Tag: Something For Thursday

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Something for Thursday

I see that filmmaker Blake Edwards died today. I didn’t see too many of his movies, but those that I did, I liked immensely. Here are two favorite clips from his movies.

First, the ever-amazing Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

The way she looks up at the end and says “Hi!” just sends shivers a-tingling the length of my spinal column. Audrey Hepburn always seems so…weary in this film. It’s evident in her eyes that she’s seen so much, and that a great deal of what she’s seen has been sad or traumatic in some way. It always amazes me that she made this movie three years before she made my beloved My Fair Lady, in which her spirit is so youthful in her energy and her exuberance that she seems ready to bubble right off the screen.

And, of course, being right up my alley, there’s this little scene from Edwards’s zany road-trip comedy The Great Race. It’s just the greatest pie fight ever filmed. Huzzah!

Well, maybe it is. I’m not entirely sure what the criteria would be for judging pie fights, but this one’s got a lot going for it: duration, amount of edible ammunition, a scantily-clad beautiful woman sustaining multiple hits, and the lead actor almost managing to wander through the scene without getting hit himself. That adds up to a pretty good pie fight!

RIP Blake Edwards.

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Something for Thursday

(Yeah, I screwed up the date when I scheduled this post, which is why it was here, then it wasn’t, and now it’s back. Oops.)

A lot of my friends from work are either hunters or married to hunters. I’m not into hunting myself, but lots of people I know are. With hunting season about to kick off in a big way here in Western New York, here’s a selection in their honor. From the opera Der Freischutz by Carl Maria von Weber: the Huntsmen’s Chorus.

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Something for Thursday

I’ll be using this again in a post sometime, but for now, here’s a nice piece of music for our upcoming Halloween. Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was intended by the composer to tell a story, detailing an artist’s captivation by a woman (represented by a recurring melody he called the idee fixe that is heard in each movement) and his eventual descent into madness as, in the last two movements, he takes opium and begins to suffer demonic hallucinations. In the last movement, he envisions his lover as a witch, leading a horrible kind of celebration in which our hero has visions of death and other horrors. I’ll provide a more detailed annotation of the Symphonie fantastique at some point in the future, but for now, here is the last movement of the work, “The Dream of the Witches’ Sabbath”.

(The Idee fixe is heard in the clarinet twice, first at the 1:33 mark, and then again at 1:52. A bit later on, Berlioz invokes the famous Dies irae melody, more than once. I normally don’t like posting symphonic movements outside of the context of the larger work, but it’s Halloween….)

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Something for Thursday

Amongst my many musical discoveries during my college years was the German electronica band Tangerine Dream, which has been around in one form or another — always fronted by synthesizer genius Edgar Froese — for over 40 years. That’s quite a long time, and TD has been through many shifts in its musical style in that period. Many fans seem to think that the early to mid 1990s represent a low-water mark for TD, but that’s the TD music I knew first, and I still return to it fairly often. This lovely track finishes up their album Melrose.

Here’s “Cool At Heart”.

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Something for Thursday

Incommunicado for much of the day. Hectic week! I can’t believe how much we’ve had to spend on school supplies. I also can’t believe the kinds of hyper-specific things that schools ask for now. Math class requires a notebook, and a folder with pockets, and four green pens. Huh? Is there a unit on Irish math? But anyway, back to the music. A bit of film music this time!

Lots of film music lovers are very discouraged about the state of film music these days. Increasing reliance on electronics; music being composed by musicians who are not trained in the classical techniques; a seeming obsession on the part of filmmakers with a certain type of musical sound; the complaints go on. I tend to be unconvinced by such arguments; historically, the people living in any particular era tend to be very poor at judging the work of their own artists, and the whole “test of time” thing requires the actual passage of time. The music that filmscore lovers decry now may end up being the classic filmscores of score fans twenty, thirty, forty years from now.

One voice fairly new to the filmscore scene is Michael Giacchino. This composer first began to get noticed by his music for videogames, and over the last seven or eight years, Giacchino has secured a lot of high-profile scoring assignments. He’s done several Pixar films (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Up), and he’s been lucky enough to become the composer-of-choice for one of the bigger “new names” in movies and teevee, J.J. Abrams. Giacchino has been leading a fairly charmed life of late.

Of course, it helps that he writes some very fine music. His score to Star Trek 2009 sounded a bit odd in my ears at first, but the more I listened to it, the more it grew on me, to the point where I now think it’s one of the finest scores of the 2000’s. My favorite cue is the sad and beautiful cue that underscores the self-sacrifice of George Kirk and the birth of little James Tiberius. Here, from Star Trek 2009, is “Labor of Love”.

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