Katherine Hoover, born in West Virginia and living in New York City, is a leading composer and flutist who attended the Eastman and Manhattan Schools of Music. On several occasions she has been drawn to Native American subjects through works in media other than music. In the case of Kokopeli (1990), her most often performed and recorded work for flute, the composition was suggested by the Hopi Nation stories of Kokopeli, who is one of the mahu, or hero spirits, and who is often depicted as a hunchbacked flute player. Kokopeli led the migrations of the Hopi through the canyon lands of the Southwest, playing his flute so the people could follow him by sound, a sound that can sometimes be heard whistling through the canyons and reflecting off cliffs. Hoover sought in this work to depict this wandering, during which the Hopi learned of their special relationship with the land. The music has a kind of solemn joy, and suggests a Native American ritual (Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide). Watch a performance of Katherine Hoover's Kokopeli by flutist Johanna Borenstein . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), the stark tale of political and moral corruption in Los Angeles, is one of the undisputed classics of a bright decade in American filmmaking. In Chinatown Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne took the disillusioned, shadow-dappled cinematic language of '40s film noir and translated it into contemporary terms. Every neo-noir film released since then has borrowed from Chinatown, which looks as fresh today as it did in 1974. Yet a preview audience hated it, and studio executives were sure that it would bomb at the box office - until composer Jerry Goldsmith, working against the clock, wrote a brand-new score that helped turn a costly disaster into an unforgettable hit. It isn't unusual for movies to be rescored under pressure, but Goldsmith's music for Chinatown is so well suited to the film that it's hard to imagine that he knocked it out at the very last minute. The original score, written by Phillip Lambro, was heard on the soundtrack of the version of the film that was shown seven weeks prior to the film's release date at a preview in San Luis Obispo, a small town north of Los Angeles. "By the time the lights came up, half the audience had walked out, scratching their heads," Robert Evans (the film's producer) wrote in his 1994 autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture. Concluding that Mr. Lambro's original score was responsible for the film's poor reception, Mr. Evans called in Goldsmith, and 10 days later Chinatown had a new score. Mr. Towne, who was present at the first recording session for Goldsmith's score, later told a journalist that "you could see the movie come to life. It was like you couldn't see the movie with the other score, and now you could, and I thought, 'Omigod, we may have a chance.'" So it did: Chinatown is now universally acknowledged as one of the key American films of the '70s. Yet most of the critics ignored the score, and though Jerry Goldsmith received an Oscar nomination for Chinatown, he lost out to Nino Rota for The Godfather, Part II. Nowadays, of course, film connoisseurs don't need to be told twice that the music of Chinatown is central to its greatness - but how many people are aware that Goldsmith's score is one of the finest compositions of the postwar era, regardless of genre? (Terry Teachout, WSJ Online) Watch an excerpt from Roman Polanski's Chinatown . . . it's our PYTHEAS SIGHTING for the week.

Jeremy Grimshaw writes of our Second New Music Video for the week: "Of Charles Ives' more than 200 songs, General William Booth Enters Into Heaven (1914/33) is one of the best known, and certainly one of the most musically ambitious. The stirring song is a setting of the poem by the same name, penned by Vachel Lindsay in 1912. The poem, which became very popular and brought considerable notoriety to its author, is an ode to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. In it, Lindsay imagines Booth marching into the hereafter at the head of a large army consisting of lepers, drunks, and other downtrodden folks, of which 'each slum had sent its half-a-score the round world over.' These 'vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath' march as a procession in drills before the pearly gates, and, as they enter in, Jesus appears, his outstretched hand healing them of their ills. Ives' brash musical style is a perfect match for Lindsay's uncompromising imagery (which William Butler Yeats praised for being 'stripped bare of ornament'). Ives characteristically includes in his broad palette of musical materials liberal quotations from familiar musical sources. The most prominent of these is a repeated refrain, interpolated throughout the song, which is taken from the Salvation Army hymn tune known as 'Fountain.' The refrain, which often finds itself juxtaposed with Lindsay's most unsavory images, poses the question 'Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb.' These parenthetical asides poignantly highlight a familiar Christian metaphor by placing side-by-side the unsightly image of Jesus' suffering with that of Booth's weary followers. Ives' further seems to revert the message outward to the listener by rendering the refrain with a sudden change of tonal orientation. This imperative is driven home when, at the end of the piece, as Booth's troops are healed and welcomed into heaven and the piano's drum beats fade into silence, the refrain appears once again as a lingering question." Watch a performance of Ives' General William Booth Enters Into Heaven by The Lee University Chorale, with Dr. William Green, conductor . . . our second FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEO.

"I never saw Duke Snider play — by the time I became aware of the Dodgers, Snider had been lost to the newly created Mets and then traded to the hated Giants. But the old-timers still talked about him and that kept the memory of his greatness alive. The Duke was part of the collective memories of the fans — our shared history, our myth, our lore. Baseball fans love this kind of stuff — the constant measuring of the present against the past, the counting of things, the microscopic scrutiny of arcane statistics. The baseball historian Bill James revolutionized the way players and games get evaluated with his innovations in how these statistics get sliced up and weighted, inventing new terms like 'sabermetrics' and 'win shares.' Baseball fans not only love this stuff; they think that knowing these things makes the game more fun to watch. Connections are drawn between the game in front of you today and all the games ever played before, creating an intense dialog between each player on the field and all past players on all past fields. Somehow the legendary magnificence of baseball's past doesn't get in the way of enjoying what is happening in baseball’s present. Can we say the same thing about classical music? Not always. Our love of the past can enhance what we hear, but I often feel that the appreciation of classical music’s glorious past can get in the way of truly hearing the music being made right now . . ." Read more from A Pitch for New Music, written for The New York Times by composer David Lang . . . this week's FEATURED THOUGHT & IDEA.