Category: Music

ELOquent

Rock music history continues to look very favorably upon the Electric Light Orchestra, and deservedly so. This hour-long feature analyzes, in great detail, the evolution of Roy Wood’s band The Move into ELO. The lion’s share of credit is given to Wood, but the band’s greatest success came from Jeff Lynne after Wood left ELO to start Wizzard.

Big Boys Don’t Cry

I should have been in Belgium the summer of 1975, after my sophomore year of college. Long story, about a girl, of course. Instead, I spent that summer working the night shift at a Cape Cod restaurant called the Hearth ‘n Kettle. I cooked, I bused tables, and I washed dishes. Back then the workers weren’t immigrants. The crew included the year-round locals and the summertime college kids. There was some flirting, and some of that paid off, but mostly we all just worked hard and got along.

A radio was always playing in the back room of the restaurant. The big songs that summer included “Love Will Keep Us Together” by The Captain and Tennille, “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell, and “Listen to What the Man Said” by McCartney and Wings. But the one that I never tired of hearing was, “I’m Not in Love” by 10cc.

Sweden’s Neglected Composer

By chance, while cleaning up my lists of favorite channels on the cable TV DVR, on Music Choice I happened to hear the beginning of a symphony that sounded interesting, by a Swedish composer I couldn’t recall ever hearing before. Kurt Atterberg.

I ended up sitting through the entire piece, and enjoyed it enough to buy a CD copy on Amazon. Here is Atterberg’s 8th symphony, taken from the same performance that I ordered:

Why is Kurt Atterberg’s name not more familiar? When he wrote his 8th symphony in the 40’s, Romantic music was still popular, at least with general audiences.

After ordering the CD I went looking for an answer, and found a possible explanation. Atterberg was believed to be a Nazi sympathizer.

Another musical figure with a Nazi connection, the German conductor Herbert Von Karajan, found terrific success after the war, but Atterberg’s career faded. He stayed on at his day job in Sweden’s patent office, apparently ignored and embittered.