Feeling Hawkish

A look at the songs that have shaped
my life and ended up on my devices.

A classical track or two has made it onto my devices. This one is both a wonderful classical piece and a chunk of a classic movie score: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Sea Hawk.



It sounds even better in this version than it does in the original film. This is how Hollywood movie music used to sound: big and majestic and powerful. You don't hear it like this anymore. Maybe from John Williams or Danny Elfman you do, but how many movie scores burn themselves into your head?

We had the soundtrack CD laying around the studio when I worked at KBIA-FM in my University of Missouri years. Occasionally, on our in-depth news program "Between The Lines," we would pop it in and play it for bumps between reports. It shook things up from the jazz cues we usually pumped out. It has energy, and you need to be pumped up when you're anchoring a hectic half-hour radio show and watching the board operator behind the glass hurriedly load up reel-to-reel tapes and cartridge machines. Sometimes the technology -- and the operator -- would not work as expected.