{"id":12817,"date":"2024-01-09T01:22:49","date_gmt":"2024-01-09T00:22:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/?p=12817"},"modified":"2024-01-07T12:47:29","modified_gmt":"2024-01-07T11:47:29","slug":"morning-songangelo-badalamenti-laura-palmers-theme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/2024\/01\/09\/morning-songangelo-badalamenti-laura-palmers-theme\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning song#Angelo Badalamenti #Laura Palmer’s Theme"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Suffering from a case of middle age, I recently decided to learn the piano as an adult. The lesson I played on Monday was the theme from \u201cTwin Peaks\u201d \u2014 well, the idiot-proof, one-hand version that my iPad teaching app prepared for me, built around that low, hypnotic pattern. Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later that day, in the sort of coincidence that seems to happen only in dreams and in small, spirit-afflicted logging towns in Washington, came news that the song\u2019s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, had died at age 85<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with a long r\u00e9sum\u00e9, including the scores for David Lynch\u2019s \u201cBlue Velvet\u201d and \u201cMulholland Drive.\u201d But his memory is secured by those mesmeric notes, which opened the red curtains on Lynch and Mark Frost\u2019s eerie mystery, and which stand above and apart from most music written for television like an ancient evergreen in an old-growth forest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent list of the 100 greatest TV themes ever, Rolling Stone ranked \u201cTwin Peaks\u201d at 35<\/a>. It would be unfair to use Badalamenti\u2019s passing to dunk on that choice. (Counterpoint: Come on.<\/em>) But whether or not it is the best theme of all time, it may be the most otherworldly, the most unlike anything that came before it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TV themes before 1990, when \u201cTwin Peaks\u201d premiered, tended to be come-ons or introductions. They whipped up a sense of excitement and adventure, like the theme from \u201cMission Impossible.\u201d Or they outlined characters and told a story, like Waylon Jennings\u2019s \u201cGood Ol\u2019 Boys\u201d from \u201cThe Dukes of Hazzard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Badalamenti\u2019s theme is not a synopsis. It is not a fanfare. It is a passageway, a portal. It is slow, spare and meditative, even by the relatively languid TV pacing of three decades ago. It tells you to reset your pulse, abandon your expectations and step for an hour into a dark wood where the owls are not what they seem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Posted from: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/12\/13\/arts\/television\/angelo-badalamenti-twin-peaks.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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