Natural Curiosity

Published on January 26, 2011

The Music: The “theme,” as it were, that you hear in the beginning and through a fair amount of the piece is from the opening of the score to the movie, Please Give, as is the piece at the end (Memory Palace Thumbs Up on both the movie and the score, by the way). We also hear a song called Le Chat Noir and a bit of a song called Quiet Drive from Elmer Bernstein’s score to a move called Kings Go Forth, which I’ve never seen (and is, apparently, a WWII flick in which Sinatra and Tony Curtis get into a love triangle with on the South of France with a townie played, naturally, by Natalie Wood). There’s also a piece called “The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus IX” by a Tuba Quartet called, ahem, Sotto Voce. The thing, it turns out, that I love about Sotto Voce is that their albums feature moody/edgy portraits of the four members of the quartet made to look like they’re in a Nu Metal band, circa 1994. Also they are called Sotto Voce. And they are a Tuba Quartet.

The Footnotes: I read a bunch about Joice Heth but, it turns out, I really only needed to read one thing: The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America by a dude named Benjamin Reiss. It’s pretty kick-ass.