… as a specimen of beautiful music.
I’d love to know what single track does this for you. What piece of music changes your emotional gear onto plane that no other piece of music manages to?
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Sorry Czarcasm. Thanks for moving it. One tends to put a thread in the place one thinks it will have it’s biggest effect and I happened to think that was IMHO in this case but if you think people will willingly submit their examples of music that singly stand above the rest in cafe society moreso than in IMHO then I am behind this move.
Brahms’ String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major really pulls my strings. Apparently I’m not the only person to feel the emotional power of this piece. Star Trek: The Next Generation used a snippet of it in an episode that involved Spock’s father, Sarek. The usually impassive Vulcan was moved to tears by a performance of Brahmns’ String Sextet No. 1. Oddly, the episode ascribed the music to Mozart.
What gear are we talking about? I’d say The Sicillienne by Gabriele Faure would answer the OP, but I also have a weakness for the dog-bark Jingle Bells.
Lobsang, I came into this thread specifically because The Lark Ascending is a favorite piece of mine – especially in springtime. I thought it was fairly obscure!
I also like an Irish song “She Moved Thru the Fair.” Someone here helped me to identify it from a movie.
Edith Piaf singing La Vie en Rose does it for me. The first few notes in the clip had me in tears, I guess that’s a gear change.
I don’t know if it’s because the song is inherently sad or because I associate it with World War II.
Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium is one of those pieces that I just have to drop whatever I’m doing and listen to when it comes on the radio.
p.s. The Lark Ascending ain’t too shabby either.
Dead Can Dance’s version of the Saltarello can lift me up and make me whole, anytime.
The Smiths’ Oscillate Wildly, also, in a completely different way.
“Miracles,” by Pet Shop Boys. If there’s a more glorious instrumental part in a pop song, I’m unaware of it.
It’s a Christmas thing, but it brings quiet to me even now: Videntes Stellam by Francis Poulenc. It’s so hauntingly beautiful…I cannot begin to describe it.
Ralph Vaughn Williams wrote “The Lark Ascending” and he also wrote “Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis” - this piece is quite amazing: it seems old, it seems modern; it is cold and astringent, it is warm and romantic.
There is nothing else like it.
Peter Stampfel’s “Griselda,” from the 1975 album Have Moicy. The greatest album ever recorded.
Okay, for PRETTY tunes, Mahler’s “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” from the song-cycle Das Knaben Wunderhorn. The theme is also the basis for the Scherzo movement (In ruhig fliesender Bewegung) of the Second Symphony – this instrumental version features some of ol’ Gustav’s most brilliant orchestration ever, and NOBODY could rock a full-bore fin-de-siecle Late Romantic orchestra like ol’ Gustav.
Barber’s *Adagio *and the 2nd movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2.