The Fredösphere

There was five-year-old der Drübermensch in church this morning, waving a pencil around to the music.  He's conducting.  So do you think he'll be one someday?  An ambition I've never had, myself.  I've done it naturally, a few church choirs, some small vocal groups I've lead.  Once I was lucky enough to stand in front of 95 singers and a 10-piece brass choir and conduct Joseph Jongen's Mass, but I was never really captivated by the fantasy of making the music happen just by waving a stick around.  You think that's power?  Try being the guy who puts some black dots on the page, then watches everyone struggle mightily to interpret their meaning.  That's power.

Der Drübermensch got the idea that conducting is cool from all the high-brow, educational media he gets, right?  No, it comes from watching a certain Tom and Jerry episode compulsively.  I wonder, is that a rip-off of my beloved Baton Bunny?  T&J is from 1950, but BB is from 1959.  No, give T&J credit for doing it first.  Although Bugs has conducted orchestras in several episodes, including a couple of the most famous:  What's Opera Doc, Rabbit of Seville, and Long Haired Hare.  Hey, that last was in 1949.  And by Chuck Jones.  (Of course.)  But let's face it:  the real influence -- the 800 lb. dancing hippo of animated orchestras -- is Fantasia, from 1940.

So we watched Fantasia tonight, all of us:  me, the wifeösphere, der Drübermensch, and the maharincess (who is two and a half).  James Lileks already bleated (here and especially here) about Fantasia months ago.  A blogger with even half a brain would not attempt to add anything.

I am not that blogger.

Lileks mentioned the middle-brow earnestness, and it really comes out in the worshipful attitude to classical music.  We call this third type of music:  absolute music.  Oh dear.  It must always be performed with every muscle of the head and neck at maximum constriction.  In some ways Stokowski is one of the worst offenders.  He's one of the masters of the Count Dracula school of conducting.  But give him credit for doing the movie and losing some of his snob appeal.  He shook Mickey Mouse's hand, and he didn't even wipe it off afterwards.

During the dullest segment, the Bach D-minor T&F, my son asked, "is this real music?"  It don't get any realer, kid.  "What are those squiggles on the screen?"  Good question.  Later:  "Were the flowers trying to fall down the waterfall?  They didn't think they would die, but would they?"  Sorry, I'm not an expert on the physics, let alone metaphysics, of the world we're observing.  "Are faeries real?"  Ah, an easy one:  no.

Finally, the monologue was not written up to modern standards.  It bogged down in information we really don't need.  Some scholars have noted the twelfth measure of the final theme of Beethoven's 9th Symphony spells out the letters D-E-A-F, which is remarkable because the composer was deaf when he wrote it.  Others discount this as a coincidence and point out that his native language was German.  However, the German word for deaf is taub.  No notes are represented by the letters t and u, so this proves that....  Shut up and play yer orchestra!