On The (Formerly) Beautiful Blue Danube

When Johann Strauss, Jr. sat down in Austria 140 years ago to write this popular Viennese waltz, the Danube River was indeed beautiful, winding its way through some ten European countries. Sadly, the results of the Industrial Revolution and now some 165 million people dumping their waste into the river have done a lot of damage. There have been many attempts to reverse the problem, but it is still an uphill battle.

The juxtaposition of this once lovely river, the waltz, and the theme for this year's revue inspired my sometimes loony sense of humor to pay tribute to Strauss and Spike Jones with this fun-loving arrangement. It lets your kids have a great time with kazoos and Boomwhackers® against an orchestration of classical strings, lots of percussion, and slapstick winds. Add some sound effects and you have the formula for a favorite in the making.

The kazoos and Boomwhacker® parts are pretty easy to grasp, especially if you let your kids play along with the recording a few times. Probably the only thing to watch out for is the change of tempo at the end. It gives the players a measure to catch the new tempo, but they will need to listen.

There are a couple of neat extras for this product on the web, including a special rehearsal part for the kazoos, and a real live version of the full orchestra recording of the original waltz to download and play for your class. (See following for details.)

About the optional Boomwhacker® roll toward the end of the piece - depending on how your students play their instruments, rolls are most easily performed by a player with two tubes. These can be two different tubes within the chord, or they can be two tubes with the same note value. For our recordings, we will sometimes use two BWs with notes an octave apart, such as a G from the regular set and a G from the bass set. It is also possible to achieve a similar effect if each player with a single tube taps quickly to repeat a note often for the duration of the note.

And if you remember last year's discussion of the famous Hollywood sound effect, the "Wilhelm"... see if you can find it. (A description of that is on our web site as well. Tell your students about it, and let them listen for it in many of their favorite movies.)

Online extras - The free, downloadable extras mentioned can be found under the "Graphics and Extras" for Volume 18, No. 3 at MusicK8.com