The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I re-watched all of Carl Sagan’s epochally brilliant series Cosmos last fall and winter, and for a science series that is going on 32 years of age, it’s still moving and poetic and inspiring and, well, all the things that it’s always been thought to be. In honor of the Mars-fall earlier this week of the Curiosity rover, here is the entirety of the fifth episode of Cosmos, “Blues for a Red Planet”.
I suppose I’m one of a fairly small number of people in that my favorite Ridley Scott movie, by a wide margin, is Kingdom of Heaven, which I consider to be one of the finest epics I’ve seen. (But in its Director’s Cut. This is one of the rare cases that truly justifies the Director’s Cut; the theatrical cut is a travesty when you see what Scott really intended.) I love this movie and plan to re-watch it at some point this winter.
Here is the opening bit of the score by Harry Gregson-Williams. Gregson-Williams is a composer who, for me, is hit-or-miss, but when he hits, well…he hits.
I need to watch this movie again, having only seen it all the way through once on a VHS copy way back in college (and there may have been drinking involved), so my memories of it aren’t the best (although I’ve watched parts of it since), but one of the very best things about the animated F&SF flick Heavy Metal is its score by Elmer Bernstein. Here is “The Flight to the Temple”, from the film’s closing segment, the “Taarna” sequence.
What’s great about this score is that it’s kind of eerie at first, then somewhat comedic, then eerie again, depending on the story (the film is basically a collection of loosely-related stories), until we get to the Taarna sequence, at which point Bernstein just lets loose with some wonderfully powerful epic stuff. I love me some Elmer Bernstein!
An interesting thing happened in the 2004 and the 2005 Academy awards: the first year, the Oscar for Best Original Score went to Howard Shore for his enormously epic score for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, a score which featured huge orchestral and choral forces over three-plus hours of music. The next year, Oscar recognized what might be the polar opposite of Shore’s work, a score with a delicate, almost impressionistic, chamber music-like sound. And both are among my very favorite filmscores of the last ten years. Here are several selections from Jan AP Kaczmarek’s Finding Neverland.
Apropos of yesterday’s Random Wednesday Conversation Starter, I’ll put a couple favorite country and western songs of mine, as I can’t name just one.
Ray Charles and Willie Nelson, “Seven Spanish Angels”. I love this because, in addition to its gorgeous melody and the fact that the two performers here are, well, geniuses, the song invokes the folklore of the American West that I like a lot when used in country music.
Eddie Rabbitt, “Every Which Way But Loose”. Yeah, the title song from the goofy Clint Eastwood movie (which I like, thank you very much). It too has a wonderful melody, Eddie Rabbitt’s voice was fantastic, and this song has a slow, sad sensuality to it that I like when country is able to do it right.
Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire”. I could have named any of, oh, five hundred or so Johnny Cash songs. The man was a miracle. I choose this one because I love its rhythm — this is a song that has a hitch in its step that at first you don’t really even notice, but try walking along to it: you’ll find that the beats end up on different feet. (Seriously.)
Jo Dee Messina, “I’m All Right”. With newer country music, I tend to respond to female artists more than males these days for some reason. I think Jo Dee Messina’s voice is amazing, and this song’s lyrics are cleverly used to relate one half of a conversation — but that’s really all we need.
A brief but lovely selection today: a bit of diegetic film music from Princess Mononoke. “Diegetic” film music is music that is actually a part of the narrative, or part of the world which the characters inhabit…by way of example, the Cantina Band in Star Wars: A New Hope is diegetic music, because it’s actually being heard by the characters as it’s played. The John Williams score is non-diegetic.
Anyway, this is the work song sung by the women of Lady Eboshi’s Iron Town as they work the bellows for the forges. It’s short but beautiful, not unlike just about all of this wonderful film’s score by Joe Hisaishi. Here is the “Tatara Women’s Work Song”.
It’s Graduation Time all over America — actually, it has been for a few weeks now, since colleges tend to graduate students in May and high schools send their charges out into the world with a piece of paper in June. And that means that the Graduation Tune is getting played a lot. Everybody knows it as “Pomp and Circumstance”, but the whole thing is actually Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D, and there’s a lot more going on in that march than just the famous “Bring on the graduates!” tune. Here’s the entire thing, as played by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.
Incidentally, in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett suggests that the following would be, by its tune and character, an even more appropriate musical accompaniment for academic commencements, if not for the associations of its lyrics. It is, after all, titled “Behold the Lord High Executioner!”
I, of course, think that this ought to be used for all such occasions, but nobody ever asks me:
Congrats, grads! I hope the world’s prospects improve for you, and soon.
Before the series finale episode of House MD aired, FOX played promos for the show, using this song that I’d never heard before, by a group I’d never heard of before. This is one of those spiritually hypnotic songs that, when well done, I tend to find absolutely and utterly captivating. It’s hymn-like in its musical approach, and since those ads started airing, I can’t get enough of this song…so much so that I’m almost afraid to sample anything else by this band. I kind of want this song to exist all by itself, in some ethereal realm. Here’s Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors, with “Live Forever”.