Laconia Music Center

This one might not be the most impressive but it is build with a large variety of complex techniques, the forty seven strings are made out of pulled sugar! I've... always wanted to make a chocolate showpiece instrument, which one should I do next? Subscribe to my new Youtube channel (link below): https://www.youtube.com/c/AmauryGuichonChef

It is International Women's Day so I wanted to share some information on my great, great aunt Cora Youngblood Corson who is the topic of my PhD dissertation. My... family moved to Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory in 1902 when the lands were opened to white settlement. Cora is frequently cited as a Native American, due to her last name, living in Anadarko, and using Native American outfits in her performance, however she was not Native. Cora had an amazing career in Vaudeville stretching from 1902-1933. She founded the first band in Anadarko, Oklahoma. She performed at the 1904 World's Fair. She also married Charles Corson at the Fair and they were married until 1921. In 1905, she then joined the Helen May Butler Band and became the leading euphonium soloist. After two years, she formed her own band and moved it onto the Vaudeville stage. Through this time, she was a pioneer for women musicians. She was the first woman to play the euphonium as a solo instrument. First woman to play the Double Bb tuba as a solo instrument. She played the worlds largest sousaphone and the worlds largest solo tuba. She had a euphonium covered in diamonds, rubies, and sapphires that had been gifted to her by the C.G. Conn company. At the height of her popularity, her vaudeville production costs ran as high as $8,000 in 1913. By comparison, a Model T cost $600 at that time. Her group of girls performed lavish shows with many costume and scene changes. They constantly sold out theaters, including the Broadway, Majestic, and Lyric theater circuits. The C.G. Conn company also featured Cora heavily in their publications and advertisements from 1908-1926. During her career, she graced the covers of Billboard Magazine, Variety Magazine, The Player Magazine, and The Standard and Vanity Fair Magazine. Despite being a vaudeville performer, she also had a farm in Anadarko where she would spend her off seasons. Her favorite pastime was horseback riding and raising animals. This made her independently wealthy, so she joined the White Rats Actors Union to fight the Vaudeville Trust. During this time, Cora and the band (which included my great great grandmother) would picket theaters. In Chicago, this got them arrested MANY times. So often, in fact, that the police knew them all on a first name basis and would bring them instruments to play for them in the jail...Some of the police even came to their performance at the end of the month. This activism got Cora blacklisted from the major theaters. But, determined to fight against the men of the trust, she told them that if they wanted a fight, "then they shall have it." So she came back and performed in every possible theater in Oklahoma and Kansas just to prove a point that she wouldn't stop performing just because they told her to. She then took them to court over the blacklist. However, World War I broke out that same month. This postponed the court case. Cora and the girls decided to sail to Europe to perform for the troops. In December 1917, they sailed to England. They then spent the year performing in England and Ireland, even playing for President Woodrow Wilson on his visit to England. Once the war ended, they traveled to France and joined the Knights of Columbus, becoming the only women performers of the organization. They then performed for the troops in France and Germany until August 1919. Upon their return to the United States, they returned to the court case, but lost. This continued their blacklist...So they performed at smaller venues and with the Shriner circus. In 1928, the Cora Youngblood Sextette performed their final show. However, Cora was not done. She then joined the US Indian Reservation Band and performed at the 1928 and 1933 inaugurations. She is even pictured shaking hands with President Calvin Coolidge. During her life, she performed for 5 sitting US Presidents. I actually own the dress Cora wore when meeting the President thanks to Kelli Youngblood for saving it! After the performance in 1933, Cora retired to Tulsa, Oklahoma where she and her second husband, Frank Barsanti ran poultry farms. She passed away in 1943. Cora had an amazing life and I am continually uncovering more and more fascinating pieces of her life's story. Thanks to wonderful contributions from various family members who have held on to photos and stories all these years, I have been able to piece together much of her life. I hope that by the time I finish my dissertation, her full legacy will finally be acknowledged.

March 5, 1977. On a rainy morning day, the London Symphony Orchestra gathered at Anvil Studios in Denham, Buckinghamshire, to begin the first of 16 recording se...ssions planned to record a score for a new 20th Century Fox 'sci-fi-meets-fantasy' film written and directed by 32 years old American filmmaker George Lucas. The title of the movie was short and intriguing: STAR WARS. The 86-piece orchestra assembled on the scoring stage, waiting for composer John Williams to strike the downbeat on the very first cue to be recorded, curiously titled "The Swashbucklers" on the manuscript. Assisting Williams were orchestrator Herbert Spencer, 20th Century Fox music supervisor Lionel Newman, and music editor Ken Wannberg. The recording was being engineered by English master sound engineer Eric Tomlinson. The composer wrote the score between October 1976 and February 1977 and settled to record it in England with the prestigious LSO through the help of his friend and colleague André Previn, who was then principal conductor of the orchestra. Under the watchful eye of writer/director George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz, the composer began to record the first cues of his mammoth 700+ pages score. Lucas assigned Williams to compose the soundtrack for his film with a very clear brief: write a score that harkens back to the sound of the great 1930s and '40s Hollywood films, in the tradition of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's scores for the swashbuckler films starring Errol Flynn. The director was initially convinced that no composer alive could be able to fulfill such an assignment, but he was persuaded by his friend Steven Spielberg to give the job to John Williams, who was then a fresh Academy Award winner for the iconic score of Spielberg's blockbuster hit JAWS. The composer accepted the challenge with enthusiasm and, together with the director, planned a score that would feature a series of recognizable themes and motifs associated with the film's principal characters, all set within a traditional symphonic context. Among the cues recorded on the first day of sessions was also the regal, thunderous composition that would've accompanied the film's now-iconic opening crawl, starting with a blasting high B-flat major on trumpets lead by LSO's principal trumpet Maurice Murphy, who actually began his 30+ years tenure with the orchestra on that very same day. The rest, as the old adage goes, is history. Lucas would've later admitted that the score was the only element of his film that turned out better than he expected. Williams' stirring symphonic score defined the film's characters and locations, creating that magical atmosphere that continues to give this film its immortal status and helping it to achieve its incredible worldwide success. And it all began 44 years ago today. (Text Maurizio Caschetto for The Legacy of John Williams)

Em Kyushu, no Japão, foi feito um xilofone gigante que toca Jesus, alegria dos homens, de Bach, apenas soltando uma bolinha floresta abaixo...

Henry Goldrich, owner of Manny's Music has passed on February 16th, 2021.

Happy Birthday Maestro!

Watch the SNEAK PEAK of today's new Besson Fridays Episode, which will pay tribute to Maurice Murphy (1935-2010), who was Principal Trumpet in the London Sympho...ny Orchestra for the soundtracks of the first six Star Wars films, among many other ones! Don't miss the show at 6pm UK time on our facebook page! #WeAreBesson

A new Selmer History Series has launched. I hope you enjoy it.

Remembering the great John Thomas "Tommy" Johnson on his birthday. If you lost on "The Price is Right" - you'd hear Tommy. You also heard him on "Jaws", "The G...odfather", "Indiana Jones", "Forest Gump", "The Lion King" and "Titanic" to name just a very few. Incredible musician. Incredible career. 86 years ago today. Happy birthday, Tommy. See more

Merry Christmas!!

Remembering Glenn Miller, Major US Army Air Corps, lost this day in 1944. Next to a letter from home.. Check out the Major Glenn Miller and the Army Air For...ces FB page Major Glenn Miller and the Army Air Forces Band It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude of Glenn Miller’s success in the years immediately proceeding America’s entry into World War II. Though he was a relatively unspectacular instrumentalist himselfhe’d played the trombone in various prominent orchestras but never distinguished himself as a performerMiller the bandleader came to dominate the latter portion of the swing era on the strength of his disciplined arrangements and an innovation in orchestration that put the high-pitched clarinet on the melody line doubled by the saxophone section an octave below. This trademark sound helped the Glenn Miller Orchestra earn an unprecedented string of popular hits from 1939 to 1942, including the iconic versions of numbers like In The Mood (1939), Tuxedo Junction (1939) and Chattanooga Choo Choo (1941), as well as Miller’s self-penned signature tune, Moonlight Serenade (1939). In 1942, at the peak of his civilian career, Glenn Miller decided to join the war effort. At 38, he was too old to be drafted, and first volunteered for the Navy but was told that they did not need his services. Miller then wrote to Army Brigadier General Charles Young. He persuaded the United States Army to accept him so he could, in his own words, "be placed in charge of a modernized Army band." After being accepted into the Army, Glenn’s civilian band played their last concert in Passaic, New Jersey on September 24, 1942. At first placed in the United States Army, Miller was transferred to the Army Air Force. He served initially as assistant special services officer for the Army Air Forces Southeast Training Center at Maxwell Field, Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1942. He played trombone with the Rhythmaires, a 15-piece dance band, in both Montgomery and in service clubs and recreation halls on Maxwell. Miller also appeared on both WAPI (Birmingham, Alabama) and WSFA radio (Montgomery), promoting the activities of civil service women aircraft mechanics employed at Maxwell. Captain Miller initially formed a large marching band that was to be the core of a network of service orchestras. Miller's attempts at modernizing military music were met with some resistance from tradition-minded career officers. For example, Miller's arrangement of "St. Louis Blues March," which combined blues and jazz with the traditional military march. Miller's weekly radio broadcast "I Sustain the Wings" moved from New Haven to New York City and was very popular. This led to permission for Miller to form his 50-piece Army Air Force Band and take it to England in the summer of 1944, where he gave 800 performances. While in England, now Major Miller recorded a series of records at HMV (now EMI) owned Abbey Road Studios. HMV at this time was the British and sometime European distributor for the American record company that handled and originated Glenn Miller's recordings, RCA Victor. The recordings the AAF band made in 1944 at Abbey Road were propaganda broadcasts for the Office of War Information. Many songs are sung in German by Johnny Desmond and Glenn Miller speaks in German about the war effort. Also, the Miller-led AAF Orchestra recorded songs with the American singer Dinah Shore. These were done at the Abbey Road studios and were the last recorded songs made by the band while being led by Miller. They were stored with HMV/EMI for fifty years, never being released until their copyright expired in Europe in 1994. In summarizing Miller's military career, General Jimmy Doolittle (hero of the daring Doolittle Raid on mainland Japan and later the unified commander of Allied air forces in Europe in World War II) said, Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder in the European Theater of Operations. December 15 marks the date that Miller disappeared while traveling from England to France to arranged a tour for the band. To sum up his contributions I think he put it best in a press statement released in 1942, Glenn explained why he joined the service, writing, I, like every American, have an obligation to fulfil. That obligation is to lend as much support as I can to winning this war. It is not enough for me to sit back and buy bonds I sincerely feel that I owe a debt of gratitude to my country. the mere fact that I have had the privilege of exercising the rights to live and work as a free man puts me in the same position as every man in uniform, for it was the freedom and the democratic way of life we have that enabled me to make the strides in the right direction. At their last concert on November 15, 1945 in Washington DC, Eddie Cantor, introduced the Band, telling the audience, As a civilian he led an orchestra that for three years was the number one band in America. Now Glenn Miller could have stayed here. He could have made himself a lot of money. But he chose not to. He was an extremely patriotic man, and felt an intense obligation to serve his country. So he disbanded his orchestra and formed an even greater one. He took himself and his orchestra overseas where he felt he could do the most good for our fighting men. And now this great band is back here this evening without its most important man, Miller himself. For, as we know, he made the supreme sacrifice for his country. But he will never be forgotten, for always we will have the sound of the great music he created. Form a PDF Next To A Letter From Home: Glenn Miller and his Army Air Force Band in WWII

Just a coincidence that it’s giving Tuesday .. A truck load of support to my friend Wayne Morrison and the Rock for Xmas foundation We have supported his efforts for 15 years.

Congratulations my friend and long time customer Dr Peter Archer Peter will be honored tonight on Disney by a essence as an Essential educator hero! Peter is the inspiration for the main character in the soon to be released Disney- Pixar movie Soul!! The movie is even set in his former school MS74 in Queens NY. Laconia music has provided the hundreds of rental instruments to his program for 20 years!!

Orquesta Nacional Infantil de Venezuela Maestros de Fila de Cellos: Valmore Nieves y Benito Liendo Garofalo Fecha: Agosto 2013