I was flying back to Boston from Atlanta Friday night, and by good fortune had a port side window seat in front of the wing. I hadn't thought much of the view I might get on this budget Spirit Airlines flight, but as we descended from clouds into the Greater Boston area, I started noticing I could see a lot of detail out the side, although honestly the window looked too small and smudgey to think I could do any worthwhile photography. I took a few phone photos that looked pretty bad and kind of put the idea way.
Then as I started seeing the Boston skyline way in the distance, I thought this might be a nice approach and started video-ing. In this way, I captured the last two minutes of the flight in gorgeous, dusky skylight, with clear views of the South Boston waterfront all the way to the crossing of Boston Harbor (almost at water level!) and onto the Logan Airport runway which sits just across the harbor from downtown.
When I got home, I did some triangulating with Google Maps, working backwards from the very clear view of the "Rainbow Swash" design on a giant National Grid LNG tank that sits right on the ocean's edge, followed shortly thereafter by a spectacular view of UMASS-Boston and the JFK Library. In the opening of the video, I could pretty clearly see what looked like a cemetery, and after following the flight course backwards, I identified the Cedar Grove Cemetery in Boston's southeastern Dorchester neighborhood; the long white roof of another nearby location turned out to be the Ashmont MBTA station. Here's the basic flight path I retroactively charted:
Anyway, I came here not to talk about Boston geography (though the views coming in over the city and harbor are gorgeous), but rather to talk about the music I chose to pair with this majestic descent into town - because I had to share this video on social media, and the cabin sounds of overhead announcements are so pedestrian. [To be fair, although the views are awesome, you don't get a great view of the Boston skyline which is more classically photographed from a little further north across the harbor. The three tallest buildings in Boston (including the Hancock and the Prudential) can be seen early on rising up over Back Bay in the upper background, but as they are west of downtown, they always remain in the distance.]
When looking for the right soundtrack, I thought of the terms "soaring" and "flying," and I think I even did a search for those terms with "classical music." But on my own, I pretty quickly thought of the glorious "whales" scene from Disney's Fantasia 2000, which is accompanied by music from Respighi's Pines of Rome. There are lots of great "big finishes" in classical music, but this one has just the right kind of stately, inexorable grandeur that an airplane descent calls for, even if Disney has its whales ascending. (Notice how often slow, steady, rising scales are heard amidst all the gleaming fanfares.) It took just a little experimenting to get it to line up pretty well, and I feel confident in saying this soundtrack complements the visuals very effectively. In fact, for me the music elevates the experience quite a bit, mainly because the music is SO good. (But I'm also genuinely amazed at the quality of video one can get from an old iPhone through a small, smudgey window.)
This reminds me that just last week, I was looking for some music to go with a spirited game of tug-of-war between my dog and a niece's dog last week. In this case, I intentionally sped up the video for comic effect. I'd wanted to post it for family members but thought it awkward to include the unrelated conversation going on in the background, so I brought in some great fight music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and shortened the fight itself so that it ended along with a good stopping point.
One of my favorite aspects of this kind of thing is how our brains can find connections that weren't necessarily intended between sight and sound in such situations. I'll let you find your own! In the meantime, here are a couple of older posts/videos where I experimented with adding unrelated soundtrack music to new video.
- Les Baxter's high-energy lounge music used to accompany video of me out riding bikes with my then young daughters: MMmusing: Music for a summer's day . . .
- A legendarily comical bungled football play is paired with a variety of soundtrack options: MMmusing: Choose your own soundtrack
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