Sometimes it is supremely frustrating to have a piece of music stuck in your head when it’s an instrumental piece, there are no lyrics to look up, and you lack the musical skills to play it, even in a faulty or broken form.  I love music, and I am awed by and in love with but occasionally cowed by its total abstractness.  Humming a few bars doesn’t work on search engines, and I doubt my skill with words, which is not altogether terrible, is really up to the task of finding it through description.  I quickly found out that words like ‘moving’, inspiring’, and ‘stately’ are, apparently, applied by someone somewhere to every piano piece ever written! 

I found the tune stuck in my head the other day as I was shoveling snow.  I’ve heard it probably hundreds of times, which sounds like a lot, but compared to the number of times I’ve heard any one Beatles song, it’s downright obscure by comparison.  The worst part is that I’m pretty sure I’ve never known the title; that’s the hardest part of musical illiteracy, the simple lack of information. 

My brain is so chock full of things I don’t need to know.  Every book on physics or space I’ve read has given my joy and knowledge, but I am not likely to either participate in a physics experiment or launch and pilot a rocket to the moon (itself an incredible physics experiment, I suppose).

Even looking for a painting on the internet is easier.  You can always look for ‘purple abstract painting’ to start with.  Purple is, despite the occasional color blind person, a mostly universally agreed upon term.  I’ve found visual art that way with almost no effort.  Looking for a modern classical piano piece is harder.  Words like stately, somber, slow, modern, quiet, rising, and dissonant all mean different things to different people.  I’ve heard some cool music while searching, but the object of my pursuit is still missing.

In other news, my wife and I just bought a piano!  She plays beautifully, and we plan on teaching the kids, too.  Perhaps my skills will one day be sufficient to play a broken and feeble rendering of the tune and I will be able to convey it to such a degree that someone, somewhere, will be able to recognize it.  Until then, does anyone know of a modern, classical, alternatingly slow and mid-tempo, somber and bright, almost atonal (but not really), might have been used in a film (I keep thinking I’ve heard it in a film), sparse with moments of a more hurried complexity, solo piano piece?