h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's all about the rhythm section today.

I could get into this, you know. I'm sitting in a chair, but my shoulders are marching already.

They don't have shit on the Field Marshal Montgomery pipe band though. That's music. It's awesome. The drummers can keep the time. This is...culture.

The idea seems to be if you bang your drum hard enough you don't have to keep time. I'm not an Orangeman, but I'm embarrassed on their behalf.

I've been to the Orange Day parade twice, in the mid 60s. For a kid of ten or eleven years old the politics were an unknown unknown; it was all about the spectacle, including the bonfires the night before, and people throwing the mace impossibly high and catching it every time

But I do have clear memories of seeing three letters painted on walls around Belfast, letters which meant nothing to me, at least for a few more years: IRA.

The whole thing about the marching can get very complicated. Because so many people see it as a bandwagon to jump on, or a tool to advance whatever their agenda is.
I'll take myself as an example. Nationality-wise, I'm Irish, part Scottish, mostly. Religion-wise, I'm probably more presbyterian, methodist, or quaker than catholic. Politically, I owe a lot to England: I believe in a democratic socialist-y thing which has some inspirational roots in England.

In terms of music, I love bagpipes. Accordions not so much. I adore Beethoven, and I like a bit of Verdi.

Yet for all that, and even though most of those influences are either Protestant or secular/atheist, the lads who are strutting today think I'm a catholic.

I'm also a pacifist.

I'm somewhat of a pacifist too, except when a bunch of flies are buzzing around me .

I like marches for the most part. There's "liberty Bell," which was the theme song for Monty Python. There's "Entrance of the Gladiators," which is often used in circuses. Every year on July 4th, the Boston Pops plays "Stars and Stripes forever." Almost every graduation I've ever been to has played the Elgar march which sometimes has the words "Land of hope and glory." Almost as popular is "Prince of Denmark" march, which you sometimes hear at Vatican functions. There's the march that sued to be the theme song for "Masterpiece Theater." I noticed the mention of Verdi, who wrote the grand march from "Aida," which has extensive choral parts when performed as part of the opera.

What's not to like about marcghes?

Ask anybody who's heard the 'Horst Wessel Lied'.

I'm not touching Horst Wessel with a mile-long barge pole today!

It is a good idea to be cautious with the Horst Wessel Lied.

Do those people actually sing 'The Old Orange Flute'?

Hey, I am one of "those people".

But try as he might,
And it made a great noise,
The flute would play only the Protestant Boys.

But the Ould Orange Flute is a world apart from the scary songs.

I meant the people who pound the drums.

If they had a drum parade in our town today, they would be murdered by all the people hereabouts who are having migraines due to the strange air pressure up here in the hills - storm coming.

I know what you mean - people shouldn't use music for hate.

"Ask anybody who's heard the 'Horst Wessel Lied'" [Dmitri]

Why would anybody need to? It's not as if they play it on the radio ten times a day. I expect that the "Internationale" doesn't get played much any more, either.

Oddly, I don't know the words to the 'Internationale'.

I do know the words to 'Horst Wessel', but then, I'm a historian, and I studied in Germany.

I know the words to the 'Partizanerlied', too, and the 'Moorsoldaten', so I guess it depends on where you are and who you hang out with as to what kinds of songs you hear.

Take your pick, there's a lot of versions of the Internationale
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BIvqbyku5g

Gack. Now I'm stuck on that tune.

Tis a good ear worm

I remember it from the Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton film "Reds." Oddly enough, it reminds of the Verdi Aida grand march.

This isn't entirely a joke, you know, or entirely hypothetical.

They *were* hanging up Nazi flags. And, to their credit, other loyalists got them taken down. Probably through force of arms, but whatever. It doesn't make it a nice place to work or live. Especially for a Jewish person.

Horst Wessel? Yep.

"Gott erhalte Franz Der Kaiser" went through some metamorphoses. At first it was written by Joseph Haydn in homage to Austria's Hapsburg leader, and became Austria's national anthem. Later, Germany coopted it and changed the words to "Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles." During the forties, those of outside the German world did not feel comforted when we heard it played. It is still Germany's national anthem, though the words may have been changed.

Austria, having had its national anthem coopted, needed to find a substitute. Mozart was the next best thing to Haydn*, but he wrote no music suitable for a national anthem. They got around this by taking a tune from his masonic cantata and adding national-anthemy words to it, making it the musical equivalent of a manticore or hippogryph.


* Many people might think that the reverse was true -- i.e., that Haydn was/is the next best thing to Mozart, but in some genres [his late masses] Haydn built the finest set of pieces since the Renaissance, and his late oratorios still pack the house when they are performed. No one of his era wrote a trumpet concerto that can compare with the one he wrote, and his one sinfonia concertate stands out in its genre. He's credited with bringing the symphony from its early days to a very high level, and he is known as the father of the string quartet for good reason. Not all of his vast output is inspired, but it's hard to find any that is not at least very good.

I kind of wish paulh would do that in his own journal. Not mine.

Sorry. I get carried away.