Here are a couple of half-baked musical thoughts that would have been yesterday�s entry, had I had a chance to post. More to come later, I hope.

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I spent yesterday evening watching North by Northwest and marveling, for about the forty thousandth time, at how amazing the sound track is.

What makes good film music? A good sound track can be many different things -- good music, a good fit with the action, appropriate use of preexisting music. Bernard Hermann's score to North by Northwest gets all of them. My favorite moment, I have to admit, is during the restaurant scene where, while Cary Grant is being abducted, an instrumental version of "It's a Most Unusual Day" plays slyly in the background. It makes me snicker every time.

But my favorite slice of music is the main theme, the fandango. It is an excellent incarnaton of action plus anxiety. It sounds amazingly contemporary, like an orchestral parody of Philip Glass, the composer that Edward Strickland's article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians calls "one of the most commercially successful and critically reviled." Except that Philip Glass wasn't writing music like this until years later. In 1959, when North by Northwest came out, Glass was 22 and had not yet developed his trademark minimalist style that, like the fandango, typically alternates between duple and triple divisions. Glass was still a student finishing up his diploma in composition at Juilliard where, among other things, he studied film scoring. He didn't start composing music in the minimalist genre he helped to define until the mid-60s.

I can't help but wonder if this score influenced him somehow. It made me want to see Koyaanasqatsi again.

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Thursday night, on my way home from a particularly energizing yoga class, I rolled down my windows and cranked up one of my favorite radio programs, American Roots.

Last night's guest was a soul singer with whom I was completely unfamiliar: Bettye Lavette. They played a song she recorded in the '60s entitled, "The Stealer," that rocked my world. As a singer, she reminds me most of Aretha in style, but she very much has her own voice. And unlike Aretha (and most of the other early soul artists), she didn't grow up singing gospel. She's my pick of the week, another one to add to my growing list of fabulous female singers. fairlywell is recommending another soul singer today, Alice Smith. Clearly I have some listening to do.

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