The Ups and Downs of Art and Julie Andrews
February 10 2010

On the 18-hour state of suspended animation, misnamed "flight", to Beijing, pinched between consciousness and slumber, no longer able to read Douglas Adams, Mordecai Richler or the 3,000 page trial transcripts of Builder v School Board, the Pianobabbler began to rifle through the plane’s onboard entertainment system. Quite the grandiose name for 4 inches of digital plastic.

Recordings, movies, television by the tonne. Long gone the days when the airline showed a, as in one, movie. When the music flowed through a few narrow channels.

Airlines in the recent past put their media handmaids on fertility drugs. They begat multitudes. Louis Armstrong, Lady Gaga, Harry Potter, Casablanca. A century's parade of art distilled into the back of a seat.

I come upon The Sound of Music. Julie Andrews. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Climb every mountain, and all that. Reflexively, I skip over it. The Pianobabbler does not [cue upward nose tilt] do The Sound of Music.

I skip over it. But... Postfacto pause.

I saw The Sound of Music when it first came out. Not since. What do I know about it, really? What memory or information can I have, to reject the film with such Pavlovian haste? The Sound of Music has certainly stuck in the public mind. Why? Sugar or substance? Can you call a work as popular, and populist, as this art?

Art. Define it as the created stimuli of human invention – I do – and you can have no doubt: The Sound of Music is art.

OK. Does this SoundofMusic art have merit? You bet.

Many-faceted merit. The script. Brilliant but easy. It weaves and flows. Clear story sightlines.

The music. Do-Re-Mi, for example, the Doe-a-Deer song. A perfectly crafted music lesson cast into a hooky tune, with an impossibly simple lyric that furthers the narrative. Dazzling. And like all virtuosi, Rodgers and Hammerstein, toss off as flourishes what for mortals would be finished works. Over Do-Re-Mi's disquisition on music's mechanics, they layer a second song that runs in perfect counterpoint. Damn.

Then there’s Julie Andrews. Julie Andrews. She may come across as virgin plain, but I bet she tastes like molten chocolate. Dead-on acting. Mesmeric movement: I haven’t seen so much vital running on film since Toshiro Mifune electrified The Seven Samurai. And that voice, that voice, that voice! The range, the clarity, the control, the phrasing...

Next person who belittles Julie Andrews gets a Mary Poppins umbrella up their chim-chiminee.

And so, the ordeal of my flight sank into the ebbing tide of prejudice I had harboured against The Sound of Music. I finished watching it just as we came down in Beijing. I was crying. I took off a snob, and landed a sobbing fanboy.

So Long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Good night.


The Pianobabbler has babbled.

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