A former film student, Song turns out to be making a video about red balloons, which suggests that Mr. Lamorisse's 1956 movie is beloved not only by Western children.
The first, to a folk tune previously used for a student song about Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great, corresponded to Chapter 13 of the Anthropogenie and tells how zoologists' lancets raised the status of the lancelet (Reymond 1877, pp. 76 79).
The composer thanked the university by writing the Academic Festival Overture (1881) based on various German student songs.
Rather than composing some ceremonial equivalent of Pomp and Circumstance a more standard response Brahms crafted what he described as a "rollicking potpourri of student songs," in this case mostly drinking songs.
In "The Damnation of Faust," he whipped up Hungarian marches, student songs, and peasant rounds as enthusiastically as he did the shimmering string effects and jagged assaults of the brass.
Brahms described the work — written to thank the University of Breslau, then part of the German Empire, for giving him an honorary doctorate — as "a very boisterous potpourri of student songs".
During the first half of the program about 80 student choristers, along with some student percussionists and a couple of rappers, joined a roster of musicians from the Philharmonic to present an imaginative original work by the students, "Songs: Ritual Rhythms," sort of a street oratorio based on themes, philosophical and musical, from "The Rite of Spring".
The title Nimmersatte Liebe (Insatiable Love) is immediately undercut by a teasing piano introduction and, despite the intervening chromatic treatment of the pains of passion (girls are like lambs under the knife, the poet tells us), it all ends, as Wolf put it in a letter to a friend, by breaking out "into a right old student's song, damned merry".
At the last one, cast members taught students the song "There's No Business Like Show Business," and some students read their written work onstage.
Kyla La Grange is a former Cambridge philosophy student whose songs are inspired by the "epic sadness" of Cat Power and Elliot Smith.
After study at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin (B.A., 1936), and Columbia University, Lomax toured the prisons of the American Deep South with his father, John Lomax, also a noted student of folk song, recording folk-song performances for the Archive of American Song of the Library of Congress.
