Some People Call Me Maurice

While all the cool kids have, for years, been streaming rather than purchasing music, and though I’ve long had a Spotify subscription that I occasionally used to find tracks that popped to mind, I’d long listened primarily to the overly large collection of music I actually owned – much of it dating back to ripping MP3s of my now-retired CD collection back in the later 90’s and early 00’s – rather than stuff from the cloud.

With the launch of Apple Music, however, I’ve been listening to streaming music first and foremost. And though it’s occasionally led me to repeat plays of some rather suspect choices (no, seriously, “Trap Queen” is an excellent song!), it’s also allowed me to wander through a bunch of choices – some of which I’d even owned – that I might otherwise have ignored or missed.

Today, I spent six hours and seventeen minutes straight listening to John William’s soundtracks for all three original Star Wars films, sequentially. And, holy crap, is that some awesome music.

I mean, sure, it’s basically Holst repurposed, with a Wagnerian leitmotif structure and a liberal pulling from E. W. Korngold. But, seriously, that’s some compelling, magical stuff.

In particular, and in a way that you rarely hear in scores recorded one-off with a studio orchestra, the London Symphony is so amazingly tight, in tune and synchronized across articulation and volume. Above it all floats Maurice Murphy’s principal trumpet – alternatively soaring majestically and cutting incisively. It’s everything an amateur classical trumpeter might aspire to be.

If you haven’t listened to those scores – and, ideally, to all of them one after another – take advantage of the power of streaming music to do so. If that doesn’t make you fired up to vacuum, sort files or clean your bathroom, nothing will.