music blog i guess 0_0

                                   After finishing Death of a Salesman, I thought it’d be interesting to listen to the soundtrack and take a look at what is conveyed musically in the soundtrack. I couldn’t find the music of the 1949 stage play, but I managed to find the OST of the 1951 film. This OST was written by Alex North, who also wrote the music for the Broadway production, so I’m pretty confident that it’s similar to the stage play’s soundtrack.  The soundtrack consists of six songs: Willy, Ben--Willy’s Symbol of Success, Linda, The Boys Meet Ben, Willy’s Affair in Boston, and Good-bye WIlly.  WILLY The first track, Willy, starts off with a lone flute, as expected. It’s a haunting melody that seems to be full of nostalgia and longing. It’s reminiscent of pioneers, a melody that carves itself out for the audience, full of long wavering notes and vibrato, almost seemin...

          Movements in the arts have always influenced one another, each cultural movement sending ripples felt in a variety of fields such as art, music, literature, and architecture. But curiously enough, there is no realism period in music. There’s the Romantic era, which comes before, and the Modernist era, which comes after, but no Realism (technically there’s verismo but that’s only opera). Romanticism in music extends from the early 1800s all the way to the early 1900s, where eventually it falls off in response to Modernism’s popularity. It’s not possible to say that music was simply not affected by the realism movement, because every single other movement, Baroque, classical and Romantic, were all influenced by movements in literature (they were probably actually more influenced by art but I’m trying to make a point here): the Baroque movement inspired the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, the Neoclassical/Enlightenment period infl...