Sweet Dreams
Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2004 @ 10:07 am
Filed Under Macalester College, Musick
My first encounter with a stereo headset was in high school; my friend (and choir seatmate) Vik Berstis insisted that there was something magical about the device, and forced me to listen to--well, I really don't remember what. But I did agree about the magic.
For a long time, the "most magical" headset recording I knew was the Robert Shaw Chorale's recording of the Bach B-Minor Mass, a rendition I first encountered in a college Music Appreciation class (it's actual name was Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinsky--but that's probably another day's tale). One evening's listening assignment included the last few movements of the Mass--Sanctus, and the several Osanna movements--and the only word was heavenly. The Dona Nobis at the end, in particular, builds from every side to a glorious climax of chorus and trumpets and kettle drums. Every time I hear the music it takes me back to a little room in the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center....
This little reminiscence courtesy of my Mac, which doubles as a music box. Every night I feed a few CDs to the machine, then (circumstances permitting) I don a headset at work the next day and listen mostly to randomly-ordered "new" musicks. So far I've stored about 5,000 "songs" in iTunes, and it looks like I'll reach 6K before I run out of compact disks.
One of last night's imports was the Eurythmic's Sweet Dreams album, and the title song came up a few minutes ago. There's really nothing like it; this song was clearly engineered in a headset. I'm not much of an Annie Lennox fan, but I really like this one song. Hard to believe, though, that I've been listening to it for twenty-some years.
Last changed 10/22/07 @ 8:46 pm
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