Peace on Earth

Peace on Earth may refer to:

Peace on Earth (Kitaro album)

Peace on Earth is a Kitaro album of classic Christmas songs taken from cultures around the world. It was released by Domo Records in 1996 and reissued in 2011. The reissue includes a DVD of nature visuals synchronized to music from the album.Peace on Earth peaked at number 4 on the Billboard Top New Age Albums Chart in December 1996.

Track listing

All songs are traditional, except "The Great Spirit", which was composed by Kitaro.

Personnel

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" is a Christmas carol based on the 1863 poem "Christmas Bells" by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The song tells of the narrator's despair, upon hearing Christmas bells, that "hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men". The carol concludes with the bells carrying renewed hope for peace among men.

Origin

During the American Civil War, Longfellow's oldest son, Charles Appleton Longfellow, joined the Union cause as a soldier without his father's blessing. Longfellow was informed by a letter dated March 14, 1863, after Charles had left. "I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer", he wrote. "I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good". Charles soon got an appointment as a lieutenant but, in November, he was severely wounded in the Battle of New Hope Church (in Virginia), during the Mine Run Campaign. Coupled with the recent loss of his wife Frances, who'd died as a result of an accidental fire, Longfellow was inspired to write "Christmas Bells".

Harman and Ising

Hugh Harman (August 31, 1903 – November 25, 1982) and Rudolf "Rudy" Carl Ising (August 7, 1903 – July 18, 1992) were an American animation team best known for founding the Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studios. They are particularly celebrated for Harman's 1939 antiwar MGM cartoon Peace on Earth and Ising won an Oscar for the MGM cartoon The Milky Way in 1940.

Early history

Harman and Ising first worked in animation in the early 1920s at Walt Disney's studio in Kansas City. When Disney moved operations to California, Harman, Ising, and fellow animator Carman Maxwell stayed behind to try to start their own studio. Their plans went nowhere, however, and the men soon rejoined Disney to work on his Alice Comedies and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit films. It was during this time, that Harman and Ising developed a style of cartoon drawing that would later be closely associated with, and credited to, Disney.

When producer Charles Mintz ended his association with Disney, Harman and Ising went to work for Mintz, whose brother-in-law, George Winkler, set up a new animation studio to make the Oswald cartoons. The Oswald cartoons which Harman and Ising produced in 1928 and 1929 already show their distinctive style, which would later characterize their work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon series for Warner Bros. For example, in Sick Cylinders (1929) there are sequences which were later remade very closely in such Harman and Ising Warner Bros. efforts as Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930) and Bosko's Holiday (1931). The Oswald cartoons that Harman and Ising worked on are completely different from the Oswald cartoons made before and after Disney and can easily be distinguished by anyone familiar with their work. Late in 1929, Universal Pictures who owned the rights to Oswald, started its own animation studio headed by Walter Lantz, replacing Mintz and forcing Harman and Ising out of work.