forty-six (theme: snowflakes)

[amethysting.livejournal.com]

Signs
Bloc Party
Intimacy
2008

I first heard this song on an episode of...um...Gossip Girl.  It was December 2008 and, in a perfect parallel to this December, I was counting down days on the calendar.  I worry that I will be counting down days all of my life.  That December I was feeling pretty depleted.  It's when all the back-to-McGill excitement had kind of worn off, and when I realized that actually teaching was really different from all of the concepts we discussed in the classroom.  True to my nature, I kept a precise tally of the number of days of substitute teaching that remained before we breaked for Christmas.  I lost myself in escape-to-London-or-New-York fantasies and kind of started to rely on old habits to make things seem more bearable.

Do you ever have a song that you always associate with another song?  I instantly associate this song with Placebo's "Song to Say Goodbye"...maybe because I listened to both songs constantly around the same time or because they stir the same feelings up inside me.  During one of the enlightening presentations in...Conrod's?...class someone played a YouTube clip of scenes from the movie Thirteen edited together with the (as I would later find out) Placebo song.  I immediately thought, I need that song right now.  I had that same feeling when I heard "Signs" for the first time--kind of like everything cluttering my head fell away and my focus narrowed down to a pinprick.

The beginning of this song does me in every time.  It sounds like ice.  It makes me think of the way the air can be during Winter--really clear and sharp.  Those chimes sound like thousands of fluttering snowflakes--the ones that fall in lightly-packed clusters before landing on the tops of your eyelashes. 

This song hollows me out.  I love that kind of empty part that starts at around 3:00, after the drawn-out "statuesque"...there is a heart-wrenching urgency to it.  The overall melody of this song makes me think of turning circles, being caught in a swirl of snowflakes or spinning on a too-fast merry-go-round--holding on to the pole that shoots out of the bobbing horse's neck with heavy, slippery hands that can't quite seem to grasp on tight.  Or of those times spent in someone's backyard, gripping the hands of a friend and twirling around and around together, gaining momentum, until you both collapsed in a heap, dizzy and out of breath.

Second album art in a row that I've posted of people making out, hahaha.

forty-six. [THEME: snowflake]

[cabaretlights.livejournal.com]

Waltz of the Flowers
Artist: Peter Tchaikovsky ---- as performed by the Orchestre Symphonique du Montreal
Album: 1812 Overture; Capriccio Italien; Nutcracker Suite Etc.
Year: 1985
♥: Well, nothing says "snowflake" like The Nutcracker. The book, the ballet, the music: everything about that story evokes a sense of European Christmases, snowy nighttime and sugarplum fairies and little girls swirled away from reality to ride across ice lakes. The Nutcracker is as much a snowflake as is an actual physical snowflake, I think: the harbinger of the holidays, the sense of right and beauty and possibility.

My favourite piece of classical music -- and believe it or not, making it onto my Top 15 Songs of all time -- is in fact "Waltz of the Flowers,' but THIS VERSION, and only this version.

I grew up with this CD -- it's one of those albums I know inside and out simply because I listened to it from the time I had ears. My mom even told me she played it for me in the womb, Christmas '85, hah. That may be all there is to my preference, but I really think that this version of 'Waltz of the Flowers' is absolutely perfect. I have listened to dozens of other recordings, and all of them leave something to be desired -- a bit too fast here, too slow there, what the fuck is that weird instrument, not enough passion from 3:45 - 4:17 (perhaps the most beautiful, heartrending 32 seconds in musical history? I am inclined to think so.). This version is perfect. Just enough bombastic, just enough life, so much flow and beauty and it sounds like I am sitting in a Russian palace in the middle of the 19th century and there is no other version that makes me feel that way.

Snowflakes.
No two are alike.
Each individual snowflake takes on its own unique quality, something powerful and potent all on its own. Who knows: maybe this version of 'Waltz' is just a haphazard snowflake, something that has gained its own significance for me over time. But maybe it's one of those really beautiful, stunning snowflakes, one of the really big ones you don't have to put under a microscope: maybe this version of the song really is perfect.

Either way: 'Waltz of the Flowers' isn't just a snowflake because it's in a snow-set ballet. It's a snowflake because it stands apart, because it set the standard, because it is singular. It is unique -- and this is the song that taught me about uniqueness. It taught me that a remix or a live version are worlds apart from the original, and that no two translations or interpretations (musical or literary) are the same. That, in and of itself, is kind of beautiful: that you can get such different things, feelings, experiences, from what is supposedly the same song/text. It's why I'll never understand people who don't want all the versions of a song on their hard drive, or who happily pick any old translation of a book: STYLE, friends. It's not just the notes, but how you play them.

AND, AND, whenever this song comes on: I feel absolutely whole. Also I get up and start waltzing. It might be a little embarrassing because the extent of my waltz-skills are a few lessons from when I was in Sound of Music, but who cares -- it's the WALTZ OF THE FRICKIN FLOWERS, and it is so beautiful I can never, ever sit still.