Everything I Know About Classical Music (I Learned From NPR)

I love classical music. I never thought I would, since I'm basically a nerd, but a few years ago I tuned into a classical radio station and I haven't been able to turn it off. I would never have believed I'd connect with all the deep, smart, arty stuff but it's true. It's been so long I've actually become something of an expert, and I'd like to share some of that expertise with you.

One of the reasons people love classical music is its ability to emotionally touch us. Without classical music, people would watch Jurassic Park and say something like, "Hey, there's dinosaurs." "Look, dinosaurs." "Oh, wow -- it's a dinosaur." With the added layer of drama and tension and surprise provided by classical music, though, now everybody's like, "OHMIGOD! HOW MAJESTIC! A DINOSAUR IS EATING A BUSH!"

Classical music dates back to the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Before then, movies just played Elvis or Doris Day in the background, depending on whether the audience was hip or thought sex made girls explode. With 2001, the filmmakers knew neither of these would fit a weird space movie, so they hired composer Richard Strauss. I don't think Strauss even saw the movie: he just wrote up a bunch of spacey shit and the producers were like "Hell yeah!" It became the highest-grossing film of the year, and I'll bet the local weed dealers made even more.

Unfortunately, yesterday's Tesla is today's FitBit, which means the movie is unwatchable now. Kids today just see what might have been, and silently thank God Strauss didn't do another film. If he'd written the soundtrack to Jaws, for instance, we'd probably hear a tambourine every time the shark appears. Somebody would play the triangle during Psycho's shower scene. When The Birds started to swarm it would have been to a yodel. There's an evil computer but does Strauss think to write a "Theme For An Evil Computer"? And that's not the worst of his mistakes: one need only recall Buddy Elfman's score for Honey I Bought Us A Beehive to know that monkey antics live and die with trombones.

As if by magic, in the late 1970's a talented composer appeared by the name of John Williams. He said, "I can do better than that!" and he did, writing music that actually fit the movie Superman. While the movie set records at the box office, classical radio stations from coast to coast played the shit out of "Theme from Superman (Main Title)," "Theme from Superman (Extended, With Choir)," and "Theme from Superman (This Time With A Clarinet)." While to me the tunes are pretty straightforward, apparently they still have a fan in Wallace Schiff III, early music curator at San Bernardino NPR.

Ten years later, the producers of Star Wars used this as a starting point for their film. "Why just write one song and then make endless variations on it?" they asked. "For our movie, we're going to write TWO!" That soundtrack was an even bigger smash, featuring an astounding 47 versions of the "Love Theme" including "Love Theme For Princess Leia" (with a soprano replacing the trumpets), "Love Theme In The Cantina" (with the soprano replaced by an accordion), and "Love Theme For Chewbacca" (instrumental with maracas and snare drum).

Lurking around the corner, though, was classical music's quantum leap. In the next period, which I call the Middle Ages of classical music, we see songs tailored to individual scenes. In the original Spiderman, for instance, a piano's somber chords deftly express the heartbreak the title character experiences when he sees his girlfriend Mary Jane kiss his arch-rival Dirk Wanderstone. An atonal spray of discordant notes convey what he feels when he's hit by a blast of Arachmantium. You can see the massive jump forward from the early period just by comparing two Spiderman songs: In Spiderman IV: The Webbening there's the simplistic bravado of "Spiderman Bounces Off Buildings" while in Spiderman MCXLIV, we have the fourteen-minute, violin-heavy adagio, "What's This Creamy White Stuff (Shooting Out Of My Wrists)?"

It sounds counterintuitive, but tying classical music to cinematic action actually benefitted both. One quick glance at the soundtrack to Superman 14: Is That A Turquoise Cape? makes this obvious, with the crowd-pleasers "Lois Sees Stars When She Sees Clark," "That's Ruff: Superman Flies A Sick Dog Over New Orleans," and "Whoops! Clark Breaks His Dad's Arm Throwing A Donut." (Unfortunately, composers took this a little too far. 1998's throwaway Do You Take This Chicken? has over four hundred tracks on its soundtrack, from the three-minute "Rooster Shuffle" to the jaunty, twelve-second "A Chick and Chewing Gum." Mr. Schiff only plays the latter on NPR, and that's just during Pledge Month.)

In what I call the late period of classical music, all the rules had been written and the formula drawn up. Now instead of accompanying scenes with four hundred unrelated pieces, the soundtrack had an arc just like the storyline. Now a soundtrack had four main parts: the allegro (yes, like the cold pill), the adagio, the scherzo, and the allegro reprise.

The allegro is the opening salvo that says, "This is going to be exciting!" (unless it's a Marvel film). It's a quick overview of the movie as much as the poster is, with trumpets and violins representing Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard Dallas. (Or if we're talking indie films, a theremin instead of Kate Winslet and a banjo replacing George Clooney.)

The adagio is the slow part of the movie when the dinosaurs eat grass. Maybe there's a tuba to emphasize the fact they're big, and there's a piccolo to represent the seaweed hanging from their mouths, or a clarinet to mimic their jaws while they chew.

The scherzo is pretty much anything loud and fast. It's the filmmaker's way of saying, "Y'all need to get your asses back from the snack bar, because this shit is gonna end."

Then the allegro comes back with a reprise. If it's a happy ending, there's more trumpets. If it's a sad ending, oboes. If there's going to be a sequel, there are conflicted violins. If there's monkeys, well, you know.

If you think this is the end of the line for classical music, think again. There's a lot of groundbreaking stuff being written by young, untrained composers. Lars von Zitzberg of the band Flattened Cheerleader is doing some great work with horror movie soundtracks, most recently the obscure Argentinian film AIEEEEEE!!!, while Bobby Clampf, who cut his teeth on the children's TV show Blinko's Tangerine Teapot, is breaking new ground in Rom-Com soundtracks like Three Pelotons For Thirteen Bridesmaids and My Pronouns Are OH NO YOU DIDN'T!

Anyway, I hope you guys learned something here. And remember to support your local classical radio station, where all day long you can listen to the very best classical music from the very best movies. It's a surprise every time you tune in, whether you hear the jaunty "Proud to be Plastic" from The Lego Movie, the tense edge-of-your-seater "Okay So That's Kryptonite Too" from Superman XII, or the rambunctious "Four Plesiosaurs And a Hacky-Sack" from Jurassic Park 15: Why Do We Even Bother Locking The Gate?

If enough of you ask, maybe I'll write something about religious music next. From what I hear on the radio, it has a long, diverse history too, all the way from Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" to George Michael's "Faith."