This is a meditation upon the track known as "Brokeback Mountain #1" from the soundtrack. I have heard it enough times that I do not need to hear it as I perform this meditation.
It begins (joyfully) with an intricate and happy musical piece performed on one guitar - deep and resonating - much like a baritone voice. But it is quicly joined by a pump organ which also plays its own song - harmonizing with the first voice in its own tinny instrumentation. It is a plaintive voice an octave or two higher than the first one.
Into this beautiful and playful harmonization is introduced orchestral strings, which bridge the silences that grow wider and wider as the music continues, until finally the tenor voice dies off completely, leaving the guitar to harmonizeas best it can with the orchestral strings.
As for the musicality of this piece, it quickly and lively moves upward through the note scale, but not without some tune of pure essentiality: a voice which harmonizes joy and serenity, union and seperation, life and death. As the music continues and the two voices learn to mesh and play off of each other, where one falls back and its music is muted, the other pulls forward and fills the void.
When the violins are introduced, the musical piece quickly cresendoes then dies down in tone and emphasis slowly. The songs of the two voices slow down as well. When the baritone voice is left entirely alone with the strings, they both suddenly crescendo again before fading out completely.
The Five Stages of the Soul: "Something about returning to music after all those years aroused feelings of an old companionship and made life seem newer and richer. Existence is not over til the last breath, and we all have an obligation, a mandate even, to plumb its depths."
Beauty, the Invisible Embrace:
"Music does not touch merely the mind and the senses, it engages that ancient and primal presence we call soul. The soul is never fully at home in the social world that we inhabit. It is too large for our contained, managed lives."
"Sound and gesture are contemporary, identical, and indistinguishable... Linked to its own past, the gesture fills up with music and becomes rounded, like the universe... The beauty of gesture renders time invisible." -Catherine David
"For their short while on earth, most people long to have the fullest life they can. No one wants to remain a prisoner in an unlived life."
"Where woundedness can be refined into beauty, a wonderful transfiguration takes place."
The music is not over until is is over and every instrument is silent. During the music are we not drawn into some experience transcendent to ourselves?
Do we not experience emotional pains: joy, loneliness, sorrow, mourning. In society, we are requested not to experience these - we are told to live a normal life and not to worry about being more than human.
Ultimately, the soul insists upon movement. It cannot remain stifled in lesser forms but must expand to fill the gap between God and Man. Inspiring works of art, including music, can expand consciousness and advise the soul to seek what it does not have.
If music is a gesture, when combined with vision it resourcefully dislodges the soul from its quiet slumber. It awakens the soul to the experience it most lacks, makes bold our weaknesses, and instills within one a desire to relinquish them.
In other words, certain pieces of music wound us to the core. They wound us so that we may see the necessity of transformation and experience fulfilment by that transformation.
