Respighi Would Have Dug It

Worth checking out just for the arrangement of the Pines. The recording was quashed in 1975 when Hawthorne was ejected from the field after they were protested successfully for having overaged members. Some of the guys in the drum line looked like they were in their 30s but no one could remember a competitive protest that put out a national championship contender.

It’s interesting mostly because the 1975 records didn’t carry Hawthorne’s performances and by any measure they could have won and there are a lot of people who’d like to know how this recording finally made it out after 37 years. I met and spoke with Hawthorne’s horn arranger about another project years ago and traded stories but Larry never spoke about that year, which was one of the Hawthorne’s last. Sad, but it’s nice to finally hear this performance.

18 Comments

@FlyingChainSaw: So glad you’re posting again. All snark aside, I’ve sincerely missed you.

@SanFranLefty: Missed you, too. The last few months at work and stuff have taken their toll on everything. Trying to claw back some of my life.

@nojo: Yes, it works. I got a Video Not Available notice on a black screen and thought for a second, oh, no, I find the great lost recording and the hateful thugs at DCI have pressed a take down order on YouTube. Franklin Field had reasonably neutral acoustics so the recordings were relatively easy to competently master.

Ah, I think it was my junior year that our band played Pines of the Appian Way for commencement. It was so much fun to perform, even in our no-doubt-amateur high school manner and even though I played clarinet, which meant that my entire part consisted of a near-constant trill. Anyone who can listen to that piece and not get major chills up their spine has no soul and also is probably dead (so basically Cheney).

I’d like to take a second to whine and complain about the total lack of skullfucking and necrophilliac bestiality in this post. At long last, have you no shame sir? HAVE YOU NO SHAME?

Awesome arrangement. I hear some surf music chord progressions in there.

@flippin eck: I’ve got a recording of the Chicago Symphony playing it, RCA Red Label, maybe, in perfect condition. On the big Technics it is terrifying. Tympani goes straight through you. Hawthorne’s arrangement is a nice reduction of the original but the field bugles make the sound. This being 1975, the line was still on straight field bugles with one horizontal valve and rotary, a real kludge but the bore and taper on them was built for field work, allowing a dozen guys (e.g. angry, possessed, savage blood in the eye types, etc.) to pound a stadium with sound and 50 to damage the concrete. Rhespighi’s literature worked well in the genre with that epoch’s instrumentation.

@Dodgerblue: Larry is deft. Berklee composition grad from the old days when it was a jazz school.

I don’t know what this is. Forgive me.

On the other hand there is this velvet rendering of Arunjez as performed by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band fronted by a bunch of actors trying to look like people.

In Britain, back when the unions tried to make the world new it was not uncommon for working men to aspire to a higher thing that wasn’t the washing drying overhead on stretchers in the kitchen. So they formed brass bands and taught themselves how to play. Thatcherism came in to destroy their lives. Here is an elegy for the working class. The story happens as Thatcher’s government sends out its thugs to shut down the pits and condemn the men to a life on the dole.

It’s a nice movie and it does honor to the generations of men who were thrown out of work so Thatcher could have the biggest dick.

I think that’s a fluegelhorn. I know it’s her embrasure.

@Benedick: I hope they regularly check the coffin to confirm she’s still in it.

@¡Andrew!: The stake through the heart should have done it.

@Benedick: Is that not Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey in the band?

@¡Andrew!: not too shabby, I guess. Things are kinda straight around here lately so I wanted to inject a little mauve.

@Benedick: Lie on your back and look up at me. Ring any bells?

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