The Hours (Score)

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Music reviews of The Hours (Score)

Music Review: Phillip Glass' Best Work: Oscar Worthy Music
Rating: 5 Stars

Phillip Glass has composed elegant chamber music, and makes use of this in The Hours, as well as the twentieth century music technique of minimalism. The Hours is scored for a chamber orchestra, violins and a piano. The music perfectly captures the haunting, reflective, serious nature of the film. After all, the film, based on Michael Cunningham's book, is a tragedy containing pain and struggles, death and the less romantic but life-affirming aspects of reality. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) commits suicide by drowning herself in a river after a lifetime of feeling herself an outsider, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) feels the pain of her husband's suicide, an Aids victim and poet and Laura Brown (Juliann Moore) is a troubled woman who abandons her family.

Especially striking are the opening "The Poet Acts" and "Morning Passages", but the score seems to be more expressive, more dark in "Why Does Someone Have To Die ?" and in the final segment "The Hours". The haunting piano passages almost recalls Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata- a haunting three notes that become variations. Three is a significant number in the film because we are watching, to quote the film, "the lives of three women in a single day, and in that day, her whole life".

The climatic scene of Virginia Woolf's suicide in the river is accompanied by appropriately somber music and seem to echo even her last words which she wrote to her husband and publisher Leonard, "Always the years between us, always, the hours".I thought the music was the best from the movies and encourage its purchase and addition to your collection.

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