playing for a much-larger-than-normal congregation, and had the rare opportunity to pull out almost every stop and crank up the volume. THAT was fun. Those 32' stops put a grin on my face every time.
Speaking of musical jokes and organs being played out of their typical context, I humbly submit the following two:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_HdrywerGE
(seriously? who plays half the piece with just the pedals?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8EYtirfF4I
23 June 2012 at 5:05 am
I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Enoch Light before. Thanks for this!
23 June 2012 at 1:49 pm
To be honest, even my quite high tolerance for crazy lounge music is exceeded by a lot of Enoch Light's stuff. I bought an actual CD of Enoch Light and the Light Brigade that was so obscure that I couldn't even find an MP3 preview of it anywhere; then it turned out I couldn't stand even one track on it :-).
This YouTube search will find any of the eight Light tracks I've kept in my music library, if of course someone's uploaded them all.
23 June 2012 at 2:59 pm
Wow, that rendition of the Passacaglia & Fugue sounds completely different to the one I've got on CD... I'll have to acquire a copy of that one - it's much nicer than the version I have.
24 June 2012 at 10:02 am
My favourite version is the Peter Hurford one from this 2-CD set
, which is even a little more stentorian than this one.
I also like the rather gentle and lyrical version on this 10-CD set by good old Helmut, which if you like Bach organ music and don't already have a sizable collection is so cheap as to be a no-brainer purchase.
27 June 2012 at 4:18 am
Dude. Now I *really* want someone to make a Culture novel into a movie. Consider Phlebas, I think, for the mayhem. Though I really like the way he uses Skaffen-Amtiskaw to subvert the cute robots trope (in Use of Weapons). Not only is the thing bitchy and obnoxious, its human companion is still pissed at it for a bloody massacre, and it's clearly hoping for an excuse to commit another. Also, I think the Culture novels must set some kind of record for the largest number of non-gendered characters, which is kind of interesting.