Sunday 22 June 2008

Dancing Hero Worker Statues

This is classified on YouTube as "Sport - extreme," but I think it's dance. I suppose it's possible that could be said of many body-building competitions. I also think it's amazing. (This is another one for you, MB).



And will somebody please remind me what this piece of music is? I don't think I've heard it recently, perhaps not since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the tune is deeply familiar to me. It feels like the sort of thing Bestemianova and Bukin might have used in the eighties (remember them?). People in the YouTube comments say it's from a 1992 movie flop called "Conquest of Paradise", but my memory says that's nonsense, for ten-year-olds who've never heard music, like saying Vaughan Williams' Rhapsody on a Theme of Thomas Tallis is "from Master and Commander". It reminds me of part of Carmina Burana, but I don't think I've ever known its actual origin and I'm not even sure what language is being sung. It might be medieval vernacular Latin, like O Fortuna, or it might be almost anything.

And if anyone can read the Chinese characters, do translate.

Hat tip to Lory.

5 comments:

La Tanguerita said...

It's the main theme from the soundtrack for the film "1492" composed by Vangelis. The film was crap, but the music stuck with me.I think one can still find it somewhere online.

Anonymous said...

No that is (or is a reproduction of) the original score of 1492: Conquest of Paradise by Vangelis. While some of it is proper latin hymns like "De Profundo" and "Dies Irae" the rest of it is makey-uppy pseudo latin designed to make it sound old, ominous and authentic.

msHedgehog said...

If that is an original score, what the hell, then, is the other, older tune that it is like?

It must be one of those things - like the first phrase of Flower of Scotland always merging in my mind with Va, pensiero ...

Anonymous said...

I've had a check and Vangelis is the only composer listed for the soundtrack by the music rights societies. They're not obliged to say if the work uses previously composed music if its out of copyright, but they usually do. Perhaps it just sounds so familiar because it is written as a pastiche, even though it doesn't reference a particular work? And of course it has been used a lot.

msHedgehog said...

@Jo, considering what you work as and who for, I'm inclined to assume you're right and my memory deceives me. It is definitely the pastiche thing, then. But a pastiche of what or whom?

Master and Commander was appropriate - itself a rather good Patrick O'Brian pastiche.