This is an ongoing series of written explorations into songs/music in general that has somehow significantly contributed to how we remember our past selves. Importantly, understanding these sonic memories will go onto colour one's preferences for a future that is yet to come. This series sets out to chronicle some of these musical milestones that are intimately biographical yet somehow universal - miles through tones.
The River Waltz, Alexandre Desplat ft. Lang Lang (2006)
One of the stranger outcomes of putting words to thoughts is the emergence of patterns that one never knew existed. For instance - water as a motif invariably sneaks into comfort music. And I'd romanticise them to a point that most of my bedtime songs create this fluid, amniotic refuge muffling out the noises of the world. River Waltz - in that sense, is like water crests along the banks of a restless mind.
In the movie, the composition is set to this almost watercolour-esque landscape where the Fanes are seen crossing a river, bridging gaps - mirroring their blossoming affection for one another. Lilting yet pensive. At the onset, the arrangement establishes the waltz on the piano: the gentle, slow course of the river, with tiny little eddies of interleaving piano and violin notes. There is a mystery and comforting sadness to this length. Gradually going up an octave, more string arrangements come in dramatising that same notes - the violins now building anxiety and climactic joy. Alas, only to rise as if on a waterfall, and then come crashing down to stillness.
But the river, though it flowed so slowly, had still a sense of movement and it gave one a melancholic feeling of the transitoriness of things. Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? ... It seemed that the human race, like the drops of water in that river flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart - a nameless flood, to the sea.
No better words than by W. Somerset Maugham himself - author of The Painted Veil accurately convey the essence of this composition - in all of its ephemerality. Like dragonflies in the rain, a gentle reminder that this too shall pass.
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