But his song remains, pulling me ever deeper into the woods. I took it as he's going to some how stumble into the black lodge. This is the power of a great theme: However disorienting things might get, on the screen or in life, you can always return to that musical mantra. ARM WRESTLING TOURNAMENT ONLY 79.99 FOR EARLY TICKETS sonspapertiger 6 yr. Those notes live somewhere deep in my brain I could feel that as I clumsily plunked them out on my piano. TV series are rituals, and those opening notes feel quasi religious, like an “om,” the one true bass line thrumming under eternity. When Lynch and Frost brought “Twin Peaks” back for a revival in 2017, it was in many ways a different series with a different sound: even more gorgeously and truculently experimental, with an audio palette that leaned heavily on Lynch’s eerie, mechanical sound textures.īut as the opening sequence began, there it was again: Bum bommm. Like “Twin Peaks” itself, it meant what it said, even if you could spend your life grasping after that meaning. The score played with Americana and pop history, but despite coming out at the dawn of the age of TV irony - “Seinfeld” had premiered a year before - it never winked. Badalamenti met the challenge in his playful and minimal score for the rest of the series, from the wistful “Laura Palmer’s Theme” to the seductive “Audrey’s Dance” to the jazzy, twitchy “Dance of the Dream Man.” It needed to work in a cherry-pie all-American diner and in the anteroom of the underworld. The music for “Twin Peaks” had to make realistic and surrealistic sense. (The synthesizers, the critic John Rockwell wrote in The Times in 1990, “invest everything with an electronic glow, as if the music were radioactive.”) It’s retro, with echoes of a rockabilly riff, and space-age. Their interplay sets up contrasts that Lynch and Frost built into their supernatural murder mystery. The theme couples that figure with a wash of dreamy synthesizers. (Counterpoint: Come on.) But whether or not it is the best theme of all time, it may be the most otherworldly, the most unlike anything that came before it. It would be unfair to use Badalamenti’s passing to dunk on that choice. In a recent list of the 100 greatest TV themes ever, Rolling Stone ranked “Twin Peaks” at 35. Later that day, in the sort of coincidence that seems to happen only in dreams and in small, spirit-afflicted logging towns in Washington, came news that the song’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, had died at age 85.īadalamenti was a classically trained composer with a long résumé, including the scores for David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” But his memory is secured by those mesmeric notes, which opened the red curtains on Lynch and Mark Frost’s eerie mystery, and which stand above and apart from most music written for television like an ancient evergreen in an old-growth forest. The lesson I played on Monday was the theme from “Twin Peaks” - well, the idiot-proof, one-hand version that my iPad teaching app prepared for me, built around that low, hypnotic pattern. Suffering from a case of middle age, I recently decided to learn the piano as an adult.
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