Brooks & Dunn, one of country music’s best-selling duos, will bring their “Reboot 2023” tour to Omaha this summer.
The concert will be held June 1 at the CHI Health Center Omaha. Special guest performer Scotty McCreery will be the opening act.
Led by musicians Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, Brooks & Dunn has 17 Country Music Association awards, 26 Academy of Country Music awards and two Grammy Awards. In 2019, they received the Academy of Country Music’s Icon Award, which is given to those who have advanced the popularity of country music through songwriting, recording, production, touring, film, television and more.
The duo’s most famous songs include “Boot Scootin’ Boogie”, “Neon Moon” and “Believe”.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Joanna Lumley, the actress, campaigner and all-round Good Egg, is practically perfect in every way. The latest example of her ability to bring a light touch to a serious subject is a podcast with her husband, the composer and conductor Stephen Barlow, which launches tomorrow. Joanna & The Maestro explores their joint passion for (mainly) classical music, inspired by their concern about its dwindling accessibility and apparently inexorable decline into a niche subject for a mainly elite audience.
The Government’s National Plan for Music Education, set out in 2011 and reissued last June in a “refreshed” version, announces its “clear ambition to level up musical opportunities for all children, regardless of circumstance, needs or geography”.
But in the decade between versions, that ambition has not been realised: music A-level entries declined by 39 per cent; GCSE entries are down 31 per cent, with students in affluent areas far more likely to study the subject than those in deprived areas.
The star cellist, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a shining example, with his equally talented siblings, of the excellence that a state music education can offer, seems likely to become part of a vanishing minority.
It was not always thus. My love of music began at my very ordinary state grammar school, where I took music GCSE, seriously considered music A-level and still stumble through Beethoven piano sonatas from a 19th-century edition of the complete sonatas given to me by my music teacher.
The Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for an extended maths education is apparently based on the belief that it will encourage financial literacy. Somehow, I manage my finances with a mere GCSE maths, but without the love of music nourished by my education, I’d be an entirely different person, with a hinterland stripped of the lifelong curiosity, resilience and delight that a musical education supplies.
Lumley is right: classical music is too important to be wasted on the elite.
How to beat Satanism
The bad-boy allure of Satan, poetically illustrated in Milton’s Paradise Lost, may explain the rising popularity of Satanism recorded in the last census, with an increase of 167 per cent since 2011 in the numbers of Satanists in England and Wales. Meanwhile, Christianity became a minority religion for the first time in the history of the census.
Amid the shrinking congregations is a curious anomaly: the growing popularity of choral evensong. Writers with an interest in church matters have sought to explain the phenomenon, citing the allure of free music, and free entry to cathedrals that generally charge for the privilege. But there is a less venal explanation: humans crave the numinous, and choral evensong is the one service from which the beauty and spirituality of language and music has yet to be stripped.
The fact that beauty is a crucial element of belief has been obvious to every generation of Christians except our own. The connection between the decline in congregations and the hideous corporate-speak in which the Church of England largely chooses to conduct its worship is painfully evident – though not, apparently, to those in charge of such matters. For now, we should cherish choral evensong while we can, before that, too, is incorporated into what Private Eye used to call the Rocky Horror service book.
Pop star Jony (Jahid Huseynli) will thrill his Baku fans in the
summer, Azernews reports.
The singer will perform at Sea Breeze Resort on June 24,
2023.
In July 2022, Jony’s solo concert was a huge success at the Sea
Breeze Resort.
Jony is a Moscow-based performer born in Baku. He became famous
in Russia and the CIS countries after the mega-hit Alley.
In December 2019, he became the winner of the Breakthrough of
the Year nomination according to VKontakte and the BOOM music
service. In 2020, Apple Music named his track Comet among the most
popular songs in Russia.
Over the past years, the singer has taken part in multiple music
projects, including the Zhara Music Festival.
Jahid Huseynli was named best at the Bravo International
Professional Music Awards 2022. His song Comet was named Song of
the Year according to the Bravo Awards.
He also won a prize (Best Artist Award) at New Radio Awards
2021, which brought together Azerbaijani and Russian pop stars.
In 2021, the singer was named best in the Best Song category at
MUZ-TV 20/21. World Beginning. He won the prize for the song
Comet.
In 2022, Jony won the Golden Gramophone Award, one of the main
awards in the Russian music industry since 1996.
The pop star received his first Golden Gramophone for the song
“Titles”, which became an absolute record holder at Russian Radio
Hit Parade.
The Cadenza Contemporary Orchestra has given a breathtaking
concert at International Mugham Center, Azernews reports.
Since 2016, the Cadenza Contemporary Orchestra has been actively
participating in both local and international festivals.
The orchestra aims at preserving the traditions of modern
musical performance in Azerbaijan and developing the traditions of
modern musical ensembles created in the country.
The artistic director of the orchestra is Composer Turkar
Gasimzada.
The concert program, titled Epitaf, included pieces of music by
the son of outstanding composer Gara Garayev, professor of the
Moscow Conservatory, well-known composer, People’s Artist of
Azerbaijan Faraj Garayev and his students Elmir Mirzoyev, Aliya
Mammadova and Ali Alizada.
The orchestra performed Elmir Mirzoyev’s music piece Epitaf
dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide and Aliya
Mammadova’s composition String Quartet.
The concert was also remembered for Mirkhalid Mammadzada’s flute
performance The Pain of One Plane Tree, written by Ali Alizada back
in 1988 and not heard from the stage for many years.
The musical composition was accompanied by the sound of the Baku
wind. It was an elegy of the struggle of a lone tree with a storm
that bent but did not break and defeated the squally wind.
Media partners of the event are Azernews.Az, Trend.Az, Day.Az
and Milli.Az.
Michael Meyers wouldn’t be the same without John Carpenter’s iconic, bone-chilling score.
Earlier this year in the pages of the Inlander, I wrote about how so-called “elevated” horror films had begun to stake their claim in the summer blockbuster landscape. But now that spooky season is in full swing, thrillers, slashers, monster flicks and their ilk have crawled out of their coffins to dominate pop culture for a month. One crucial element for any effective horror movie — quite possibly to a more pronounced degree than with any other cinematic genre — is an impactful score. The best of the best stick to the viewer like so many gallons of Kensington Gore (aka fake blood) long after an initial watch. So it felt like a perfect time to explore some of the most iconic horror soundtracks of all time, along with some underrated gems.
Let’s get the classics out of the way first. Sometimes, the strength of a score lies with the simplicity of its leitmotif — melodies so iconic that they transcend the films themselves and become tattooed on the universal psyche. Take, for example, the brilliant economic two-note pulsing dread of John Williams’ Jaws score or the shrieking violins of Bernard Herrmann’s strings-only score to 1960’s Psycho, which perfectly syncs with the visuals of the overkill stabbing of Janet Leigh during the infamous shower sequence.
When polymath horror legend John Carpenter first sat down at his synthesizer in the late 1970s to compose the haunting, repetitive score for his foundational slasher movie Halloween, the music’s lack of ostentation was borne out of his limited means as a scrappy independent filmmaker as much as it was creative intentionality. What he landed on was a barebones 5/4 melody that his father had taught him as a child, which now will be forever synonymous with late night heebie-jeebies. This month, Carpenter revists the unforgettable score via the recently released Halloween Ends, which supposedly serves as a capper to the long-running franchise (it’s proven to be as unkillable as the bogeyman himself, Michael Myers).
The brilliant horror scores of the ’70s don’t end there, however. At the outset of the decade, famed composer Ennio Morricone made the genius decision to contrast the sexualized violence depicted on screen in Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (a hallmark entry in the Italian giallo horror subgenre) with an unexpectedly beautiful, innocent-sounding theme. A Nightmare on Elm Street and every other subsequent horror movie that weaponized childlike sing-song falsettos owes the late maestro a debt.
“When I think of the scores that scare me the most, they’re the ones with creepy kids singing,” says Colleen O’Holleran, who programs the “WTF” series (Weird, Terrifying, Fantastic) for the Seattle International Film Festival.
Later in the ’70s, Argento would recruit the prog rock outfit Goblin (with whom he’d previously collaborated on another celebrated giallo film, Deep Red) for the soundtrack to his lush, witchy Suspiria. It’s a score that’s at times whimsical, at times discordant, and splashed throughout with warbling synths.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre boasts an equally idiosyncratic score composed by its writer/director Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell. Hardly musical at all, it’s an experimental, macabre collage of sound effects, ambient noise, and grating drones of musique concrète (music composed using the sounds of raw material).
Special mention must also be paid to the spine-tingling “ch ch ch ah ah ah” of the Friday the 13th franchise, which was so indelible that I (and one can only presume many others) were taunted with it on childhood playgrounds. Apparently, the iconic noise resulted from composer Harry Manfredini sublimating the phrase “Kill her mommy” (as uttered by Pamela Vorhees, the killer of the first film in the franchise) into its most rudimentary syllabic form.
Jumping ahead in time and offering a refined contrast, Candyman (1992) exists on the more cosmopolitan side of the horror landscape with a score by wildly influential and adored composer Philip Glass. (Though when asked about the music for Candyman, Glass’ tone is usually dismissive, unbefitting of his masterful amalgamation of elegiac pianos, booming choirs and cascading pipe organs.)
More recent efforts within the genre also deserve their moment to shine under the moonlight. In 2018, director Luca Guadagnino released a controversial remake of Suspiria, one which altered the setting and themes of the original and bleached out all of Argento’s signature vibrancy. To accompany this radical and more muted reinterpretation, Guadagnino’s film required a drastically different sonic palette to accompany it. To take on this challenge, the director roped in Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Yorke’s Suspiria score is subdued instead of splashy, and redolent with the kind of minimalist melancholy that characterizes many of his solo outputs.
On the other end of the aural spectrum lurks Cliff Martinez’s score for 2016’s vicious, opulent fashion industry satire, The Neon Demon. Like his previous collaborations with divisive Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive‘s soundtrack ranked No. 19 on Pitchfork‘s list of “The 50 Best Film Scores of All Time”), the critically acclaimed score is heavy on atmospheric synth tones, but features an additional injection of throbbing club music rhythms; it wears its electronic musical influences proudly on its haute couture sleeve. Fascinatingly, Refn had cut The Neon Demon to a temp score of compositions by Psycho composer Herrmann, but Martinez wisely disregarded this completely and followed his own impulses to great effect.
There are far too many quality horror scores to give them all proper recognition, to say nothing of the great horror needle-drop soundtracks. You will never hear “Hip to be Square” or “Blue Moon” the same again after watching American Psycho and the lycanthrope transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London.
Clearly, there are a lot of directions a composer can (and should!) take when scoring a horror film. The very best stand out from the rest of the (were)wolf pack because of their innovation, their ability to make the most of the sometimes-limited resources at their disposal and their willingness to take risks. Others help ground the viewer in a character’s perspective, be they the archetypal final girl or the antagonist stalking the film’s frames.
As O’Holleran puts it, “In terms of memorable horror movie scores, they work best when they subconsciously connect you to the character.”
The beautiful thing about the horror genre is how it can be adapted in wildly divergent ways. Don’t be afraid to have your Halloween party playlist reflect this diversity.
![Faraj Garayev’s music sounds at Mugham Center [PHOTO/VIDEO]](https://lseband.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Faraj-Garayevs-music-sounds-at-Mugham-Center-PHOTOVIDEO-1200x800.jpg)
