Motion Picture Scores are beautiful. It is as simple as that. Every song was carefully composed, edited, revisited, rehearsed, deleted, and started from scratch to produce three, four, seven or several minutes of emotions. The object is to get a reaction from the audience, to connect what they see with what they're listening and feel empathy, and there it is! That magical connection between our brain, our eyes and our ears, all joined together to produce laughter, gosebumps or horror -I must confess, I'm very into this kind of music. So, why is that we go crazy about downloading these pieces to listen to them over and over and over again? Why would we like to revive the saddest scene of a film or the most hilarious part? We're just stuck in a moment -hey, U2 is part of my background too!
That moment when you sit or lie down, put your headphones on and click the 'play' button is fantastic. We go back to experience the same emotion either because it brings back good memories or just because we're kind of masochistic about it. I'd rather think is the second option. Well, not exactly. Orchestral music has the capacity to firmly grip on our neurones, and we like the feeling. We just can't fight it, so we go with the flow. Take a moment to listen to Hans Zimmer's "Time" or James Newton Howard's "Thought I'd Never Call?" It seems that the world stops for some minutes, it's only you and the music -and your reaction to it, of course. Close your eyes because if you don't, the result is not the same. You're creating. Yes, we all create. As long as you have a functional brain, you can imagine, you can design your universe -Epica, must be thankful for that conceptual album- and paint your own surroundings, like Robbin Williams did on "What Dreams May Come." In the end, we make the soundtrack of our life based on someone else's idea. Some would call it plagiarism, but of course, it is not. Music is like poetry. The original idea is sticked to its creator, it is us, the rest of the world, who have the right and duty to interpret and make the most of it. So we atribute these pieces to our life.
Graduation day, first kiss, first date, the loss of someone you love, travelling abroad, everything or almost everything has a song that goes well with it in our head. This happens not only with scores but also with lyrics, but that's another ground I'm not interested in at the moment. The crescendo cadence of a piece that precedes the grand finale or the very last notes of a song, those are the biggest moments that we live for. Once I heard in Grey's Anatomy that "it all might be gone tomorrow," and that is a quite accurate utterance. Life is just a little tiny piece of years that we're prepared -or not- to enjoy, with its ups-and-downs and all the rest. Music sometimes makes it easier, it diminishes the burden, the weight of the whole world. It's like magic, you can't see it, but the impact on you, the effect is unforgettable.
Live with music.
