July 10, 2008
Call me a dolt,
if you like, but I have this hankering to write that I’m voting for Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart’s mid-’80s performance of “People Get Ready” as one of the most beautiful of the so-called rock era. And while we’re on the subject of recorded beauty, I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m giving the nod to Brian Eno’s Discreet Music as the loveliest “composition” of the 20th century. You?
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Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart’s mid-’80s performance of “People Get Ready” as one of the most beautiful of the so-called rock era.
I love that song. Boy, I have not heard it in ages. As for your question, I am not sure I am ready to answer yet.
Perhaps my entry may be unorthodox as well, but my vote is for the composer Richard Einhorn’s album “Voices of Light”, which is usually paired with the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. It contains some of the loveliest movements and really carefully crafted sounds. Together with the film, it’s a very moving composition, particularly the song “Pater Noster”. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay it is that it sounds so intentional.
Song Cycle by Van Dyke Parks has been on my mind these many years, though.
Recorded beauty . . . yes, it’s out there. I will ponder, but the Van Dyke Parks oeuvre has a permanent spot in my pantheon.
(”He is not your run-of-the-mill garden variety Alabama country faire/Left on Silver Lake he keeps a small apartment top an Oriental food store there/ He returned from Alabama to see what he could see
Off the record . . . he is hungry, though he works hard in his Alabama country fair/I should think he’d fade away the way that Bohemians often bear the frigid air/He returned from Alabama to see what he could see”
One must hear, of course.)
[...] reference made by the representative of Corwood Industries to Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc [...]