Last week, in my Arts Seminar class, we discussed “beauty.” My professor, Professor Ugoretz, gave us, the students, an assignment. We had to find something beautiful, capture it, and then upload it onto our seminar eportfolio.
But there are so many beautiful things in the world! How could I possibly choose one thing?!
I immediately decided that I wanted to post about music. I love music. And I really wanted to show the class a piece I truly love. My first instinct was to post a song by one of my favorite musicians, Secret Garden.
The song is called Pastorale. When I first heard this song, I immediately fell in love with it. A beautiful yet melancholic song. As I listened to it in bed, right before I went to sleep, I feel into a deep, dreamy state of mind. The violin tugged on my heartstrings, almost as if it was weeping in my ears. As trite as this may sound, I pictured myself in a white dress roaming barefoot through a forest on a rich green, grassy cliff. And in this “dream,” I felt overwhelmed with grief, heartbreak, sadness from a thousand years of solitude! And in real life, I started to shed tears, unbeknownst to me. It had been quite a while since music has touched me so intensely.
But not only is the song beautiful, the album artwork is beautiful as well. The way the musicians’ faces gradually fade into the background of a luscious green forest is absolutely gorgeous. And oddly, or maybe not so oddly, when I first saw the album’s artwork, it reminded me of Swarthmore College’s amphitheater. Absolutely stunning.
As I was thinking of posting about this song, I remembered the piece Minor Waltz from the soundtrack of Cinderella’s Sister, a Korean drama.
This song is equally as beautiful as Pastorale. As the latter, this song is melancholic as well as entrancing. However, Minor Waltz has a fairytale-like vibe to it. Although this song did not pull me into a dream world, it has evoked strong emotions out of me. When I first heard this song, I fell in love with it as well. It was soothing and fit perfectly with my mood at that time. My grandmother had been in the hospital at that time. She was suffering through cancer and in my mind, I already knew her time was quickly ending. And as I lied on my mother’s bed, even in the midst of a crowded house filled with loving, visiting relatives, I felt immensely sad. Listening to this piece figuratively grabbed my internal bucket of tears, pulled it downwards, and released all of my hidden sorrows. Since then, I’ve had a strong connection to this piece. Even though it reminds me of a sad time in my life, I adore the song much the same as any other song. Maybe even more because it reminds me of my grandmother.
But as I was trying to choose between Pastorale and Minor Waltz, I thought of another song. They’ll Remember You by John Ottman, for the soundtrack of Valkyrie.
This song is tremendously beautiful. When I first heard this song play during the ending credits of the movie, I immediately searched it online. I had to know the title, had to listen to it in the following days. Being a member of my high school’s chorus, I have a thing for foreign choir music. Especially haunting and spooky ones like this. It sounds so dark and mysterious and sad and magical. (Actually, currently I am going through a Harry Potter “phase,” meaning, I feel as if I am in an alternate world where I feel the dark, magical vibes of the Wizarding World all around me, all the time. All I want to do is reread the novels, rematch the movies, and make up alternate scenes to the story. I want to live in the world of Harry Potter and create my own storyline within. This sounds cuckoo… But back to my point, I’ve been listening to They’ll Remember You the past three days because it is the closest thing I have on my iPod to this Harry Potter “mood” I am craving for, and also because I’ve been trying to decide what to do for my seminar post.) Although I never had any heart-wrenching emotions from listening to this song, I still think it is just as beautiful as the other two.
The lyrics, the poem Wanderer’s Nightsong II by Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, is also eerily beautiful. And a video I discovered that someone made to go with this song is quite intriguing.
Along the way, while trying to decide which song to choose, I stumbled/remembered other things I would want to use for my post. But ultimately, I tossed them out of mind so that I wouldn’t make this quite simple assignment an even harder task.
I finally did decide on a song though. Earlier today, actually. So what did I end up choosing?
Dun dun dun….
They’ll Remember You. Why? Just because. I had to move on with my life.
