My sister in law told my wife the other day that she heard that Lady Gaga was going to become a minister so she could perform same-sex marriages. A little googling later and it turns out that this rumor does appear to have some validity to it. We do not have cable or satellite TV pumped into our house so we tend to miss these important pieces of news that involve celebrities. Our family’s knowledge of Lady Gaga is limited to the Glee cast covering a few of her songs and watching (without the kids present) a video or two of hers on YouTube (freaky stuff, in case you didn’t know). Her tunes are catchy enough, you just can’t get the images of the videos out of your head. Some things, once seen, cannot be un-seen.
Last night while waiting for the weekend to end, I was looking at one of my favorite websites, Woot!. If you have never heard of Woot! then may I suggest you NOT click on the links that I have provided (don’t say I didn’t warn you when you become addicted to this site). Specifically, I was looking at the Deals section of Woot! where there are a few, daily posted deals and then the Woot! community can post other deals they have found, make comments on other’s posted deals, etc. This is sort of like a bulletin board for good deals. Anyway, I saw a link where the Amazon mp3 store had “The 99 Darkest Pieces of Classical Music” on sale for $1.99. This is 99 pieces of music totaling around 11 hours in play time. I recognized a few of the titles (the wife has brought some appreciation of classical music to our marriage for which I am grateful) and I thought that $2 was not too bad of a deal. Given my slow internet speed, it took several hours to download the entire collection but by this morning I had thrown all the songs in a playlist on our home theater PC and we were enjoying these “dark” pieces.
One of the songs early in the playlist (track 4 to be precise) is “The Valkyrie: Ride of the Valkyries” which was composed by Richard Wagner in 1851. It is a very famous piece and even the 8 year old recognized it immediately (by sound, not by title). The wife knew the title but did not know the composer so it was off to Wikipedia for more information. I have noted in past blogs that I could lose hours on Wikipedia if not careful so I limited myself to the entry about this piece of music and the entry about Wagner himself. Fascinating stuff really. You can read the article (go ahead, I won’t mind) but the things that stood out to me were…
- While written in 1851, the piece was not performed until 1870 and even then it was against Wagner’s wishes
- Wagner spent 12 years in exile for his part in politics, namely being a supporter of socialist / leftist movements
- Wagner's published a notable essay: "The Art-Work of the Future" (1849), in which he described a vision of opera as a “total work of art", in which the various arts such as music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts, and stagecraft were unified
- In his lifetime, Wagner inspired fanatical devotion. For a long period, many composers were inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner's music.
So Wagner was a popular musician (Gaga) that threw himself into the political issues of the day (Gaga) and who envisioned entertainment as a combination of song, dance, visual arts and stagecraft (Gaga). I think we as Americans tend to brush off celebrities and their foray into politics as funny or cute but this is no new thing it seems. I could probably take more time than this to research the history of musicians and politics but I am just too lazy for that, besides I have 11 hours of music to listen to.
Oh, one more thing. I found a coupon code in the comments section of the Woot! deals site that, if used before 1 Nov, gave a $3 credit toward the Amazon mp3 store. Since the 99 songs only cost $1.99 that left me with $1.01 left which I used to purchase one single song by (you guessed it) Lady Gaga.
Jon
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