Hello and welcome to Morganchem, the home of all things NErDy at Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School and the official web presence of Michael Morgan.
I take your child's education very seriously. It is with that intention that I have provided this webpage for you and your child to help get a better understanding of what goes on in their Chemistry class. Here you will find our weekly and semester long schedules, copies of all the homework assignments and laboratories, daily announcements, and important information to help parents keep their children on track.
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Over the past twenty years music education has disappeared from our schools. This becomes obvious when listening to new music on the radio only to hear music that is unoriginal or even bad. Most of today's so called artists do not write their own music or even play their own instruments.
So in the spirit of teaching you everything we can, this page features an Album of the Week. These are not ordinary albums in the history of music. These are the groundbreaking pieces of music that truly shaped how music was presented, recorded, and how it influenced other musicians and the public.
A few notes about the choices. They are albums and not collections of single songs thrown together willy-nilly. They were meant to be played in order. They often told a story or set a mood. Some of them defined a genre and some defined a generation. I strongly recommend that you ask your Parents/Grandparents to dig through their record collections and find their old copies of these and put them on the turntable and experience them the way they were meant to be experienced.
Tubular Bells is the debut studio album by English composer and songwriter Mike Oldfield. It was released on 25 May 1973 and is important historically as the first album ever released on Virgin Records, with the catalogue number of V2 001.
Mike Oldfield was only 19 years old when the album was recorded and he played most of the instruments, on the mostly instrumental album, himself.
The album sold slowly at first but gained world-wide recognition in December 1973 when its main opening theme was used for the sound track of the horror film The Exorcist. This caused a huge surge in sales, which increased Oldfield’s profile around the world. The album stayed in the top ten of the UK Albums Chart for a year from March 1974 during which is it was number one for one week. In the US it reached number 3 on the Billboard 200 and was also number one in Canada and Australia.
The album has sold over 2.7 million copies in the UK and about 15 million worldwide.
A number of different versions of Tubular Bells have been issued over the years including sequels and remastered editions.
Its importance and contribution to British music and culture was...(continued)
Tubular Bells is the debut studio album by English composer and songwriter Mike Oldfield. It was released on 25 May 1973 and is important historically as the first album ever released on Virgin Records, with the catalogue number of V2 001.
Mike Oldfield was only 19 years old when the album was recorded and he played most of the instruments, on the mostly instrumental album, himself.
The album sold slowly at first but gained world-wide recognition in December 1973 when its main opening theme was used for the sound track of the horror film The Exorcist. This caused a huge surge in sales, which increased Oldfield’s profile around the world. The album stayed in the top ten of the UK Albums Chart for a year from March 1974 during which is it was number one for one week. In the US it reached number 3 on the Billboard 200 and was also number one in Canada and Australia.
The album has sold over 2.7 million copies in the UK and about 15 million worldwide.
A number of different versions of Tubular Bells have been issued over the years including sequels and remastered editions.
Its importance and contribution to British music and culture was recognized when Mike Oldfield played extracts from the piece during the Opening Ceremony for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
Oldfield learned to play the guitar at an early age and played in folk clubs with friends at the age of 12 or 13. He did not have a happy childhood and to escape trouble at home, he spent many hours in his room practicing his guitar and composing instrumental pieces.
By the age of 17, Oldfield, by now an accomplished musician, was the bass player for a group called Whole World and spent several month in 1970 recording an album at the Abbey Road Studios. This experience was his introduction to a variety of instruments – pianos, harpsichords, percussion instruments – and he would arrive early to spend hours experimenting and learning how to play each one.
In 1971 Oldfield was lent a two track Bang & Olufsen ¼ “ tape recorder which he modified by blocking off the eraser head. This enabled him to record one track of music, bounce it to the second track and then record a new instrument on the first track. By repeating this process he overdubbed each instrument one at a time, making a multi-track recording. Using this technique he made demo recordings of a piece that he had been composing in his head for years, provisionally titled Opus One.
He approached most of the main stream record labels with the demos, but no-one was interested, especially because the tracks had no vocals. Eventually, just as he was considering contacting Soviet Embassy in London, having heard that the Soviet Union paid musicians to give public performances, he was introduced to the young entrepreneur Richard Branson.
The rest, as they say, is history!
Mike Oldfield spent a week at Branson’s home recording “Opus One” which became “Tubular Bells”. He played all the instruments himself using his overdubbing technique and won the 1974 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition.
The iconic artwork on the cover of the album – a triangular bent bell - was inspired by the damage Oldfield had done to the tubular bells while playing them for the record. Oldfield loved the artwork and insisted that the title and his name be printed in pale orange, so as not to distract from the overall image.
The “bent bell” has become the image most associated with Oldfield and appears on all of the sequel albums and as the logo for his company Oldfield Music Ltd.
In another nod to the importance of the album in British culture, the cover of Tubular Bells was chosen as one of ten images for the UK Royal Mail’s “Classic Album Cover” postage stamps issued in January 2010.
The significance of the this album to his Virgin company was not lost on Richard Branson. He named his first Virgin America aircraft Tubular Belle, carrying on the legacy of the Virgin Atlantic 747 of the same name.
“I never thought that the words “tubular bells” were going to play such an important part in our lives … Virgin going into space most likely wouldn’t have existed if we hadn’t hired that particular instrument.”