Patriotic Music

As well known as the music itself is, the full background to Finlandia, the great symphonic poem composed by Finn Jean Sibelius, was unfamiliar to me until very recently. It turns out that Finlandia was originally part of a larger work that Sibelius composed in 1899 with the rather unartistic title "Press Celebrations Music". The seventh movement of that work, "Tableau 6, Suomi herää (Finland Awakes)", was later reworked into a stand-alone piece and became known as Finlandia, and this is how we have generally heard it performed since that time. It has become recognized as one of the most important national songs of Finland, but it is not the national anthem, that is Maamme ("Our Land").

"A really nice selection of American patriotic music from the Revolution to the onset of the Civil War. The performances are excellent. It includes some of the best work, including his patriotic anthem Chester, by the outstanding New England choral composer William Billings."

The first ever album dedicated to the music of Ernest Shand, including several first recordings.

Michael Kamen is a master at capturing nostalgia, especially when the age in question is the bittersweet "tie a yellow ribbon" landscape of World War II. For the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers, Kamen re-visits much of the same territory he explored with fellow sepia-tone junkie Roger Waters on Pink Floyd's The Wall and The Final Cut. Alternately tragic and uplifting, Band of Brothers is a raw, patriotic, and wistfully elegiac tome of swelling choirs, salvation army brass band, and melodious strings that compliment the series' balanced depiction of the horrors of war and the unpredictable sweetness of humanity.