Since I was a kid I loved soundtracks. I listened to everything from "Dumbo" to "Star Wars" to "Jesus Christ Superstar". I was fascinated by the music that a composer would create to support the images of a motion picture. I would try to rematch the images to the music I was hearing from memory. Back then, before VHS, you couldn't just watch a movie anytime you wanted to. Listening to the "Star Wars" soundtrack over and over was as close as I could get.
As I aged and started writing music of my own I would start to create scenes in my mind to the music I was hearing. After a time I could even record some of them on my little 4 track cassette recorder. When I heard about the highly anticipated upcoming "Waterworld" I was intrigued as to what the music for it might sound like. I wrote a little music cue on my 4 track recorder that was surprisingly close to what actually ended up on the screen when it was finally released. "Can I do it too?" I thought...
I busied myself to think of a melody under the imaginary pretense of being hired to write an introduction to a film. An opening scene, a little boy getting out of school, I thought, jumping on his bicycle and riding in and around a series of obstacles in a small town on his way home. I could see it in my mind. So I wrote it and recorded it. Without any images or characters to draw from, strictly from my imagination. It sounded like this...
I played it for several people and they all told me that they could imagine the scene I had described while listening to the music I had written.
Creating a piece of music for a scene that never existed from my own imagination in a way closes a circle in my life that began for me as a child and ended 5 decades into my life. I bet that closing that circle, while it might be a conclusion, might also signify my next step into a whole new circle... Stay tuned...
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