Overtures Overture


Mulberry Street, NYC, 1900.

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, This Is It (Bugs Bunny Overture).
Duke Ellington, Three Suites: Overture.
Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera: Overture.
The Who, Overture.
Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady: Overture.
Al Duffy and Tony Mottola, Light Cavalry Overture.
Mobb Deep, Intro.
Richard Strauss, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme: Ouverture.
Rush, 2112 Overture.
Arnold Schoenberg, Variations for Orchestra: Introduction.
The Gentle Soul, Overture.
LMP, Back to a Century of Song.

I used to run into Warren from time to time during the 1970s. Once, at a nightclub called Reno Sweeney, we watched an entertainer named Genevieve White. This was just a few years after the Fillmore East had closed. Maybe Warren and I had thought the Fillmore, and all it represented, was going to be definitive for our generation, and here we were in a nightclub. Genevieve White had just sung a song called "Romance Is On the Rise."

"Romance is coming back, Warren," I said.

"You know what's coming back?" Warren said. "Everything. And then it's going away for good."

George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context.

All parts of the universe are interwoven and the bond is sacred. And nothing is foreign or unrelated to each other.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

It is generally our fate as human beings that as we approach the end of a century, we go collectively mad. And as we approach the end of a millennium, we grow collectively madder. That is what is happening to us today. More fundamentalism. More visions, more insecurities, more madness...The last century has been the most awful century in the history of the millennium. I hope and I pray that we are at the beginning of the end of that awfulness.

Chaim Potok, interview, 1997.


Mulberry Street, NYC, ca. 2001.

Assorted introductions: Bugs and Daffy, 1960; Ellington (making Tchaikovsky swing), on Three Suites, 1960; Threepenny Opera, 1928; Tommy, 1969; My Fair Lady, 1956; Duffy and Motolla's western swing version of Franz von Suppé's warhorse, 1944; Mobb Deep, intro to Murda Muzik, 1999; Strauss' Gentilhomme, 1917; Schoenberg's introduction to his Variations for Orchestra, 1928; Rush, 1976; The Gentle Soul, from their self-titled (and only) 1968 LP; LMP's track is from their epic Century of Song, now out of print.

So, as LMP says, let's go back...