Jack Pribek

This morning, early, I watched an interview with Van Dyke Parks. He’s always been on the periphery of my musical consumption and I find him to be a fascinating figure.

Like I said though, periphery…I haven’t really spent much time on his actual work under his own name. And thus I found myself listening to a couple of his albums while doing my some of my daily chores.

I would describe a good deal of his arranging as cinematic. Which brings up an interesting notion; a lot of actual cinematic music is designed to invoke specific emotions in the viewer. However, those emotional-musical connections are often based on historical, even ancient precedents. When a composer comes up with music that reminds you, vaguely perhaps, of something from a movie…is that composer using the movie as a resource or, hearkening way back? Or, just playing to what’s in the mind’s ear?

Anyway, while listening as background music (maybe I should say “hearing” because I recently heard someone make the distinction that “most people nowadays are hearing music as opposed to listening to it)….anyway, Van Dyke was playing in the background and a thought came upon me just willy nilly: It must easily be in the hundreds of times that I have heard people talking about “the incredible power of music” because it has the ability to “take you back to a place and time”.

I just don’t feel like that…at all. I like music but I’m not interested in time travel.