www.shoppolisislands.com

    Shoppolis Islands Information

I am Roscoe Pryne, and I sing.  I am a performer with the Danigan Group, and my favorite musical is Oklahoma, even though you see a picture of me from Gilbert & Sullivan's "Pinafore." Music plays an important part in life on Shoppolis Islands.  It is sufficiently important that on special occasions, music is piped through the public address system on the islands.  Some years ago, Alvin Smith, a sound engineer from Turkey, made his home in SI, and ended up on the SI Music Committee.  He loved music and used to say that under certain circumstances the world could be controlled if one perfect song were played to all people all at once.  As a result, he composed a piece called The SI Serenade.  Consequently, as an experiment, he played an this original digital song in 1999 without anyone warning anyone.  Only the Executive Staff and town Executives knew.  Halfway through the song, that could be heard everywhere outside, all traffic had stopped, people halted and the islands came to a crawl. 

Alvin Smith

During that time, Zurich and his staff, had the power company on Gavin 2 turn off non-essential power to the SI grid.  It was almost ten minutes later, five minutes after the song was over before anyone really noticed that there was no power.  Once they began to look around and shake their heads, the power was turned back on, and the public address system, normally used for national emergencies, explained the experiment.  No one seemed offended, and Zurich and his staff made over $300,000 in revenues from sale of the CD cut for the Islander Music Parade.  Aside from being a musician and engineer, Alvin is one of SI's most influential tour guides.  In the name of national security, ear plugs were issued to each citizen just in case.

Mercy Beckette in Oklahoma

Partial List of Ethnic Musical Instruments

Greg Prentiss and Gala Lin, both musicians with the Fishermen's End Park Players, have compiled a listing of ethnic musical instruments knowing that it is not complete.  We assured them that we would update it whenever they wanted to add to it.  Review the types presented and look them up in your catalogs of instruments or better yet, order one and learn to play it.  Some of most resounding music comes from places one would consider too remote to understand, but one thing is for sure about music....you don't have to understand it to enjoy it.

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