"La Mer", by Claude Debussy

Watch this video of a performance of La Mer by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev, recorded in March, 2007



Compare that version to this one, recorded 29 December 1941, on a Columbia 78rpm Set MM 531 (XCO 32293-32298) by the Cleveland Orchestra, Artur Rodzinski, conductor. This recording is available at The Internet Archive, under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0


Now, listen (and download if you'd like,) to Fred Child, host of American Public Media's Performance Today, and Ted Libbey, author of the NPR Guide to Building a Classical Music Library, discuss, "Debussy's most concentrated and brilliant orchestral work, La Mer," what they deem as, "one of the supreme achievements in the symphonic literature."


This is an animation created by Ali Habashi set to 'Dialogue du vent et de la mer'
(Dialogue of the wind and the sea) from "La Mer" by Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Thomas M. Sleeper, conductor, University of Miami Symphony Orchestra. It's from the Internet Archive. The film is courtesy of the Edward H Arnold Center for Confluent Media Studies at the University of Miami


If you'd like to compare Debussy with the real thing, listen to the sounds from this video (there is no video)

Tom Lehrer and the Elements

Watch and listen to Tom Lehrer's famous song about the elements (as known in 1959, when he wrote the song):




"Meet The Elements," is a new animated music video from They Might Be Giants. This animated, upbeat ode to the periodic table of elements and how they form our world, appears on the new TMBG kids' album "Here Comes Science." Video directed by Feel Good Anyway.




Here are the words for the Tom Lehrer song (You can download a copy here)

The Elements
(© 1959, Lehrer Records.) 

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.
There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There's sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha'vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard.
www.privatehand.com

There are others!  If you want to find out when each element was first observed, and who described, click here to read a "Timeline of chemical elements discoveries"

Click here to listen to (and download as a QuickTime file)  The Elements, by Tom Lehrer

Wild Music

Curious about sounds? animals? Visit the web page, Wild Music, and investigate how animals make sounds,

create your own soundscapes,

play with vibrations and frequencies,

and learn how the natural world influences musicians.  (You can listen to soundscapes created by Philip Blackburn here.)

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra

The world's first collaborative online orchestra performed at Carnegie Hall on April 15, 2009. Selected by the YouTube community and several members of the world's most renowned orchestras, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is made up of over 96 professional and amateur musicians from 30+ countries and territories on six continents and represents 26 different instruments.



Program on the Act One video:
07:15 Johannes Brahms - Allegro giocoso from Symphony No.4 in E minor, Op. 98
17:15 Lou Harrison - Music from Canticle No. 3
27:45 Antonín Dvořák - Music from Serenade in D minor, Op. 44
32:45 Giovanni Gabrieli - Canzon Septimi toni No. 2
38:15 Johann Sebastian Bach - Sarabande from Suite No. 1 in G major, for Cello Solo, VWV 1007 (performed by Joshua Roman)
43:30 Heitor Villa-Lobos - Bachianas brasileiras No. 9
54:00 Richard Wagner - Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walkuere



Program for the Act Two video:
3:00 Sergei Rachmaninoff - Vase from Two Pieces for Pian, Six Hands (performed by Derek Wang, Charlie Liu, Anna Larsen)
07:45 Tan Dun - Internet Symphony Eroica
16:00 Sergei Prokofiev - Scherzo from Concerto No. 2 in G minor for Piano, Op. 16 (featuring Yuja Wang)
23:00 Claude Debussy - Nuages from Nocturnes
32:15 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Finale from Concerto No. 5 for violin in A major, K. 219 (featuring Gil Shaham)
48:00 John Cage - Aria with Renga (featuring Measha Brueggergosman)
57:15 Mason Bates - Preview of Warehouse Medicine from B-Sides
1:05:30 Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Finale from Symphony No. 4

"The Internet Symphony" Global Mash Up


A book was created with photographs from the event - you can see a preview of it at this web page.

JUNGLE BOOK - Year 5 & 6 Production

CLICK ON THE ABOVE TITLE FOR MORE INFORMATION