Solo Hands
I have not seen this movie. I have not necessarily thought about seeing this movie. In fact, I’ve been much more jazzed about Star Trek than anything else. If someone were to ask me what to watch, I wouldn’t mention it.
But I’m mentioning it now. Why?
Through some whim of a random link, I went to the official website of the film THE SOLOIST, and found it to be a moving experience. For one thing, the music that pops up is Beethoven.
Now, playing Beethoven as your placeholder for high musical culture isn’t original. But they play two pieces of Beethoven that aren’t really addressed much in the popular culture. One is the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony. I swear the website plays at least a third of the movement, which is far more than I would have imagined it going. The movement runs about 15-20 minutes depending on the performance. Normally, I get somewhat testy about using the Ninth, but this was refreshing at 2 am.
The other piece is Beethoven’s Third symphony, the Eroica or Heroic, which is another not so mainstream work although it’s probably a better overall piece than the Fifth symphony in my opinion. There is a strange sounding cello melody that slowly becomes enveloped within an orchestral sound, and you realize that the music you heard was a symphony from the point of view of one of its cellos practicing alone. A brilliant demonstration of how one person adds to the symphonic sound.
Well, I’m not a sucker for the usual web enticements, but this was enough to make me stop and smell the roses as it were. Usually, you’d expect a big movie to feature something with pizazz, something that sparkles, something virtuoso and showy, something like…well, the prelude from Bach’s first cello suite.
And predictably this is what we find in the trailer for the movie…along with Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground. The cello prelude is perfect for films. It’s been featured in, among other things, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Master and Commander, and You Can Count on Me. None of those projects really have anything in common with each other or really with the piece of the music at hand. Yet it works.
I suspect it has something to do with the simplicity of the musical idea that really translates into an openness for whatever is on screen. If music is too complex or demanding, it ultimately detracts. And to top this off, the music has a very convenient musical climax at the end with a chromatic passage that leads into the final cadence that always works perfectly for an editor looking for a place to cut.
So enjoy it already!
