In the “Sometimes we laugh to keep from crying” department, a snippet from Friends that seems to me sadly applicable. Joey’s refrigerator has given up the ghost, and his solution was…this.
In times like this I often turn to optimistic art that reminds me that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is, and that it won’t always be like this.
In that spirit, here is “Another Day of Sun”, the opening number from La La Land.
There’s a small visual memory that I’ve been carrying around for years, in my head. I have thought that it would turn up someday in a story I wrote, and who knows, maybe it still might…but right now it’s relevant to my photography journey. It has to do with light and the things it does.
It may have been close to twenty years ago, maybe more, but I was driving on Union Road in Cheektowaga, NY, maybe on my way to the Walden Galleria or the Borders Bookstore there (before it eventually closed, obviously). It was a warm summer day, and while I was driving, one of those quick in-and-out thunderstorms rolled through. You know the type, the ones that announce themselves with a sudden darkening of the skies, some lightning and thunder, and with a few big fat drops coming down before the skies open up. And the storm is over as quickly as it came; ten minutes or so of rain, another five or ten minutes of slackening and clearing, and then the sun is back out and you’re looking at the back of the storm clouds as they depart.
And everything now is wet. The whole world, it seems, has been momentarily soaked.
That was the case as I was driving that day. Storm barrels through and leaves, and the sun comes back out and everything is soaked.
But after such a storm, everything also has been suddenly cleaned and made shiny again, and the pavement itself is gleaming and shiny with the brilliant post-rain light. And on this particular day, as I drove up Union Rd. behind some other guy, I saw something amazing that I’ve never seen since: because the car in front of me was kicking up spray from the water still on the street, and because the bright afternoon sun was shining through that spray, that sunlight was getting broken up into a spectrum. Two tiny spectrums, that is–one for each tire.
Put another way: it was like the car in front of me was driving on rainbows.
I had never seen that before. I had never seen light do that before.
And I’ve never forgotten that. I thought it was a detail I’d save for use in a story someday. I never thought it was a lesson my brain was filing away for when I’d find myself in a place where recognizing light as an active force would be desirable.
One constant recommendation I see in photography content aimed at beginners and novices is to shoot at “Golden Hour”: the hour or so surrounding sunrise and sunset, when the light is bright and golden and rich and amazing. And yes, this is great advice. Everybody should shoot at Golden Hour when they can. (That last, “when they can”, is something I’ll need to address another time.)
There’s another time when I think the light is frankly astonishing, and that’s right after one of those rainstorms. Maybe you won’t see rainbows under the wheels of the car in front of you, but you’ll see amazing gleaming and reflections that you won’t see any other time. You’ll see color that’s somehow cleaner, more perfect, than at just about any other time. You’ll see light doing things that you won’t see any other time.
Last week I was on the roof at work. I’m required to go up there a few times a month to check things out, verify that there is no existing damage to the roof membrane, check the functioning of rooftop-mounted HVAC systems and exhaust fans, stuff like that. Well, while I was up there, on a sunny day, one of those ten-minute storms raged through. I just hung out in one of the machine houses while it went on by, dumping water on everything, and then sure as anything, the sun was back out. I continued my walk, eventually moving along the part of the roof at the front of The Store, the part that overlooks the parking lot.
What I saw amazed me, so I pulled out my phone and took a quick shot and did a quick edit in Snapseed.
It wasn’t just the way that the sun was gleaming off the cars that had been suddenly washed by rain to a high shine. It wasn’t just the way the colors of those cars popped as if they had been painted by some master. It wasn’t just the way those gleaming surfaces reflected off the wet pavement.
It was all of that, at once.
We often think of “the light” as a passive thing, but no…in this moment the light was active. It was dancing in the clean air after the storm. And I saw it.
So I guess that was the lesson from all those years ago: not that I had seen something that might be useful in a story or an essay, but that I had seen that light doesn’t just shine. It dances and bobs and weaves and flits and does all that kind of Carl Sandburg stuff.
Not a bad lesson for a photographer to receive, huh?
I was trying to come up with a theme for this month’s Tuesday selections, since themed groupings are fun and this month is good because it has five Tuesdays instead of the usual four. (Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure if it’s more frequent for a month to have four Tuesdays or five….) So, what we’re going to do is look back one hundred years! Every Tuesday Tones work this month is a piece that premiered in 1925. We’re basically looking at where classical music was a century ago.
We’ll start with a piece I actually featured a year ago! But it’s a good piece, and I have no problem featuring good works more than once, so let’s listen again to Manuel de Falla’s wonderfully sensual, exotic, and fiery ballet El amor brujo. The ballet tells the story of a woman who is haunted by her dead husband’s ghost as she goes to marry another, and it really is one of the few outright sexual works of classical music that I know. I always have difficulty when people describe specific works as “sexy” or “sexual”; most times I just can’t hear it in that music, which inevitably leaves me to wondering if I’m not…well look, you know what I’m getting at. Ravel’s Bolero is often mentioned as a sexual and erotic work, and yet every time I hear it, I want to ask the people citing that one just how boring their sex lives really are.
But I digress. Let’s get to the music. This ballet is by turns energetic, gorgeous, moving, exciting, and downright sensual. I love this aspect of the music of a century ago.
If not for Monty Norman and John Barry’s work on the James Bond Theme, the most famous theme for an action-packed spy series would almost certainly be Lalo Schifrin’s theme to Mission: Impossible.
Schifrin passed away today at the age of 93. He was one of the bigger names in film music, and he had a long and distinguished career composing for film. His voice will endure, though. It absolutely will endure.
Here is Mr. Schifrin himself, leading a performance of what might be his most famous work. I honestly had no idea he was this good a pianist!
According to the signs at the Botanical Gardens two Saturdays ago, those are the names of the persons who were getting married at a ceremony at the Gardens while we were there. Sure enough, as we arrived in one of the rooms bordering the courtyard, there was the wedding, just finishing up. How did I know they were just finishing up? Because we arrived in this room as “Ladies and gentlemen, I now present Mr. and Mrs. ____”, at which point the groom kissed the bride.
I, of course, armed with Miranda, saw a good opportunity for framing up a good shot.
A minute later I was at the other end of the room (the Orchids and Tropical Plants room), and our newlyweds did their recessional, which meant that they were walking toward me in the room, and when they reached the back of the courtyard, they paused for another kiss…which gave me another opportunity to frame them up:
Truth be told, I like the second one better than the first. They’re not partially obscured by their guests in their seats, and I was able to use the string lights inside to offer a bit of added symmetry.
I’ve noticed, as I practice photography, that I really like framing. I’m always on the lookout for good opportunities for framing, and the windows at the Botanical Gardens, with their old weathered glass and wood, offer up really nice opportunities for framing. I’m mildly amazed that Dave and Twiggy’s paid photographers weren’t inside getting good framed shots of their own. What were they thinking! Amateurs!
(I’m kidding there, by the way. I’m sure those photographers are professionals who know way more about wedding photography than I do.)
Anyway, congratulations to the happy couple, and thanks for providing a novice photographer a nice opportunity for practice!
Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was a prominent 20th century voice in American music, as well as gay art. He explored homosexual themes in his work, which was strongly modernist to the point of being avant-garde at times. He was heavily influenced by Asian music and Asian sounds, and he incorporated those sounds and tonalities into much of his own work. Harrison was one of the most important gay musicians of the last century, and he was open during his life about the influence his own homosexuality had on his art and how it informed much of what he had to say through his art. How difficult that must have been, even as he watched acceptance of homosexuality slowly, ever so painfully slowly, grow in America. And that struggle has by no means ended.
Today’s work, Pacifika Rondo, features that fascination with Asian sound. Here are some notes I found about it (via):
British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
But on today’s date in 1963, East did meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, Pacifika Rondo Written for an Orchestra of Western and Oriental Instruments, at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.
For Lou Harrison, it was just one more stop on a journey he had begun decades earlier.
In the spring of 1935, when he was a teenager, Lou Harrison enrolled in a course called “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by American composer Henry Cowell, who became Harrison’s composition teacher. Cowell urged his pupils to explore non-Western musical traditions and forms. Javanese gamelan music became a big influence in Harrison’s music, and, in 1961-62, a Rockefeller Foundation grant made it possible for him to study Asian music in Korea.
The movements of Harrison’s “Pacifika Rondo” refer to various sections of the Pacific Basin.
Like many modernist works, it is a fascinating listen, a study in pure musical color and mood.
(This is a repost of what I wrote when composer James Horner died ten years ago, very prematurely, in a plane crash. Apparently Horner had been an amateur, hobbyist pilot. My relationship with his music through the years was complicated, but I wouldn’t ever say it was complicated to the point of being “love-hate”. Horner was one of the most important and notable film composers from 1980 until his death, after all, and as prolific as he was, I wish he was still around.)
Composer James Horner died the other day when the airplane he was piloting crashed. He was the sole passenger.
This is, quite simply, the worst news to hit the film music world since Michael Kamen, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein all died within a year of each other.
For me, though, the hit is more directly personal. Although my relationship with Horner’s music has been rather complicated over the years, he still wrote a fair number of my favorite filmscores of all time, and when a score of his connected, it connected. He had the ability to hone in on the precise moment of a given scene’s emotional high point and construct his music to reach its high at the same moment. All film composers strive for this, but Horner’s gift for this was something else.
Moreover, I saw Horner’s career take flight, as he rose from obscurity to, well, stardom in his small corner of the film world. He started writing for films in the late 1970s, and I first encountered him in his fifth film, the Roger Corman space opera flick Battle Beyond the Stars. This is the first James Horner music I ever heard:
That score is still a fun listen to this day, even with all its minor faults: its heavy debt to Jerry Goldsmith (one of Horner’s strongest early influences), its occasionally awful orchestration (there is a track called “Cowboy and the Jackers” when you can hear the trumpet section slowly die), and occasional transitional missteps. Horner wrote a swashbuckling score that was better than the film it accompanied (although the film really is not all that bad, as long as you don’t ask too much of it).
When next I encountered the music of James Horner, it was for another science fiction film: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Gone was Jerry Goldsmith’s brightly optimistic bombast from The Motion Picture, and in its place was a lyrical score that had an older and more seafaring quality to it.
It wasn’t all lyricism, though; Horner’s action writing was impeccable, and the film’s climax gives a great example of Horner’s skill for matching the music to the exact visual and the emotional beats of the scene. Here is the music, titled “Genesis Countdown”:
And here is a portion of the scene as scored, starting with the Enterprise backing away from Khan’s crippled Reliant:
This entire cue is a clinic in how to spot a film: you hear the desperation as the ship begins to move so painfully slowly, the drive as Spock climbs down through the ship toward Engineering, a snippet of Horner’s theme for Spock himself as he mind-melds with McCoy, the desperate ticking down of the seconds as the bridge crew realizes they’re doomed, Khan’s final expressions of hatred. When Horner was on, this is what he could do.
Horner would return to Star Trek for the next film, The Search for Spock, but he never did any more Trek after that. This always seemed to me a pity. I would have liked to hear, perhaps, a more light-hearted take on his themes from Treks II and III in IV, perhaps, or maybe his take on the adventures of the Next Generation in any of their films. Alas, it didn’t happen. I next encountered Horner via his score to the SF film Brainstorm, which is notable mainly for being Natalie Wood’s last film and, well, for Horner’s score.
It’s amazing to hear the progression in Horner’s sound from Battle to the Treks to Krull and beyond. You can really tell how much he was learning along the way, and his development along these lines culminated in 1988’s Willow.
One can detect a certain amount of the common lot of the film composer: often the scores are, on balance, better than the films. Not everyone can be John Williams, with a partnership with Steven Spielberg.
Horner was also able to do a lot more than genre films. He scored everybody’s favorite gentle baseball film Field of Dreams, in which he flexed his Americana muscles without quite aping the typical Coplandesque sound, and a couple years later he scored the Robert Redford caper flick Sneakers.
In the mid-90s, Horner reached what was almost certainly the height of his powers, and his filmography from about 1993 to 1998 basically includes one fine score after another, with three that were truly wonderful and one other which would become his single most famous work.
For Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, Horner managed to capture both the optimism of the Apollo moon missions and the elegiac sense, looking back, that that was as far as we were willing to go at that time and for quite a long time afterward. Horner infused that entire film with amazing energy, never moreso than during that film’s incredible rocket launch sequence:
Then there was Braveheart. Horner’s score for this film is amazing, one of my favorites of all time, and I consider its first half to be some of the finest film music ever written. It’s really quite something, what Horner did here. Mel Gibson’s film takes a fairly ‘dreamy’ approach to its subject matter, with long, lingering shots and scenes that feel like meditations. Horner accompanies all this amazingly, never better than in the “Secret Wedding” sequence. This love music is more complex than it seems, with a main melody that is subtly varied through a number of different stepwise progressions, and as the scene becomes more and more intimate in the film, so too does Horner’s score, boiling down to the utter simplicity of the rhythm being set by an ostinato harp. The first half of this score amazes me each time I listen to it.
Also in this same period came what I consider to be Horner’s finest score, Legends of the Fall. This melodrama is actually a favorite film of mine, and Horner’s approach to its big emotions is to basically say, “To hell with subtlety”. It’s a choice that works amazingly well, as Horner moves from big moment to big moment. This is a movie that blends World War I tragedy with Native American mysticism and Depression-era bootlegging with the generational drama of a family of strong-willed men and women underneath the Big Montana Sky, and Horner turns in a lush, Romantic score that proves that sometimes less is not more.
And then, in 1997, Titanic arrived.
Oddly, while I love the movie Titanic to this day, I’m not a huge fan of its score. It does, though, have a number of great moments. Horner would win his only Oscar for Best Original Score for Titanic (he also won Best Original Song that year for “My Heart Will Go On”). Titanic seems to be mostly laughed-at these days, which I always find unfortunate, but Horner did play a crucial part in its success, from the wonderful energy of “Southampton” to the way he scored the scene where Jack shows Rose how to “fly”. Note, in the latter scene, how the music seems to swell, only to swell again, with an upward modulation, when Rose lifts her hand to Jack’s neck, making the kiss all the more intimate.
One thing that’s always struck me about Horner’s Titanic score is how unobvious it is. He doesn’t go for the type of “seafaring” sound that one might expect from a disaster-at-sea film; nor does he particularly try to capture a “British” feel with proper Elgarian pomposity. Horner’s score, even if it’s not one of my favorites of his, still does manage to somewhat lift the film from its period setting, thus helping make the love story a bit more eternal, if that makes any sense.
The best part of this score, though, comes when Horner sends the orchestra home and uses a simple solo piano for the scene when Jack draws the portrait of Rose. It’s the film’s most intimate scene, and the solo piano is an inspired choice. You can hear that track here. (I’m having trouble embedding it because this post was originally written for the old BlogSpot iteration of this site, and the copying-and-pasting of entire blocks of text-and-video doesn’t always play well with WordPress’s “blocks”.)
Listening to all these selections, I’m struck by something I’d never totally noticed before, with regard to Horner’s melodies. He leans toward long melodies that seem at first to meander, before settling into an internal logic that makes a lot of sense.
Since the late 90s, I’ve lost track of Horner a bit. Partly this is because I stopped seeing as many movies, and he wasn’t scoring as many films that I actually wanted to see. Also, it seems that he wasn’t scoring as many films in general. He was active right up to the end, but he wasn’t getting as many of the blockbuster assignments and high-profile films, as tastes in film music have shifted toward the kind of tuneless soundscapes of Hans Zimmer and the like. I think Horner’s style has somewhat fallen out of favor, but he didn’t disappear entirely. The last new score of his that I heard to any significant degree was his music for James Cameron’s Avatar. I didn’t care for it all that much at first, but it has grown on me on repeated listens.
Horner had his detractors, of course, and sometimes they had cause. Over time, it became clear that Horner had little sonic “tricks” that he liked to use repeatedly throughout his scores — a particular motif to indicate that something bad was in the offing, for instance; film music fans would sometimes call this the “Danger Motif”. Another is what I came to call the “James Horner Rolling Chord of Melodic Punctuation”. More than a few times I would see a film with a Horner score and notice these very tricks playing out, and though it wouldn’t much faze the general audience, I knew what was going on.
Horner’s gifts of melody and his skill at spotting a film were always in evidence, however, and I can’t name a single film that he didn’t enhance with his music. After John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner’s music was the most familiar to me growing up. His musical storytelling, in its finest moments, stands with any film composer who has ever put pen to paper.
And his voice will be missed. I may not have heard much of his music of late, but I don’t like knowing that there will be no more to discover. I didn’t like everything he did, but I liked most of it and loved a lot of it. Seeing his name attached to a film was always exciting.
So thank you, James Horner. Your music is part of the soundtrack of my life.
(This is a repost from a couple of years ago. I’m bringing it back in honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of JAWS, which opened June 20, 1975. I didn’t get to watch JAWS until I was a teenager, which is both probably a wise move on my parents’ part and also really lame. I mean, come on! JAWS! But hey, it instantly became one of my favorite movies ever when I finally did get to watch it all the way through, instead of seeing little bits and pieces through sneaky glimpses at this or that telecast. Anyway, here’s a bit of silliness….)
I’ve seen a few of these photos surfacing online the last few months, and they make me really happy because there’s a kind of absurdity going on. These are behind-the-scenes snapshots from JAWS, featuring actor Robert Shaw and “Bruce” the Shark, in between takes. Bruce, if you didn’t know, was the name lovingly bestowed upon the mechanical shark they made for the movie, which ended up not working half the time, forcing director Steven Spielberg to rely on implied-shots, shadows, oblique techniques and other ways of creating the sense that the shark was there without actually showing that the shark was there. It’s generally accepted that the difficulties with the model are a big reason why the movie ended up as good as it is.
I love these shots because they have a kind of absurdity to them, as if Bruce was really a living part of the cast, waiting for his next take like everyone else. They just scream out to be captioned, so:
“Come on, Bob, sing it with me! ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies….” “Shut UP, Bruce.”
“I mean, it was a great fight scene and all, but you gotta admit, Bob, the way your character in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE lets James Bond get one up on him is kinda lame.” “I didn’t write it, Bruce.”
“Haha, in your big speech you’re supposed to say ‘We delivered the bomb’ but you make it sound like ‘We delivered the bum’! Hahaha…ouch, please get your hand off my eye! It’s not REALLY like a doll’s eye!” “Too bad, Bruce.”
As John Oliver always says, “Moving on….”
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A metaphor
In the “Sometimes we laugh to keep from crying” department, a snippet from Friends that seems to me sadly applicable. Joey’s refrigerator has given up the ghost, and his solution was…this.
Happy birthday, America. I guess.