See also Reddit - Dive into anything. You can get annoyed that yet again someone only that day learned that George Harrison funded Monty Python’s Life of Brian, or you can remember that that was you once, and in most cases you finding something out happened well after the event.
Alton Towers is a popular theme park near where I used to live. They adopted “In The Hall Of The Mountain King” as their unofficial theme music, so wherever you went around the park you would hear it at very regular intervals. After a day you really start to hate it.
I see what you did there (sadly it appears nobody else does).
I am saddened, tho’ to see that boingboing thought it necessary to identify the musical number and its composer. Are people really that uneducated in the Arts these days?
(disclaimer: I’m a physicist and a musician. And a lot of other things not worthy of mention)
That’s one old engine. Twin SU carbs standard distributor with contact points and push rods. Lucky you could find the parts my car is not that old but I can hardly access parts for it may have to scrap it because of that.
I’m 43, played violin in school orchestras in the 80s for 6 years, played in the Floriwa West Coast Youth Symphony for ~4 (which included music theory and conducting classes as well as rehearsal and performance), played jazz piano in school ensembles for two years, was in Music Honor Society in high school, am an electronic musician nearing completion of my 16th album, have a bachelor’s in Management Information Systems and am a software developer at an engineering software company.
And while I’m entirely tired of the Mountain King at this point, I actually hadn’t realized it was part of Peer Gynt. (I used to have a recording on cassette that included parts of Peer Gynt without this, which now seems like an odd omission. But maybe they were tired of it too.) There was never a course where we went through and listened to a comprehensive list of works or read scores the way literature courses go through books and plays, and it was never the repertoire we played.
Also known as Anitra’s Dance, this was the part where the Troll King wanted Peer to marry his daughter. It was sort-of the climax of the whole story.
I am untutored in music, and essentially have a mild form of amusia. People get all excited over some tune or other, and I’m just “meh”.
But, one thing my doting parents got for me, quite several decades ago, was The Peer Gynt Suite on 78 RPM disks. I sort of liked Anitra’s Dance, but don’t think I could stand to listen to it repeated all day at an amusement park.
Whenever you hear this, you might think of the ugly Troll Princess doing her most seductive dance down in the cavern, while Peer looks nervously about for the exit. The disks were accompanied by a nice illustrated story book. Or, you may watch the animation with the sound off, as I did until this thread came up in the discussion.
[edit] I was mistaken. Upon looking it up in Wikipedia, I find that Anitra’s Dance is a separate and distinct piece of music. My childhood 78 must have been titled “In the Hall of the Mountain KingANDAnitra’s Dance”, and that was about all the audio you could squeeze onto a 78. The other disks in the set would have had the less dramatic numbers in the suite.
In a similar vein, if you ever go to PC Richard (an electronics store in NY, not sure how popular it is nationwide), they have a jingle that they use in their TV advertisements. But, if you go to their store, that jingle plays throughout the store, via their sound system, every 5-10 minutes. Went there for a quick errand. By the time I left, I was almost mental. I cannot imagine what it must be like to work there.
