Far Out There Character Soundtracks: Alphonse (Patreon)

Well, last time we talked about Tabitha, so it only stands to reason that we move on to her kids next.  And weirdly enough, the two kids who are incapable of uttering sounds have perhaps the most explicit acknowledgement of their musical tastes in all of Far Out There. Alphonse, for example, is known to be a connoisseur of classical chamber music, we’ve seen him (through the magic of copy/pasting sheet music) playing the likes of Debussy, and we even know that his favorite instrument is the cello, even though he’s not big enough to play one yet! With all these deliberate clues to follow, piecing together a playlist for Alphonse should be easy, right? Yes, it SHOULD be very easy. Unfortunately, this is where we come up against a problem I’ve hinted at elsewhere but only becomes a true problem here: Alphonse listens to music that I don’t listen to.

Now, that’s not to say I’m some knuckle-dragging philistine who HATES classical music or anything, I like it just fine. Heck, the reason Alphonse likes the cello so much is because that’s the instrument I took lessons on in my younger days, and I still have a major soft spot for it. It’s just not the sort of thing I ACTIVELY listen to. When I have something even vaguely classical on, it’s something playing in the background that I deliberately don’t want to pay attention to. And let’s face it, instrumental chamber music isn’t exactly packed with memorable hooks that lodge themselves in your brain of their own accord. Thus, while I’ve heard plenty of classical music that I liked, God help me if I can remember any of it well enough to find it again later. And when I DO remember something, well, it’s the same ones that EVERYBODY remembers.

So, yeah, Alphonse’s soundtrack ended up being Baby’s First Classical Album in a lot of ways, resorting to a lot of those stock songs that movies and TV always turn two when they need something that sounds sophisticated. We may not always be able to identify these songs by name, but we all know them from hearing them in one thing or another. Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G major is “That song from that one scene in Master and Commander.” Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major Op. 9 No. 2 is “That piano piece at the end of that one Muse song.” Debussy’s Clair de lune is “That song from the Godzilla trailer.” The Swan and The Aquarium from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals have turned up in more commercials over the years than I can count. Massenet’s Meditation is “That one song Chester plays in the clip from A Cricket In Times Square that they used a flashback in A Very Merry Cricket.” …okay, I’m probably the only one who makes that association. The point is, most of these songs have been floating around public consciousness for years, to the point that a lot of them probably seem totally played out to people who actually pay attention to this kind of thing. So apologies to anyone out there who groans at the thought of someone using Air on the G String or Moonlight Sonata yet again.

That’s not to say the selections here are ALL wildly familiar, not to me at least. There’s a few songs on Alphonse’s soundtrack that I don’t really have any pre-established knowledge of… and I feel like I owe them even more of an apology than the others, because most of them are here by completely random fluke. Like, I already had some classical music samplers on iTunes that I didn’t know anything about, I probably only got them during one of the times me and my Dad would consolidate our music collections, and I’d listen through them once before grabbing a few tracks almost at random. That’s not to suggest that Vivaldi’s Cello Concerto in C minor or Gloria Chopin’s  Berceuse or Manfredini ‘s Christmas Concerto or Bach Musical Offering are in any wall lesser than any of the works mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’m not qualified to judge either way. All I know is I needed to plug in some empty spots in Alphonse’s playlist, and these were the tracks that struck me as best fitting in those specific spots at the moment. If I had to rebuild this soundtrack from scratch, it’s entirely possible that a completely different set of songs would strike me as “the right ones.” Nothing personal, Vivaldi.

Speaking of “empty spots,” though, that reminds me: Alphonse’s soundtrack has gone through one of the more drastic re-workings of any soundtrack on the list. Originally, I though Alphonse would listen to a combination of classical music and 60s pop, which actually ISN’T as weird a combination as you might think. The harpsichord was actually a very trendy instrument for several years in the mid-60s, and an awful lot of bands tried to evoke a kind of sort of vaguely not very “baroque” sound on at least a few songs. And because it’s me, and of COURSE I wanted to slip in some 60s songs wherever I could, I tried to mix the Bach and Chopin up with songs by The Left Banke and The Zombies and other harpsichord-heavy bands. “Dancing Bear” by The Mamas & The Papas was one I tried especially hard to squeeze into this playlist somewhere. But no, even at its most mellow and old-fashioned-sounding, 60s pop just sounded too… it sounds ridiculous to say this about something as dainty as “Walk Away Renee,” but too ROUGH. Like, even the slightest hint of drum just sounded too aggressive for a gentle soul like Alphonse. Or, more importantly, the transition between tracks was just too jarring, so out they went. In the end, the only twentieth century composition to make it onto Alphonse’s playlist was "La Petite Fille de la Mer" by Vangelis, which has been on a TON of soundtracks over the years but I know from being in Stranger Than Fiction. And man, it says a lot about Alphonse that the closest thing to a rock song on his soundtrack is a piano lullaby from the “Chariots of Fire” guy.

(This was a uniquely weird one to put together on YouTube, given how different classical music is from pretty much everything else on these soundtracks. For the most part, finding versions of the songs themselves wasn’t that hard at all, it was finding a version on YouTube that resembled the one on my playlist. It isn’t like modern pop music, where there’s a definitive recording of a song that’s “real.” There’s a billion different performances of most of these songs, and it can be surprisingly heard to find a recording that resembles the one you want to find, ESPECIALLY if you’re going off of a track from some public domain collection without any individual artist credits. All that’s to say that the YouTube version of Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2 is played by Vadim Chaimovich, even though the one on my personal playlist is performed by Fou Ts'ong. I’m sure you’re all crushed by this betrayal and I’ll understand if you never trust me again. Also, they eagle-eyed among you might notice that two of the songs appear to be YouTube Music videos, which I’ve normally tried to replace because of the whole “not available in two thirds of the world” thing. But weirdly enough, those two specific tracks both seem to be region free. I tested the link more than once, and it insists they’re not restricted. I guess maybe they just LOOK like YouTube Music posts, but they have the usual notes at the bottom from the companies that provided the song, which is normally a dead giveaway. I also wondered if maybe it’s because these are oooooold songs that are obviously public domain, but I found other releases of the same recordings by other companies that have all the same geo-restrictions… and anyway, I always figured that was inherent to the Music service, not something the specific rights holders could control. Oh, and that’s the weirdest part right there: these two mysteriously region free videos belong to a company called Believe SAS, which is apparently pretty infamous around YouTube for claiming copyright on videos they clearly don’t own. Not exactly the sort of people I would have pegged as being super generous about anything.)

Alphonse's Playlist