Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I was looking for a relatively light movie that my husband Charles and I could watch to get our minds off the dreadful political news surrounding the 2022 midterm elections and preferably one with a Hallowe’en theme. I found it in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the 1975 film of Richard O’Brien’s musical The Rocky Horror Show, a Queer-themed spoof of Frankenstein that premiered in London in 1973 and then played Broadway before 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights. They assigned it to director Jim Sharman and told him to recruit a cast of major American rock-music stars for the roles, but Sharman insisted that at least for the (more or less) British principals he wanted to use the players from the British stage version: Tim Curry as mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter (well, it’s a better name for a Frankenstein spoof than “Frankenweenie”!, Richard O’Brien himself as his servant Riff Raff (who a...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a quite interesting YouTube video from a man named Elam Rotem who runs a Web site called Early Music Sources. He sounds hike one of those guys I usually can’t stand – one of those “historically informed performance” fanatics who insist on doing research to go back to the way pre-Romantic music was presumably played when it was written by making mountains out of historical molehills – but this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFPW9ENtNKA , proved unexpectedly interesting because its subject was historical recordings. Beginning in the late 19th century and through the 20th,we had major composers actually making recordings of their own music, and he played a snippet of a brief piano recording by Edvard Grieg of one of his minor piano pieces, then compared it to a modern recording of the same piece. He also played a recording of the opening of...