Tone Poem Tuesday

Here’s a particularly lovely piece of tone painting from the film music world, from a movie you might not expect it from: The Karate Kid Part II. These movies had a “diminishing returns” kind of thing going on, in that the first one was great, the second one was pretty good, and the third was too much. But in the second, there’s a lovely scene toward the end when Daniel and his new Okinawan girlfriend enact a tea ceremony, and this is the music that Bill Conti wrote for that dialog-free scene. It’s impressionistic and beautiful, and it creates its own little tone picture. (It also ends abruptly because in the movie, that’s when the wind from the approaching storm whips up and blows out their candle, alerting them that danger is on the way.)