Classical Piece ID Needed

Cafe Society
1

This should be amusing, hang in there with me for a sec.

I need an ID on a very famous classical music piece. It’s a powerful, Wagner-like (it may be Wagner) piece. You hear it all the time on various TV commercials and movie trailers.

It does have lyrics, sung by a choir, but I don’t know what they are. The best I can describe it is this:

Da-da-da-da…Da-da-da-da…Da-da-daaaaa-da…DA-DA-DA-DA…DA-DA-DA-DA…DA-DA-DAAAAA!!

Got that?

Heh, I hope this is enough, because that is best way I can describe it with text.

Links to audio files would be very helpful as well.

Thanks

2

Amazingly enough, I think I know the song you mean… but I can’t remember the NAME!
Bear with me, it will come to me.

3

could it be ‘The Ride Of The Valkyries’?
(I still have the tune in my head, but I’m not sure if that’s the name of the song)

4

Best guess would be “O Fortuna,” from Carmina Burana.

5

No, I found ‘The Ride Of The Valkyries’ online and it’s not the song I had in my head…

6

That’s it, I’m sure, since it is unavoidable in commercials and movies. It can be heard here.

7

That’s the one I have in my head. Here is a crappy mid of it. you have to wait a bit for the tune in the OP to appear.

8

Ha, simlupost. And simul-midi file too!

9

Ah-ha! That’s it! O Fortuna!

I found a great quick sample of it here

Thanks guys!

Carl Orff is the composer?

10

You’ll find it under Orff in the classical music section.

IIRC the music is medevial and he sort of found it and dressed it up a bit.

11

The text is from medieval sources, but I’ve never heard that the music itself wasn’t original.

12

Thanks

Just out of curiosity, are there any royalties involved with that piece? If so, somebody is making some serious bank! That piece is played all over the place!

13

The music is public domain, so anyone can perform it or record it. However, if you use a recording, then you have to pay royalties to the musicians.

14

Oops. My mistake – the piece was composed in 1937, so it’s likely it’s still under copyright.

15

Royalties from copyrighted classical music are small enough to be negligible.

16

Hey, remember the opening scene of Jackass the Movie where they’re all riding in a giant shopping cart in slow motion?

17

I’ve sung in recordings of that piece on three occasions for various different advertising campaigns. Like most choristers, I don’t like it very much.

18

Carmina Burana (“Songs of Benediktbeuern”) is a modern musical setting of a collection of “student underground” poems from the Middle Ages. Written mostly in Latin and German, the poems are usually described as offering an earthier perspective of the times than most contemporary sources, the sort of things that student monks scribbled in the margins of their textbooks when they got fed up with writing commentaries on Augustine. It uses blatantly paganistic language to reflect on the joys and despairs of a hedonistic life.

The O Fortuna chorus, which begins and ends the musical setting, is a hymn to the (allegorical?) goddess Fortune, who alternately rewards and punishes her devotees. It is followed by sections that celebrate springtime, drinking, and courtship. In general, it’s not as dirty as high school Latin teachers like to tell their students. You want dirty? Try Orff’s follow-up piece, Catulli Carmina.

The text itself is public domain. I don’t know about translations, though. Maybe our doper lawyers will know: can you copyright a translation of public domain literature?

19

Fortuna was a Roman god - who also makes a popular appearance in Medieval music in the song Fortuna Desperata.

20

[snark]
I didn’t even have to open the thread and I already knew the answer. 9 times out of 10, when someone posts a thread here asking about a classical piece they heard on a TV commercial, it’s “O Fortuna” from Carmina. I’d bet that back when it was written, it wasn’t well-liked, but now it’s just become clichéd and overexposed. It’s a shame, because there’s so much good music in there.
[/snark]