Current Assignment(s)Students should be working on the Remote Learning Assignment for the week of April 13 (due Monday, 4/20). Details can be found in Google Classroom. Practice Resources can be found here. | Updates |
This Day in Music
- National Glazed Spiral Ham Day
- National Rubber Eraser Day
- National Take a Wild Guess Day
- National Tax Day
- National Titanic Remembrance Day
There are also some interesting pieces of music history that happened on April 15:
 | April 15, 1729: Johann Sebastian Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" premieres in Leipzig, Germany. It sets chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel of Matthew to music, with interspersed chorales and arias and is widely regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of classical sacred music. Click here to learn more. |
April 15, 1896: The first Modern Olympic Games close in Athens, Greece. This may not seem like an important musical event - but did you know that the Olympic Games used to include fine arts? Between the years of 1912 and 1952, juries awarded a total of 151 medals to original works in the fine arts inspired by athletic endeavors, including music. The first-ever Gold Medal for Music was won by Italian composer and pianist Riccardo Barthelemy for his "Marcia trionfale olimpica" ("Olympic Triumphal March"). Click here to learn more.
| April 15, 1961: The Music Man closes at Broadway's Majestic Theater after 1,375 performances. The show opened in 1957 and became a hit, winning five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The cast album won the first Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album and spent 245 weeks on the Billboard charts. The show's success led to revivals, including a long-running 2000 Broadway revival and a popular 1962 film adaptation. It is frequently produced by both professional and amateur theater companies. Click here to learn more. |  |
April 15, 2019: Aretha Franklin posthumously receives the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation honor. She is the solo first woman to receive the award, which is not necessarily given every year. Franklin was recognized "for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades." Learn more here.
Aretha Franklin is arguably one of the most recognizable voices of all times, and she impressed audiences throughout the span of her career: from her string of early hits in the 1960s to her final performances in the 2010s:
| Aretha Franklin performs "The Shoop Shoop Song" in 1964. | Aretha Franklin performs "Natural Woman" at the Kennedy Center Awards in 2015. The performance was a tribute to fellow artist and honoree Carole King, who wrote the song for Franklin in 1967, and clearly loved this rendition of it! |
The Catchiest Pop Song Ever?
In 2014, a group of researchers in England released an online test called "Hooked on Music." It contained one thousand clips from pop hits, going all the way back to the 1940s, and it asked 12,000 participants to identify songs as fast as possible. They found that "Wannabe" by The Spice Girls was the catchiest song: people were able to recognize it in about 2.3 seconds, which was way below the 5-second average of identifying other popular songs.
Click here to learn more, and watch the Top 10 Catchiest Songs, as identified by the survey:
Click here to learn more, and watch the Top 10 Catchiest Songs, as identified by the survey:
So what do you think? Is "Wannabe" really the catchiest pop song? What song would you vote for as the catchiest of all times?
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