yhlee wanted to know my favourite German song. Well, I had to divide the answer(s) by genre, and even then I had a hard time narrowing them down. However, here are the results:

( Selena's Favourite German Songs are... )


The other days

Gentle and not so gentle readers, you may recall my post about Fanny Mendelssohn (Hensel). Over 200 Fanny Hensel (Mendelssohn) compositions are now open to the public thanks to Hensel Songs Online and editor Tim Parker-Langston. Check out this link!

yhlee asked me this. Well, you know, there's an eas(ier) answer for this, since I'm a Beatles fan. And several of the Beatles' albums were, among other things, movie soundtracks. Of these, pace Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour fans, I certainly would list A Hard Day's Night, Help and Let It Be among my favourite scores of all time. Hard to impossible to choose between these three, as it very much depends on what I'm in the mood for. Note that none of this is about the quality of the respective movies - general consensus, which I don't disagree with, is that A Hard Day's Night is best on the movie front - but Help has the title track, Norwegian Wood, If I Fell, and oh, yeah, good old Scrambled Eggs, aka Yesterday, and Let It Be, even in the Phil Spector'd version, has again the title track, Don't let me down, Get Back.... Nah, can't choose.

Excluding the Beatles, but still in the 1960s, there's the score for The Graduate, which has Simon & Garfunkle on top of their game, with Mrs. Robinson and Sound of Silence as the two standouts, but I can't say I remember much of the orchestral music, so it doesn't really count.

Let's go back in time: among the many aspects that are truly great about Citizen Kane even after decades of cultural hype and backlash is most definitely the soundtrack, which put good old (back then, young) Bernard Herrman on the musical landscape. Like most of the people involved in creating Citizen Kane, he'd worked with Orson Welles on the radio before, including arranging the music for the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, and composing it for various other Welles/Mercury Theatre radio productions, like Rebecca, and it shows in the best way. Citizen Kane was in fact his first movie soundtrack, and he pulled it off in great style, and in a great variation of styles, from the forbidding opening "Xanadu" theme to the engaging "Kane takes over the Inquirer" sequence (here it's conducted by none other than John Williams in a concert performance) to composing a bona fide Meyerbeer style opera aria for Susan to sing (or rather, fail at singing), which afterwards was and is still performed in concert by many a soprano; here is Kiri Te Kanawa doing the honors. As this is also a score where I love both the music and the movie, it definitely heads my list of non Beatles favourite movie scores.

Now upping the stakes to "score with not one sung word" - which excludes Kane because of not just the aria but also the "Who's the man?" song from the party scene - I have to move forward in time again, to all the Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone collaborations. While the soundtrack for Once upon a time in the West probably objectively speaking is better, my own favourite among these is the one for Once upon a time in America. I'm only so-so about the movie itself, but I bought the vinyl of the soundtrack back in the day, and the cd was one of the very first cds I bought. So definitely this one, in that category. To this day, when I hear the pan flutes I get wistful and sad.

Moving on to tv: I still think overall Buffy the Vampire Slayer offered a superb mixture of original instrumental music by Christophe Beck and well selected songs by various artists to go with its episodes, even if you exclude the musical episode (which even many a year and competition later is still my favourite musical episode of a tv show). Beck's masterpiece was probably the score for Hush, aka the "silent movie" episode, but seriously, it's hard to single out one particular episode beyond that because the soundtrack was consistently good from start to finish, and it's definitely my favourite for tv.

The other days

Since looking at the headlines, both national and international, as usual makes me headdesk a lot, and I imagine this to be true for others, have another round of cheering-up service by music:

"For Good" , sung by 20 different Elphabas and Glindas, from the musical Wicked:



And Mamma Mia:

Because I'm not all doom and gloom, not I. :)



Spot and Data centric TNG comic: I think if I try really hard, I can still recite a few lines from Data's "Ode to Spot". Anyway, this is a delightful treat for cat lovers and TNG fans alike.

Peter Capaldi reads "The Magic Wood" by Henry Treece. Put up by the BBC, which means it won't be there endlessly, so check it out now and enjoy.

Twentytwo Movie Musicals in 12 Minutes, starring Emily Blunt, James Corden and Lin-Manuel Miranda:

Before the meme, a fic rec.

Sarah Connor Chronicles (which everyone should watch, do you hear me, Fox?!?):

Seven Sunday Mother-Daughter Mornings: Savannah and Catherine Weaver, and it's absolutely fantastic, plausible, chilling and touching alike, just like that storyline on the show.

Now, on to the music.

fannish5Name the 5 most memorable tv/movie soundtracks.

Personal choice of the moment, keeps changing in places, etc.

1) Maurice Jarre: Lawrence of Arabia. And not just because he died last week. It's impossible to think of the desert, as immortalized by David Lean, and not to hear that music in one's mind.

2) Nino Rota: The Godfather. Whether it's the main title's solo trumpet (making it one of the most instantly recognizable themes) or the waltz later, the Sicilian Pastorale or the operatic baptism/executions sequence, Rota proves that hiring him was one of Coppola's smartest decisions.

3) Christoph Franke: Babylon 5. A different variation of the main title for the credit sequence in each of the five seasons (my personal favourite is the one for the third season, though sometimes I prefer the elegic fifth season sequence) is the least of Franke's accomplishments. The B5 soundtrack was a quintessential element of the show - which is why watching the pilot in its original form, when Franke wasn't hired yet, is so weird - , and the score for the show finale, Sleeping in Light, is one of the few that makes me cry on cue whenever I hear it.

4) Christopher Beck: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show used its share of already existing songs, sure, and, um, I hear there was a musical at some point by some Whedon guy, but Beck's original themes were crucial, too. Two of my favourite all time episodes - Hush and Restless - being two great cases in point. I was glad he came back for the finale, but to me Restless was the apotheosis of his composing for Buffy. (But then I'm prejudiced in favourite of that episode anyway.)

5) Bear McCreary: Battlestar Galactica. I think the one single thing all viewers agreed on till the very end was that McCreary's scores were gorgeous. I remember the opening sequence of the s1 finale and then the closing sequence, with the opera house theme, watching them for the first time and thinking "this was an awesome episode, but damn, where can I get that music? And McCreary remained that good, assigning themes to characters, battles and visions alike, and *whispers heretically* improving on Bob Dylan.