Classical Plasma I

"The Night Aquarium Is Closed"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]


I’ve always said there’s only 2 kinds of music I don’t like at all: country and opera.  All other types, I like at least a little bit.  Take classical music, for instance.  There isn’t a lot of classical music I like, but there’s a few pieces.  And, a few months ago, I got a wild hair to make a mix based around classical music.  Of course, the big problem is that I don’t really like enough classical music to make an interesting mix out of it, and also classical music pieces can sometimes be hugely long, which I rarely allow on my mixes.¹  So I thought, let’s expand the parameters.  What about cinematic music?  Mostly I favor soundtracks with actual songs on them,² but the more common, neoclassical-style form of soundtrack has its place too.  Often I pick up such things to use as bridges for other mixes; Four Rooms, for instance, with its instrumental tracks composed nearly entirely of tunes by Combustible Edison, is great for this, although perhaps not properly neoclassical.  We’ve seen snippets from Beetlejuice and The Da Vinci Code³ and Coraline⁴ and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,⁵, and we’ll see more from those movies and many others.  But there are also some pieces from soundtracks that are larger, more stand-alone, and don’t lend themselves to quick instrumental breaks on otherwise-vocal mixes.  And what about gaming music?  Both videogame soundtracks, and what I often consider to be music composed exclusively for listening in the background while playing roleplaying games?  Those are often in this ballpark as well, and, again: some of them can squeeze into some of my other mixes here and there, but many of them are left looking for a home.

So here we are, with something a bit beyond classical gas and into a whole new state of matter.  I think I’ve managed to represent most of my classical and neoclassical interests here, and the mood is fairly wide-ranging.  Most importantly, I think a really good classical piece tells a story: Peter and the Wolf does that, as does The Nutcracker Suite and The Carnival of the Animals.  That story is mostly in the mind of the listener, but I think we can all agree it’s still there.  I wanted this mix to tell a story in the traditions of those classical pieces, and I feel pretty good about what I ended up with.  (Interestingly, I used individual tunes of two of those three longer pieces, plus some from another, similar work.  Whether I was successful in recontextualizing them or not, I’ll leave it to you to decide.)  So I’m going to do something I don’t normally do for these mixes and actually tackle the exact order of the tracks.  Perhaps it’ll help to clarify the journey I’m trying to send you on.

First, a few notes about the works I’m drawing from.  There’s the Nutcracker Suite, of course, which many people think of as Christmas music, but I have to say I don’t.  Each tune within the suite is its own little world, as far as I’m concerned, and I really like some of them, and don’t care for others.  There’s also the Mother Goose Suite⁶ by Ravel.  My eldest heard this on the radio at a fairly young age and declared it was the only classical music they’d ever actually liked, so of course I tracked it down.  Eventually I started to like it too.  The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns has only a few pieces I like, including the amazing “Aquarium,” but Saint-Saëns is also the author of Danse Macabre, which you’ve heard in countless cartoons and Jim Beam commercials.  Erik Satie’s piece I first heard in its Gary Numan form in LittleBigPlanet;⁷ most of the rest of the “properly classical” tracks I gleaned from yet another in the Lifescapes series: Classical Meditation.⁸

In the soundtrack department, there are a few names one can’t really skip over in a mix such as this: John Williams is the major figure that looms over modern cinematic music, of course, but Hans Zimmer is a pretty big name as well, and Danny Elfman, while perhaps not as traditional as the others, is just as ubiquitous when it comes to soundtracks.  Perhaps lesser-known, but no less talented, is Christopher Young, who is known primarily for his work on horror film soundtracks such as Hellraiser and (the one I draw from here) Drag Me to Hell.  For videogames, I’m looking at Jesper Kyd (Assassin’s Creed) and Koji Kondo (Legend of Zelda).  For gaming music, I have my old standbys Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana, plus yet another track off the CD that I got with an Eberron book.⁹

For this particular tracklist, I’m going to follow the classical music tradition of listing the composer as the artist rather than the performer.  In most cases, the performer is not critical; any reasonably competent performance of the piece should suffice.  Pick your favorite, if you have one, or listen to a few and pick the one that strikes your fancy.  For the soundtracks, of course (both movie and videogame), there is generally just the one version, so you’re covered there.  The big exception would be the Kondo piece; I recommend the Legend of Zelda 30th anniversary CD, which gives orchestral interpretations of many of the classical Zelda tunes.¹⁰  But there are 3 exceptions to the pick-your-own-version guideline, which I’ve indicated in the tracklist using “performed by” tags.

First, “Aquarium,” from The Carnival of the Animals, is an interesting and tricky piece.  Saint-Saëns wrote it specifically for the glass harmonica, which is an instrument that almost no orchestra will actually have on hand (nor anyone to play it even if they did).  Because of this, there are various strategies to getting around this, including using a glockenspiel, a celesta, or just chimes (or even, in the supreme cop-out, trying to play it on the piano).  Some strategies work better than others, but since we’re talking about entirely different instruments (as opposed to just different performances, different instrumentalists, etc), there are pretty huge differences in one version of “Aquarium” vs another.  First of all, if there exists any good quality recording of this piece played orchestrally with the glass harmonica, I haven’t found it.¹¹  The one I indicate, by the ever-popular Nash Ensemble, is in my opinion the best substitute.¹²  Secondly, there are a million different versions of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (yet another tune you’ll be familiar with from cartoons and commercials).  In this case, you really want the amazing version by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, from the soundtrack for The Social Network.  Trust me.  Finally, “Once Upon a December” is actually a vocal piece, from the not-quite-Disney movie Anastasia.¹³  But this version is an instrumental one by piano virtuoso Emile Pandolfi.  I don’t actually like the version from the movie.  But this version is sublime.

Since there are no words on the entire mix, there’s no lyrics to draw a title from.  So I’ve taken a different approach on this one: I took a few words from each of three different track titles and glued them together.  It provides an evocative, yet non-specific, volume title.

Classical Plasma I
[ The Night Aquarium Is Closed ]

“Tableau I: Spinning Wheel Dance and Scene” by Maurice Ravel, off Mother Goose (ballet) [Classical Piece]
“Meeting Aragog” by John Williams, off Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets [Soundtrack]
“Into the Night” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg (performed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) [Single]
“Drag Me to Hell” by Christopher Young, off Drag Me to Hell [Soundtrack]
“Danse Macabre” by Camille Saint-Saëns [Single]
“Sharn: City of Towers” by David P. Davidson, off Shards of Eberron [Game Soundtrack]
“Act II. Le Cafe (The Arabian Dance)” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, off The Nutcracker Suite [Classical Piece]
“Spirit of Damascus” by Jesper Kyd [Single]
“Dream Within a Dream” by Hans Zimmer, off Inception [Soundtrack]
“Tableau III: Conversations of Beauty and the Beast” by Maurice Ravel, off Mother Goose (ballet) [Classical Piece]
“Nocturne #19” by Frédéric Chopin, off Lifescapes: Classical Meditation [Compilation]
“The Carnival of the Animals - zoological fantasy: The Aquarium” by Camille Saint-Saëns (performed by Nash Ensemble) [Single]
“Gymnopedie #1” by Erik Satie, off Lifescapes: Classical Meditation [Compilation]
“Prelude in C-Minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach, off Lifescapes: Classical Meditation [Compilation]
“Act II. Le Tea (The Chinese Dance)” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, off The Nutcracker Suite [Classical Piece]
“Gerudo Valley” by Koji Kondo [Single]
“Fate” by Danny Elfman, off Wanted [Soundtrack]
“City of Sails” by Midnight Syndicate, off Dungeons & Dragons [Game Soundtrack]
“Once Upon a December” by David Newman & Stephen Flaherty (performed by Emile Pandolfi) [Single]
“The Park Is Closed” by John Williams & Michael Giacchino [Single]
   

Total:  21 tracks,  74:58

So we begin with “tableaux I” of Moother Goose: “Spinning Wheel Dance and Scene.”  The main thing that I love about this is that it just bursts into being, and then slows down a bit to settle into a groove which is somehow both magical and slightly menacing.  Something amazing is coming, but it might not be the good kind of amazing.  As this track slowly fades away, we get to “Meeting Aragog,” from the second Harry Potter movie.  If you know the movie, you know that this signals the arrival of the amazing thing, and it is definitely not the good kind.  Which carries us perfecty into Nox Arcana’s “Into the Night,” which I’ve always felt was a sort of background menacing—it’s like looking out into the darkness and knowing that something scary is probably out there, but you have no idea what it is.  The final bell chime fading away from that tune is replaced by the electronic hum of Nine Inch Nails’ founder Trent Reznor’s take on the classic Halloween piece “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”  This particular version starts out with a pretty slow tempo, but gradually builds up to a sort of frantic frenzy, which crescendoes to several false stops, and then bleeds perfectly into the demonic “Drag Me to Hell,” which is pretty much right what it says on the tin.  From there, it makes perfect sense to gently slide into “Danse Macabre,” which, after all, means “Dance of the Dead.”

The strange thing about “Danse Macabre,” though, it that it’s not actually creepy in the same way that “Drag Me to Hell” is.  Despite the fact that “Danse Macabre” is specifically supposed to represent Death fiddling skeletons from their graves on Halloween, there’s a gentleness, and even a playfulness to it, that starts to come up out of the darkness that the opening tracks plunged us quickly into.  It ends with a very quiet violin part, and then the opening strings of “Sharn: City of Towers” come up, and it really feels like dawn breaking on the impossibly tall spires of a fantasy city.  Which is not unlike what Tchaikovsky wants us to feel with his “Arabian Dance,” harkening back, as it does somehow, to stories like Aladdin and Sinbad.  Which is, of course, the perfect intro to “Spirit of Damascus,” which (coming from the Assassin’s Creed version of the Middle East) seems to marry the quiet nomadic spirit of Arabia to the fantasy feel of Sharn.  All this majestic building culminates in the somewhat dramatic “Dream Within a Dream” (from Inception).

Which in turn leads us to a quieter turn in the mix, starting off with the middle act of the Mother Goose Suite, “Conversations of Beauty and the Beast.”  It does indeed have a conversational tone, and it flows nicely into one of Chopin’s “Nocturne"s.  This is a quieter, contemplative piece which allows the listener to reflect on perhaps a quiet nighttime vista.  And that in turn bleeds very prettily into “Aquarium,” with its waterlike trills and glissandoes, and then directly to “Gymnopedie,” both of which have a natural feel, like quietly watching animals roam about, unaware of being observed.  The turn to Bach’s “Prelude in C-Minor” is a bit of a step down, as the key implies, but it’s still a piece that’s more reflective than sad.

The next “movement” of the mix kicks off with another portion of the Nutcracker Suite: in this case, “The Chinese Dance.”  It’s the perfect bridge, as it retains a ghost of the contemplative nature of the previous set, but also sets up for the much more active “Gerudo Valley,” which has a bit of a feel of traveling along an exotic landscape.  This leads inevitably to “Fate,” which feels like a brief moment of preparation before setting off on the journey that is “City of Sails.”  As the name implies, this is also a traveling song, but more like a slow ocean journey than the rapid transit of “Gerudo Valley.”

Finally, we come to the closing of this musical story, which kicks off with the gentle, mildly romantic piano of “Once Upon a December.”  This is a waltz-like piece that feels a lot like a slow dance, perhaps the last one before “The Park Is Closed.”  This latter marriage of John William’s original Jurassic Park score with Michael Giacchino’s updated musings provides the perfect closer for the mix.


Next time, we’ll dig a little deeper into the meaning of “operatic.”

__________

1 As always, there are some exceptions.
2 Two of my favorites in this regard are Pretty in Pink and Lost Boys.
3 Both on Phantasma Chorale I.
4 Also on Phantasma Chorale, but also once on Shadowfall Equinox IV.
5 On Paradoxically Sized World II.
6 There are two versions of this: an orchestral piece and a ballet.  The ballet includes extra interludes as well as new bookend movements, so it’s more complete.
7 Also the inspiration for the Paradoxically Sized World mixes.
8 Although of course you could feel free to substitute your favorite versions of those tracks; I know the Lifescapes CDs are a pain in the ass to find.
9 For a fuller discussion of this CD, see Phantasma Chorale I.
10 The link in the tracklist is actually to a YouTube copy of that exact version.
11 Please enlighten me in the comments section if you know of one.
12 I’m pretty sure their choice of substitute is glockenspiel, but I haven’t been able to pin it down for certain.
13 To be clear, it wasn’t really even remotely a Disney movie at the time, although it used the classic Disney animated movie style, and many people misremember it as a Disney film.  In a weird twist of fate, it now belongs to Disney, after their merger with Fox, so it ended up being a Disney movie after all.