I love orchestral music, but probably for the wrong reasons. I took my daughter to a chamber orchestra recital last week at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. She is learning to play the cello. Looking for a fun Daddy/Daughter event, we found the Brentano Quartet was playing. Score!

OK, that’s as sophisticated as I will get. Now I will explain my “wrong” reasons. Sitting in the Hall, listening to the music, I realized that I only really listen to classical or orchestral music when it is connected to a cartoon, or a Batman movie, or a Hitchcock film. With the music not tethered to a picture, it was like these sounds were flying around the Hall looking for an animated rabbit or costumed celebrity to punctuate. I enjoyed it, and really thought they were pretty thrilling musicians. But I have been brought up to hear this type of music as a narrative support, and never on it’s own. 

There are certain modern film composers whose work is so iconic, that their signature themes wordlessly scream the name of the films or TV shows they score. John Williams’ “Star Wars” or “Superman” scores can symphonically stream clips of those films into my brain. Danny Elfman, the man who has scored literally every American film for the last twenty years with absolutely no exaggeration (and the Simpsons theme to boot), once sat next to me on a plane. I was a complete nervous wreck.  Here is the 21^st Century Tchaikovsky sitting next to me.  What will I say? “Hey remember that time in Batman when…?” Yeah, no.

Well, when he got up to go to the bathroom (we were still on the runway), I called my wife and told her I was sitting next to Danny Elfman. She remembered him from his days in the new wave band “Oingo Boingo.” But to me, the cartoon snob I am, I knew better. During the flight, I took out my laptop and started working on some storyboard or illustration I was working on at the time, to try and goad him into striking up a conversation. I thought he’d say, “Hey, do you work in animation?” And I would say, “Yes, yes I do. And so do you! Isn’t that funny?” But no, he said nothing. Not even when I spilled a soda on him. All over him.

When the plane landed, and I was still sitting right next to the composer of the “Batman” theme, I pulled my cell phone out to quietly tell my Missus that I had arrived safely. She shouted, really loudly, like super loudly, as if she were on a speakerphone, “Hey did you talk to Danny Elfman from Oingo Boingo?” Pause. “No honey, but you just did.”

But I forgive her, because I knew she was the love of my life.  On our honeymoon, The Blue Danube was being piped through some speakers at the hotel pool, and we both simultaneously said aloud, “Quack quack. Quack quack.” echoing the musical phrasing immortalized in the Looney Tunes classic “A Corny Concerto.” 

Quack quack. Quack quack.