Immigrant Day

On a more positive note, here is an inspiring little song, "Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Inc." from the musical Ragtime. The character singing is an immigrant named Baron Ashkenazy who starts a motion picture company -- it seems fitting with the recent visibility in the media about the push for granting citizenship to illegal immigrants in the U.S.

I love the B section in this song because of the sudden change in orchestration that adds the high descending piano sixteenth notes. It's such a shift in texture that it reminds me of a key change even though it's just moving from the tonic to the subdominant. After 8 measures, though, it does modulate up a half step. Like many of the pieces from Ahrens and Flaherty, this modulates a lot -- I count 5 times in just 2 and a half minutes.

Neil Diamond Requiem

My friend sdoic inspired me with her daily poem list to set up a daily song. Of course, it will probably be more like one every several days or worse depending on my schedule. I'll just leave songs up for a short time span after each post.

Sadly, I have to start out on a somber note with some songs I've listened to recently while remembering a guy I knew who died in a plane crash last week. Robert Samels (that's his photo to the right) was an amazing musician and all-around outstanding person who I miss and mourn even though I only knew him through the several weeks during which he conducted the choir I was in this semester. The music school set up a blog to help memorialize each student in the plane -- Robert's certainly elicited a bunch of comments.

I found a surprising number of songs about loss and stuck them in a playlist, so I'll choose one of these for the first song of the day. The most appropriate piece, of course, would be the "Pie Jesu" from Robert's own Requiem which was performed at his memorial service yesterday. But since I don't have a recording, we'll settle for something else. Lots of Dave Matthews Band songs seem appropriate, as do songs from Wildhorn's musical The Cival War or Bernstein's Mass, but perhaps the most fitting is a short song, "Done Too Soon", written by Neil Diamond who said he was inspired during a scary airplane flight to write a song about life ending too soon.

Written by Neil Diamond

Jesus Christ, Fanny Brice,
Wolfie Mozart and Humphrey Bogart and
Genghis Khan and
On to H. G. Wells.

Ho Chi Minh, Gunga Din
Henry Luce and John Wilkes Booth
And Alexanders
King and Graham Bell.

Ramar Krishna, Mama Whistler,
Patrice Lumumba and Russ Colombo,
Karl and Chico Marx,
Albert Camus.

E. A. Poe, Henri Rousseau,
Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman,
Alan Freed and
Buster Keaton too.

And each one there
Has one thing shared:
They have sweated beneath the same sun,
Looked up in wonder at the same moon,
And wept when it was all done
For bein' done too soon,
For bein' done too soon.

For bein' done