It's Not 'Stardust'! - Valerie Fliss

My favorite kind of music is movie soundtracks - not songs that feature in movies, but the actually orchestrated score of the movies. I think that it comes from an early fascination with classical music, plus my social-life-destroying love for movies. I have the soundtracks for the movie "Stardust" and "Lady in the Water"; they are two of my favorites, and I play them so much that I've memorized them. My sister, however, cannot tell one movie theme from the other, and every time I put "Lady in the Water" on, she says, "Oh, wait, don't tell me - this is from 'Stardust', isn't it?"

Now, the two scores are done by totally different people, so I'm not sure what my sister's problem is, but I do find it interesting to get soundtracks done by the same composer from different movies. A good example is the composer Hans Zimmer - Mr. Zimmer has done tons of movies, from "Gladiator" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" to the "Lion King", "The Road to El Dorado" and even "Thelma and Louise." When you listen to these soundtracks, they are all different because they fit to different stories and genres, but at the same time, Mr. Zimmer has a very distinctive sound to him because of the key he chooses to write in, the instruments he favors, and the overall rhythms that he employs.

But if you think about it, all music is the same, essentially. How many times have you heard a piece of music and thought, "Hey, this reminds me of this other music…" Hans Zimmer has a distinctive flavor to all of his music because of how he hears the world - yet his music is similar to music from other genres, and those genres are similar to other genres…and it keeps going on until you wind up with one big mass of sound. All those distinctions disappear into the idea, the art of music - which ties into the idea of eschatology, or the idea of destruction. Music evaporates because it is only air, spirit, and all the individualism of the pieces of art called music disappear into one another. And so this is why I think Van der Leeuw's interpretation of music as belonging to the ideology of eschatology is appropriate. There is a disappearance of the individual within the art of music.