Courtesy/TSOM

Taos School of Music News:

This Thanksgiving, while everyone else is arguing about stuffing versus dressing, you’re casually going to drop: “Did you know there are two skulls in Haydn’s tomb… and also that ‘karaoke’ literally means empty orchestra?”

Boom. Most Interesting Person at the Table unlocked.

Classic FM’s “20 downright bizarre classical music facts” is basically a cheat sheet of outrageous, bite-sized stories you can sprinkle between courses.

Examples:

• The piano sitting in the other room? Its strings are under about 20 tonnes of tension – that’s like parking a truck on your soundboard. 
• Rossini composed an aria while waiting for his risotto in a Venice restaurant. So yes, procrastinating over dinner can be productive.
• A single violin is made of over 70 pieces of wood, and in the 18th century, makers sometimes sanded them with dogfish skin (think shark sandpaper). 
• Renaissance composer Orlando de Lassus was kidnapped multiple times as a child because his singing voice was so beautiful. 
• Liszt received so many fan requests for locks of his hair that he bought a dog and sent fur clippings instead. 
• And yes, the Japanese word karaoke really does come from a portmanteau meaning “empty orchestra.”

You can spin each of these into a conversation starter:

• With the engineer cousin: “How would you design something holding 20 tonnes of tension that people slam with their fingers all day?”
• With the foodie aunt: “On a scale of 1 to Rossini-writing-an-aria-over-risotto, how inspired is your stuffing recipe?”
• With the quiet teenager: “If you were kidnapped for your talent, what would it be?”

This article arms you with the perfect mix of weird, nerdy, and delightful, so when the table starts to lull into that post-turkey silence, you’re ready:

“Want to hear about the opera singer whose facelift went so badly it made music history…?”

Pass the pie. You’ve got stories.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/latest/incredible-facts/nellie-melba/

Did You Know? 

American composer Charles Ives wrote A Symphony: New England Holidays to memorialize his boyhood memories of quintessential American holidays. The symphony’s final movement, “Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day,” is a spectacular work filled with imaginative orchestral sonorities that anticipate the innovations of Stravinsky and Copland.

Listen to this remarkable work here.