Inspiration Case Study #9: The Case of Dad Music Going Back Centuries

[Published on the Facebook Group Thunkity Thunk: An Open Ideas Forum on June 18, 2020]

Two evenings ago, thinking to throw on an easy, quiet before-bed piece of music, I cued up “Wonderful Life” by Black on Spotify, and while my daughter happily continued running back and forth to its deceptively peppy synth beat — as I finished cleaning up the kitchen — my son, around the corner on the couch surprised me by groaning, “Oh no, not this again!” I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “It’s so depressing. Why do you like it?!” I thought for a moment and could only come up with the obvious answer: “Um... because of nostalgia?”

Certainly, I have a lot of thoughts about nostalgia, but this penseé here isn’t really about that. As usual, it’s about the way inspirations leapfrog each other, from year to year and decade to decade and century to century, often with so much pressure on shoulders going unnoticed in this fluid, subtle process.

My girlfriend pointed out to my son: “Imagine how it was for us: Have you heard any music from the ‘60s?” But the truth is that, growing up, I hardly ever heard any, even though my parents had some records from that era, mostly folk music with a couple of the odder Beatles albums gathering dust on the shelf too. No, the only music I remember hearing them play was the chamber music my dad played constantly in the car and often also at home. (Because his mother was a piano accompanist for touring classical musicians and singers who would put on concerts at UC Berkeley). Like my own son, though, I grew to hate the repetitious music my dad subjected me to — for his own nostalgic satisfaction.

It didn’t help that he made me and my sister take half a dozen years of piano lessons. My resentment at that — and more — would have turned me off from appreciating classical music for good, were it not for a concurrent, burgeoning interest of my own: a love for film. It took decades for me to understand how each film soundtrack often contains a palimpsest of all the orchestrated music that has come before it. And frequently that is true of tv music now too.

A few hours earlier, the same day, as I half-watched an old episode of “The Simpsons” my kids had thrown on, I was shocked to hear incongruous, hauntingly-familiar music rise up from my tv. It was the theme from one of my favorite films: Terrence Malick’s 1978 masterpiece “Days of Heaven.” In “The Wife Aquatic,” episode 10 of season 18 — which went on to be the highest rated for all episodes from seasons 17-20 — this music kicks in when old home movie footage is showing of Marge and her sisters, Patty and Selma, when they were little girls, clearly because the show runners know that, for many people, it’s an easy shorthand for... nostalgia.

The indelible voiceover in that film by the child actress Linda Manz (playing the little sister of Richard Gere’s Bill) has a wide-eyed, looking-back quality that can only be compared to either Sissy Spacek’s high schooler’s present/future reminiscences in Malick’s first film, 1973’s “Badlands,” or the preteen girl narrator Mattie Ross’s detached play-by-play in Charles Portis’s novel “True Grit.” (And — more so than the 1969 version — the 2010 Coen brothers film adaption of it). Time is circular for sure, when we loop our thoughts back to the past with golden, bittersweet thread — and thus it’s no surprise that Ennio Morricone’s beautiful piece of music for Malick’s second film has a music box’s rising and falling looping quality.

But it’s not even really his own creation we’re all hearing. (In this sense, “The Simpsons” music supervisor was cueing up layers of references, even if they and most viewers didn’t realize this). It’s a riff on a piece of classical music whose onomatopoeia composition is intended to evoke the looping of... fish swimming around. In fact, while Morricone’s piece does occur at the end of the film (when Linda escapes boarding school to walk along train tracks with her friend from her farm harvesting days), the similar sounding snippet over the opening credits is its inspiration: the seventh movement (“Aquarium”) of Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1886 suite “Le Carnaval des Animaux.” In the middle of the film, Malick perhaps unconsciously nods to this with a return shot to the river, where Bill and his girlfriend Abby have had a tryst at night, to show fish swimming around a champagne glass one of them accidentally dropped into the water.

We loop ourselves like those fish, around the celebratory mementos others dropped in the river of culture long ago. It happened yet again the day prior to all this, in a way that tied into yet another of Terrence Malick’s films.

While sorting through pieces I could use for a collage, I threw on my dvd of the 1943 Fritz Lang film “Hangmen Also Die.” (It was written by him and the avant-garde playwright Bertolt Brecht, giving this chronicle of resistance against the proxy for Hitler in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia the feel of a talky Hitchcock thriller). It had been maybe a decade since I’d watched it, so I was taken completely by surprise by the music I heard in an early scene showing a main character seeking refuge in a movie theater in Prague. I knew immediately what other film I knew it from: Malick’s 2011 ode to nostalgia about his own childhood, “The Tree of Life.” This piece of music not only scores a key scene where the three brothers are rollicking together on their front lawn, it also is used to score most of the film’s trailer. It’s the “Vlatava” (meaning the Moldau River) movement from Bedrich Smetana’s “Má Vlast”(My Homeland) set of six symphonic poems, composed between 1874 and 1879.

As written in Wikipedia, Smetana “was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became closely identified with his country’s aspirations to independent statehood.” Of course, then, Lang used it in a scene of defiant patriotism, where many filmgoers standing up allows the protagonist to escape suspicious Nazis. They flow like a river, carrying him out, just like the river of humanity at the heart of “The Tree of Life.”

Interestingly, for me the sweeping motif of “Vlavata” reminds me of the famous beginning of one of the few piano pieces I enjoyed learning as a child: the E G A B rise of “Alas, my love!” in “Greensleeves.” That broadside ballad, first registered to Richard Jones in London in 1580, is a lover’s lament, whereas Smetana’s piece is a celebration of a river — yet both overlap in my mind in a way that makes a whole new, contradictory emotion. That yearning can be called nostalgia, or just a nameless, gaping sense of the awesome connections between so many things.

As Colin Vearncombe (AKA Black) sings on his 1986 hit “Wonderful Life,” “There’s magic everywhere.”