"The hills are alive with the sound of music..."Ahhh, the "Sound of Music." What does this familiar title conjure up in your mind, in your memory?War? Naziism? Many forget that the Academy Award Winning film was based on the famous von Trapp Family Singers' If you were born in the 1950s or 60s, likely it's the youthful exuberance of an adorable young actress by the name of Julie Andrews that springs to mind. You may not recall the war theme at all. In either case, no doubt it's the music in the Sound of Music that you remember most...and sing to yourself to this day. What kid born after 1960 didn't partly learn the diatonic scale (a staple of Western Civilization for Pete's sake!) from the infectious "Do-Re-Mi"? Doe, a deer, a female deer, Ray, a drop of golden sun Admit it, you remember every word! Did you know that the Broadway stage version of the musical (which was adapted for the screen) was the last collaboration between show-tune legends, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein? Did you know that another enormously popular song from the same movie, "My Favorite Things," has been recorded hundreds of times by such diverse performers as jazz great John Coltrane (who made it a jazz standard), 70s vanilla pop stars The Carpenters, and alternative rock diva, Tori Amos? Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Every facet of our culture is linked, in some way or other, by Events in Music. Remember the 80s cult smash "rock-theatrical" The Rocky Horror Picture Show? You may recall that it led, among other things, to the launching into stardom of pop-rock enigma and mega-selling singer Meat Loaf. But do you know that The Sound of Music, like Rocky Horror, featured a full-on interactive, audience-participation (complete with costumes and props!) cinema version? Really? Rocky Horror and the Sound of Music? Amazing. And how many stupendous feats and miraculous recoveries have been accompanied by the glorious and uplifting, "Climb Every Mountain"? Thousands and thousands, the world over. It's a universal theme.
Climb Every Mountain Climb every mountain, search high and low A dream that will need Climb every mountain, ford every stream What searcher doesn't connect with those words? Yes, we are all connected through music events. And that's what this website is all about...connecting those dots...in hopes of helping us all better understand who we are, where we come from, where we're going, and celebrating the fact that, after all, we still have a lot to sing about! "The von Trapps have never directly profited from the film or Broadway musical: Maria, whose husband died in 1947, sold the rights to the family story to a German film company in the mid-1950s for just $9,000. Johannes and now his son run the [Vermont] cross-country skiing lodge that trades on the family’s fame with Austrian food, waitresses wearing dirndls and pictures of the family, but not a single poster from the movie." —NYTimes.com Update 3.19.11: The Sound of Music is artfully revisited by the Brooklyn Rundfunk Orkestrata. Check it out...very cool! |
escape from the encroaching Adolf Hitler in Austria in 1938.
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