Theme Music Revisited

     In an earlier blog about Theme Music I spoke about filling in a musical crossword puzzle by discovering the names of memorable tunes I’ve enjoyed over the years. The pieces I mentioned then were primarily from radio serials or soap operas. I forgot to include Alfred Hitchcock’s famous theme by Charles Gounod, Funeral March of a Marionette and prolific Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges used as the theme for the radio show “The FBI in Peace and War”.

    Another rich source of memorable music is from commercials on radio and TV. As a beer drinker I quickly recognized the Rheingold beer jingle as being Waldteufel’s Estudiantina Waltz.

    Then there’s the Sprint commercial which used Shostakovich’s Waltz no. 2 (The Russian Waltz). This link will take you to a YouTube version of the music with no Sprint commercial which used light pens to draw images choreographed to the music.                               

                                             http://youtu.be/bkJHBSAqVIo

    Recently, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf has been used in a TV commercial for a soft drink. Another of Prokofiev’s compositions, The Dance of the Knights (also called The Montagues and the Capulets from Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, scene 2) was used in a commercial for a car and also for Chanel perfume. I don’t remember the commercials but I definitely remember the music!

                                             http://youtu.be/DUmq1cpcglQ

     A warehouse in New Jersey overloaded a trailer I was to deliver in Norfolk, Virginia and I didn't realize until I weighed the rig in Maryland how much overweight I was. It took me over an hour of weighing, sliding my tandems and re-weighing to get my trailer weight legal but I was still overweight on my drive axles. The solution was to take the long way to Norfolk so that the fuel use would lower my tractor weight to within legal limits before crossing a DOT scale. That's why I chose to use the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel. While I was on the bridge out of sight of land, this Prokofiev Dance of the Knights came on the radio. The sky was gray, the wind was brisk and there were whitecaps on the water everywhere. This music could give me chills anytime but this setting was perfect for this piece.


                                              I still get the chills.

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