I’m not sure precisely when this change happened, but sometime in the last few weeks, David Lynch.com became a mostly music-oriented site, where you can listen to a wide range of outtakes and alternate versions of music made for (mostly) the Twin Peaks series and film.  And if you’d rather have the music bundled together for portability, somebody posted it to nodata.tv as well.

I listen to a lot of music composed for film, though I’m not a big movie/TV buff.  There’s something I adore about the clarity of motivic material for film, the careful use of timbre and arrangement to create and sustain specific kinds of emotional atmospheres, and the occasional strange moment that’s jarring in the audio but needed to match some kind of on-screen action.  And I’ve long been smitten with John Zorn’s file card composition period, which is largely evocative of film music in its atmospheres and its montage approach.  Then you have folks like Ennio Morricone who are masters of the genre, and whose music largely stands alone.

In the case of the Twin Peaks music, Angelo Badalamenti and Lynch have written music with a somewhat simple approach, but it’s very resonant with, even critical to, the success of its on-screen counterpart.  20 years later, I can hear just a few seconds of these cues and immediately be pulled back into the series of feelings and images they represent in the TV series or Fire Walk With Me.  They’re generally not as epic or highly orchestrated as a lot of big-budget film scores, relying instead on sparse textures and cleverly-written motifs that are simple and incredibly memorable.  In their way, they’re the perfect film cues: they fully respect and support the strange, often sparse, and occasionally horrifying world of Twin Peaks with a transparency I rarely find in other scores.  Perhaps all directors should strive for the same level of musical sensitivity and understanding as Lynch–this kind of collaboration between the imagery and the music can make a powerful film even more evocative.  For me, while these aren’t as exciting as some scores for purely audio enjoyment, I’m amazed at just how emotionally complete they are on their own.

Here’s a video from Angelo Badalamenti describing the collaboration between himself & Lynch in creating this music:

While I’m at it, this is a fascinating video of Zorn describing his file card composition Spillane.  While there’s no film to accompany this piece, it’s one of my favorite compositions of all time, and the approach certainly evokes the major themes involved with composing for film.