Anyway. In The Hours, I was a little concerned at times, just because the mood of the song seemed too dark for certain scenes. But as the movie went on, I realized what an excellent job Philip Glass did in manipulating the emotional undercurrent. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf has a narrator to bounce between minds and reveal the sometimes surprising darkness within each of them. The Hours has the soundtrack to fill this role. Although the scene may seem happy, the music shows there is more going on than meets the eye.
Then there's the use of polyrhythm. Ohmygoodness. Basically it's this neat thing that Impressionist composers were known for especially, where two contradicting rhythms are played at the same time. (You can get this effect by simultaneously tapping eighth notes with one hand and triplets with the other.) Polyrhythms are cool because they provide subliminal emphasis. The contrasting flows paradoxically both separate the melodies and unite them under a single flow, not unlike a harsh, lovely river current. So it gives this feeling of weight and emphasis to the melody while revealing an undercurrent of peaceful chaos. Like there's all this heavy emotion boiling beneath the surface that only the music, in its wonderful intricacies, can make us see. This is the song that specifically stood out to me in its polyrhythmic beauty (the cool part starts at 2:50):
Music can make or break a movie. I'm thrilled with the addition Philip Glass brought to The Hours.
I was thinking of Glass's work complementing the themes of the film mainly in terms of time--simultaneity, the sense of a moment in suspension but also moving irrevocably forward, yet still suspended via the magic of art, etc., etc. (see my own post on this same topic, "The Music of the Hours"). But I really like your thoughts on how polyrhythm suggests layers to experiences, the sense of surface and depth, or undercurrents, that is so central to Woolf and to the film.
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