The Screech of Brakes, the Blare of Horns and . . . Cue Music
This year, my husband and I agreed not to spend too much money on each other for Christmas, which meant I bought him a few nice but reasonable gifts and he refurbished my wardrobe and had a CD player installed in my car.
Obviously, we need to define our terms better (not that I’m complaining). I didn’t even find out about the CD player until Christmas night when I was about to embark on an errand of mercy--taking leftover desserts to ailing relatives. As I was piling a few stray pies and cakes into the car, I noticed a festive gift bag on the front seat, which contained a CD carrying case, and thus my husband’s kind act was revealed--I thought he had been awfully insistent that we get that 10,000-mile checkup before Christmas.
So I drove into the once-silent night, past the darkened tree lots, the gift-laden pedestrians, the still-hopping convenience stores, listening to Julie Andrews sing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and I realized that my husband had given me access to the thing I had been longing for all my life--a personal soundtrack.
See, I always figured that the reason my life seems so un-Hollywood-like, so messy and realistic and lacking definitive story arcs, was because it lacked a soundtrack. The drawn-out horn, the sudden dip into a minor key, the anxious tap of a single piano note--in the movies, it’s so often the music that evokes the emotion, clues the audience into the upcoming action, or the underlying tension. Without music, those poignant close-ups would seem a bit odd--did the poor soul forget her lines? Does she never blink? But add swelling strings, and suddenly this is a woman whose love (or fear or sorrow) plumbs depths beyond words.
When you think about it, it really isn’t fair that actors, who already have the benefit of lighting and makeup and high-maintenance hair, who have directors telling them where to stand so they don’t look fat and writers giving them snappy lines so they don’t sound stupid, should also get music to fill in those hard-to-manage moments when there are so many of us who need it so much more.
Many of us already use music to mark the great moments of our lives--the song all the DJs played that first year after college, the terrible Top 40 songs that seemed so insightful the weeks after the big breakup, the George Winston tape playing endlessly in the labor room until its removal and destruction was requested. And some of us (think John Cusack in “High Fidelity”) even go so far as to compile such collections.
Me, I don’t have that kind of time. And, actually, my ideal soundtrack would be omniscient, orchestrated by the great Soundmixer in the Sky. Imagine knowing you were about to get into an accident, or run into a former lover, or get eaten by a zombie because your background music suddenly changed. Wouldn’t it be great? Wouldn’t it be handy?
My new CD player, alas, does not have a deus ex machina feature (though I’m sure my husband would have gotten it had it been available). And in reality, the soundtrack is not the movie--as powerful as it is, music remains the incantation, not the spell. The creeping piano keys work because we have all felt the empty-house fear, and those rising strings evoke perhaps a certain rain-speckled afternoon, when the touch of a familiar shoulder caused something within us to lift, and for one moment we were filled with inexplicable joy.
Still, it’s nice to be able to control, or modify, at least the sound of one’s life, if only during a pie-run or a commute. With six CDs at my command, I can now switch the music to suit the scenery and my mood. Or, better yet, switch my mood to suit the music. A therapist friend of mine tells all his patients that the first thing they can do to reduce their anger levels is listen to soothing music while they drive. Just as it’s almost impossible to laugh in a movie when the music is telling you to cry, it’s hard to give someone the finger while Julie Andrews is singing.
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Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.
