Wedding Day Of The Fairies
I use ragtime music at the halfway point in my radio show, bottom of the hour. Just about twenty seconds in and a little more coming out of a feature piece. Nice stuff, gives a little lift to the program and adds about a minute to a short insert.
The music tends to be around 1890-1917, the height of ragtime’s popularity. Scott Joplin was a big name from those days, as well as Charles Johnson (now fairly forgotten). I’m going through an especially good disc by Mr. Johnson and, unlike Scott Joplin, never heard of any pieces he composed.
For instance, “Wedding Day of the Fairies.”
Back 100 years ago, it had a delightful touch about it, these denizens of the forest, dancing about the flowers and open hillsides. What could be more picturesque? I grew up on these imaginative books, as did my mother and her mother before her.
Alas, no more. What you’re likely to get, having mentioned the name of this piece to others, is a snort and perhaps someone’s beer shooting out of their nose.
I miss those days when books had magical, full-page illustrations of fairies in fairyland, of sprites and butterflies, of dragonflies flitting about, of little boys and girls sitting in their leafy bowers. I was one of them, in my imagination, and spent time under my grandfather’s grape arbor with butterflies and fairies.
The music tends to be around 1890-1917, the height of ragtime’s popularity. Scott Joplin was a big name from those days, as well as Charles Johnson (now fairly forgotten). I’m going through an especially good disc by Mr. Johnson and, unlike Scott Joplin, never heard of any pieces he composed.
For instance, “Wedding Day of the Fairies.”
Back 100 years ago, it had a delightful touch about it, these denizens of the forest, dancing about the flowers and open hillsides. What could be more picturesque? I grew up on these imaginative books, as did my mother and her mother before her.
Alas, no more. What you’re likely to get, having mentioned the name of this piece to others, is a snort and perhaps someone’s beer shooting out of their nose.
I miss those days when books had magical, full-page illustrations of fairies in fairyland, of sprites and butterflies, of dragonflies flitting about, of little boys and girls sitting in their leafy bowers. I was one of them, in my imagination, and spent time under my grandfather’s grape arbor with butterflies and fairies.
posted by Tom Carten at 4:04 PM
1 Comments:
Having just read Alan Moore's The Black Dossier, the third in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, I had no problem immediately getting the proper image. (Fairies and other fictional creatures and characters figure prominently throughout the story.)
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