Time for a virtual safari in music!

This is music of wide open spaces, the grace and majesty of African wild animals, a thoroughly different time and place. It is music that transports you far from your day to day and that’s why it’s in the Headspace category. And if you know the film, a little daydream about Robert Redford or Meryl Streep never does anyone any harm either.

How do they do that?

So what is it about this music that creates that sense of vast landscape and heat? I’m going to focus on the orchestration (the choice and use of different instruments). Throughout this piece there is distinction between the stringed instruments and the brass instruments. The piece starts with a tremelo of high strings, shimmering like a heat haze. And then, wandering into view, come the majestic low, slow and rounded notes of the brass instruments. The high strings continue to shimmer above them, whilst cellos join with a gentle rocking motion, emphasising the slow and graceful movement of the brass. And yes, I am imagining elephants and giraffes as I listen. After the heartrending chord in the brass that makes you catch your breath and feel suddenly homesick (even if you’re at home!), the high strings play four descending notes which then lift upwards - the brass now beautifully blends so that you are barely aware that it’s there. An occasional boom on the timpani gives further weight and gravitas to the scene. Next everything brightens as the light is captured in sound by the harp, before the full orchestra plays the main theme together for the first time (over a minute into the piece) combining heat, space, light and the movement of animals in a dazzling sonic painting. Within the main theme is a secondary melody of four descending notes that looms and entwines itself between and around the strings and which is taken up by different parts of the orchestra each time it repeats. Our magnificent brass section have it for the final repeat as the music reaches it climax. I must also mention the call of the wild at the end of the main theme, always in the brass and rather like a elephant I always think. Especially the final time we hear it when followed by a lingering drum roll on the timpani. The piece trails away into the landscape to end. Completely mesmerising and transporting.

Hope you enjoy it or feel inspired to listen to something new today.

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