guess!

i love to play this game with this composer in particular because he wrote some stuff that was so very atypical of what we (as musicians) know him for. this has been stuck in my head for a bit. if you feel like playing the guessing game, click here and close your eyes and try to guess the composer.
after you've finished the little guessing game read on below.

this is the waltz from "the first echelon," film music written in 1956. it was later included in his "suite for variety orchestra no. 1" (8 movements from various film/ballet music scores)
much as i hate to do this, i'm just going to paraphrase a blurb i found while searching: shotakovich wrote quite a lot of light-spirited music, for films, plays, or plain entertainment, and they don't really have much meaning apart from that. after an initial growing pains kind of period while he suffered the "initiation" of becoming a "soviet" artist, he got used to writing music that toed the line. and paid the bills. by this time stalin was dead, of course, but film music had become one of his staples, financially speaking.
this waltz is so cute. i'm playing it in an orchestra right now for a coffee concert and it's been stuck in my head all day.

i was originally going to do some mozart today, but i got home with only 20 minutes to midnight to spare so you get something really simple today. enjoy ;)


(originally had the jump function incorporated into this post. however apparently using this feature causes the text editor on blogger to royally freeze up, so no more jumps. sorry if seeing the extra information spoiled it for anyone.)