I’ve come to like this band a great deal. Here are Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, in a lovely song about unrequited love: “Someday”.
Something for Thursday
Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of those composers who seems to exist in his own world, related to but not quite part of everything that was going on around him at the time. I often find in him a dreamy, almost otherworldly quality; there are influences, but he doesn’t really fit into any particular school of thought. His music both stands squarely in the 20th century and looks back five hundred years. His musical voice is fascinating. Here is his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Oops…how on Earth did I completely forget about last week’s installment? It just totally flew out of my mind, alas.
I’ve been listening a bit this week to John Williams’s amazing score to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the other classic score he wrote for a sci-fi film released in 1977. (If you don’t know by now what the other one was, I can’t help you.) Williams’s CE3K music is quite different, as it is mostly by turns either atonal, or haunting, or militaristic during the “Government agency” scenes. Only gradually does a lyricism emerge from the score, becoming stronger and stronger, beginning really with the introduction of the famous five-note “Communication with the aliens” theme. Gradually Williams stitches all of this together into an amazing tapestry of emotion that is one of his more overwhelming efforts.
This is a well-produced suite of tracks from the film, edited together very convincingly into a pretty nifty listening experience.
A few annotations:
0:01: The score opens with the swirling music that plays as the teevee reports of the disaster at Devil’s Tower appear, leading Roy Neary and Jillian Guiler to separately realize that their visions of some strange mountain are of a very real place.
1:30: Roy and Jillian drive cross-country into the Wyoming back woods to try and get closer to Devil’s Tower.
2:12: Roy and Jillian see Devil’s Tower, in person, for the first time. “I can’t believe it’s real!”
What follows is some suspenseful music as they continue driving into the back woods. At about 4:15, they drive past four ‘dead’ cows. Now they’re taken by the military and processed, with Neary being questioned by Lacombe and Loughlin.
6:40: The ‘conversation’ between the electronic music synthesizer and the mother ship.
10:52: The terribly sad scene where Roy thinks he’s going insane. “This means something…this is important.” (The subtext with Roy’s family is awfully troubling, really. His wife is completely justified in thinking that he’s utterly lost it, but of course, he hasn’t. Now, it’s never established at the end of the film how long he’s going to be off with the aliens, so I don’t completely buy into the notion that he’s ditching his family forever. But what does poor Ronnie Neary think when she reads the next day’s newspaper?)
13:25: The ‘returnees’ begin emerging from the Mother Ship, abductees who have been missing, in some cases, for decades (the pilots of Flight 19). Among them is little Barry Guiler, who is reunited with Jillian at the 15:14 mark.
15:35: Back to the beginning of the film. The mysterious crescendo ending in a smash as we open in the deserts of Mexico.
16:00: And back to the film’s finale, as the ETs come down from the Mother Ship and begin interacting with the people gathered at the Devil’s Tower landing site. Roy Neary is taken away to be prepared to join the astronauts who are being allowed to go. Note “When You Wish Upon a Star” at 17:03.
17:41: The ETs choose Roy Neary. More “When You Wish Upon a Star”. Neary looks back; Lacombe urges him to go. He meets Jillian’s eye, and then goes up on board.
19:00: The main ET greets Lacombe; they exchange the hand signals at 20:20. Here Williams starts letting the “Alien Communication” theme take over; where it was strange and haunting before, now it’s plaintive and beautiful.
21:05: All the aliens go back on board. The music begins to swirl as the Mother Ship prepares to depart. We arrive on a gorgeous chord of resolution that holds as little Barry Guiler says, ever so perfectly, “Bye.”
22:17: Oh, wow. End titles over what might be the most perfectly gorgeous finale of John Williams’s career. When he lets that Alien Communication theme peal forth, complete with bells, it is one of the greatest moments in the history of movie music.
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Something for Thursday
I suddenly thought of this piece the other day, after quite literally not having thought of it in nearly twenty years. I listened to it a lot in college, and then it dropped off my radar completely, for some reason. Sir Edward Elgar is often pigeonholed into the notion of a stuffy Brit who wrote stuffy music for the “stiff upper lip, Keep Calm and Carry On” generation, but in truth, he wrote a lot of passionate, dramatic, Romantic music, and he was as fine a tone painter as anyone, as this concert overture demonstrates. He wrote this work out of inspirations he received whilst on a family holiday to Italy. Here is “Alassio (In the South)”.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
A violin concerto today, and one of my favorites! I love the way this concerto eschews any introductory stuff in favor of jumping right into the melody, and I love the way the Romantic lyricism is tempered with a Classical attention to structure. Pay special attention to what happens at about 2:50 in the first movement: the soloist (Hilary Hahn in this case, one of this generation’s finest musicians) soars to a very high note on a dramatic flourish, but as she does, you can hear the tension dropping away, and then she arpeggiates down to a very low note, which she sustains while the woodwinds play the movement’s lovely second theme. That is one of my very favorite passages in all classical music.
Here is the Violin Concerto in E minor, by Felix Mendelssohn.
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Something for Thursday
Oh crap, it’s Thursday! And in my time zone, it still is, for another 19 minutes. Ha! Sorry to drop the ball so completely, but I’m in “Vacation Mode” at work and in my head and I’m still trying to extract this frakking book from my head. I know where the book is going, but I’m well into the third (and final) act and I’ve got quite the juggling act going on, and I’m finding it in general a bit of a struggle to make sure everything happens that’s supposed to. Plus I’ve got my Muse, doing his drive-by visits, which are always helpful but also a bit vexing as I try to figure out how to use what he’s giving me.
But anyway, enough whining. Here are the End Titles from Hook, by John Williams. This very fine score has pretty much disappeared except from the consciousnesses of devoted film music fans by virtue of the movie being, well, not all that good.