Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

Lontano as a whole seems to describe a long journey. From the start to about 1:55 everything feels beautiful and ready with just hints of the tribulations to come. At 1:57 when the strings enter with such a harrowing rhythmic pattern it feels as though an obstacle has presented itself. The sustained note above depicts the hero of the journey persevering over the evil which disappears at 2:39. Then the basses set up what seems to be a a much more difficult task to overcome. The loud noise at 3:30 and then the subsequent strings that come in at 3:54 almost set up a subplot in the hero narrative. And the crescendo and slow, steady rise in pitch create a feeling of deception. So the entire scenario is something like Hercules with the Nemian Lion. A beautiful woman is discovered who ends up being a terrible monster. From 5:10 on the hero is getting more and more wary about his situation, but also sucked further in. This continues until 6:30 when the danger reveals itself and the hero is presented with the tall task of fighting his way out. The near silence and then short bursts of loud noise could be the foe attacking the hero and then disappearing, only to come out and attack again. At 8:00 there is a face to face confrontation and the two just stare each other down until 8:21 when the hero realizes that he isn’t so different from his enemy after all. Disillusionment sends him into a panic at 8:55 that grows steadily into sadness and anger and hatred all at once represented by the low, middle, and high sections of the orchestra. These three emotions battle for prominence until 10:08 when the hero re-realizes his current task and discards his distractions and completes his duty. I know I may have taken that story a little far, but I just kept listening to it over and over again and piecing the thing together.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under david, ligeti. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.