We have had a wonderful run, starting in late 2017 until now. No breaks, no holidays. Regular posts every week. This tends to be exhausting work, trying to find something new to share with you. And we hope to continue to do so in the future. But that future will be 2024. We need some time off to regroup and figure out the future. In the meantime, look at some of our old posts, now more than 1,000 in number. So, Happy Thanksgiving; Happy Holidays; Happy New Year. We will give you an update on January 2, 2024. (fb)

We come to the end of our series on instrumental music. We have shown the versatility of Broadway composers, as they wrote marches, ballets, waltzes and patrols: however, we cannot end our discussion quite yet. Today, war rages in Ukraine and Israel. War is being threatened by China against the Philippines and Taiwan. Yet, with all the conflicts that face us and our allies, "the plain and simple fact is" that WWII carried with it the awesome responsibility of preserving our way of life. Tonight, we are revisiting WWII (The World at War) at a time when, In 1940, the UK fought off the might of the German Luftwaffe single handed. In what has come to be known as the Battle of Britain, the Royal Air Force flew circles around the Luftwaffe and refused to cower in front of overwhelming enemy forces. Winston Churchill said it best, when he stated: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." That phrase could very well be applied to all those allied forces who served in WWII, for the future of the free world was being held in the balance. In Europe, only Great Britain and the USSR stood in the way of Hitler's total domination. In the Far East, Australia and New Zealand stood alone until December 7, 1941. Much of WWII was fought at sea, whether above the waves by planes, on the waves by ships or below the waves by submarines. However, the main purpose of the sea was our ability to transport troops to the beachheads, to the landing areas, where North Africa, Europe and thousands of islands in the Pacific waited to test our strength and our will. We should be eternally grateful that we turned the tide against Rommel, that we successfully invaded Italy and France, and that we took and held islands, such as Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. We also should be grateful that documentaries were made to commemorate these efforts. What we see in those documentaries is the awful carnage of war and the courage of those not killed or wounded to continue to move forward under fire that was taking down friends on either side. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the world will little note nor long remember what we say after the war, "but it can never forget what they did..." The war ended in 1945 on both fronts. The troops came home. Rationing ended. Factories could begin once again to make cars and dishwashers. But some photographers who had taken miles of footage during the war did not forget. They tried to put the footage into chronological order, to put names and faces and places together into a tapestry of conflict, depicting moments of complete terror, bounded by lulls of peace before and after the fighting. One such effort was the attempt to show the war at sea from archival film shot from 1941 to 1945. Spearheaded by Lt. Commander Henry Salomon after he left the Navy in 1948 and backed by his Harvard classmate, Robert Sarnoff, the project was approved by NBC in 1951. Eventually, the 60 million feet of film was cut down to 61,000 feet for 26 episodes or 13 hours of a TV show, called Victory at Sea. It was shown for one half hour by NBC on Sunday afternoons from October 26, 1952 to May 3, 1953. The producers had recognized that the footage needed two additional but vital elements, to add power to the visual images: a narrator with gravitas and a musical soundtrack that could portray the various moods of war, ranging from fear to confidence and back again to fear. In 1951, The King and I opened on Broadway, with Leonard Graves cast as The Interpreter and with the compositional team of Richard Rodgers as composer and Robert Russell Bennett as orchestrator. Leonard Graves became the narrator for Victory at Sea. And Richard Rodgers and Robert Russell Bennett collaborated on the 13 hour soundtrack. As we outlined in our website under major orchestrators, "not only did Bennett orchestrate all of the Rodgers & Hammerstein great Broadway shows, but he went on to orchestrate and partially compose the magnificent Victory at Sea suite of music. As Rodgers said in his autobiography, 'What I composed were actually musical themes [estimated to be twelve, about 2-3 minutes in length]. For the difficult technical task of timing, cutting, and orchestrating, I turned to my old friend Russell Bennett, who has no equal in this kind of work. He fully deserves the credit,…' " If you have never seen Victory at Sea, you owe it to yourself to watch the entire series. I did just that when I was seven years old, with my father sitting on one side (US Army Air Corps) and my mother on the other. I thought at the time that the men who fought in the war were all pretty old. Seeing those faces again, I now am shocked at how young they were. They were just kids, teenagers or guys in their early twenties for the most part. They weren't "ripped" with muscles; they didn't look all that impressive. They had one thing in common--determination. They had a job to do; they were trained to defend their country and families by searching out the enemies of our country and destroying them. And that is what they did. https://youtu.be/x3dwsRSA6KE "Victory at Sea" (1952) - Suite - Richard Rodgers https://youtu.be/7MxL0MePNB8 Victory at Sea Symphonic Scenario, Richard Rodgers conducting New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 1955. Arranged by RRB (12:32) (fb)