Monday, October 11

Art

What's That Tune?

It's Music for a Found Harmonium by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

It plays during the Basel section of the BBC's The Story of Maths, about the Bernoulli family.  I knew it, but couldn't place it, and it's been driving me mad for several minutes.

If you're not familiar with the piece, it's this:



(I think the producer of the series is a Penguin Cafe Orchestra fan; now that I've placed the Harmonium piece, I'm pretty sure their Perpetuum Mobile was in there too.)

Update: Just purchased Preludes, Airs & Yodels, their compilation album, on iTunes.  That cost me 98¢; the rest was covered by the gift card I got for participating in an Adobe survey last year.  Yeah, I haven't been buying much music of late.  That $30 iTunes gift card has lasted me through two years of random episodes of Name That Tune!

Though actually I have still to purchase In C.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:51 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1

Notice how the keyboard player is holding a certain pair of notes constantly with his left hand?

You could play that same piece using a bagpipe instead of the harmonium. The constant notes would be the bagpipe drone.

It even makes me wonder if it was originally a bagpipe piece.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, October 12 2010 03:09 AM (+rSRq)

2 I have one of their albums (actually on cassette, but let's call it an album, neh?), bought it from a bargain bin because of the group's name some 25 years ago... at the time, I hated it.  Now?  I appreciate them quite a bit more.

Pixy, could you shoot me an e-mail please?  Have a non-blog related question for you...

Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, October 12 2010 09:57 AM (2MleY)

3 As to the bagpipes idea: This was an original composition; the name is quite literal.  The guy who started the PCO found the harmonium in question sitting in a backstreet in Kyoto one day, took it to a friend's house, and composed the piece there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 12 2010 01:33 PM (PiXy!)

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