Welcome to State of the SkateMUSIC… the next generation of my long-running blog State of the Skate! 

As I explained in my final post at the old blog site, with State of the SkateMUSIC I intend to focus almost exclusively on the stories behind cuts of music currently being used by elite figure skaters all over the world. 

I’m starting out with two “stories” per post; that number may fluctuate depending on the piece(s) of music being discussed. And I’m choosing the music as the season progresses and different programs get revealed and/or rise in popularity… but if you’d like me to feature something in particular, please leave a comment and I’ll gladly consider it!

Time to dig in. Thanks for reading!

Moulin Rouge!

Over the past two decades, skating fans have come to see those two words in much the “warhorse” way they see Carmen or Scheherazade-- in fact, music from the Moulin Rouge! Soundtrack was singled out in this Yahoo! article as the most-used at the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang.

Was that because it was the first time all four skating disciplines could use music with vocals at a Winter Olympics, as the article theorizes? It’s possible that gave it the nod over something composed by Vivaldi or Chopin. But it also didn’t hurt that Moulin Rouge! offers a little something for everyone in its soundtrack; five skaters could generate five different programs from it.

If most of them weren’t busy incorporating “El Tango de Roxanne,” that is. Back to that in a minute…

But for those who don’t really know what Moulin Rouge! is, here’s a tiny cheat sheet:  

• It’s an American “romantic musical drama” with an Australian writer/director/producer (Baz Luhrmann), and it was a smash hit back in 200, and winning two Academy Awards. It has since been adapted into a multiple Tony-winning broadway musical as well.

• Its “romantic musical drama” plot borrows from a number of classic sources, including Orpheus and Eurydice and Puccini’s La Boheme, to tell the tale of a young poet in turn-of-the-20th-century France and the beautiful songstress/”kept woman” he falls in love with, much to the chagrin of the man who is “keeping” her.

• Here’s what I find so interesting about Moulin Rouge! as a vehicle for figure skaters… if skaters turn to “warhorses” because they want to put their own stamp on popular music choices, this musical is much the same way. It’s not just a bucket of popular music formatted for a singular production, nor is it a discography of one particular artist. Rather, it’s songs from bygone eras (“Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”, “Nature Boy”) co-mingling with recent ones, as well as classics (“Roxanne,” “Your Song,” “The Show Must Go On”) fully re-interpreted. 

• With the advent of vocals in all disciplines of elite figure skating, we almost hear more re-interpretations of pop music than originals (Like Joe Cocker covering INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” and Linda Eder & John Legend covering Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” both of which we’ve heard in the GP series this season). But Moulin Rouge! arguably got that ball rolling when “El Tango de Roxanne” got some high-profile usage in the mid-2000s… first by future Olympic Bronze Medalist Daisuke Takahashi, and then by future OGM Yuna Kim when both used an instrumental version for their short program.

• In fact, Korean Olympic hopeful Eunsoo Lim has cited Kim’s early use of “El Tango…” as the inspiration for her own use of the same SP music in the 2021-22 season.

A few years later, Canada’s Weaver/Poje made a free dance out of Moulin Rouge!’s “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Come What May,” and “El Tango…” But it was Virtue/Moir’s 2018 winning Olympic performance-- which led with “El Tango…” and finished with “Come What May”-- that is probably better remembered.

And in between those two was Ashley Wagner’s free skate-completely devoid of “El Tango…”, but brimming with “Hindi Sad Diamonds,” “One Day I’ll Fly Away,” and “The Show Must Go On.” It was a free skate she used for 2 ½ seasons, including the one that earned her a World silver medal.

So how did “El Tango…” get singled out as such a popular choice from the soundtrack? Maybe because it’s the only tango in the film, and skating has come to embrace tangos in the past 20 years? Maybe it’s the razor-sharp violin lines? Or the intense, gravelled vocals that start the piece?

Maybe because of its pivotal place in the film itself?

The piece itself, a mashup of “Tanquera,” “Roxanne” (by The Police), and “an original operatic melody line and lyrics for Christian (the Ewan MacGregor character),” according to a recent recap of the film on its 20th anniversary. “Merging together these three forms, it drives the film to its dramatic and musical climax.”

If you don’t know much about the “Roxanne” part of “El Tango…”, you might be surprised to hear the song is what put Sting and his band, The Police, on the map to rock superstardom when it became a hit in 1979. If you ARE familiar with the song, you might be surprised to hear of its roots-- as a tango!

This piece from Far Out magazine and this one from Auralcrave shed more light on “Roxanne’s” humble beginnings… in Paris, no less (where Moulin Rouge! takes place)!

OR, you can give the song a listen and try to hear the tango within it:

Will it be as popular in Beijing as it was in Pyeongchang?

Two more programs to look for this season (that do NOT include “El Tango…”) are from:

• Camden Pulkinen (USA), using “Come What May” for his SP

• Nazarova/Nikitin (UKR) using “Backstage Romance” from the Moulin Rouge! Original Broadway Cast album (which, as you’ll hear, is a reworking of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”…)

… And along with the aforementioned Eunsoo Lim, skaters that ARE incorporating “El Tango…” this season include:

• Maiia Khromykh (RUS), Free Skate

• And Della Monica/Guarise (ITA), Free Skate

Tosca

Free Skate for Satoko Miyahara, 2020-21 and 2021-22 season

If you have any amount of opera knowledge, you may find this look at Tosca (as it relates to skating music) annoyingly simplistic. But I’m in constant learning mode when it comes to certain types of music, and opera is one of those types. If you’re a skating fan who gets Puccini’s Tosca and Puccini’s Turnadot mixed up (or at least used to), perhaps you know what I mean. 

Anyway-- with vocals or without, classic works of opera have long been popular to skate to. Why? It’s the drama of it all: the powerful voices, the emotion that flows out of every note in the arrangement, and the over-the-top plot points that inspire it all. Strong jumps and spins always have their place within such music; intense choreography and step sequences underscore it perfectly, helping the skater “become” Carmen and/or Don Jose… or Madame Butterfly and/or B.F. Pinkerton…

Or in this case, Floria Tosca and/or Mario Cavaradossi. 

I found this summary-- literally called “Tosca in a Nutshell”-- that you might find interesting if you’d like to know the details of Tosca in a Cliff Notes kind of way. 

For an even shorter version: I present the following needs-to-know: (Contains spoilers!)

• Tosca has a lover (Mario); that lover does something for a friend-in-trouble that gets HIM in trouble.

• Tosca also has an admirer that is the chief of police; once Mario is under arrest, he tells Tosca if she’ll sleep with him, he’ll free Mario. Long story short, she gets what she wants for Mario and manages to murder her admirer before submitting to his advances.

• Tosca and Mario make plans to flee before her admirer’s body is discovered, but then Mario is killed as well… leading a despairing Tosca to fling herself over a wall to her death. 

Love, lust, separation, reunion, murder, suicide… who could ask for more?

When it comes to selecting just the right edit of Tosca to fill a four-minute free skate-- not sure I’ve ever seen it used for a short program-- the tried-and-true cuts tend to revolve around the ominous, haunting melody that comprises Mario’s aria "E lucevan le stelle" (“And the Stars Shone”) while he’s imprisoned, trying to compose a letter to Tosca but overwhelmed with memories of the two of them. The motif returns for his execution scene, and is played tutta forze (as loudly as possible) in the final bars as Tosca takes her own life… those final bars being the way every Tosca skate I can think of has ended, naturally!

Ever wondered how this part plays out on the stage? Take a look:

There have been countless Tosca programs through the years. By the time Michelle Kwan took it on in the 2003-4 season, she was at a stage in her storied skating career where she was using classics rather than deliberately avoiding them in favor of more unique options. And with Tosca, she chose to use the best-known motifs throughout the program, starting with what sounds like the end of the opera but fading out of the final notes… kind of like a movie that starts with an immediately intense scene, then restarts with the graphic “2 days earlier…” up on the screen:

Two years earlier, Russia’s Irina Slutskaya won her first World title with a Tosca free skate. In her version, the first minute is a less recognizable part of "E lucevan le stelle" (“And the Stars Shone”) before delivering the main motifs for the rest of the program. (And if you watch Slutskaya’s final, climatic, multi-positioned spin at 4:45 in this clip, you may notice a few bars of the music repeated an extra time or two… if I’m right about that, it must have been done to give her enough time to complete said spin and do all the final choreo flourishes at the end…

When USA’s Belbin/Agosto used Tosca for their 2008-9 season, the focus was on "E lucevan le stelle" to start, but with the vocals included… something singles skaters weren’t able to do for several more years. If you go to the ending on this one (4:25), you’ll see it ends with choreo that is pretty well suited for Tosca’s final moments (if you overlook the fact that Mario couldn’t have been holding Tosca at the end?!)… but, um, admittedly, impossible to pull off if you’re skating Tosca solo.

Which brings us to Japan’s Satoko Miyahara, who is using Tosca for her free skate this season as she did last season. What’s unique about Miyahara’s version is her usage of the titular character’s aria “Vissi d’Arte” (“I lived for art, I lived for love”) for the first two minutes. It’s what Tosca sings mournfully when faced with the choice of complying with her admirer’s demands for the sake of her lover Mario’s life… an interesting way, I think, to set the stage as she tells the rest of the story:

Miyahara is trying to qualify for her second Winter Olympics this season; she finished 4th in Pyeongchang in 2018.