French composer Ernest Fanelli -- and his mustache -- in Paris, 1912. Has he written the next modern-surf-rock classic?
Here's my latest iTunes bill:
Pimsleur French 2, Unit 22 (an audiobook) ... $5.95
Tin Can Trust, Los Lobos ... $9.99
Spot the Difference, Squeeze ... $9.99
France!!! v2.0 (an iPhone app) ... $2.99
Fanelli: Symphonic Pictures ... $9.99
This is a rather telling bill, isn't it?
First, it says, "Hey, this guy loves France!" And yes, I do. Quebec too. I also love the French language, French food, French booze and French movies -- but I'll save all that for my new "Things No One Cares About" blog.
The bill also says I've downloaded a few albums (including new stuff by Los Lobos and Squeeze), albums I've -- so far -- failed to review or mention in this blog. They're both great, by the way, and they'll be addressed in my next entry.
And then there's that last item: "Fanelli: Symphonic Pictures."
Even though I'm a Fanelli -- and I've even been known to hastily slap together a tune or two -- this album, a classical work recorded by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2002, has nothing to do with me. At least I think it doesn't.
Not long before he died in 1996, my father, another Fanelli, said something to the effect of, "There are many Fanellis in Paris. We have lots o' relatives there." This is something that has stayed with me, and every now and then, I do the odd Google search, looking for some long-lost, stinking-rich French cousin, someone with a lot of French booze, perhaps.
Last night, Google came up with a new result: French composer Ernest Fanelli, born in Paris on June 29, 1860. This struck a chord with me because, besides his last name and the bit about the song writing, there's his birthday, June 29, which happens to be my birthday. (I burst onto the scene just a few years later, of course.)
And, as it turns out, he's an interesting guy. So interesting, in fact, that it's generally accepted that two of Fanelli's more famous and slightly younger contemporaries, Claude Debussy and Joseph-Maurice Ravel, based a lot of their well-known impressionist compositions on a Fanelli score called Tableaux Symphoniques, which was first performed in Paris in 1912. It actually was written nearly 30 years earlier, and the score was apparently gawked at -- while still unpublished -- by people like Debussy and Ravel, who -- how shall I put this? -- stole bits of it.
Fanelli has been called "one of the greatest inventors and musical iconoclasts of all time."
Right. Anyway, I'm listening to "Symphonic Pictures" (aka Tableaux Symphoniques, 1883/1886) with the idea that it might be cool to pinpoint a simple melody within the overall work and make a modern-surf tune out of it -- sort of "Fanelli covers Fanelli." I think I've found something catchy in one of the later movements on the album.
This could be interesting -- especially if your name is Fanelli!
To read more about Ernest Fanelli, and to get a better look at his mustache, click here:
