As a person who came of age long before the first computer, I was totally ignorant of video games, much less the music for them. My children, however, came of age during the reign of Gameboy, and I certainly tried my hand, although without much success, at Tetris. Soviet Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov designed and programmed the video game in the early 1980s and picked a Russian folk song to accompany it. Inherent to the style of the folk song, the increasingly faster tempo instills panic in anyone playing the game, as it underscores the fact that the blocks are falling faster, such that keeping chaos at bay becomes far more challenging and eventually impossible. The rendition of the folk song we present tonight by the early 20th century Russian composer seems to be the only choral arrangement available. We add the repetition of the first stanza in increasingly faster tempo to simulate the music of the game, and the singers required that it become as fast as possible to instill the anxiety they used to experience while playing the game.

Other music on tonight’s program also preceded the medium for which it was used. The popular series Outlander, about a 20th century woman transported to 18th century Scotland, thus uses a Scottish folk tune as its title song. I knew this tune as a child, and I always picked it when asked because it was my favorite tune in volume 7 of the Concord Music Series book of folksongs used in our school. The Gaelic tune was composed in the late 18th century, but the original Gaelic words became superseded by the popular 19th century English lyrics describing the journey of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” to the Isle of Skye to escape capture by government soldiers after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The Coen brothers’ movie O Brother, where art thou? used period-specific folk music to set the tone for a story of escaped convicts in the Depression Era American South. “Down to the River to Pray” is heard as they come upon a mass baptism at a river.

Mike Nichols was very taken with the music of Simon and Garfunkel, so much so that he licensed it to permeate The Graduate, a film that came out in 1967, although the duo’s album, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, which contained the British folk song “Scarborough Fair,” came out a year earlier. Nichols showcased that song in its entirety as background music for the lead character’s journey to see the woman for whom he felt unrequited love. I am very grateful to the hive mind of the singers in the group, one of whom, Ian McGullam, is very knowledgeable about English folk history. According to him, many scholars think the original text does not have the final stanza but instead is excerpted from a longer ballad involving an evil antagonist posing impossible riddles to a child or maiden on the road.

The Welsh lullaby “Suo gan” rounds out the trio of songs from the British Isles heard in tonight’s concert. Stephen Spielberg told the story of a Welsh boy, played by 13-year-old Christian Bale in his first movie role, interned in Japan during World War II in his 1987 movie, Empire of the Sun, and used it to score three pivotal moments in the story: when the boy gets separated from his parents during evacuation; when he observes the rituals of the kamikaze pilots before they take off; and when he is reunited with his mother. I defy anyone to watch this movie and those three scenes without developing a lump in their throat. We are very fortunate to use Edward Jones’s setting in tonight’s program. I first heard it at the Carol Service in Memorial Church, where Ed, a native of Wales, is the Gund University Organist and Choirmaster.

I use the words of the composer, David Lang, to describe “I Lie”:

“‘I lie’ was commissioned by the California vocal ensemble Kitka… an all-woman group [concentrating] on music that comes out of the various folk traditions of Eastern Europe, so when they asked me to write a kind of ‘modern folk song’ it seemed natural to me to take the text of an old Yiddish song and give it new music. I chose this particular text because it has a darkly expectant feeling about it. It isn’t about being happy or sad or miserable or redeemed; rather, it is about waiting for happiness or sadness or misery or redemption. As is the case in many Yiddish songs, something as ordinary as a girl waiting for her lover can cast many darker, more deeply beautiful shadows.”

I discovered it in watching Paolo Sorrentino’s movie La grande bellezza, essentially a love letter to the city of Rome with a narrative constructed to allow it. The work occurs early on in the movie; at first it serves as background music to various morning vignettes in the city, but as a man splashes water on himself in a fountain, the camera pans to the top of the building behind the fountain where a chorus of women is singing it. In this context the movie captures Lang’s interpretation for despite our hopes and fears, no one knows what a day will have in store. It turns out that Sorrentino is my kind of movie director in scoring his films; this movie also uses music by John Tavener and Arvo Pärt, among many other selections.

The final example of borrowed music on tonight’s concert is both borrowed and new. The great film composer Michel Legrand wrote “The windmills of your mind” for the original The Thomas Crown Affair of 1968. Perhaps those of you who lived in that time and saw it in its first run were as struck as I was by the beauty of this song sung by Noel Harrison, Rex Harrison’s son. The reason for its melancholy melody is revealed in the last lines of the song, and the heroine, Faye Dunaway, had light brown hair appropriate to the lyric. I always loved the song but figured its age made it too obscure to include in the program. However, in watching the Apple series Severance, I was thrilled to hear it used in the final moments of the Season 2 finale, where the heroine’s red hair fits the lyric even more appropriately. To my chagrin, I couldn’t find an arrangement that I liked well enough to include in the program. I had the thought to ask one of our former sopranos and present board member Rebecca Blum, who had sung a lot of a cappella in college and done a fabulous arrangement of “Shiloh’s Hill” for our 2013 concert commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, to consider arranging it, and she on very short notice graciously and felicitously agreed. As a result, we have this fabulous arrangement where the melody is tossed from one voice to another to illustrate the incessant obsession with one thought. In the case of the movie the song provides a backdrop to the hero’s trip in a hang glider. As such it may provide a reference to his worry that his crime will be found out, but otherwise it adds nothing to the drama of the film. In Severance, however, the song aptly intensifies the anxiety of the hero and heroine, who have the worry of whether they are doing the right thing and whether they will be able to survive as they are. To say anything more would be a spoiler for those who haven’t seen it.

The rest of tonight’s selections are original to the visual art they first appear in. The video game ABZÛ has as its final accompaniment “Then were created gods in the midst of heaven,” a setting of an ancient Sumerian text. The members in the group who play the game say that it takes place underwater and thus inspires a calm and contemplative mood. The piece is united by a theme heard in the opening soprano line and reiterated throughout the piece. In the last iteration, however, it is slightly changed as the text first mentions the appearance of the gods. I have never played either Halo or Final Fantasy, but I love the plainchant settings of each. I discovered these arrangements by the male Finnish group Munx on YouTube, and I find them quite stirring. I very much admire the work of Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell, and I’m not surprised that “What was I made for” won an Oscar for best original song in 2024 when it played in the closing credits of Barbie. The melancholy tenor of the work befits Barbie’s ambivalence about whether to be an uncomplicated happy doll or a human with implicit complex emotions.

I never watched Game of Thrones due to its violence, but there was no escaping its theme music. I like the wordless choral arrangement we present here; many choral arrangements will set words to music originally written for orchestra to what I consider their detriment. I have to say that had I not known about the violence in the show the energetic and dramatic nature of the theme song would have seduced me into watching it.

The two songs from Frozen are not as well-known as the ubiquitous “Let it go” but I find them more intriguing. The first one uses an ancient Nordic text with music the composer attributes to the traditional choral literature of Danish composers. The second one, “Vuelie,” employs a repeated accented chant known as yoiking used by the indigenous Sami people in the regions of Scandinavia and Russia; it has similarities to Native American chants.

Numerous people recommended “Baba yetu” to me when we first collaboratively conceived of this program, but prejudice against game music, born of my ignorance of video games, tempted me to dismiss it. After all, the final scene of the movie Tár shows the ignominious reboot of the lead character’s career as a conductor with a performance of her leading an orchestra in a concert of video music attended by fans dressed as their favorite character. But that movie and I could not be more wrong. Christopher Tin composed it and all the music for the Civilization series of games, and “Baba yetu” won a grammy at the 2011 Awards, becoming the first piece of video game music to do so. His work often incorporates world music; this piece makes use of a Swahili translation of the Lord’s Prayer. Though composed for a game, this piece, as well as much of his music, is performed in concert throughout the world.

I have always been a fan of the New Age artist Enya, and her composition “May it be,” written in 2001 for the first movie in the Lord of the Rings series, does not disappoint. The elegant melody and calm setting provide a balm to anyone hearing it. Contrast that with the ebullient vitality of “Defying Gravity” that ends our concert, taken from the 2024 hit movie Wicked. Steven Schwartz has been a fixture of Broadway musicals since writing Godspell in 1971 at the age of 23. He composed Wicked for Broadway in 2003, and he is one of only two composers to have had two shows run on Broadway for more than 1500 performances. Aside from his work on Broadway, he also provided music for animated films by both Disney and DreamWorks, winning three Oscars in the process. The highly syncopated melody and upbeat tempo provide the incredible energy characterizing this song.

I hope that the next time you watch a movie or show on TV or play a video game, you will pay close attention to your emotional responses to a scene. If you find your heart racing with excitement or anxiety, or yourself moved to tears, parse out how much of that may be due to the music you are hearing as much as, if not even more than, the visual medium in which you find it. ▣

© 2025 Mary Beekman. All rights reserved. No portion of this document may be quoted or reproduced without the author’s permission.