A strange math: GI Bill + Henry Mancini = Lata Mangeshkar!

It is the middle of the term, and I have way too many papers to read and grade.  If only I simplified my life and students' lives by not assigning so much of writing, and instead used bubbling-in testing, right?

Nah!  Never, ever!

But, I always seem to have a great deal of inertia when it comes to this task.  I then look for distractions so that I can put off the reading and commenting and grading that much longer, even as the pressure builds within me that I am delaying it.

Following political discussions, or anything related to higher education, is, therefore, very, very appealing right now.  In this essay, I read:

it was the G.I. Bill that really gave us the Mancini we love. Without its backing he would likely not have been able to afford to study at the Westlake School of Music. There he attended one-on-one theory and harmony classes with Alfred Sendry, a former classmate of Bartok, and orchestration with Mahler’s son-in-law, the romantic-turned-atonalist Ernst Krenek. Anyone who admires Mancini’s score for Stanley Donen’s Arabesque, with its thunderously unsettling chromatic bass riff and its double harmonic (Arabian) melody line that can never quite settle on either A minor or G minor, should be thankful for what he learned at Westlake—and doubly thankful that he wanted to share it with us. If Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock served to introduce many people to the discordant ideas of late romanticism, Mancini’s functioned to popularize the yet harsher sounds of Viennese modernism. Even the lovely waltz-time theme he wrote for Donen’s Charade, which finds room for an astonishing diminished C sharp arpeggio in it’s A minor melody, can pain as much as it pleases.

As I continued reading, in the background my mind was bothered that it could not remember the Charade tune.

So, when done with the essay, I hopped over to YouTube, and easily tracked down Charade.

As the music started playing, I was immediately reminded of a Hindi film tune.  Another quick search; here is Lata Mangeshkar singing the tune that is pretty much the Charade theme. 

Now, about those papers ...