Tuning in on Apple's Hottest Product Line

Published December 28 2004

By C. W. Oberleitner

DVD players, DVD recorders, plasma and flat panel LCD television sets, books, movies, Caribbean cruises, sweaters, shirts, skirts, jackets, socks, mufflers, and scarves--these are just a few of the things you may have given or received for Christmas. Chances are none of them sold half as well or was received with as much joy and pleasure as the little disk drive that could, Apple Computer, Inc.'s wildly popular family of iPod products.

Within the span of few short years, the iPod and its companion products, iTunes and the iTunes Music store, have become, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs no doubt intended, virtually inseparable from one another. You can use iTunes to mix and burn your own custom CDs of legally downloaded music from the iTunes Music Store. The iPod, however, remains the only MP3 player you can use to carry around thousands of songs from the store at one time. And, so far, it's sucessfully fending off all challengers.

If you wanted an Apple iPod for Christmas but didn't get it, or if you did get an iPod but are overwhelmed by the vast selection of recordings at the iTunes Music Store, we can help you .

The iTunery column on o-meon.com is an occasional series that, hopefully, will help the more technologically impaired among you embrace this revolutionary device and, at the same time turn, you on to some of the bins in Apple's online music emporium that don't receive the same marketing attention as the big names in popular music.

o-meon.com is a member of the iTunes Affiliates program. You can support the site and purchase many of the albums, songs, equipment, and accessories referenced in iTunery by clicking the links within the images located to the right of this column.

[For those unfamiliar with iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, you can download a FREE copy of iTunes 4.7, for Mac or Windows, and learn more about both Apple's digital jukebox and music store here. —Editor]

Nooks and Crannies

The iTunes Music Store is probably best known for its huge selection of music from a wide variety of some of today's most popular artists and musicians. At a cost of just 99 cents a song, it's the most successful legal source for downloading music in the world. As those who have whiled away a few hours in the music store know, there are quite a few gems from many genres available in its farthest reaches.

What do Law and Order SVU's forensic psychologist Dr. George Haung, The Producer's madcap personal assistant Carmen Ghia, and The West Wing's hyperventilating media relations person Annabeth Schott all have in common? Well, if you guessed Disney you'd only be partly correct.

B. D. Wong plays Dr. George Haung on NBC's popular procedural drama, Law and Order SVU. He is also the voice of Captain Li Shing in Walt Disney Pictures Mulan and Mulan II. Roger Bart, the completely over-the-top Carmen Ghia in Mel Brooks' Broadway musical version of his 1968 film The Producers, was the singing voice for young Hercules in Disney's 1997 animated film Hercules. And Kristin Chenowth, who is recurring character Annabeth Schott on The West Wing, was the maiden librarian, Marian Paroo, in Disney owned ABC TV's 2003 remake of The Music Man. She will also be the voice of Rapunzel in Disney's upcoming CG animated production Rapunzel Unbraided, currently scheduled for release in 2007.

If you're a fan of any or all of these great performers, you may be interested to know that, once upon a time, they all worked together. In the 1999 Broadway revival of You're a Good Man Charlie Brown, Wong plays Charlie Brown's best friend Linus. Chenowerth is Charlie Brown's sister Sally, who is completely smitten with Linus. And, the ever-versatile Bart plays part-time Red Baron hunting World War I flying ace and full-time flop eared beagle Snoopy.

Not all roads at the iTunes Music Store lead to or through Disney. The store does feature a huge selection of music from Walt Disney Records. There is, however, quite a bit of music from stage and screen that requires Disney fans to play Six Degrees of Mickey before making a connection to The Mouse.

One of the rarest of these gems is the original Broadway cast recording of The Roar of the Greasepaint the Smell of the Crowd. The book, music, and lyrics were written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. The show was produced by legendary--The Abominable Showman--musical theatre impresario David Merrick. Directed by Newley, Greasepaint opened May 16, 1965 and ran for 231 performances at New York's Shubert Theatre. It starred Newley and Cyril Ritchard. Ritchard is probably best known to Baby Boomers and their children from his performances in 1955 and again in 1960 as Captain Hook in the NBC TV presentation of the Broadway musical version of Peter Pan starring Mary Martin.

Initially, Greasepaint wasn't nearly as big a hit as the earlier Bricusse/Newley collaboration, Stop the World I Want to Get Off. The original cast recording, however, became an early cult favorite among then adolescent Boomers, who embraced the themes of many of its songs about the struggle between haves and have-nots, upper and lower classes. This 1990 re-release holds up remarkably well as a new audience finds these themes as contemporary and poignant today as they were nearly forty years ago.

The King of Old Broadway

Perhaps the best and worst represented musical theatre artist at the iTunes Music Store is legendary composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. To be sure, the majority of his greatest works are available through iTunes, just not very many of the original cast recordings. Only the original cast recording of Anyone Can Whistle is currently available. A search of the music store's database using "Stephen Sondheim" produces about 115 results, almost all of which are from concert albums, reviews such as Side by Side by Sondheim, or collections by famous artists like Cleo Lane covering the Sondheim oeuvre.

In 1985, Barbra Streisand released an album that is still considered a must for her fans, and Sondheim's as well. While not purely a collection of Sondheim songs, The Broadway Album (Remastered) is available, as, are most albums at the iTunes store, either song by song or, in this case, a partial album.

As you might imagine, modern musical theatre is also well represented at the iTunes Music Store. The Producers, Hairspray, and Wicked are just a few of the hit shows you can legally download, mix, and master into your own personal iTunes and iPod soundtrack.

Product of the Year

MacCentral, the online news service of MacWorld Magazine, has called 2004 The Year of the iPod.

Like two of the twentieth century's greatest achievements, the automobile and motion picture, the iPod is poised to redefine the way people live their lives in the twenty-first century. And, like the automobile and motion picture, the iPod and its companion products, iTunes and the iTunes Music store, are not based on earth-shatteringly new technologies but, rather, a rethinking or imagining of well-established ones.

Think about it, hard disk drives, which at its heart is what an iPod is, have been around for nearly half a century, and databases, the soul of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, have been around even longer. The automobile combined century old carriage building with the internal combustion engine, invented in the nineteenth century. Now it's virtually impossible to imagine a world free of cars, trucks, and SUVs--not to mention the hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars related to their manufacture, sale, and maintenance.

The same holds true of the entertainment industry. Thousands work in the creation and exhibition of movies. The life of movies once ended there; now movies live on, on broadcast, cable and satellite television, and home video tape and DVD sales. All of which arose from the nineteenth century's "magic lantern" technology.

There was even a brief merging of the two industries in the mid twentieth century with the arrival of the drive-in movie theatre. Eventually suburban sprawl and the multiplex movie theatre and home video theatre markets spelled doom for the drive-in.

As with movies and the automobile, the iPod can trace its roots back to earlier technologies, like Edison's gramophone and even earlier clockwork music boxes. The desire for music in our lives appears to be almost as strong as our will to live. And the ever-increasing success of the iPod and iTunes indicates that we've only just begun to experience the digital future of personal entertainment.

In Remembrance

Each year, time takes its toll on far too many of our favorite actors, artisans, musicians, and composers. This year we lost two giants of film score composition: Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein.

Jerry Goldsmith passed away July 21 at the age of 75. He could probably be called the Disney, SciFi, and film geek's favorite composer. His amazing body of work included the score for Mulan, the main themes for Star Trek the Motion Picture, Star Trek the Next Generation, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek Nemesis. Other classic award-winning Goldsmith scores include Stagecoach, Chinatown, Patton, and Planet of the Apes, to name just a few.

At the age of 82, Oscar and Emmy-winning composer Elmer Bernstein passed away on August 18, almost a month after his colleague Goldsmith. During a career that spanned more than fifty years, he created some of the cinema's most memorable scores. Among his best-known works are the scores for The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, and, his personal favorite, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Goldsmith was better able than any of his contemporaries to capture, in music, the essence of what it meant to be part of Hollywood's golden age. In the early sixties, he composed the main theme for David L. Wolper's documentary series Hollywood and the Stars. Within the short span of three minutes, he captured the grace, glamour, and grandeur of this by-gone era.

Elmer Bernstein's documentary signature tune, Hollywood and the Stars, along with many of his other scores as well as many of the works of Jerry Goldsmith are also available at the iTunes Music Store.

iTunery

Stephen Sondheim

Composer Jerry Goldsmith

Composer Elmer Bernstein