Flutterby™! : Shining Night

On Saturday evening, Charlene and I went into the city to the Brava Theater for a showing of Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen and a performance/fundraiser by Volti.

I learned something interesting about myself. Lauridsen is a composer who does choral chants, the movie interplays his music with interviews with him. The credits have an extended musical overlay, and this was followed by a couple of songs of his sung by the 20 piece choir (and one done as a sing-along). As the credits rolled, one of the speakers said something like "I can't imagine that anyone has an elevated heart rate", and as we shuffled out of the theater various people said "wasn't that beautiful?"

Here's the thing: Lauridsen's music reaches deep into my lizard hindbrain and tweaks my alert detectors. It elicits my body's fear reaction; straight past that "you've gotten through things that you've thought were going to kill you by focusing and thinking clearly", raises my heart rate and kicks my adrenaline.

It'd be like walking out of a screening of Alien and hearing "wasn't that beautiful?". Awesome? Amazing? Yeah, these are words that capture it, but there's something about how his music impacts me that is apparently completely the opposite of how it hits the rest of the world.

Curious. And weird.