Classical Gas: Special “If It’s Not Scottish, It’s Crap!” Edition

So over the weekend, Turner Classic Movies (god bless 'em) happened to show Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983), which is one of the most magical movies ever made, IMHO, and one which I hadn't seen since I last wrote about it (for reasons that will become clear shortly) in these precincts back in 2012.

I bring it up now (as I had back in the day) because -- aside from being blown away by the film as a whole once again -- I had forgotten about the sheer level of gorgeousness of Mark Knopfler's score.

Seriously -- f**k Dire Straits. If for nothing else than the closing credit music below -- "Going Home: The Song of the Local Hero" -- Knopfler deserves to be be an immortal.

Please -- take five minutes and listen to it, in case you've never heard it before.

Okay, here's my two cents.

That happens to be classical music, and it deserves to be treated as such, i.e. it should be played at Philharmonic concerts just like any great opera overture/prelude/curtain raiser you could mention.

In fact, as far as I'm concerned, what Knopfler did there is akin to what George Gershwin (yes him) did some decades earlier, which is to say, he took pop/folk/vernacular music -- in this case, Celtic airs and the rock/r&b urban street-corner romanticism of Phil Spector and Bruce Springsteen records -- and made something utterly sui generis and grand and universal from them.

I have one cavil, however; the drum and synth sounds on the Local Hero soundtrack album are a little dated; if there's a brilliant young orchestral composer out there, please score this for traditional symphonic ensemble (plus guitar) and soon.

Arthur Fiedler really should have lived to conduct this, is what I'm saying.

POSTSCRIPT:

And to further illustrate my point, here are two five minute classical pieces (and by five minutes, I'm talking about the length of all sorts of great pop records) that I think are in the same ballpark melodically and harmonically.

From 1597(!) and arranged by Leopold Stokowski, who knew something about pop stardom, here's Renaissance proto-rocker Giovanni Gabrielli's all horn "Sonata Pian e Forte." You may notice that Gabrielli is doing the whole soft/loud thing that people thought was totally innovative when Kurt Cobain did it several centuries later.

And, a little closer to the idiom that Knopfler was working in, here's unjustly obscure (outside of his home country) Austrian late Romantic Franz Schmidt's 1914 intermezzo from his opera Notre Dame.

As in The Hunchback of...

Both of those are gorgeous, but no less so than the Local Hero music, I think. In any case, you get my meaning.