I went to the dentist yesterday. I was in an out of there in an hour. The doctor drilled into a sixteen year old crown and re-gouged out my canals with a marvelous collection of files and drills. I think he even used a falchion at one point. Since the original root canal had been a medieval process I was a bit nervous about this one. He assured me I’d feel no pain. He injected me with something and for the next hour he and his assistant field stripped my tooth. He was right. I felt no pain.
That came later.
That afternoon, trying to get some work done, the pain came at me like the Norman army. Dosed up on pain killers, I poked about looking for something I could use as a sort of aural anodyne. I decided to give Alexandre Desplat’s score for The Painted Veil a try. It had been recommended to me by someone but I’d never gotten around to checking it out. As it turned out, it was the perfect analgesic.
It reminds me of Richard Robbins’ score for Remains Of The Day. It has that lively, Glass-y style that somehow manages to be both upbeat and somber. The opening track, sampled below, is an arpeggio pulse, populated by flutes, accented by the brassy trumpet and pinned to the earth by great surging strings. Check it out.
Alexandre Desplat: itunes, amazon, official site,
