https://soundcloud.com/ben-nylander/wild-at-heart-ballad-for-orchestra

Early in my college career, I became obsessed with the remarkable and bizarre world of David Lynch films. Lynch effectively uses the elements of discomfort, confusion, and subconscious perception to create an experience that leaves an audience bewildered, but with a strong urge to decipher what they just witnessed. These films are a puzzle to analyze, and rather than smacking the audience in the face with meaning, some thinking is required to put the pieces to together. Many composers have likened music to painting, but music just as much like a movie- constantly evolving, spinning anecdotes with every gesture, every moment in time a new perspective on what’s happened and what’s to come.

The title Wild at Heart is a tribute to David Lynch’s 1990 film of the same name, which tells the dark comedic love story between the characters Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage). Lula’s famous line “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top!” stuck with me from my first viewing of the film, and I was inspired to compose a piece in the manner that David Lynch would direct a movie. The idea of this “Ballad for Orchestra” is much simpler than many of my other pieces: compositionally, it’s a love story between tonal and atonal harmonies. The music is based in traditional Western aesthetics, and very romantic in style (hence the subtitle “Ballad”). However, like the movie that inspired it, this ballad adheres to its own rules, like a massive distortion of Romanticism. The music desperately searches for a tonal center, but in vain. Tonality and atonality become interchangeable, and are no longer a means of style; instead I use them to create moods, characters, and colors. Separate lines settle on familiar harmonies and recognizable musical devices, but are immediately answered by erratic moments of unexpected dissonances that spur the music forward. Like Lynch, my goal was to take something that is familiar to the audience and alter it to create a new type of narrative. I do not attempt to tell a specific story with this piece, the idea is that the orchestra itself is fighting to regain balance between all of the forces pulling it wildly out of control, little by little, until it finally gives way to chaos and veers to a stop.