Audio

An evening at the pops

By Kevin Steel ⋅ February 24, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

One of my favourite vinyl records within my reach when I was little–besides the one I mention here–was a Living Stereo recording of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops playing Rossini’s Overture to William Tell on one side, and Tchaikovsky’s Slavonic March on the other (here’s a CD reissue). As children of the time, my siblings and I instantly recognized in the fourth section of the Rossini the theme music for the TV show The Lone Ranger. But it was from that record that my father taught us to appreciate and anticipate with equal excitement the second section, The Storm, and the swiftly moving dark clouds heard in the lower brass. I can recall with great clarity dad holding in his hands an imaginary trombone, pumping the slide and saying, “ta ta ta ta taaa” as the music exploded and the maelstrom blew through our little heads.

I have always liked the idea of the pops orchestra… oh who am I kidding, I went through an elitist phase where I abhorred all “vulgarizations” in art; that was before it dawned on me that it’s a big ol’ world with lots of room for many different things. In the language of music, the symphony orchestra is the prescriptivist element, and the pops the descriptivist. (And experimental modernist symphonic music–you know, where the pianist suddenly stands up and sticks his head under the lid of the grand to start plucking the strings, or stuff by John Cage–is the Esperanto. For an optimistic explanation of Esperanto check out this Wikipedia entry; “Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television….” Okay, whatever, it’s a big ol’ world).

But back to the pops. If I were picking the program for an evening of pops music, I would open with the main theme of the 1974 BBC series World at War by Carl Davis and continue with a few more selections from that show. Next would be selections from the Sherlock Holmes TV Soundtrack by Patrick Gowers. After intermission, a choir would join the orchestra on stage and the second half of the evening would be devoted to Ennio Morricone, starting with Once Upon a Time in the West and finishing with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Then I would book a bus and take the show on a tour to cash in on boomer nostalgia.