Today a long tone poem by composer Michael Kamen, who is famous for his film scores (Highlander, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Three Musketeers) as well as his work with many rock musicians, often providing orchestrations for their songs that required such services. One notable entry in this part of his oeuvre is the orchestra work on Pink Floyd’s album The Wall. Kamen had a wonderfully engaging musical voice, and his untimely death in 2003 when he was just 55 was a deeply hurtful blow to the music world.
This piece is called (in keeping with our ongoing “Moon” theme!) New Moon in the Old Moon’s Arms. Kamen cited as his inspiration for this work the Anasazi Tribe who flourished in the American southwest, and later disappeared, close to a thousand years ago. The piece is by turns contemplative and extroverted, rhythmic and lyrical, dance-like and song-driven. It’s very dramatic music with a lot of ebb and flow and contrasting musical textures thoughout.
The work’s title is an inversion of a phrase used sometimes to describe a very real astronomical phenomenon. Sometimes, during a new moon, when the visible part of the moon is just the barest sliver, the rest of the moon can be faintly seen in the reflected glow of the earth. This is typically called “Earthlight”, but another, possibly more poetic, term for it is “Old moon in the new moon’s arms”. Kamen seems to have intended his inverted title to hint at greeting the future in the light of the past.
I’ve been thinking about reviving my dormant Substack newsletter and one feature I’m thinking about is an occasional (maybe monthly) deep look at an entire album that I love or that has special significance to me, but I have no more thought through on the notion than that, so we’ll see. Meanwhile, here’s my favorite song from a candidate album: Enya’s 1989 record Watermark. The song is “On Your Shore”.
Continuing, but not completing, our exploration of classical music inspired by the Moon, we have a work that I have been waffling on whether or not to include…because it is not inspired by the Moon, even though it always shows up on such lists because it’s one of the heavy-hitters when it comes to “Moon music”. It’s one of the most famous pieces in all of classical music, to be honest. It is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp minor, almost always called “the Moonlight Sonata”.
Why on Earth would I possibly exclude the Moonlight Sonata from a featured list of music inspired by the moon? Because there is no evidence at all that Beethoven was ever inspired by the moon when writing it. He didn’t name it “Moonlight”, after all; a poet named Ludwig Rellstab offered the appellation Moonlight Sonata in 1832, after Beethoven was already dead. For Beethoven, who didn’t do much with so-called “program music”, it’s doubtful that he had any particular scene or inspiration in mind for the sonata at all. He may have heard the comparison of the sonata to “moonlight” prior to his death, but that’s a tall order and isn’t supported by any actual evidence.
We’re also left with the work’s three-movement structure, typical for piano sonatas. If the whole sonata is called the Moonlight Sonata, does that mean that all three movements are to be taken as redolent of moonlight? I don’t know. The first movement, which breaks with sonata tradition in being slow and lyrical (usually the opening movements are the fast ones), is the best candidate for “moonlight”…but then there’s the second movement, a gentle and lilting minuet in triple time, which might also suggest moonlight in its graceful tones. And the third movement, which is stormy and even violent? Well, who knows…perhaps it’s the kind of moon that shines on a windy night at sea, or something like that.
All of this isn’t much of an exercise, anyway. Many musicians hate the idea of attaching extra-musical “meanings” to music that is inherently abstract, anyway, and if Beethoven had any particular point in mind, he surely would have written it in the margins of the manuscript. Or…maybe he wouldn’t. Beethoven was one of humanity’s towering artistic geniuses, clearly, but at the same time he was also a pretty strange man.
In the end, we’re left with the music. Is it really “moon music”? Maybe, maybe not. I lean toward “not”…but because of that name, we can’t really totally exclude it, either. As the founder of Gramophone, Compton Mackenzie, once said, “(W)hat these austere critics fail to grasp is that unless the general public had responded to the suggestion of moonlight in this music Rellstab’s remark would long ago have been forgotten.”
Here is the Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp minor, “Moonlight”, by Ludwig van Beethoven.
Last weekend we watched the original Jurassic Park, which still holds up amazingly well! Especially for a movie made in the pre-cell phone era. (That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but I have found that lots of times I watch movies in the pre-cell phone era and have to constantly remind myself that the characters don’t have phones and can’t call for help or look up useful information.)
Anyway, since we don’t really need a whole lot of introduction here, let’s just let Mr. Williams do his thing, shall we?
Returning after several weeks to our series of music inspired by the moon, we have a work by Julian Anderson, a composer with whose works I am unfamiliar. One bio of Anderson I read provides this information:
Julian Anderson is one of the most talented composers of his generation and has been commissioned by organisations including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Born in London in 1967, he studied with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail and first came to prominence when his orchestral Diptych (1990) won the RPS Composition Prize in 1992. Anderson has held Composer in Residence positions with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Cleveland and London Philharmonic orchestras, relationships which produced an impressive body of orchestral works including Stations of the Sun (1998, a BBC Proms Commission) and Eden (2005, Cheltenham Festival). Fantasias (2009), written for the Cleveland Orchestra, won a British Composer Award and The Discovery of Heaven (2011), a co-commission by the New York Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic Orchestra was awarded a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Both works were recorded by the LPO live label.
As Anderson writes, The Crazed Moon ‘takes its title from a poem by W.B. Yeats, in which he describes a frightening vision of ‘the moon, crazed through much childbirth/ staggering through the sky.’ This image combined with the beautiful lunar eclipse seen in March 1996 provided the main starting point for a work for orchestra lasting about thirteen minutes, in one continuous movement. The other factor determining the threnodic character and funereal mood of the work was the sudden death in September 1995 of a composer and friend, Graeme Smith, at the age of only twenty-four. This piece is dedicated to his memory.’
(Julian Anderson)
‘This tragic occurrence dictated the nature of much of the piece: predominantly slow, with tolling bells, heavy chords, keening melodic lines, and climaxes not only of mourning but also of protest. But two things make its expressive course over its 13-minute duration unpredictable. One is the overall plan of the work, which like a film sequence cuts between different elements developing independently of one another. The other is the incorporation as a recurring musical idea of Graeme Smith’s initials, G.S., which in German note-names spell G and E flat (Es). These two notes make a bright major third, which whenever it is used, harmonically or melodically, stands out in the darker, atonal context, to poignant effect.’
(Anthony Burton, LPO programme note, 2011)
I found myself more and more entranced each time I played the work. I hope you will too.
I mean, sure, it’s been autumn, technically, for about two weeks now. But still, it’s autumn!
And sure, “meteorological autumn” started a month ago, but this is different. This is October. So, we have Meteorological Autumn, which starts September 1; we have Astronomical Autumn (the traditional Autumn), which starts roughly September 20 or 21, depending on when exactly the Autumnal Equinox happens; and then I would posit we have Emotional Autumn, which for me starts either October 1 or whenever the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival happens, whichever comes first. So now we’re really into Emotional Autumn, when the leaves start turning and the football season is heating up as teams shake off the preseason jitters and as baseball is getting exciting (unless you’re a Pirates fan, in which case you’re annually shocked to learn that they let the good teams keep playing baseball after the season ends) and as hockey is doing…whatever it is that hockey does, I guess.
So, let’s spend October listening to autumn songs! And who better to lead off than Nat King Cole?
Yes, we’re still here! I’ve been posting more on social media lately than here, but a return to the longer-form thing is definitely in the offing. Basically the last several weeks have seen a whole bunch of things all come to a head at the same time: a hugely busy period at work as we prepped The Store for a visit from the folks whose name is on the front of the building, followed by my annual getaway with The Wife to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and then followed by a surgery for The Wife, which we hope will alleviate some pain and mobility issues that she has been suffering for a while now. And before that was an infamous violent act that dominated the American conversation for a bit (I still haven’t figured out if I want to say anything about that at all in this space).
I’m off from work all this week, partly a vacation and partly a LOA to help care for The Wife in her post-surgery existence. (Oh, she’s doing great, by the way, thanks for asking!) Hopefully this will translate also into a bit more time to pivot my brain back toward some creativity and expression. We’ll get back to my “Moon Music” theme for this series, probably next week. For now, though, here’s a piece I have definitely featured here before and have shared on social media, but I don’t think I’ve shared it here in a while. It’s the concluding track from Hans Zimmer’s score to the 1997 rom-com As Good As It Gets.
Hans Zimmer’s music seems to be achieving higher and higher regard these days, and it definitely seems like the younger set is embracing him as basically their generation’s John Williams. I definitely love a lot of Zimmer’s work, though my John Williams is actually John Williams, so there’s that. I also am not as big a fan of Zimmer’s shift the last decade toward atmospheric music and less melody-driven work. I also miss his scoring of quieter, more intimate films like this. If there was to be a rom-com based in some weird way on my life, I’d want it to sound like this. I love when rom-coms set in NYC use music like this, that make the place sound like the kind of place for Parisian love-magic can happen amidst all the bustle.
Here, from As Good As It Gets, is “The Greatest Woman On Earth”, by Hans Zimmer.
Regular posting still isn’t resuming (I just finished up an extremely busy work week, and now The Wife and I are getting out of town for a short getaway, and then next week has some other challenges forthcoming but we’ll get to those in good time), but hopefully next week we’ll start to settle down a bit…meantime, today we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of one of America’s greatest musical voices, George Gershwin, who was nice enough to be born exactly 73 years before I was, so that’s cool!
Like I said the other day, there’s a kind of perfect storm of STUFF all coming to a head at once that isn’t leaving me with a ton of time for posting, so posting much, I have not. This is likely to continue for the next week, maybe even two, depending on how things transpire. None of this is bad, by any means: we have a big work event that’s taking up tons of time to prep coming up, and then next weekend is our annual getaway to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, and right after that, The Wife has a medical procedure that will occupy a lot of mental cycles and energy.
But, I do need to get something up here at least once in a while, don’t I? And I’m still saddened by the passing earlier this week of Robert Redford, so I’ll discuss my personal favorite Redford movie, to which the title of this post alludes. The film is the 1992 caper film Sneakers.
Here’s the text of a post I wrote some years ago about the film, and then I’ll come back and say a few things more about it:
COSMO: You could have shared this with me.
MARTIN: I know.
COSMO: You could have had the power.
MARTIN: I don’t want it.
COSMO: Don’t you know the places we can go with this?
MARTIN: Yeah, I do. There’s nobody there.
COSMO: Exactly! The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy or money. It’s run by ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons!
MARTIN: I don’t care.
COSMO: I don’t expect other people to understand this, but I do expect you to understand this! We started this journey together!
MARTIN: It wasn’t a ‘journey’, Coz. It was a prank.
COSMO: There’s a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information: what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information!
MARTIN: If I were you, I’d destroy that thing.
I saw Sneakers when it first came out, back in 1992 or thereabouts. It quickly became one of my favorite movies, and I saw it several more times theatrically before it became a fixture in my rotation of movies to rent on occasion, and later, when I had a sizeable collection of movies on VHS. But for one reason or another – mainly because I just never got around to it – Sneakers never got into my DVD collection, so I haven’t seen it in…holy crap. More than ten years. That seems rather wrong to me now, in retrospect, but never fear – I finally watched it recently, with some fear and trepidation that, like many a techno-thriller made more than a decade ago, it wouldn’t hold up very well.
Surprisingly – and satisfyingly – it does hold up, very well. And more than that: it’s striking to me now, twenty years later, just how eerily prescient this movie was.
Sneakers is one of the most entertaining cyberthriller-espionage movies I’ve ever seen. Robert Redford stars as Martin Bishop, the head of a security firm consisting of a group of men whose backgrounds mostly include shady dealings or outright brushes with the law. Their main job is simply to break into places that are supposedly highly secure, in order to demonstrate the lax areas in the security. They seem to be mostly just eking by: when they complete a job for a bank early in the film, a bank officer fills out the payment check, looks at it, and comments that it’s not a very good living. The team gets hired for another job, this time by two men claiming to be NSA agents, who happen to know who Martin Bishop really is (for which he could go to jail). They are to steal a device that decrypts codes which are supposedly unbreakable, which they do, and then give to the NSA guys – only to learn that they’re not NSA guys at all, and that they’ve murdered the mathematician who invented the device.
In a deeply eerie scene, Bishop’s hacker buddies start probing around with the little black box, just to see what it can do – and they discover that it can allow anyone to hack into extremely sensitive computer systems. The power grid of the entire Northeast…the Federal Reserve…air traffic control. They couldn’t have known it, writing this movie ten years before 9-11, but hearing one of the hackers jokingly say, “Anybody want to crash a few passenger jets?” is deeply chilling.
The entire movie is about security in an increasingly digital world, and at the end of the film, the exchange quoted above takes place, between Bishop and his onetime college buddy Cosmo, who has become a villain since doing time in prison for a crime that he committed with Martin at his side (but who eluded capture by the police simply by going out for pizza when they showed up with the guns). The idea of the world become increasingly governed by, and even defined by, the processing of data was a pretty bold one back in 1992. When I saw this movie, I had not yet even heard of the Internet, and the digital infrastructure that Sneakers portrays – with dial-up modems and not a cell phone in sight – seems utterly quaint. And yet, the movie is somehow fresh, despite all that, largely owing to the charm of the cast, the sparkling dialogue, the engaging direction, the brisk pacing, and – in terms of the technology – the nicely non-specific way the technology is depicted.
There are a lot of very clever touches in Sneakers: the reverse ‘race against time’, for example, in which Martin Bishop has to get a job done and yet literally can only do it at a very slow pace, lest the motion detectors notice his presence. Also the way they enlist Martin’s former (and yet still friendly) girlfriend to help with the problem of recording a particular scientist’s voice for use against the voice-print ID gizmo. (If the phrase “My name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” is in your geek lexicon, then you are my kind of people.) I also like how vague the movie is about Cosmo’s villainy. We never learn who he works for, or if he is the main ringleader; we never learn what exactly it is that he wants to accomplish with the little black codebreaking box. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Cosmo doesn’t even have a specific plan in mind at all, and that he just wants the codebreaker because it will give him power that he as yet doesn’t really know how he intends to use it. He’s almost purely a theoretical villain, which is what makes him even scarier — as well as the sheer optimism of his villainy, which is what makes the quote above so memorable. It’s not about making threats or committing crimes or any of that dirty stuff. It’s about the possibilities inherent in controlling the world’s data.
And that is really makes this twenty-year-old film stay relevant.
OK, that’s the old post. I notice that I didn’t mention the film’s acting much in my original post, so I’m addressing that now, because Sneakers is one of the best-cast movies ever made, in my opinion. If they handed out Oscars for casting, Sneakers would have won it that year. You have River Phoenix as a young hacker, and Dan Aykroyd as an old hacker who is deeply invested in paranoid conspiracy theories. (This was a considerably more charming and entertaining character trait thirty years ago. Now, not so much.) You have Sidney Poitier as a retired CIA spook who hasn’t given up the game just yet, and David Strathairn as a blind hacker. Leading them all is Mr. Redford, a hacker with a past that has led him to assume a false identity. Joining them is Redford’s old girlfriend, played by Mary McDonnell, and the villain is Ben Kingsley as an old friend of Redford’s who went to jail for their escapades while Redford did not.
It’s really something to watch this movie and note the complete chemistry among the cast. At no point is there any break in the illusion; we really believe that this motley crew of hackers and law-benders has spent years working with one another at the weird intersection of legality and morality and…neither of those things. And they really do seem to enjoy doing it; they’re having fun, up until the moment when they realize that they have somehow become embroiled in something very real and very dangerous. But even then, once they sense that the winds have shifted in their direction again…the sense of fun returns.
Speaking specifically of Mr. Redford’s performance, he is doing more than having fun. There’s a sense right from the start that he’s been at this longer than anyone else, and that he’s starting to get a bit weary of the whole business. Redford shows us a Martin Bishop who is genuinely sorry for what happened to his old friend back in college, and who does want to move past the hackery part of his life. He’s also skeptical of what is to come and what Cosmo seems to be embracing, as shown in the exchange quoted above; Bishop’s hesitance to embrace a world where everything is determined by information and who controls it is notable, and in Redford’s hands, very, very real. Redford does things in this film with simple facial expressions that are just wonderful: a rolling of his eyes when he’s told to hurry up when doing a job where moving as slowly as possible is required, or a sudden snarl when he decides to punch out the thug who has been inconveniencing him all movie long. Or his mischievous smile that lets us know he’s pulled a fast one on somebody.
Most of all, though, Redford captures that Bishop is the brains and the heart of this whole operation. He’s the one who suspects first that this whole business with the code-breaking machine is more than he bargained for and that he and his team are involved in something more deep and sinister than they have ever dealt with before. This is something that Robert Redford was always great at, something that made him one of the best. He was always able to suggest, often without even saying anything, the emotional and intellectual lives his characters were leading.
And he was just so damned cool about it. Who wouldn’t want to be Robert Redford, after all?
Oh, this is a delayed Something for Thursday post as well, so here’s a nice suite culled together from the soundtrack to Sneakers, with music composed by the late, great James Horner. This is one of the great “caper film” scores of all time.
