The Classical Music of Today

I have always had a private passion for movie scores, the background music in a movie, today’s classical music. If done properly, it is absolutely arresting. Some scores will always be remembered with the movie and can’t be appreciated without the movie. This depends, though. In my case, the ‘Farewell Duet’ in the movie Edward Scissorhands is just breathtaking. In this case, I make no associations between the music and the movie, since I discovered the music first.

I feel things that no other kind of music can arouse: the xylophone, the high accompanying chorus, the staccato strings, the rising and falling of the central theme. I feel like I’m being carried up the crest of a tidal wave and gently sat down on the shore of my own private island, and awaiting me is the Fountain of Youth or that Something I’ve been searching for my entire life, that Well at the World’s End, beyond the frontier, that Undiscovered Country. It starts off quiet, slow, brooding, lifted and carried by the horns, and the flutes are its laurels, sprinkled with the chorus, and then it settles back down, only to be whisked away again, as if on a magic carpet out of an Arabian desert of the spirit, and onto the roof of some enchanted castle. More importantly, I feel like the old ache I’ve felt, a pain (the pain we hide) is - for only a moment - touched by an invisible hand, and I taste the beginning of what it means for ‘every tear to be wiped away’.

There is also the movie Conan: The Barbarian. Again, the music! Set aside the movie for a moment. The music! It was conducted by the great Basil Poledouris. Listen to the ‘Anvil of Crom’! The drum beats rhythmically, the bard’s stirring prologue, and then that HORN, that majestic HORN! I wish with Nietzsche I didn’t have to write this blog, but for some angel to sing it! Then it shifts. The drums cease. A melody enters lead by the strings and carried by the horns and lifted to a peak and then descending. Oh how Dionysus is shaken and fluttered! The deep has been opened up. But it is tempered and transformed by that melody, as if to say: this steel being forged in the fire is forged for a reason, the crafting of a beautiful blade, a sword that you alone were meant to wield, to slay the monsters you alone were meant to slay.

Oh, and then Poledouris’ ‘Riders of Doom’, music that strikes like lightening in a clear sky, that overwhelms like an avalanche. The floodgates of the spirit of the muse are opened! The high horn is the switch! The chorus! Oh, the chorus! Ancient Greek Tragedy! Womb of music! Odin! Zeus! Sophocles! The wrath of Achilles! War! Fury! Wrath! The symbols clash! The drums are beaten! I stand before the music like one standing before an overpowering might: awe, tears, fear, terror, tremendous terror! I think of the titanic forces of the spirit and music releases it like a ferocious lion out of a cage. I feel energy, a life-force, like I’m merging with a great power, a muse, and I’m riding it like a Pegasus - I’m lead to the gates of Hades and I soar over the dead like a glider swoops down over fields of corn in wide open spaces! Passion! Passion! Words are like broken toys! Just listen! Whereof I cannot speak I must remain silent.

Or, how about Alan Silvestri’s ‘No Words’, which dovetails into “Small Moves”, from the movie Contact? The orbed electric piano hovers over an abyss of unspeakable beauty, and the music echos our anticipation; we rise and rise as if coming up over the edge of a huge cliff, and we see it! No pretension. It is not loud: just the soothing tune of a tender piano. This streams gently over to “Small Moves”. The music evokes a void. It warms us like a blanket and the wonder is so engulfing we just gaze. The uninterrupted beginning is broken by a delicious splash of strings. Then it stops: the piano enters like a woman gracefully walking on a river. All of the music comes together like a flock of seagulls. We are on the beach of our consciousness, looking out onto the ocean we shall all one day have to cross, and one day! - cross over into . . . Well, you know.