Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Messing Around with The William Tell Overture

When I’m researching topics for this blog, I come across all kinds of strange little tidbits. Writing about the new movie coming out, The Lone Ranger, I remembered Bobby McFerrin’s performance 20 years ago in Denver.

He directed the orchestra in “The William Tell Overture”, but they didn’t play their instruments. They used their voices. It looked something like this:



Sadly, Freegal only has one album of Bobby McFerrin’s, but he is directing some rather nice classical music on it.

The other recording I came across was one by Spike Jones. I had never heard of him (even I’m a little too young for that), and I listened to the sample, thinking he might be some hip dude.

When I heard someone who sounded like they were gargling the music, I reassessed and looked him up. He was known for his comic albums. The William Tell Overture is one of his classics. In it he calls a horse race, playing on the crazy names racing horses can have. I leave it to  you to gauge the funny factor of lines likes “Cabbage by a head,” and “Girdle in the stretch.”


If you like it, a bunch of his stuff can be downloaded free on Freegal.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for commenting on my blog freeandlegalmusicdownloads.blogspot.com.