The above question is the exact response that occurs every single time I explain to someone that I am a music major (and an English major too, but the focus here is music). I mean, after all, we just sit around and play instruments all day, don't we? LIES! As music majors we actually take entire classes on the history of music and the rules of writing music (SEVENTHS RESOLVE DOWN!), and THEN we spent the rest of our lives playing our instruments or singing.
But in order to really understand the music that we're performing, we end up listening to a lot of music too. I talk about music all the time around here, and how my genres range all over the place, from Pearl Jam to Disney music to Classical composers, but every once and a while they overlap in really weird and impressive ways. A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Illuminations 98B and Jupiter, specifically how I've actually played that music, and in the past, my wind ensemble has performed many of the songs that are played throughout the parks.
Today I wasn't performing though. I was just listening. In our theory class, around once a week (although I do believe this week we have two!) we have what we call a "Musicians Moot," where we examine a particular composer or work, just listening, following along with the score or sometimes picking out specific characteristics of a piece. Our latest piece: Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I promise you know this work, even if you don't know the whole thing, although for our purposes I want to take a look at the final movement: Rondo.
Now, the Disney park. If you skip ahead in the following video track to 3:06, just take a listen for a few seconds.
Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? Turns out, the arranger of the Festival of Fantasy track used Mozart's Nachtmusik as inspiration for the parade we all love so much! We talk a lot about how Classical music is often made up of short, catchy tunes that get stuck in your head, and Festival of Fantasy proves that fact right out! I'm pretty sure we all walk away from the parade with the music stuck in our head...at least until we head on Haunted Mansion or Pirates and get a completely different song stuck in our heads.
It's sort of funny though because during theory class this morning I just could no for the life of me figure out why this song sounded so familiar. I knew it had something to do with Disney, because you just KNOW when it is, but I couldn't find directly where it came from. Then, a few minutes later, right before French class I was sitting, humming the tune and suddenly the lyrics from Festival of Fantasy popped into my head and the mystery was no more! Ironically enough, it took me longer to find the spot in Festival of Fantasy where the theme comes in than it took me to realize where I knew it from. The theme does come back multiple times throughout the rest of the parade though!
And there it is, your lesson on why Music Majors are important. Whoever put together the music for Festival of Fantasy was probably a music major somewhere once too, and you know what, now we all have Mozart stuck in our heads.
Have a magical day!
No comments:
Post a Comment