Showing results for "The War of the Worlds" in Music

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers - Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich - lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music.

On December 15, 1944, Maj. Alton Glenn Miller, commanding officer of the Army Air Force Band (Special), boarded a plane in England bound for France with Lt. Col. Norman Francis Baessell. Somewhere over the English Channel the plane vanished. No trace of the aircraft or its occupants has ever been found. To this day Miller, Baessell, and the pilot, John Robert Stuart Morgan, are classified as missing in action. Weaving together cultural and military history, Glenn Miller Declassified tells the story of the musical legend Miller and his military career.

When her father died, singer songwriter Roxanne de Bastion inherited a piano she knew had been in her family for over a hundred years. But it is only when she finds a cassette recording of her grandfather, Stephen, playing one of his compositions, the true and almost unbelievable history of the piano, this man and her family begins to unravel.

For more than thirty years Francesco Lotoro, an Italian pianist and composer, has been on an odyssey to recover music written by the inmates of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps and the gulags of Stalin's Soviet Union. Between 1933, the year of the opening of the Dachau Lager in Germany, to Stalin's death in 1953 when thousands of Soviet prisoners were released, Lotoro pieces together the human stories of survivors whose only salvation was their love of music.

With war clouds gathering and harassment increasing, the stars of Continental opera, many of whom are Jewish, face dark futures under the boot heel of the Nazis. What can two middle-aged British spinsters do about such matters? They can form a secret cabal right under Hitler’s nose and get to work saving lives. The sisters conspire to bring together worldwide opera aficionados and insiders in an international operation to rescue Jews in the opera from the horrific fate that everyone intuits is coming.

Companion audio to the Music & Performing Arts Library exhibit on music in World War 1 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (Spring 2023)Contributors: Kirsten Barker, Joseph Goldstein, Kathleen McGowanExhibit companion playlist (Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6BBQkZp60V9QH2RoxcKJdi Exhibit website: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dangerous Melodies vividly evokes a time when classical music stood at the center of American life, occupying a prominent place in the nation’s culture and politics. The work of renowned conductors, instrumentalists, and singers - and the activities of orchestras and opera companies - were intertwined with momentous international events: two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the Cold War.

At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the US State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism.

Remembering songs from the radio, from dance bands and music halls, from the popular films of the period, and from the ENSA tours that took British entertainers to the troops, this audiobook recaptures the spirit of the World War II years through the music and songs. It includes information about the legendary entertainers of the era, along with 23 full-length original recordings of the songs they made famous.

Rocking in the Free World explains how Americans came to believe they had learned the truth about rock 'n' roll, a truth shaped by the Cold War anxieties of the fifties, the countercultural revolutions (and counter-revolutions) of the sixties and seventies, and the end-of-history triumphalism of the eighties.

The Art of Word War is an in depth look into one of the world's fastest growing international art forms/sub cultures, "Battle Rap". Written, musically produced and narrated by legendary Battle Rapper and Artist Saleem "Serius Jones" Bligen, this colorful audio manuscript is an aural motion picture complete with scientific approaches to not only mastering the ability to weaponize words but also a master course on the rawest form of Hip Hop.

La Grande Guerre en Chansons. La guerre est une chose trop grave pour l’abandonner aux seuls militaires. Écoutons donc ces échos de la Grande Guerre que sont les chansons d’alors. Même dans la tourmente, le français chante (l’allemand aussi, mais nous nous limiterons à des documents français). Il chante à l’arrière, au front, partout : chansons patriotiques (La Madelon & Co), chansons mélodramatiques (ceux qui partent, ceux qui restent, mères et enfants dans l’attente des nouvelles), etc.