Oh, my. Oh, my goodness. With a long day that began with a teeny-tiny four-hour sleep from 1-5am, I went for a 6:30am run around Greenlake with an amazing girlfriend, followed in consecutive order by a (late) walk to school with SiKay, a Pilates class, a coffee date-cum-walk-to-Fremont-for-pie-and-back with the Muay Thai Baker, and finished off with an early return home with all three kids. I tumbled into my peaceful house exhausted but joyful, and jonesing at the bit to listen to some of my favourite soundtracks while working on dinner.
And that's when I finally discovered it.
Over the past few years, I've checked intermittently to see if anyone had posted the score for "Maurice," a Merchant-Ivory co-production that must possess one of the most gorgeous soundtracks to ever exist. Many film scores rely on the burden of the storylines ~ and their ensuing emotional associations ~ for success; "Atonement" was a tortuously exquisite movie, with music to wreak equal heart-bleed havoc, but without the material of the film to support the score (and vice versa), it's difficult to see if the music could fare as well on its own as a musical tour de force independent of the narrative.
"Maurice," on the other hand, is a film I still have not had the privilege to see, despite its stellar cast, stunning setting, and heartrending story by E.M. Forster (one of my favourite authors). However, I am in love ~ in love, in love ~ with its soundtrack. It came in a three-boxed set of Merchant-Ivory film scores, for which I purchased solely to receive "A Room with a View." "Howard's End" and "Maurice" were incidental bonuses, yet it is now "Maurice" which has won the deepest affections of my heart.
Thus, this afternoon upon returning home, I found that a wonderful dear had ~ at long last ~ posted the glorious music, which one hot evening after a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class a few years ago, provoked specific imagery and one of my first on-line postings. (In class, I remember we were working on the basics of a fundamental technique called "shrimping." As tempting as it is to totally edit the hell out of it, I think I'll just repost the thing and keep working on my other stuff.
Oh... And don't forget to hit play.
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
For ages and ages and ages, I've been enraptured by a score to a movie I've still yet to see: "Maurice," by Merchant Ivory, with music composed by one of my favourite film composers, Richard Robbins. Many's the hour I've lost to the crazily romantic, nocturnal, and distinctly aquatic nature of this particular soundtrack; I can't even remember how often I've thrown myself on my bed to listen to the score, giving up on laundry folding until I could breathe normally again. Something about it just screams, "Lake District At Night Outside of Historic Country Estate With Either Just Yourself or That Special Someone Who Sends Your Nethers A-Flutter!" Like Ravel's 'Oiseaux Tristes' and the Romantic barcarolles (Venetian gondolier-inspired songs so popular in 19th c. western European salons), Robbins' instrumentation beautifully evokes birdcalls, gently rocking waves, a transporting sense of place, swirly tummy butterflies, etc. So tonight, after a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class and tucking the kids in for the night, I plunked the CD into the laptop and started typing. Here's what I got.
Carried on the soft twilight breeze came the heady perfume of nocturnal blooms: flowering tobacco, Nottingham catchfly, fairy lily, and other unknown, musky fragrances made especially intoxicating by the coolness of the lake air. Mingled into this beguiling combination was the ever-watchful pitted moon, embedded in its plush indigo ceiling, rippling a haphazard path to the rowboat in which we were silently, contemplatively reclined. Crystalline stars revealed themselves in exponential multitudes in a darkness to which we were generally unaccustomed from city dwelling, and it took some effort ~ though not overmuch ~ to restrain ourselves from exclaiming at yet another newly visible constellation, to try not to break the almost sacred silence in which we held ourselves in mutually understood accord.
Sheepishly liberated from his great-aunt's library were ancient tapestries ~ fantastical woven tales of woe and wonder ~ we'd formed into opulent, makeshift cushions worthy of a swooning, heartsick Pre-Raphaelite damsel. Though now scarcely visible in the increasing darkness, they still served us worn, velvety comfort, and shielded our flesh from the odd splinter and puddle of water at the base of the vessel. Occasionally, a distant splash revealed the location of a feeding carp; a mourning, keening cry betrayed the whereabouts of an isolated curlew. Stress from the demands of daily reality had long since dissipated, but was now replaced by a new, palpable electricity that sparked almost incandescently in the night air. Again, the unspoken formed both a fortress and a bond, a perfectly symbiotic relationship that would save us, serve to protect us from ourselves and from each other. It would keep. It was a strange confidence to hold secret; yet as a shared gift, became all the more precious.
All in all, it was a thoroughly enchanting way to end a summer holiday which quietly, charmingly, spun itself into a warm, early autumn. And it was certain ~ but still painfully unthinkable ~ that tomorrow's leaving would plunge us both into the blackest of moods as we would reluctantly tear ourselves away from our cocooned idyll and return to face the grind of coursework, overlapping and neverending; familial obligations, rife with unwanted and unavoidable dramas; and perhaps worst of all, the quickly-hidden appraisals and openly-knowing looks.
So tonight, with faces chilled and hearts gently tripping, we floated on wordlessly.
(photo credit: I found the stunning photograph from above here, by a photographer named M. O'Gorman. For the whole of my life, I grew up with a bit of a love affair with England's Lake District, although I have yet to go; my mother spent her happiest years holidaying there at the home of a doting old former patient while she was training to be a nurse and midwife. One of the most beautiful photographs I've seen of her comes from 1958; with a voluminous dark wool nurse's cape draped over her crisp white uniform, and a white cap atop her lovely long hair, she's standing proudly in front of her country hospital, and all of eighteen years old. (She was one of only two Asians accepted into the programme, as well as three black and two Irish girls. The rest of the student body were white. She bonded well with the other women of colour ~ and yes, the Irish were included in ostracization ~ as overt discrimination was still rampant in these parts in those days.) I need to get a copy of it framed, and put it next to the one I'd also like to have of my 22-year-old father sitting and grinning astride his wicked BMW motorcycle in Taiwan, wearing the unbelievably slick rhinoceros-leather jacket he still keeps in his bedroom closet. (This, I used to sneak out of the house and wear to high school before he started getting nervous about me spilling coffee or whatnot on it. Hence, the kindly-worded pleas to refrain from "borrowing" it so often. tee hee hee.))
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