Music as a Soundtrack of Lives

(and the gorgeousness of Gustavo Santaolalla's music)

Art: Keith Mallett

Gustavo Santaolalla.

Now that’s a name. It has musical cadences embedded in its very syllables. And I have been doing nothing but listening to Gustavo’s music through the month.

I have often wondered about the incredible magic of music.

Oh, not the sheer beauty of it - or that too!! - but the mechanics of it, the technicalities. Just step back and think - you can’t see music, but it’s there in the air, all around you, and streams of sound can be heard coming from various sources and various directions.  And then we have the faculties to catch the notes in all their variations and subtleties. Unseen, pervasive, varied - and catering to the idea of beauty in different forms to different people. High notes, low notes, classical, rap, romantic - the sheer variety of it, for every mood, age, time, occasion. 

How does it travel? How does it reach us? How does it touch us? Oh these are rhetorical questions. I don’t want scientific answers. I’m talking about music’s mystical quality, its mysterious nature, the magic of their being which makes music come out of a machine and travel in ether to enter us in ways which move the very fibre of our beings. Where then it changes us in mysterious ways which we can’t define. When we are moved to tears, when we rise with determination inside us, when we are given a voice when we don’t even know the words to describe what we feel.

What is this magic of notes and scales and voices which finds its way to us from all around, in ways which leaves us less lonely, has often brought two hearts together, has often given words to what was impossible to express. What has given poetry wings, what has given words wind, what has made a man’s feelings find a hearth in someone’s else’s heart.

For when I think of a world without music, I feel bereft, empty, incomplete. It’s frightening.

Art: Keith Mallett

I think of all the nights I’ve gone to sleep with music playing on long after I’ve drifted away. I’ve thought of the times I’ve sat silently with someone I deeply care for, doing nothing more than listen to music and knowing that through that simple action I have actually let her know that I deeply care. Or just to know that there are different ways of living, of knowing more about the world through lyrics which pierce the heart.

Can there be too much of music? When you want to have silence fill your life instead of sound? But isn’t silence also another form of music? Because music is not shapeless or formless - it has depth, it has messages embedded into its fibre, a sense of being in the presence of something which is deep and meaningful.

So. Here’s to something which gives so much pleasure and wisdom to our lives. Where we connect with the talent of rank strangers, who give us something so intimate that one wonders how could someone know us with such delicate, tender insight.

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Courtesy: last.fm

Gustavo Alfredo Santaolalla is an Argentine musician, producer and composer whose musical style frequently combines elements of rock, soul, African rhythms and Latin American folk. He is best known for composing his film scores with acclaimed director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films including Amores Perros, Babel, 21 Grams. He also composed the original scores for the video game The Last of Us, as well as the themes for television series such as Jane the Virgin and Making a Murderer. He won Academy Awards for Best Original Score for Brokeback Mountain and then Babel. From the Indian context, he composed the background score for Aamir Khan’s Dhobi Ghat. His music for The Motorcycle Diaries is tender and rousing in equal measure.

He brought into mainstream the infinitesimal sound of a small Andean stringed instrument of the lute family called charango or ronroco, the usage of which has become his hallmark in his numerous soundtracks.

There is a gentleness in his music and a form of storytelling, which I find incredibly soothing and rich, full of messages and predicaments, brimming with understanding and warmth.

I select three pieces which I completely love.

Apertura

The strumming which begins the piece is confident. But it is searching for something to lean towards, something substantive, something which will bring worth - but something we all already know is incredible. And then it bursts open, like a flower clover which explodes into us as we go about in the wilderness, searching. There is nothing which could even substitute for that feeling, nothing which could match the joy - and that’s when things just blossom. The risk has paid off, everything in which we had put our all suddenly bursts open into flowers, a triumph, a gorgeousness, something which is unfettered, something where we don’t care for the world. And the wildness comes to us as if it was meant for us, right from the beginning. Though all we did, really, was walk alone.

The Wings

There is a gentle tentativeness, like a question enjoying itself being asked, as if it was important to first find other things out, as if our feelings would finally depend on something much more than our own internal conflicts.

Until there is a clearing, like the skies opening, like the clouds themselves parting, to let us gaze at our own worries and to console us that this is the way forward, as if this was the only way to live. As if this was what life was really about.

The Last of Us

Important things alway start slow. And then build themselves into their urgencies. There is sorrow around the corner. There is a sense of time running out, as if life needed to get around some corner to find something else, something more. As if it was an insistence on which life itself had a bearing. I don’t think it was about life or death. It was more about living and life. But that is a revelation still to come. And for that only the journey mattered, only the journey.

I urge you to discover more from Gustavo Santaolalla's substantial oeuvre. (Search for his discography in Spotify.)

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