2001: A Space Odyssey Soundtrack
Last week my lovely wife and I watched the classic 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’d seen it once before, and she had seen it several times (including watching it with her family on the night of December 31st, 2000; when she told me that story I got jealous and wished I’d done that too). It’s a great film and enjoyable to watch, if you can appreciate it for its cinematography and artistry while enduring the fact that it moves very slowly.
This time around I really enjoyed the pacing of the film. It’s a long one–just under two and a half hours–but it sets up that length perfectly from an artistic point of view. The movie begins with several minutes of a black screen with creepy music playing, and when images start appearing, they are long, lingering shots of open landscape with no action (as well as no dialogue for the first 25 minutes). This slow opening sets the pace for a long movie beautifully; if the opening had been fast-moving and action-packed, but then the film continued into a slow-moving artistic piece, it would have been artistically incongruous. The ending of the movie is also several minutes of black screen with music playing, which creates an arch-like form and is a nice way to complete the film the way it began.
I’ve never liked the way Kubrick chose Richard Strauss’ waltz music for the space scenes, particularly in the beginning of the movie (partly because I’m not a fan of the music itself). But my wife, who is often more astute at picking up on these things than I am, helped to elucidate it for me a bit more. The simple explanation, of course, is that the gently lilting waltz music mirrors the graceful floating and spinning of the ships as they move through space. But she also noted that the whimsical, happy music of the beginning sets the viewer up for a somewhat jarring contrast later as the “horrors” (as she called them) begin to unfold. So in addition to matching the action on screen at the time, it also puts us into a particular mood so that the events happening later in the movie will have a greater impact.
The final thing about the soundtrack that was interesting was a fascinating tidbit we found while rewatching one of the scenes in French. My wife is a fluent French speaker and I am an aspiring one, so when we watch movies we’ll occasionally go back and watch a scene or two in French if the language is available. In this particular case we went back to watch the scene where the astronaut Bowman disables the memory of the supercomputer HAL who is running the ship. In the English film, as HAL’s mind begins to disintegrate, he starts singing the song “Daisy” (also known as “A Bicycle Built For Two”), which is a classic American folk song. However, in the French dubbed version, he didn’t sing “Daisy” but rather “Au Clair de la Lune” (“By the Light of the Moon”), which is a classic French folk song that is the approximate cultural equivalent of “Daisy” in American English. Isn’t that cool?
Tragedy and Comedy
Last week my lovely wife and I completed the deal that we’d made a while back, that I would watch the 6 hour BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with her if she watched all three Matrix movies with me. The double wedding at the end of Pride and Prejudice reminded me of a simple, generalized classification system I’d heard of for Shakespeare’s plays: if everyone dies at the end, it’s a tragedy, and if everyone gets married at the end, it’s a comedy. My thought on the subject was also influenced by a book I read recently, Frederick Buechner’s Telling The Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. Among many other excellent insights, he describes tragedy as the inevitable–what we expect to happen, happens; and comedy as the unexpected–what we didn’t expect to happen happens. This complements the Shakespearean idea, I think: we expect that Hamlet will destroy himself and everyone else, and he does; we don’t expect Beatrice and Benedick to end up together, but they do. (Of course, now we’ve come to expect that two people who quarrel in a comedy will end up together, but I think it’s only because we’ve been culturally conditioned as a society to expect it. It still creates dramatic conflict, though, so I would say it’s still valid to think of it from an objective standpoint as being unexpected.)
Although my creative art of choice is music, I enjoy all other forms of art as well, particularly visual art (not least because my lovely wife is an illustrator and painter). And as a lover of all the arts, I’m continually exploring ways to apply concepts I appreciate in other arts—such as symbolism, imagery and negative space—to music. I recently finished composing a piece (which I may post about later in more detail) about the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. One of the symbols of the pilgrimage is a scallop shell:
and the modern symbol of the way is a representation that looks like this:
One of the ideas behind this symbol is that of many people coming from different starting points but converging upon one destination. So in trying to depict that idea musically, I have each of the eight parts play the same theme–but they enter at different times and play it at different rates. Each instrument takes the same pilgrimage, so to speak, but in its own unique way, just as individuals on a journey would. And a good deal of interest and conflict is created in the way that the parts interact as they play the same theme in different ways. But then in the end every part converges into a unison note.
So I’m always looking for ways like that to incorporate aspects of other types of art into my music. And I love this idea of tragedy and comedy–of the sadness of tragedy being what is expected, and the joy of comedy being what is unexpected. But I wonder how to portray that musically?
“Your Daddy’s Son,” Ragtime Soundtrack, Stephen Flaherty
I was listening to my iPod at work today, shuffling through my work playlist that contains mostly pop/rock stuff and musical theatre, working along, when suddenly a song struck me dead in my tracks. (Figuratively speaking; though probably “struck my hands,” or “struck my fingers” dead in their tracks would be more truthful, since I work at a computer.) It was a song I hadn’t heard before from a soundtrack I’d recently added to my iPod, and the beauty of the opening made me stop what I was doing, close my eyes for a moment and listen. The song was “Your Daddy’s Son,” from the soundtrack of the musical Ragtime by composer Stephen Flaherty. I’ve never seen the show or heard the soundtrack, so I don’t know anything about the story, but the song is apparently a mother singing to her son about his father who left her. The opening begins only with some thin, high woodwinds, then adds some very quiet percussion and picking guitar as the mother’s voice enters, singing a simple tune only on the sound “ooh.” The song continues with simple scoring of piano, woodwinds, and strings, but picks up with percussion and brass as the words build in intensity and climax. The woodwinds, guitar and piano return for the third act of the song through the quiet dénouement. The melody of the song is in minor, with intervals and rhythms very reminiscent of a folk tune, and the orchestration adds to the haunting beauty of it. You should go check it out. You can listen to it for free on Grooveshark (which I’ve found to be more reliable than Last.fm or iLike) here (just double-click on the song’s name in the window).
Concerning Alarm Clocks
I usually wake up before my lovely wife during the week (or, at least, I’m supposed to), as her classes and work schedule start later than I usually get to work. I like to let her sleep a little longer when I get up, so I try to set my phone’s alarm at as low a volume as possible so that it’ll be enough to wake me up but not enough to wake her up. But recently she’s been waking up more often with my alarm, even though I’ve chosen a ringtone that I can set to a very quiet level.
I have a theory as to why this is. (Well… I don’t have any evidence to support it, so I guess it’s really more of a hypothesis.) My idea is that she is subconsciously listening for the sound of my phone’s alarm going off–the particular ringtone that I have it set to. She knows what the alarm will sound like, and so her mind is subconsciously listening for that and is more attuned to that sound. I hypothesize that if I changed the ringtone to something else, equally as quiet in volume but a different song/sound, she wouldn’t be as easily awakened by it. Perhaps I’ll try to test it this week. What do y’all think? Does that sound like it makes sense?
“Avatar – Creating an Otherworldly Soundtrack with Avid Tools”
I received this article this week from Avid, the company that makes Sibelius, which is the music notation software program that I use. It details how James Horner, one of the A-plus-plus-list film composers in Hollywood and the composer of the score for Avatar, used Sibelius and ProTools HD (another
Avid product) to create the score for the movie. It’s mainly an extended advertisement for the products, but also provides an interesting look inside the composer’s studio in how the score was written, played and recorded.
“Avatar – Creating an Otherworldly Soundtrack with Avid Tools”
“Composing for Characters” – Up Score, Michael Giacchino
My friend Jessica today pointed me to a cool video on Michael Giacchino’s score for the movie Up (which incidentally is a great movie; it won the Academy Award for Animated Feature Film and Giacchino won the award for Best Original Score). Giacchino is one of the fastest-rising young composers in Hollywood today, and he’s becoming a household name (at least as much as any composer can be) for his work in movies like Up, the latest Star Trek movie and The Incredibles, as well as scoring J.J. Abrams’ TV shows Lost and Alias (which I’ve written about here). The score for Up perfectly captured the simplicity and emotional power of the story, and the video is an interesting look at the way Giacchino portrayed the characters with their musical themes, and how those themes evolved and interacted throughout the film. Worth a watch!
PAIRINGS: Food, Wine and Music in Napa
My good friend Courtney Patino, a rabid Dave Matthews Band fan, recommended to me a website sent to her via DMB’s email list. It’s called “Pairings,” and it details an evening of music, wine and food last fall when Dave Matthews met with New Orleans chef John Besh at the Robert Mondavi Winery in Napa Valley, California. There are five videos on the website featuring interviews with the two of them and Genevieve Janssens, Mondavi’s director of winemaking, as they tour the winery and kitchen, taste wine and food, and listen to an acoustic performance by Dave Matthews at the dinner culminating the event. It’s pretty interesting to watch, and there are some good parallels drawn between food, wine and music as being more thoroughly enjoyed when experienced together rather than individually, and how they are all meant not to be kept to yourself, but need to be shared to be experienced to their fullest potential. There’s no timer on the video frame, but I’d say each video is short–between three and five minutes long. Just one warning: don’t watch the fourth video, “A Magical Evening,” if you’re hungry–it shows the menu that John Besh put together and it’ll make your mouth water!
American Express Presents PAIRINGS: Dave Matthews and John Besh
I hope one day to be able to say, like Dave Matthews, that I have a small vineyard and a go-to winery for myself. Although I hope that unlike Dave Matthews, I will continue to pronounce “New Orleans” “New OR-luhns,” as opposed to the way he says “New OR-lee-uhns.”
Andrew Lloyd Webber vs. Stephen Sondheim
For reasons that will remain undisclosed for now, I’ve been listening to a lot of musicals on my iPod at work lately. Most of this music, of course, comes from my wife, since she studied musical theatre in high school and owns lots of soundtracks. A few that are on there now are Phantom (not Phantom of the Opera, but a different musical on the same story), The King and I, and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, which is awesome. In addition to those, I also have Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Music, The Magic, which is a three-CD set of some of his “greatest hits;” and Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim. (If you’ve never seen the Into the Woods DVD, recorded from the stage production starring Bernadette Peters as the Witch, you owe it to yourself.)
It’s been interesting to compare Webber’s music to Sondheim’s in Into the Woods. Webber’s songs are basically pop music adapted to the theatre: simple, catchy hooks and melodies, pop-style chord progressions and relatively tame rhythms with pop-style syncopations, with pop-Broadway orchestrations. Sondheim’s music, though, is closer to opera (or at least to classical) than to pop music. The melodies often contain difficult jumps that aren’t typical for vocal music and are more fragmented and motivic than long and flowing. The chord structures are often very complex. And the rhythms are constantly changing and shifting, difficult to pin down to a pattern or single time signature, and more closely follow the pattern of speech than typical musical patterns. I was surprised and impressed when my lovely wife and I watched Into the Woods a few months ago; the performances were good in themselves, but they were terrific considering how difficult the music was.
There’s nothing wrong with Webber’s music, of course; it’s pop-music candy for the ears. But for a substantial meat-and-potatoes meal, Sondheim delivers something unique and masterful that’s quite inspiring to an aspiring composer such as myself.
“An Overwhelming Feeling of Confusion”: The Brain and Atonal Music
I was referred last week to an interesting article by a fellow CFAMC composer. It talks about a new book by Philip Ball called The Music Instinct, in which he finds that there’s a neurological reason why people find it hard to enjoy atonal music by Schoenberg, Webern and the like. Apparently our brains are always looking for patterns in the music we listen to, and while music by Bach, Mozart and other classical composers naturally has the sort of organization that lends itself to pattern recognition, the music of twentieth century atonal composers is devoid of such patterns. (An interesting quote: “We measured the predictability of tone sequences in music by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and found the successive pitches were less predictable than random tone sequences.”) To his credit, though, Ball qualifies, “That isn’t to say, of course, that it is impossible to listen to, it is just harder work. It would be wrong to dismiss such music as a racket.” It reminds me of something my piano teacher at Cal State Fullerton used to say: he said that he enjoyed listening to modern, avant-garde music–as long as he was in the mood to work hard enough to understand it. Check out the Telegraph article at the following link and let me know what you think!
“Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope”
“Now My Feet Won’t Touch the Ground,” Prospekt’s March, Coldplay
The final song on Prospekt’s March, clocking in at only 2:27, is “Now My Feet Won’t Touch the Ground,” the coming to fruition of the theme of that phrase from Viva La Vida and this EP. In this song it comes to its full expression, and the lyrics seem to be accepting of death, even implying that it’s time–again envisioning death as freedom. It begins with just a solo guitar and Chris Martin’s voice, like “Prospekt’s March/Poppyfields,” but it’s much more upbeat and fuller-sounding. The guitar is tuned in a different way than a normal guitar, allowing it to utilize more strings for each chord, play melodic lines within the strings and provide a richer sound (like the guitar in “Kingdom Come,” the hidden track on X&Y). It has an almost folk-song-like quality to it, with its simplicity, easily singable melody and basic chords (I, IV and V). Some electronic effects are added in the background after the first chorus, which sound like manipulated brass samples; they foreshadow the repeat of the chorus, where the guitar and effects remain the same but a full brass section accompanies them (along with a doubling of the vocal line an octave higher). The last line (“now my feet won’t touch the ground”) is repeated with only the brass as an accompaniment, recalling the strings-only accompaniment to the chorus of “Rainy Day” earlier in the album; and with that, Prospekt’s March comes to an end.
And with it this series of blog posts! I hope you enjoyed the last two weeks, and aren’t too offended that it was published a year late. Hmmm… what to write about next?
