Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night – Sunday, April 9 – CBS-TV aired a special called A Grammy Salute to The Beach Boys , which I’d been really looking forward to. I’ve lived with the Beach Boys’ music nearly all my life, ever since I hear their early stuff on Capitol in the early 1960’s. Back then I actually liked them better than the Beatles, mainly because the Beach Boys sang about surfing, fun and cars (ironically, I had fantasies of being the world’s greatest race-car driver as a kid and as an adult I never even learned to drive at all!) and the Beatles just did yucky songs about people holding hands. (Give me a break: I was still pre-pubescent.) I had pretty much forgotten about the Beach Boys when everyone else did,in the mid-1960’s, until in 1971 I met a friend in junior college who introduced me to a lot of music legends that hadn’t been on my radar. Among the people I heard of for the first timoe from him were ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (April 8) my husband Charles and I went to the San Diego Civic Youth Ballet’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,which we’d heard about last Sunday, April 2, when San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez presented a sample of it, lasting about 20 minutes, at his usual Sunday afternoon organ concert. Of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream began as a play by William Shakespeare, andit’s one of his most convoluted works,mixing Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies,with normal human characters both aristocratic and proletarian. The play centers around the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons, and various amorous intrigues revolve around it. Hermia is the inigénue in love with Lysander, but Demetrius is his rival for her affections and also has a girlfriend of his own called Helena. Hermia’s father Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius ins...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (April 2) I wanted to watch the much-ballyhooed CMT Music Awards show on CBS, whose parent company, Viacom, owns the show. The award show has a rather bizarre and convoluted history; the first one actually took place in 1967 as a project of the now-defunct Music City News magazine based in Nashville, but after a stint on The Nashville Network, it debuted in its current incarnation at the CMT Music Awards in 2002 and was first aired on broadcast television in 2022. The awards sh ow was the usual lumbering beast, starting with an O.K. performance by Blake Shelton called “My Body Is Yours.” I liked it a bit beter than most of Shelton’s oter work, though it still amazes me how he’s managed to get two much sexier and more talented women,Miranda Lambert and Gwen Steafni, to fall in love (or at least lust) with him. (I told that to my husband Charl;es, and he said, “Maybe he has a big dick.”...

> by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Sunday, April 2) my husband Charles nad I had a long day together during which we went to the organ concert in Balboa Park, which featured members of the San Diego Civic Youth Ballet dancing to excerpts from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakeseare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream to promote full performances of the ballet Thursday, April 6 at 6 po.m., Friday, April 7 at 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 8 at 2 and 6 p.m. at the Casa del Prado Theater. Tickets are $20 each and are available online at https://sdcyballet.my.salesforce-sites.com/ticket#/events/a0S1G000006cdpSUAQ . “Incidental music” was what they had before there were film scores – indeed, before there were films. They were just like film scores except that they accompanied a live play – in this case, August Schlegel’s German translation of Shakespeare’s original. Alas, San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez aid ...