April still has a bite left in her, but you notice the sun staying out a little later every day. My partner and I walk down the block to the corner of 5th Avenue and West 29th Street, in through the doors of a beautiful Romanesque Revival church. Here, in the heart of Manhattan, we are about to be held ransom by the scores of Hans Zimmer, rendered by a string quartet.
I have always been someone who connects with music through lyric. The words, to me, are what carry the emotion, the voice, the memory — everything. So I went in a little skeptical about how much I could really enjoy an hour of film scores on strings. But the moment I walked into the nave, lit by hundreds of flameless candles, I knew I’d be enthralled. There is a great deal the right room can do.
Who doesn’t know Hans Zimmer? Arguably one of the most decorated film composers alive, his pioneering marriage of electronic and traditional symphonic elements is a hallmark of his genius. I don’t know all of his work, but everyone knows the classics — The Lion King, The Holiday, Pirates of the Caribbean. I can already hear some of you shouting at your screens: The Dark Knight! Interstellar! Dune! Gladiator! I concede — brilliant, all of them.
We took our seats. The quartet came on, introduced themselves and why they loved Zimmer, and named the first few pieces they would play. As the music came alive on the strings, I was forced to reckon with how much we lose listening to music through our phones. There is a soul to live music, and I sat watching it dance on that stage, in that church.
It helped that the quartet paused between sets to introduce what was coming next; it gave the evening a shape. And yet, in the dim light and the otherworldly sound, I was caught in an inescapable trance. I felt time slipping past without my being able to hold onto any of it — a lucid dream I couldn’t wake from. The Maestro, from The Holiday, brought back Christmas and the particular joy of possibility, both at once — that feeling of standing at the end of a year with everything still ahead of you. And Pirates of the Caribbean — well, that one was simply fun, and iconic.
But it was the Requiem, from The Lion King, that undid me. As you grow older, life happens, and some things become too heavy to name. How do you speak of the death of a parent or a terrible loss? How do you speak of grief that holds you but you are unable to articulate as you choke under it’s weight? How do you hold hope and sadness? And yet the need to be understood remains. The Requiem does exactly that. There is a transcendence to these scores — they seem to speak a language our souls know but our tongues cannot speak.
Sooner than I expected, the set ended. The quartet thanked us, and left us with a story about a performance Zimmer himself had once sat in the audience for. It was a nice note to end on. For a girl who usually needs words, I had lost myself in the soundscape astonishingly fast — so quickly, so easily.
As Zimmer himself once said: at his best, he leaves you at a loss for words.
The Big Smokey Apple 