music meme

[pauraque_bk]

1. If you'd like to play along, reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. You then list at least five songs that start with that letter.
3. Then, as I'm doing here, you'll post the list to your journal with the instructions.

eponis gave me G, and I came up with four right away, but figuring out a fifth was hard. Turns out a lot of my favorite bands and composers have no G songs. What's with that?

"The Great Gig in the Sky," Pink Floyd
Absolutely transcendent.

"Gnossienne No. 3," Erik Satie
Most people are probably more familiar with the first of the Gnossienne series, which has been used in a lot of movies, but the third is my favorite. It's also fun to play, and I love his surrealist mood/tempo markings, which in this piece include "open your head", "bury the sound", and "very lost".

"Go To Sleep (Little Man Being Erased)," Radiohead
I don't know if this is my favorite song from the album, but I used to listen to the whole thing straight through on the train, so it's sort of all one thing to me.

"Gaspard de la Nuit (Ondine)," Maurice Ravel
I guess I could have picked the second part (Gibet) for extra G action, but I like this first movement better. Interesting thing, Ravel said he composed this because he wanted to write something almost unplayably difficult (kind of making fun of the trend of extremely technically demanding piano compositions at the time), but he was only a good, not great, pianist himself.

"Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves," Cher
Oh yes. Love the Cher.

Comments

[lemone.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun.

[pauraque]

You get B!

[thimble-kiss.livejournal.com]

I'd love to do this meme, if you'll give me a letter. :)

I really like the Satie. It feels very gentle and peaceful. This Ravel was too intricate for me. I hate to admit it, but I'm pretty 'easy listening' in my approach to classical music! If I knew more about it, I could probably appreciate a greater range of it. (I do love some of Ravel's other music.)

[pauraque]

"Gaspard" is definitely one of his less accessible works. Parts of it are very busy, and the whole thing feels somewhat abstract even though it is actually program music. The first and third parts are both about frightening mythical beasts. An Ondine is a sort of siren; the constant motion is supposed to suggest her being almost made of water, unable to be pinned down, like she's always in your peripheral vision. Scarbo represents a demon tormenting someone, which I always imagined as sort of a fiery imp (the polar opposite of the aquatic Ondine, I guess). Le Gibet is (as you would imagine) about a hanged man; the constantly repeated notes are tolling bells. It's all very dark, sort of relentlessly so, without the interludes of soft contemplativeness that you see in many of Ravel's compositions. It's definitely not something you'd just put on to listen in the background!

Anyway, your letter is N. :)

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I want a letter! And heh, I'd probably pick "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" too if I had G. That's one of my favorites.

[pauraque]

High five! You get C.

[sedesdraconis.livejournal.com]

I feel like I'm missing a constraint. List any 5 songs that start with the letter? Your 5 favorites starting with that letter? List them from memory?

[pauraque]

I suspect there was some drift as people re-wrote the instructions, and that the original intention was for it to be five songs that you love, or something close to that. This is the form it had when I started seeing it on my friends list, and everyone seems to assume that it means five favorites, though I guess now there's nothing preventing you from listing five songs you think are awful!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hannelore/]

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

[pauraque]

You get T (and "the" doesn't count)!