“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”
January 14th, 2010 Posted in classical music, shostakovich
“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”, G. said to me, recently, within the hour.
This was prompted by Harry Dean Stanton, who stars as the aurally challenged lead cowboy in this David Lynch shortie (“The Cowboy and the Frenchman”) we watched the other night, while putting the last few brightly colored marmosets and monkeys and minnows into a jigsaw puzzle:
Which at the time reminded me of his appearance as the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Fire Walk With Me:
(Which G did not remember, hence the Youtubing tonight. I don’t see how she forgot it really, it’s one of my favorites in the movie… “I’ve already been places”). Which brought us to one of the major atmospheric forces in Lynch’s movies, the soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. Like this piece from Blue Velvet:
Badalamenti’s soundtracks are always luscious and dissonant, in a wandering, stringy sort of way. That’s exactly why I both love the music, and think it’s perfectly appropriate as a landscape for Lynch’s movies to live in. It is also very similar to some of Shosty’s brooding melancholia, especially that last piece, which was explicitly styled after his 15th symphony:
Which is of course how we wound down to the comment up there, at the top of this meandering blog post.
