Adventures in music

Serendipity in restoration

I've been working on restoring my iTunes library. About a third of it was saved on the external hard drive and I was able simply to copy it over to the computer after restoring the system. But the rest was mostly imported from CDs, so I've been re-importing those, and along the way also importing some CDs that I hadn't imported before, especially some classic country (Hank Williams), jazz (Duke Ellington), and world music.

One of the more interesting discs in that last category is one that wasn't in the online CD database, so I had to type in the song names by hand – and I had to leave out a lot of diacritical marks. It's Czech, Na Mělnickén Vinobraní, by Orchestr Tancovačka řídí Milan Baginský.

I'm guessing it's more from the Moravian side of things than the Bohemian, since the picture on the cover is a castle on a hill covered with vineyards, and about half the songs contain vino or cognates of that word in their titles, while pivo is not mentioned. The dominant song types are polkas and valčiks, which seem to be what a waltz is when it's played with a strong tuba line. One of my favorite tracks is "Na Zdraví," which is the standard Czech toast and translates roughly as "To Life."

All in all, it's a great party soundtrack, if you're celebrating a Central European harvest festival.