Originally posted by scacchipazzo I did sense the spirit of Borodin and Mussorgsky in these pieces as well as Smetana.
You are right about UK. The last image plays trick in our heads and the scads of people from the summer Olympics etched in my memory. The lines in Italy were awful when I last went!
I go to Italy quite often on business as I curate intermittently for a couple of film festivals over there. Last time I was there for pure pleasure was a winter trip to Rome. It was cold and at times wet, but I had the pleasure of having the Sistine Chapel almost to myself of a Friday morning!
Talking about changing the British Anthem, I can't agree with you Wolfgang.
I think Elgar's 'Land of Hope and Glory', with some lyrical changes would be an exceptional offer.
The land was comprising all countries and countrymen as we once ventured the world and set up communities; it wasn't all Englishmen. I agree that there is association of Hope and Glory as a piece of music with England, but lyric revision overtime would change that?
Originally posted by Teinosuke Not really 1619, though a melody by John Bull from that date apparently has some similarities. However, the anthem as anthem is really an eighteenth-century creation.
For me, far and away the most stirring national song we have is 'Jerusalem' ('And did those feet in ancient time...'😉. Magnificent words by a great poet, William Blake, and a wonderfully s ...[text shortened]... by the crowd at the Last Night of the Proms:
Originally posted by Soothfast True. Other nations move on, but the U.S. seems frozen in time, unwilling to change even in the face of overwhelming evidence in favor of change. We keep the penny, don't do simple things to help the visually impaired such as make different denominations of paper bills different sizes, we can't cope with the dead-easy metric system, we fetishize guns and ...[text shortened]... ling to a national anthem that sounds like a cat fight and basically idolizes the flag. Huh.
Don't be so fast to jump on the roundabout bandwagon.
They are done well in places like Paris and possibly London, but their use in the US has been amazingly pathetic. If we made huge, large ones like in European cities, they might not be so bad. But the extremely tiny ones used here are a joke. I've seen some half-assed examples of the roundabout tried in the Phoenix area and they are terribly bad. The main fault of their use in America is a dearth of space. Roundabouts need to be huge to gain any efficiency in moving traffic. You know how in America the standard "diamond interchange" used where roads cross over freeways? Well, in Phoenix they experimented with using small roundabouts at the two intersections in a diamond interchange. It slowed traffic down horribly, simply because the roundabouts were way too small, as they had to be to fit that application. American design engineers at their worst.
National Anthems
15 Feb '13 18:10
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