As a life-long fan of classical music from all periods, I’ve always
been drawn to film music—and indeed, I inherited my love of classical music from
film music. I cut my teeth on John Williams’ scores for Star Wars,
Indiana Jones, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and E.T., which
provided me the basic musical vocabulary for encountering and appreciating
composers such as Strauss, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Schoenberg, and
so many others—and some without ‘S’’s. The richness of the orchestration, as
well as the glorious melodies that seemed to emerge from the characters’ own
thoughts and situations, moved me to the core, and helped me ‘see’ similar
psychological richness in abstract music such as a four-movement, hour-long
symphony. In fact, film music made me question whether there really is such a
thing as ‘abstract’ music, since everything has its own story—you just have to
find it (for yourself, mostly). Moving from film music backwards was probably
the best musical education I could have received, and I attained it early: the
first music I ever purchased (or had purchased for me) was the soundtrack to The
Empire Strikes Back in the very early eighties. A handful of years later I
was listening to The Rite of Spring and Shostakovich’s Fifth.
