Over at aworks there’s a David Lynch quote:
It washed over me. It was just so unbelievable beautiful and so perfect for the ending of the film…How and when the clarinet emerges, what it does and how it dies away. Cinema is like that. And time can be your friend, but it can also be your enemy. And if things aren’t working and you are with the audience, you die the death.
I was puzzled. Robert Gable (of aworks) said Lynch was speaking about Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Um. Strings, you know? No clarinet in that work. So what the heck …??
Well, I went to the site to read the entire quote, and here’s what I read from an interview there:
Film is like music. A painting stands still. In film there’s this thing called time added to it. And it is beautiful. How it flows. These sequences. This flow. I was working on the Elephant man. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was lying on my couch. I heard this adagio for strings. It washed over me. It was just so unbelievable beautiful and so perfect for the ending of the film. And I called Samuel Sanger and I said, we gotta get this adagio for strings. He went out and bought nine different versions, ’cause I didn’t know which version I had heard. I listened to all of them and none of them were doing it for me. Finally he found Andre Previn’s version of adagio for strings. The same notes, the same orchestration, but completely different feeling. So it’s how you move through time, one thing is first and then another is second and it’s how they go together, that’s cinema. It is so much like music. How and when the clarinet emerges, what it does and how it dies away. Cinema is like that. And time can be your friend, but it can also be your enemy. And if things aren’t working and you are with the audience, you die the death.
I continue to be puzzled. If it’s “the same orchestration” then where in the world did the clarinet come from?
In Other News it’s Robert Schumann’s birthday (1810). In case you didn’t know.
For me, music is always the language which permits one to converse with the Beyond.
And Frank Lloyd Wright’s (1867).
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen
And Scott Adam’s (1957).
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
