I watched David Lynch’s The Elephant Man last night, and was surprised to hear this piece played towards the end. I’ve always associated the slow swelling of the Adagio with the death of Elias in Platoon, but it’s appeared in more films than I’d previously thought. A cursory look at the Wikipedia page (as always) tells me it has long seeped into popular culture through more channels than the movies. Truth be told, I probably heard it first on The Simpsons.

Samuel Barber, who was Irish-American and thus stakes a claim for the only appearance of an Irishman in classical music (I await correction on this), is really only remembered for this composition, though that probably does the man a disservice. Influenced by Bach and Brahms, he represented more an evolution of classical music than an original voice, and experimented with different genres such as jazz later in his career, which ran from the 1930s on.

Barber was a closeted homosexual, served in the Air Corps in WW2, and went into a depression-fuelled isolation for several years after his Opera for Antony & Cleopatra did not meet the critical acclaim he felt it deserved. I’ve never heard any of his other work, but only 27 years after his death in 1981, Barber has at least contributed one vital piece to the classical Canon.

The piece is quite repetitive around a central theme – in classical music lingo this is referred to as “arch form”. The melody quivers up the note scale, first with violins, then cellos, and finally with violas. As it moves up the register, the notes become almost drone-like, It starts quite slow-paced, but builds up noticeably as it comes to each crescendo. After the first peak is a slight fall-off down the register and a silence, which only adds to the sheer mournfulness of the composition. Little wonder that it was played at the funeral of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The piece was most famously used as Willem Dafoe’s Elias runs from the Vietnam jungle before being cut down by enemy fire, and falls into the famous Jesus Christ pose that we see on the cover of Platoon. It’s also used in the moving final scene of The Elephant Man, where John Merrick (John Hurt’s eyes and lots of makeup) lies down and dies, having just received a standing ovation. It was also voted “Saddest Classical Work Ever” by BBC listeners.

‘Adagio for Strings’ is also well-known from remixes performed by DJ Tiesto and William Orbit, and it’s to its testament that it fits so appositely to dance music. Toscanini, one of the greatest conductors of all, performed it in its first rehearsal, and could only say: “Semplice e bella”. Simple and beautiful.

You can hear the piece on YouTube here, along with some scenes from Lynch’s movies. And if you get a chance, rent out The Elephant Man. It’s the second David Lynch movie I’ve seen in a fortnight, and it’s a disturbing but compelling show, and one of the best English movies I’ve ever seen from an American director.

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I like classical music – Handel, Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, etc…but I don’t now if I was prepared for John Cage’s 4:33. I guess it could only be a once-off – silence, absolute silence, sold as a conceptual piece of modern classical music. The culmination of all things “modern”, 4:33 had to be created to be appreciated, but from that height no composer could ever escape.

The piece, if you have never heard of it, is pure silence. It is a three-movement composition, but all of it is silence. Performed live, the coughing and grunting of the audience parlays into the track, and it is supposed to be music in a modern sense.

Conceived/composed (?) by Cage in 1948, 4:33 deserves a round sneering. The performance is silent – it’s Erik Satie’s minimalism taken to extremes. Such an extreme, in fact, that you hear nothing, apart from incidental, accidental random sounds (the coughs, etc).

Here is a link to the video on YouTube. As brilliant as the whole concept really is, it can only be done once. I personally prefer Satie’s ‘Gymnopaedies’, but really – is silence by the BBC Symphony Orchestra a valid musical expression? There’s a feeling, with Cage, that he followed destiny and fell upon the concept of pure silence, which then had to be followed to the extreme of its logic.

If you listen to it in a quiet country field, or a busy office on your headphones, good luck to you. It’s not a piece of music you’ll return to. But those four-and-a-half (odd) minutes of silence are up to you. And, when that’s finished, let the music continue. And I put a heavy wager that the song that follows won’t measure up to the 4:33 that Cage set down for all of us to wonder at and YouTube comment against. Here’s a video of the song being performed, with typical BBC irony. Is silence not the language of the world?

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This is a music blog, and The Godfather is the best film ever, and one of the best things about it is the music. The ‘Love Theme From The Godfather’ is a recurring motif in the trilogy. My favourite of the three is Godfather Part II – indeed, it is my favourite film, full stop. Al Pacino’s performance as the doomed Michael Corleone is something to behold, up there with Olivier, Brando and whomever else you care to mention.

The opening chords (every note seemingly on a minor chord, played on Dm) instantly evoke Sicilian assassinations, intrigue on Lake Tahoe, Michael shouting “Appolonia! No!” in vain, De Niro disposing of the weapon after the murder of Fanucci, Frankie’s defiant last stand in the packed courtroom, Sonny’s grim end out on the Causeway, etc.

Probably my favourite scene in the trilogy is in part II. Vito (De Niro) has just ‘made his bones’ by murdering local enforcer Fanucci, and broken up and dispatched of the murder weapon in the chimneystacks over Mulberry Street. The deed done, he walks back down the street, and sits down on a step where his wife and children sit. The future Padrone picks up his youngers and says, in subtitled Italian:

“Michael, your father loves you very much…very much.”
“Michael, tu padre voglio bene sai…bene sai.”

If you have never seen The Godfather or Part II, shame on you, beg, borrow or steal a copy now. That aside, listen here on YouTube to ‘The Love Theme of Godfather’. This looks like it’s filmed in Palermo.

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Ennio Morricone is a legend, full stop. His music can be heard in the “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone, in Once Upon A Time in America (one of my favourite movies), The Untouchables, Bertolucci’s Novecento, Sean Penn’s State of Grace (another underrated classic) and, of course, Cinema Paradiso, one of the only films to ever bring a tear to my eye.

In terms of soundtrack composers, Morricone is the only one that counts for me. And, given that Paul Newman died at the weekend, it’s high time we appreciated a couple of soundtracks on thishereboogie.com.

After The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), his compositions became more and more emotional, culminating in this piece of music, possibly his last truly great score. For anyone who’s seen this fantastic Italian movie, the soundtrack looms large and listening to any piece from it will transport you instantly back to the cinema and piazza of that little Sicilian village.

There’s little more I can say about this piece of music, except that it always tugs at my heartstrings and fills me with nostalgia. Here’s a famous scene from the movie with the piece of music in the background. Hope you enjoy.

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If you’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, or if you’ve graduated secondary school in Ireland, or if you’ve ever been to Vienna, you’ll surely have heard ‘The Blue Danube‘. It’s such an ubiquitous piece of classical music that it’s featured as muzak on fairground rides, in Disney cartoons, and is effectively the unofficial national anthem of Austria. It’s also the song that got me into classical music.

I visited Vienna back in 2001, when I was inter-railing, and thought it was such a beautiful city, with lots of faded Habsburg glamour bustling side-by-side with the cosmopolitan feel of a modern German city. Vienna has been the home of much history, from Mozart, the Ruprechtskirche, the focal point of the Anschluss, the big wheel from The Third Man and Before Sunrise and the Viennese cafes that served as breeding grounds for ideas that defined much of 20th century Europe.

But, as usual, I digress. ‘The Blue Danube’ was first noticed by me when watching the famous “mothership” sequence in 2001. Only later did I realise that I’d waltzed to it at my “grad”. As I started to listen to Lyric FM, I used to plague them with requests for this lovely piece. Usually they acquiesced. Here’s the famous scene from 2001 – watch and listen.

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For some reason, this song makes me think of Lawrence of Arabia. It’s the kind of music that would be played on a film like that, with long pan shots of hundreds of Arab soldiers on camelback.

But I digress. ‘Bolero’ is one of my favourite pieces of classical music. It sounds like a Viking raid, or as the soundtrack to a battle in Crimea in the 19th century. It plunders, it blunders, it insists, it has no real quiet bits (I only ever listen to the finale), and I love it. There you go, unashamaedly commercial. It’s one of the most popular classical pieces ever.

The repetitive nature of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ has been criticised, but that is really the charm of the piece – it doesn’t try too hard, and it aims to be bombastic, written as it is for a large orchestra. Ravel himself was fairly critical of ‘Bolero’, but he was fairly hard on anything he wrote.

‘Bolero’ has been used in so many different ad campaigns, and was used by Torvill & Dean for their 1984 Winter Olympics performance. Of course, it’s been featured in quite a few movies as well. But personally, the movie with the best use of the piece is in the 1977 movie Allegro non Troppo, where it is used as a march of evolution.

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I’m heading to South America for a long holiday soon, and I’m trying to write posts to schedule for the five weeks I’ll be gone. I can’t wait to head off, so ‘Tango Por Una Cabeza‘ seems the right song to write about in the present circumstances.

Famously used in the Pacino tango scene of Scent of a Woman, as well as Schindler’s List, Delicatessen and, on the far end of the quality scale, Schwarzenegger’s True Lies, this is a great little piece. ‘Por Una Cabeza’ is Spanish for “by the head of a horse”, and in its lyrical form deals with a chronic gambler who compares his addiction to his problems with the ladies. I’ve never heard any lyrics to this song, just the instrumental piece.

And what a piece it is. Like all the great tangos, it builds and drops, with several climactic rushes. The tango is designed to express machismo and sexual desire, and so the lulls in the music show sensitivity contrasting with the aggressive impulse of the charge.

This is one of my favourite pieces of music, and gets regular play on my iPod. Here’s the scene from Scent of a Woman where the blind Pacino dances the tango in great style. Enjoy!

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You’ll have heard this one before, but it was only in researching this article that I found out how it came about. When Dresden was bombed by the Allies in World War 2 (I love these kind of facts, being a bit of a history nerd), a piece of paper bearing a small piece of a sonata in G minor was discovered. This was found to have been composed by Tomaso Albinoni, and was re-worked by Remo Giazotto in 1958 to produce the ‘Adagio in G Minor’. Giazotto claimed that the fragment of paper contained only the bass line, but there is widespread doubt as to whether Albinoni had anything to do with the piece at all.

Either way, it’s a sumptuous piece of music, albeit a little bit depressing. The perfect funeral song, a friend of mine said. But when it comes to classical music, I don’t see any of it as depressing. There’s a nice quote on YouTube about this piece – “He must have had a beautiful soul to write such a divine piece”. Maybe instead of ‘depressing’, let’s call it melancholic. Either way, it’s a haunting piece that instantly gives weight to any image that accompanies it – hence it’s been used so many times in documentaries and war films (Gallipoli, I’m looking in your direction…)

Of course, the fact that it’s in the key of G minor adds to the overall mood of elegy, but the melody to the piece is just amazing, and you might find yourself whistling it when you’re having a shower. It might be one of those solemn showers – maybe you’ve got no conditioner, or whatever. The piece moves almost into the area of opera in parts, with great feeling, before calming down to a kind of acceptance of things.

Whether or not Albinoni wrote the ‘Adagio in G Minor’ is a moot point to most people – any piece of music this beautiful deserves to be there for listeners, and to my mind it makes no difference who penned it. So, have a listen (here’s a video with some nice accompanying images). Would you believe, despite being dead over 250 years, Albinoni’s somehow managed to get his own MySpace page? Even worse, people are leaving comments on his page, wishing him a pleasant day and suchlike! Ah, the Internet.

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Any time I hear this piece of music I think of Barry Lyndon, the movie that gave me my first opportunity to hear the Piano Trio. Of course, because of the film, every time I hear the Piano Trio I think of British redcoats and French bluecoats marching against each other shelling each other to bits, with thirty soldiers cut down in a hail of cannonfire, all directed by Stanley Kubrick in our very own Kilkenny.

This piece is almost weary, as if it knows something about human nature that we don’t know but, by God, we’re going to find out in due course. Apparently it was one of the last compositions completed by Schubert, and there is definitely a sense of cynicism and world-weariness about it.

Piano and cello intertwine with each other and repeat each other’s notes, taking turns at playing the main melody. It’s a sublime piece of music, and works perfectly with Barry Lyndon. Beautifully melancholic, and possibly my favourite piece of classical music. Here’s a Youtube clip – well, a photo – from Barry Lyndon with the Piano Trio playing. Enjoy.

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Satie wrote three Gymnopédie’s [read the Wikipedia article], obviously without knowing that these pieces of music would be a major influence on ambient, post-rock, and much minimalist modern classical music.

I was in Paris over Christmas, and any time I was strolling along the Left Bank, I always found myself humming this piece of ponderous, plodding piano music. There are so few notes in the piece, and yet they feel so right, there are no more notes than necessary.

Apparently, Satie referred to much of his repertoire as “furniture music”, meaning that the music could be played in the background, while still adding to the general mood or ambience. Good God, the pretentiousness! Personally, listening to this music has me yearning for a slow, lazy Autumn day with leaves falling and nature so close.

Anyway. Here’s a lovely little video on Youtube that uses ‘Gymnopédie No. 1′ as the soundtrack. If you like this piece of music – there’s a good chance you’ll have heard it before – then I recommend you check out ‘Gnossienne No. 1′ as well. Satie influenced Nick Drake, Brian Eno, John Cage, Talk Talk’s later stuff, and a host of other musicians who saw that silence, space and stillness could be used to perfect effect in music.

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