Relistening to my Lord of the Rings soundtrack

After my ancient Gree—nay, Linear Algebra—exam today, I decided I needed something the equivalent of vegging out in front of a TV and thus dusted off my LoR CD and relistened to it. I haven't listened to it since—gosh, has it really been that long?—2001 or so.

Howard Shore has been getting a quite a beating fairly recently (as has John Williams) in one of the discussion threads of one of my FB groups, so I listened to the CD, mostly to see if he really was as bad as people made him out to be. Granted, after not listening to it for years, it turns out I didn't remember significant chunks of this soundtrack, but I honestly didn't remember it being that bad. Comparable to Williams (in fact, for a while I thought the soundtrack was composed by Williams, so that tells you how much I know), which means innocuous, but not horrible music. If you are expecting Bartok or Mozart-level quality when you listen to these things, then yes, of course the quality is probably pretty bad.

But I don't think this is a fair comparison. In fact, I only own one other movie soundtrack and both are in the "other" (not classical) category. I don't know enough theory to know what constitutes classical music vs. what doesn't (I'd classify all of John Williams as non-classical music, but several musician-types disagreed with me, so I defer to their knowledge; Satie is also considered classical music, but again, his Gymnopedies didn't sound like classical music to me, so I give up.), but movie soundtracks just don't seem to fit into this genre. Thus, comparing movie soundtracks, which were meant to be more background music, to something that is intended to be listened to more attentively, is a bit unfair.

That said, I'm "listening" to the soundtrack as I write this, and I still hesitate to call it "bad", but I was sad to discover that it didn't have the same pull it did almost eight years ago, which got me wondering whether it was the music itself or the associations I've made with this music that once had strong appeal.

You see, this was one of these soundtracks that is inextricably linked with the guy I dated during part of grad school, and my circle of friends during that time. In fact, when I picked up the CD case, the first thing that came to mind was not a particular passage from the soundtrack, but an image of a car flying down some rural road. Both of us were LoR fans (the books, though the movie wasn't bad, either). He owned the soundtrack first and used to play it in his car a lot, so I think I shortly followed suit and got my own copy, perhaps to relive those long drives where we had this playing in the background.

As I relisten to the CD, it's not the music per se that is memorable, but more that certain lines evoke memories of things C and I did together. A certain measure reminded me of a specific road in Pescadero; another line brought back memories of the anticipation we felt while we waited for the first movie to come out; yet another line conjured up an image of a random switchback from a hike we went on, while one of the flute lines brought back a conversation about speeding tickets. So many of these associations came flooding back as I half-listened to the CD.

There's the night M took us to see the second movie in his then-new car. The night we "celebrated" M's breakup with his girlfriend. The week we spent trying to strategize which movie theatre we should see this in. The I-don't-want-to-go-see-this-movie-with-someone-who-doesn't-know-who-Gandalf-is conversation I had with J. I could go on, but why bore you all?

Perhaps it's telling that I haven't listened to this CD in years; I have also lost touch with C. It's not that I'm actively avoiding him (certainly not after all of these years), but I just haven't really gone out of my way to try to track him down once I realized early on during our post-breakup friendship we superficially tried to maintain, that I wasn't going to get the "closure" I wanted, and subsequently went our separate ways. Of course I've Google-stalked him once to see what he was doing, and Facebook-stalked him to see if he's on FB (he is) but that was about it.

Now the CD has finished playing, and other than conceding that yes, there were some really bad sections, I can't really tell you what I thought of the entire soundtrack, because to be honest, I don't remember what I just listened to. Once my mind started re-conjuring up all of these past associations, I think I tuned out the actual music and these memories from that chapter of my life kindof hijacked my brain.

Then again, I think this was probably how I used to this soundtrack back then, too. Gosh. It's strange that I just listened to a CD and I can't tell you anything about it, other than give you a list of memories it brought back. (And having my brain fried from my latest marathon of studying and sleep deprivation certainly doesn't help matters.)