I remember being in Chicago back in the day, listening to an FM rock station. After a bevy of alternative rock, the DJ suddenly put on the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. At the art store where I worked, one of the young hipsters immediately yelled, "Tchaikovsky!" and began conducting with her hands. I'll never forget that moment. We had gone from, say, Throwing Muses to Tchaikovsky, and I remember thinking: How cool was that? Here was music making its own case. It didn't plead. It didn't demand. In its own way, it rocked. And then, after that glorious interlude, it was back to alternative rock. The funny thing was that the classical piece had not seemed out of place. It held its own. It brought to the table its own heft, its own weight. It wasn't preachy. It wasn't better than. It was simply another fiber in the fabric of the day. And maybe that's the way great music should be heard. Not fenced off by genre. Not placed behind glass. Not approa...
TERRA FIRMA ALIEN ENHANCEMENTS: ELIZABETH COMES ONTO THE BATTLEFIELD
How often does music portend some great emotional moment—or some martial entry?
Music has been part of the human rallying cry for thousands of years. Drums. Horns. Marches. Songs. The sound that tells us someone is coming, that armies are moving, that battle is about to be joined.
But it is rare for music that is not martial, but emotional, to drive a dagger more powerfully than any war cry.
It is rare when sheer beauty announces that moment when a new player enters the field.
And the battle changes.
Most of the alien enhancements in Terra Firma are poison-soaked daggers aimed directly at human existence. They twist our world, our technology—even the familiar places around us—into weapons against us.
But not all of them.
Some aid the human race.
And at this most terrible moment of desperate need, one of them does something extraordinary.
She enters the battlefield.
Not with a trumpet.
Not with a drum.
Not with the thunder of an advancing army.
With something closer to a song.
Claude Debussy's Sirènes, the final movement of his Nocturnes, has always suggested something beyond ordinary human experience to me: voices floating out of darkness, beautiful and mysterious, seemingly coming from everywhere and nowhere.
Listen.
Debussy's Sirènes (Nocturnes, III), performed by The Cleveland Orchestra, Pierre Boulez conducting.
Because somewhere inside Terra Firma, beauty itself becomes a weapon.
And somehow, impossibly, music becomes a giver of life.
And for one extraordinary moment, amid all the terror and darkness—
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