Prelude to an Overture

I'm a middlebrow. Make no mistake; I don't mean unibrow. That's the one bad family gene I dodged. I'm neither effete nor aesthete--in other words you'd as like to find me at a Wagner "Ring" Cycle as you would at NASCAR. But I do love symphonic music. I say "symphonic" not "classical" because my road to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky was bridged by John Williams and a million movie soundtracks. E.T. could never fly without that score, and do you really want to listen to that dialogue in "Star Wars" ("into the trashbin, Flyboy") unadorned?I especially love the ostentatious moments, the musical thunderstorms, the crashing climaxes. In storytelling, two cymbals are worth a thousand symbols. As a teenager, after buying all the soundtracks I could, it occured to me that orchestras might be doing something else between takes. I know I'm not alone in finding my way to classical music through the movies, and as orchestras wring their hands in a search for new audiences, I have three not-so-simple (or even English) words: "Also Sprach Zarathustra."You don't need to know that this is a 19th-century tone poem by Richard Strauss based on the nihilistic noodlings of Nietzsche. Because you already know the score. And people like what they know.This music speaks to everyone; we can all interpret it without ever having stepped foot in a concert hall. To Stanley Kubrick, it's the dawn of humanity. To my aunt, it's the bold entrance of the King of Rock n' Roll (may he rest in peace). If it's not in your CD collection or on your iPod, buy it. Now. Then check out Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, and don't forget "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."Thus spoke Nick.