Do You Hear It, In Your Very Bones?

I have a thing for soundtrack music. Soundtracks, particularly of the film score variety, that are big, symphonic, powerful.

The thing is, soundtrack music hardly if ever exists outside of a soundtrack, and not all the music on a soundtrack is automatically what shall be henceforth referred to as soundtrack music.

Music written for film, by nature, must have the ability to convey and induce emotion. It was, after all, composed to fit a story. Where there danger, the music must foreshadow it. Where there is longing, the music must draw it out. Where there is a sense of urgency, the music must make it all the more urgent. If something new and brilliant and breathtaking appears, so must the music take it, reflect it, draw it up and magnify it, and project it across the heavens. It is simply the nature of soundtrack music.

There is something about the way the combined powers of choral and orchestral interlace to create something entirely new and wholesome. Sometimes individual strands of voice or instrument breathe alone, floating along an ethereal and invisible membrane, or they may cut and dart among the others in playful jest. Other times, the music may be composed of vertical blocks, of solid chords built with the strength of a thousand voices. Air rushes through tubes of metal and flesh. The vibrations of strings and skins reverberate through the walls, the ground, through bone. They cut and pound. It is an army on the march, an evil on the loose, a world on the brink of destruction.

But by far the most powerful sort of piece is the sort that begins as a small, steady tune but sweeps upward as it goes. It begins to grow. There is a destination, but we do not yet see it. Slowly, as a rumbling below the surface, the music grows. It builds and builds, churning, working, expanding. A new melody emerges- but is it really new? They intertwine and separate and intertwine again. Something disappears. It reappears. And everything crescendos, crescendos, drawing up elements never noticed from below, expanding, rising, until there! The crest, the summit, the peak! Light breaks out from the darkness, and the barrier has been breached, and from there the music pans out (as might the camera), drifting unobtrusively back down.

And that? That is the magic of the music of film. Soundtracks are no mere background music. Imagine a particularly poignant scene from a movie, any movie. Now cut out the music. Chances are, it’ll not achieve half the effect it had before. Music in film often remains unnoticed, but its function is integral.

Now excuse me while I toddle back to my Lord of the Rings Pandora station.