This week on the Ether Game Weekly Music Quiz Podcast, we're seeing the fruits of our labor by playing music all about... fruit! Take a bite of our show we're calling "Apples And Oranges"! Can you name this fruity tune? (The answer is below) Remember to keep your ears out for a portion of Tuesday night's Teaser selection. And don't forget to tune into the full show on Tuesday, September 25th at 8:00pm for a chance to win a prize!
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), The Nutcracker: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
Kirov Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, conductor.
The word "Sugar Plums" certainly sounds like a tasty sweetened fruit-I certainly thought it was. But a sugar plum is actually a type of hard candy. This makes sense because in the end of Act II of the Nutcracker, the Sugar Plum Fairy appears alongside other sweet treats like Marzipan, Chocolate, and Candy Canes. This particular selection is especially famous for its use of the celesta, that rather eerie and shimmering instrument you heard throughout. The celesta is a keyboard instrument where hammers strike metal plates instead of string, and was named after its "celestial" sound. It was a fairly new instrument in 1892, when Tchaikovsky used it in his Nutcracker. It was invented just six years earlier by a man named Auguste Mustel in Paris, and was probably first used by French composer Ernest Chausson in 1888.
