Feature Fridays: Breakfast With Barenboim

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each week, music library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the music library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week student assistant Andrew Brown reviews “Lahav Shani conducts Chopin and Debussy – with Daniel Barenboim.”

I struggle to watch orchestral concerts online. As a classically trained pianist for over a decade, watching concerts online should be much easier than the traditional ritual of getting dressed up and attending a live performance. However, I often get distracted while viewing online concerts because there are so many other things to do around the house! Fortunately, I discovered a way to keep my attention during online performances during the pandemic: I have to have food in front of me.

This isn’t a new trend or phenomenon. During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, opera-goers frequently ate during live performances; there are even anecdotes of patrons shouting at food vendors for a snack while musicians were performing. If the 19^th century elite could eat during a performance, I didn’t see why I couldn’t do the same (after all, I was in my own house!)

I made an event out of this experience. I decided on eggs, toast, and coffee for my meal. I selected “Lahav Shani conducts Chopin and Debussy — With Daniel Barenboim”, a visual recording of the Rotterdam Orchestra available on Medici.TV via the American University Library. Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was first on the program, so I readied my breakfast and turned on my laptop the same way a 19^th Century operagoer would shout for their snack during the opera.

My attention to detail skyrocketed. It helped that the Rotterdam Orchestra was filmed in HD for this performance but listening to the orchestra while I ate breakfast was such a grounding experience that my brain could focus on intricate details during the performance. Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is by no means new to me, but it was so much easier to enjoy the tones of the woodwind section when I was in a grounded mindset. Daniel Barenboim’s performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in e minor had a similar effect. I was amazed at how easy it was to notice the ways his hands move to make beauty at the piano.

Overall, I would rate my breakfast with pianist Daniel Barenboim a 10/10 experience. I would recommend that anyone who has a tough time paying attention to online concerts pair the experience with a snack. I think that opera-goers of the 19^th Century cleverly used food to make the performance more enjoyable by giving themselves an opportunity for grounding. Focusing your attention on one thing for more than an hour is mentally exhausting, the additional stimulus of food helps our brains process what’s happening on stage. I hope you find the right snack for your next at-home concert, I’m personally planning to watch Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess with a plate of southern chicken and waffles.

If you’re looking to create your own dining and concert experience, “Lahav Shani conducts Chopin and Debussy – with Daniel Barenboim” and many other concerts, operas, ballets and other musical experiences are available from Medici.TV with your AU login. Looking for some new recipes? Check out the LIbrary’s Cookbook Collection!

Feature Fridays: Diana Ross & The Supremes

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each week, music library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the music library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week guest blogger Hannah Ruth Wellons, Operations Specialist at Bender Library, reviews The Millennium Collection: Best Of Diana Ross & The Supremes.

Growing up, my family never listened to contemporary pop music. We generally listened to a radio station that played “oldies”—60s, 70s, and 80s music. Today, that station mostly plays 70s and 80s music, leaving behind what to me is one of the greatest decades in contemporary  music history: the 60s. Few genres exemplify the pop sound of the 60s more than Motown, and one group stands out from the rest of the pack, to me at least, as the best of what Motown has to offer: The Supremes. 

The Supremes was founded by Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, and Diana Ross as The Primettes while the girls were still in high school in Detroit, Michigan. Diana Ross reached out to an old neighbor, Smokey Robinson of The Miracles, to help them land an audition for Berry Gordy, a Motown executive. Gordy loved their sound but didn’t initially sign them due to their age, telling them to come back once they graduated. He agreed to let them sing back-up for singers like Marvin Gaye, and despite his initial refusal due to their age, a year later, Gordy signed the group under the condition that they change their group name. Ballard selected “The Supremes” because it was the only name on Gordy’s list of approved names that didn’t end in -ette. After twelve number-one hit singles, multiple shuffles of group members, and seven years of performing and touring, Diana Ross left The Supremes in 1970. She embarked on an extremely successful solo career. The Supremes disbanded in 1977 when the last original group member, Mary Wilson, decided to leave.  

Today, The Supremes are known as the best charting female group in American history with a total of 12 number-one hit singles on the Billboard Hot 100 Charts. Diana Ross, their lead singer from 1959 – 1970, is also a Golden Globes winner, Academy Award nominee, inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with The Supremes, a Kennedy Center Honoree, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

I selected this Millennium Collection of Diana Ross & The Supremes greatest hits as this week’s feature for a few reasons. First of all, I think it’s important that we know the influences behind our favorite music. Have you ever listened to Michael Jackson or the Jackson Five? You can thank Diana Ross—she discovered them. Madonna was heavily influenced by The Supremes and by Diana Ross’s solo career. The success of The Supremes paved the way for the success of future R&B and pop groups like Destiny’s Child. The influence of Diana Ross & The Supremes’—an all-Black all-girl group succeeding in a period when white men’s voices were the norm—cannot be understated.  

Second, I think the music of Diana Ross & The Supremes is really easy to listen to. It’s familiar and catchy. During the course of the pandemic, I’ve listened to a lot of music, both new to me and tried and true favorites. I always return to music of the 60s and to the Supremes. This album in particular is an excellent compilation of The Supremes greatest hits, with and without Diana Ross as the lead singer. Volume One is the music of The Supremes with Diana Ross as a lead singer, and Volume Two is their music after she left in 1970 through to 1977 when the group officially disbanded. Containing hits like “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Love Child,” and “Floy Joy,’ these albums offer a musical insight into the sound of the 1960s. I highly recommend this collection for anyone who is feeling nostalgic and wants to spend their afternoon listening to oldies music and for anyone who wants something that is both captivating and easy to listen to. 

The Millennium Collection: Best Of Diana Ross & The Supremes and other music by the Supremes is available for streaming from Alexander Street with your AU login.

Feature Fridays: Giant Steps

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each week music library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the music library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week Music Library Assistant Ryan Jacobs reviews Giant Steps, by John Coltrane.

The legendary saxophonist John Coltrane’s quintessential album Giant Steps celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2020, and is the first album composed entirely of Coltrane originals.The album features John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Tommy Flanagan on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. One of the most influential jazz records of all time, several tracks on the album have since become standards, widely known, and performed compositions considered important in the jazz repertoire.

Coltrane recorded another seminal jazz album, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (read our review of Kind of Blue here) mere weeks prior, to which this album is the harmonic antithesis. In contrast with the pioneering composition techniques of Davis’ Kind of Blue, which sought a new harmonic language and solidified the modal jazz framework, Giant Steps was a step beyond the existing jazz vernacular. The blistering solos and dense chord changes that would become the basis of Coltrane’s signature energetic style.

The album begins with the titular track, which has been simultaneously feared and beloved by jazz musicians ever since. The “Giant Steps” progression has been analyzed countless times, so I won’t go into too much technical detail here. To put it simply, the piece includes a chord progression that rapidly spans three key signatures. A study in third-related chord movement, the complexity of these patterns (known as Coltrane changes) combined with the frenetic tempo have canonized this piece as a rite of passage jazz improvisation. This piece also emphasizes Coltrane’s soloing style which has been described as a “sheet of sound”, consisting of extremely high-speed scale patterns and arpeggios with a fluid sweeping technique that ends up sounding more like a smooth glissando than a series of discrete notes.

This soloing style appears throughout the album, such as on the next track, “Cousin Mary” (dedicated to Coltrane’s cousin). This piece, alongside the last track “Mr. P.C.” (named after Paul Chambers) belongs to the blues idiom. To quickly highlight the remaining tracks on the album, “Countdown” is a contrafact of Eddie Vinson’s “Tune Up,” “Spiral” features a chromatically descending harmonic motif, “Syeeda’s Flute Song” is an exotic, bouncy tune named after Coltrane’s adopted daughter, and “Naima” (which features Wynton Kelly on piano and Jimmy Cobb on drums, both of whom also played on Kind of Blue alongside Coltrane and Chambers) can be considered a ballad or a tone poem with rich chords over a bass pedal point, and is named after Coltrane’s wife at the time. Since the release of the album, “Giant Steps”, “Countdown”, “Naima”, and “Mr. P.C.” have all become jazz standards.

Giant Steps is available from Naxos Jazz with your AU credentials. You can also stream other Coltrane albums from Naxos Jazz, including this compilation of four classic albums (Blue Train, John Coltrane Plays the Blues, Africa/Brass, and Olé).

Feature Fridays: Henry Thacker (Harry T.) Burleigh

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each week music library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the music library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week Music Library Coordinator Amanda Steadman reviews Southland Sketches, by Harry T. Burleigh, on the album American Journey from Naxos Music Library. 

For the start of Black History Month, I want to feature a Black composer who means a lot to me personally, Henry Thacker (Harry T.) Burleigh. Burleigh was a prolific, early 20th-century composer who happens to be from my hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania.  

Harry T. Burleigh was born in Erie, PA on December 2, 1866. He moved to New York City in early 1892 to study at the National Conservatory of Music, where he met and studied with Czech composer Antonin Dvorak. His influence on Dvorak is well-documented; he introduced Dvorak to the African-American spirituals. Burleigh said of their relationship, “I sang our Negro songs for him often, and before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals.” Dvorak later said in an interview, “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” This is evident in Dvorak’s 9th symphony “From the New World”, arguably his most well-known work. In the Symphony, a flute theme in the second movement resembles the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which likely he heard sung by Burleigh during their time together. You can listen to a recording of this piece from Naxos here.  

Dvorak encouraged Burleigh to preserve and promote spirituals, saying, “Give those melodies to the world,” which Burleigh certainly did. Burleigh is most well-known today for his arrangements of spirituals and they were popular during his lifetime as well. After his studies at the National Conservatory, Burleigh worked for music publisher Ricordi in New York for many years. He used his influence to promote publication of his works and those of other African American composers.  

My exposure to Burleigh’s works began as an undergrad; my music history professor, Jean Snyder, wrote a definitive biography of Burleigh, which was published in 2016. I was her research assistant off and on for a few years while she was working on the book. During my undergraduate work and while I lived in Erie for a few years after grad school, I was fortunate to hear our local orchestras perform arrangements of his songs and spirituals and to hear friends perform the piece I am focusing on today, Southland Sketches.  

Southland Sketches is a 1916 work for violin and piano. It consists of four movements, which Burleigh arranged from an earlier work for solo piano titled From the Southland. Southland Sketches is long out of print, so the score is not available from the AU Library; fortunately, it’s also out of copyright, so it is readily available from the Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP) for free, legal download. Pianists can find From the Southland in the AU Music Library collection. Both works are very accessible to performers and audiences alike; they’re easy to listen to and at an intermediate level for performers. Both works feature spiritual-influenced themes throughout; although none of the themes are direct quotations, they are reminiscent of this style. 

I highly recommend Southland Sketches for anyone looking for some easy listening American music. 

You can listen to more of Burleigh’s work on Naxos with your AU credentials. Amanda suggests the albums Songs and Spirituals and Art Songs of Harry T. Burleigh for his some of more well-known vocal music. 

If you’d like to learn more about Harry T. Burleigh and his vocal music, check out this recent documentary from the Aural Compass Project on YouTube!

Feature Fridays: Alex Ffrench

Welcome to Feature Fridays! In this series, AU Music Library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the music library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week guest writer Andrew Brown reviews Home, by Alexis Ffrench. 

Alexis Ffrench is the pianist for this holiday season. I discovered his music by accident while hunting for a different album (specifically, A Steinway Christmas Album, which is also on Naxos Music.) To be honest, Ffrench’s latest album blew me away. I’ve known of Alexis Ffrench’s music for some time now; I’m familiar with his hit piano solo “Bluebird” — but his musical ability to bring audiences into a space resembling a fuzzy blanket by the fireplace is evident in his new EP, Home. Ffrench’s newest EP is a collection of five holiday songs he arranged for solo piano, putting elements of pop, hip-hop, and jazz into classics like “Feliz Navidad” and “O Holy Night.” Home is available to the AU community through Naxos Music Library, a digital streaming database filled with thousands of albums of classical music. Kick back and enjoy Home this holiday season while I tell you the story of Alexis Ffrench. 

Ffrench grew up in Surrey, a small county in England next to Greater London and Berkshire. He was born with the ability of perfect pitch; he could sit at his family piano at three years old and play anything he could hear. His first experience with the classical / pop style he is associated with happened at the age of seven.  He blended ‘When a Child is Born’ by Johnny Mathis with the processional music of a church service. Ffrench went on to study at The Purcell School and The Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he studied traditional piano repertoire until his best friend passed away at the age of 23. This tragic moment changed Ffrench’s musical talents to supporting good mental health. With its lush jazzy atmosphere and familiar melodies, Home is a perfect example of positive mental health in Ffrench’s music.  

Home is an album that goes well with any activity during the holiday season. Wash your car, do the dishes, or study for final exams with this EP playing in the background and you’ll feel like a character in a Hallmark Christmas movie. Home brings good energy into the holiday season, something we all need to end this year on a high note.  

In addition to albums and singles from Alexis Ffrench, many Christmas/Hanukkah/winter albums are available through Naxos Music Library and Naxos Jazz with your AU credentials.  

Feature Fridays: Florence Price, Concerto in One Movement

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each Week, AU Music Library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the music library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week guest writer Andrew Brown reviews Piano Concerto in One Movementby Florence B. Price, available from Naxos Music Library with your AU credentials. 

There is a secret to making Thanksgiving a memorable holiday. Thanksgiving in the United States traditionally happens with family members visiting from out of town, or food graciously spread out over a dining room table. I grew up with so many of these traditions as a kid, but when I was a freshman in college, I found myself a thousand miles from home without the Thanksgiving traditions I cherished. I was forced into a situation of change, and as a result, I had to change what Thanksgiving meant to me. I remember sitting in my dorm, combing through the music on my phone, and developing a real sense of Thanksgiving gratitude. My family wasn’t in the dorm room with me, and the microwave meal I made for myself didn’t compare to an oven-cooked turkey, but I learned to appreciate the music that shaped me over the years. Here is one of the pieces that helps me appreciate my Thanksgiving: Concerto in One Movement by Florence Beatrice Price.  

Price opens the work with a regal brass theme, as if she were a queen getting ready to speak to her audience. Flutes mimic the brass in a call and response style until both instruments fade away, and the piano arrives with dark yet optimistic cadenza. The piano tells the story of a young and resilient American, fighting for its place in the world. Brass and strings overtake the piano to play the main theme. Strings, woodwinds, brass, and piano constantly compete with one another throughout the first section until they unify at the end with a resolute d-minor chord.  

The second and third sections of Concerto in One Movement tell Florence Price’s personal story. A young African-American woman living in Chicago during the 1930s, Price reminisces on nights in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the entire second section. Piano and woodwinds blend for a peaceful, nostalgic rendition of southern life. Brass instruments spill into the end of the second section and kick off the third section with a spirited Juba Dance. Juba Dances defined Southern Black culture during the early 20th Century; the dance is a celebration of the new day. Strings and brass dance with the piano until a snare drum carries all the instruments into a captivating finale. Price never returned to live in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas but Concerto in One Movement was her way of connecting with the past while living near urban Chicago. 

Price’s Concerto in One Movement reminds us to reflect on what we have instead of wishing for what could be. Developing a sense of gratitude happens when we appreciate the past and how it brought us to the present. Family members may be distant this holiday season, but remembering old memories can help us feel connected with the ones we love.  

Florence Price’s Concerto in One Movement and other great music is available from Naxos Music Library with your AU credentials. If you’d like to learn more about Florence Price and see some of her original papers and compositions, check out this digital collection from the University of Arkansas. 

Feature Fridays: 40 Most Scary Halloween Classics

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each week, AU Music Library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the music library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week Music Library Coordinator Amanda Steadman reviews 40 Most Scary Halloween Classics, available from Naxos Music Library with your AU credentials. 

In this spooky season, I wanted to highlight something Halloween-related. Naxos conveniently suggested this collection of classical pieces. Not all of them sound exactly spooky to me—particularly items like Debussy’s Clair de Lune (“moonlight”) and La cathedral engloutie (“the sunken cathedral”), which are more “spooky in name only” to my ears, although both beautiful pieces. But there’s plenty to explore in this collection, which features performances from various top name orchestras and solo performers. 

Haunted highlights you may have heard before include Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, which if you’ve ever seen Disney’s Fantasia, is the one with the devil on the mountaintop. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 is also in Fantasia, but has been used for numerous appearances of organ playing vampires. Anyone with an ear for Broadway will recognize the music from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera. 

My favorite spooky secret is the Dies Irae, a melody that originates in plainchant of the Requiem mass (mass for the dead); the original setting’s date is unclear, but is generally thought to be sometime in the 13th century. You can hear the plainchant setting in on this track from the album. The beginning eight-note melody has been used as musical shorthand for death and other scary things by composers over the past eight centuries (especially the first four notes.) It appears in other pieces on this album, most notably in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (which itself has a fascinating story that I don’t have space to cover here!), in the final movement, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath.” You can hear it in this version around 3:06 and again at 7:40. Another instance can be found in Franz Liszt’s Totentanz (“death dance”) throughout the piece. For another famous quotation of this melody, I recommend an excellent episode of the podcast Strong Songs on “Making Christmas” from Danny Elfman’s score for The Nightmare Before Christmas. This melody shows up several times in Elfman’s score and hearing the host talk through Elfman’s use of the melody may help you to recognize it in other films. I will note quickly that the Dies Irae text is also used separately from this melody in settings of the Requiem mass. Mozart’s famous setting is also included in this collection. 

Overall, this collection features an alarming atmosphere for spooky studying. I recommend it for your Halloween listening pleasure. 

40 Most Scary Halloween Classics and many other albums of classical music are available for streaming from Naxos Music Library with your AU credentials. 

Feature Fridays: Flashback by Tubis Trio

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each week, AU music library staff highlights a CD or artist from our collection. While the library is closed, we will feature items available for streaming with your AU Login. This week, Student Assistant Ryan Jacobs reviews Flashback by Tubis Trio. 

Flashback (2018) is the third studio album from Tubis Trio, a three-piece jazz band from Poland comprised of pianist Maciej Tubis, bassist Paweł Puszczało, and drummer Przemek Pacan. Tubis is the group’s primary composer, and is influenced by Swedish jazz pianist Esbjorn Svensson and his trio. Defying clear genre classification, their music remains accessible even to those who aren’t typically fans of jazz. 

“The term jazz is just a label, and it imposes limits,” explains Maciej Tubis. “We create tunes with melodious themes but unforeseeable forms. Classical polyphonies transform into rock ostinatos. We draw inspiration from various musical styles and various periods, sometimes we reach for pop songs, but we rehash them using our best artistic skills.” 

This album caught my eye with its pareidolic cover art when trawling through the list of new NAXOS jazz additions, and immediately caught my ear as well. The first track, “Rekindled”, wasted no time in grabbing my attention with its joyfully infectious and upbeat groove, starting off so strong that I had no choice but to listen to the entire album. The push and pull between high and low energy is executed well, and the compositions are nicely balanced so that the band plays as a cohesive unit.

My favorite tracks on the album are the aforementioned leading tune “Rekindled”, the subdued yet emotionally-rich “Esteem”, the proggy-yet-poppy “Roadrunner”, and the slow-building title track “Flashback.” The album paints an image of a mature and close-knit trio of talented musicians with a clear compositional vision. I am very happy to have stumbled across this record, look forward to exploring more of their music in the future, and hope that you have been inspired to do so as well. 

Flashback is available from Naxos Jazz with your AU login.

Feature Fridays: Greg Smith Sound Effects Collection

Welcome to Feature Fridays! Each week, AU Music Library staff highlight an item from our collection. While the library is closed, we will feature items that are available for streaming. This week student assistant Jalen Lesly details the Greg Smith Sound Effects Collection, a resource made available through the University Library Digital Research Archive.

Many students are currently unable to access the University’s facilities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is particularly difficult for students who are enrolled in more hands-on majors, such as Audio Production (which happens to be one of my majors!). Luckily, the library offers an online archive which provides a number of sound effects collections and resources.

The American University Digital Research Archive (AUDRA) is host to a sound effects collection curated by former AU faculty member Greg Smith. Mr. Smith has worked on the sound production of several films in the past, including Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The collection is a culmination of his 20 years of work in the field of film and television sound.

The collection contains 1450 sound effects recorded by Mr. Smith himself, and an additional 400 sound effects recorded by his AU students. None of the sound effects require use of attribution, though attribution is appreciated. The collection is split into four major categories: Ambient, General, Transportation, and Weapons, each divided into appropriate subcategories, so navigation to the desired effects is fairly simple. For example, if a student is looking for crowd sounds, they can search the category list for “Ambient,” then “People,” for the desired sound effects (which can be found in the Ambience 2 section of the collection).

The Greg Smith Sounds Effects Collection contains an impressive amount of sound effects and samples, and is useful to students studying Audio Production or Film, who are in need of effects for sound work in University projects. It is an important and helpful resource, and I definitely recommend it. The download links for the various collection segments can be found here, and a comprehensive category list can be found here.

Access the Greg Smith Sound Effects Collection and other digital resources through the University Library’s Digital Research Archive. If, for some reason, you enjoy listening to sound effects, there are also numerous collections available through Naxos Music Library with your AU ID. Because who wouldn’t want to listen to explosions or bird calls?? Or Godzilla!

Feature Fridays: Zonda: Folclore Agentino

In our final post celebrating Hispanic Heritage month, guest blogger Andrew Brown, ILL student assistant, reviews the film Zonda: Folclore Argentino, available from Alexander Street Press with AU login. 

There is something for everyone in this movie. 

Carlos Saura’s 2016 film Zonda: Folclore Argentino is more of a visual album than an industry-standard film. Dancers and musicians of Argentine descent use their combined talents to present a showcase of Argentinian culture (think of it like a cultural talent show). Saura uses minimalist staging with sunset-colored backgrounds to expose universal themes of tradition, pride, and passion in the people of Argentina. Students at American University can watch this film at no cost through Alexander Street Press, and I highly recommend you do. The visuals are eye-candy, and the passion behind each performance is inspiring, but I would not recommend watching the film from start to finish. Much like an album, I invite audiences to select a random point in the film and try to appreciate the performance you selected. Bounce around the film, pick random points until you find performances you like, and you will understand the rich cultural diversity of Argentina over time. 

An ideal place to start is [50:25] with the performance entitled “Peña Cuyana.” You will see a handful of people gathering together at chairs and tables, as well as two guitarists and a percussionist. The singers in the room express heartache through the song “Volvere Siempre a San Juan,” wishing for the day of return to San Juan “when the autumn collects remainders of suns there at the vineyard.” I was confused as to why the song mourned San Juan, but after researching the lyrics of the song I discovered that San Juan, Argentina was nearly destroyed by a cataclysmic earthquake in 1944 and in 1977. The desire to return to San Juan connected with me in a way I couldn’t imagine; I’m sure that so many people reading this review have mourned for a place they could not go back to.  

I won’t break down every performance in this film, but I will provide starting points for some of my favorite numbers. “Malambo” at [54:31] honors the tradition of Afro-Latin drumming with explosive sets of percussion music. “Bailecito” at [2:45] provides context for the musical styles of Argentina as pianist Horacio Lavandera demonstrates the tradition of Argentine piano. Do not skip “Homenaje a Merceses Sosa” at [24:08], her recording of “Todo Cambia” (Everything Changes) is a moving testament to the way life changes around the world. 

The brilliance in Folclore Argentino does not come from stunning visuals or moving musical numbers, although they are beautiful to experience. The brilliance of this movie comes from shared humanity, that we have all experienced the emotions the performers recreate in front of us, and that we are no different from the people of Argentina. 

Enjoy the musical exploration waiting for you.  

This and other great music documentaries are available from Alexander Street Press with your AU login.