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November 05, 2009
Jeans by Ives
e classical music, they tend to recycle a few woefully familiar pieces: the Pachelbel Canon, “Carmina Burana,” “La donna è mobile,” the “Ode to Joy.” So it’s a bit of a shock to find Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” turning up in a recent ad for Levi’s jeans. There’s a contemporary twist to the sound: we’re actually hearing an extended version of “The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead,” a song by the Toronto-based singer-composer-violinist Owen Pallett, who performs and records under the name Final Fantasy. Pallett begins with an austere arrangement of the Ives masterwork and later segues into his own material. The ancient-sounding man intoning Walt Whitman in the ad is, as far we know, Walt Whitman himself. The original recording can be heard at the Walt Whitman Archive. (Thanks to Opera Chic.)
Originally posted by Alex Ross from Unquiet Thoughts, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Nov 5, 2009 at 05:10 PM