This is twice now that one of Thomas’s journal entries has sent me off to find really cool things on the interweb.
This time it was a cool video he embedded in his entry. It’s of a group of electric string performers playing a very lively medley of familiar tunes. Hearing it took me back to my 7th grade year. I was a member of an area honor band that year, and one of the songs we played for our concert was a piece called “Instant Concert” by Harold L. Walters. It’s a medley piece that romps through snippets from something like 30 different well-known pieces of music… all at a constant tempo. It was an absolute blast, and ever since I’ve been able to remember the melody all the way through.
I did a bit of poking around in Google, and I found out that playing this one song might actually give me something in common with more people in the world than most things I’ve done. Go to YouTube and search for “Instant Concert”. I found 10 different videos of people playing this exact song, and several of them are of people that don’t speak English. 🙂 I think my favorite band performance is the performance by the Nanyang Junior College Symphonic Band (from Singapore). You have to skip to 4 minutes into the video to get to “Instant Concert.” It’s reasonably well-recorded compared to the others, and they do a very good job playing it.
My favorite link of all, though, is of a video made by some band kids who were apparently blowing off some steam and had obviously played this song a bunch of times. They decided to sing it for fun. Amazingly, I’m able to get past the fact that they’re hideously off-key, because I can so see myself having done this back in school. I was laughing through the whole video and singing right along. 🙂