Music Out of the Moon
Music Out of the Moon is a music album from 1947. The compositions by Harry Revel are played by Samuel Hoffman on the theremin , who is accompanied by an ensemble led by Les Baxter . The arrangements are by Les Baxter, who landed his first hit with it. The album was released on Capitol Records .
The album, with which three shellac records were combined in the original edition , was planned to become a cult hit that appealed to a certain open and young audience. On the cover, sensational for the time, was a scantily clad woman lounging on the surface of the moon, it had the cover label Music Unusual Featuring the Theremin - Themes by Harry Revel. While exact sales are not known, sales were high enough to make newspapers rave about the “best-selling Capitol record” of all time.
Music Out of the Moon was one of two music albums that Neil Armstrong took with him on the Apollo 11 mission. The astronauts had a cassette recorder with them, and Armstrong brought along a recording of Music Out of the Moon in addition to Antonín Dvořák's Symphony From the New World .
The album, which was also released as a vinyl long-playing record in 1950 , consists of six tracks with names such as Lunar Rhapsody , Celestial Nocturne or Radar Blues .
It is a pioneering Exotica / Space Age pop album, and was a blueprint that would guide albums and soundtracks for the next ten years. Revell / Baxter used Latin American rhythms, a choir that sang no words but only individual vowels, a large orchestra with a harp that provides a full, harmonious background sound. This contrasts with a single electronic instrument - here the theremin - which at the same time was a reference to technology and its future potential in the early Space Age .
In 1999 the album was re-released in a 3-CD box along with two other Hoffman / Revel albums ( Perfume Set to Music and Music for the Peace of Mind ).
literature
- Timothy Dean Taylor: Strange sounds: music, technology & culture Routledge, 2001 ISBN 0415936837 pp. 83-88
Web links
- At Discogs
- Music Out of the Moon at Allmusic (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Thom Holmes: Electronic and experimental music: technology, music, and culture Taylor & Francis, 2008 ISBN 0415957818 p. 417
- ↑ Elijah Wald: How the Beatles destroyed rock 'n' roll: an alternative history of American popular music Oxford University Press, 2009 ISBN 0195341546 p. 187
- ↑ Timothy Dean Taylor: Strange sounds: music, technology & culture Routledge, 2001 ISBN 0415936837 p. 83
- ^ A b Albert Glinsky: Theremin: ether music and espionage University of Illinois Press, 2000 ISBN 0252025822 p. 280
- ↑ David Michael Harland: The first men on the moon: the story of Apollo 11 Springer, 2007 ISBN 0387341765 p. 174
- ↑ a b Timothy Dean Taylor: Strange sounds: music, technology & culture Routledge, 2001 ISBN 0415936837 p. 84