I Dream of Starships

 

Bells in Flight - 50 years ago

For those who enjoyed my post Bridge of a Million Starships (for Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday), you may want some music to accompany you on the trip and make it, well, more of a trip. Fifty years ago this week (25^th May 1973), just coming down from the apogee -the euphoria- of the classical ages of space flight and science fiction, Tubular Bells was released.   

It really deserved its own Space Movie, and got one in a 78min documentary film of that name for NASA to celebrate the 10^th Anniversary of the Moon Landings. But the lasting movie association is, unfortunately, ‘The Exorcist’, never a worthy movie link (atavistic mumbo-jumbo!) but good for exposure. If only Stanley Kubrick had heard a demo tape before he fixed the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mike Oldfield might have got the gig, but he was only ~14 at the time, bit early even for that amazing musical risk-taker. The bone flung up into the sky in 2001, turning temporarily into a spaceship, might have made another appearance as a bent bell, and perhaps landed back on Earth as the bone-on-the-beach on the album cover, or perhaps with holes in it like the Hohle Fels flute (world’s oldest musical instrument).

Anyway, and Tubular and its sequels were great as ‘the soundtrack’ to my science-fiction reading years, 11 and onwards. I have a particular association between the beginning to TB Side 2 and the return to a forsaken Earth by humans – but now the home to highly evolved cats, dogs (and rats!) – in Breed to Come, Andre Norton 1972. But the strongest sci-fi connection is with the grandeur, melancholy and desolation found in Arthur C. Clarke. There’s explicit identification here with track and album titles ‘The Sentinel’ and The Songs of Distant Earth (1994), itself with a forward by Clarke himself. Maybe if the AMiTe project ever inspires a space movie, Mike might come out of his recently announced retirement and give it a shot, if the aching loneliness appealed.

Anyone with something to say has a right to try composition, and it does give an insight into what ingredients go into making a composer. You have to absorb a lot of influences and then get stuck into the ‘problem solving’ which (spoiler alert) is the main job of being a composer. Mike is part of my compositional world; his natural feel for folk-type harmonies (sixthy, ninethy) have influenced me and would have pleased Ralph Vaughan Williams (a fellow folk enthusiast) and I’ve learnt something  from his bassist’s sense of off-rhythm. It’s been said that his true instrument is the bass-guitar, never mind that searing lead guitar sound - hey, Elgar was a bassoonist as well as a good violin player, ‘bass and lead’.

My contention in the AMiTe paper is that any aliens that can launch a spaceship that communicates by lasers will have hands, feet, fingers, toes. They may have syrinxes, like birds (that would be cool!) but they will probably have stringed instruments – guitars, violin-thingies – and woodwind/brass, and definitely percussions. They’d surely have a different history (maybe never having had a counterpoint era or a J. S. Bach) and use different combos, and may also include total silliness in the mix like, well… Mike is a bit of a  ‘Musical Alien’ who acquired his musical DNA over a different and unrepeatable personal trajectory. He’s still hard to write about even for good musicians who’ve missed out on part of that mix, eg, the whole ‘band’ experience (he is literally a one-man-band and thinks like that). He invented a whole different ensemble (to the classical orchestra), because those are the instruments he picked up. Etc, etc.

For opinions sharp enough to cut yourself on, read Colin Edwards: “He is utterly unique, ridiculously unique in fact and things of such rarity should be cherished.” “It’s not just the music but also, as mentioned above, HOW it sounds… raises the hairs on the arms”, and, on Incantations: “one of the clearest examples of Oldfield furiously pursing the ecstatic and achieving precisely that.”

He flings his soul out into the Void, and surely dreams of Starships.

Picture credit: Mike Oldfield Worldwide Discography