Happyness

In the movie, the red violin there is 5 different tales that take place. And looking at the movie as a whole it is like an album and each different tale is a separate track. During the first tail which takes place in the 17th century. It shows the creation of the violin and the importance that it had. The first scene also shows the amount of precision that was needed to make this piece of instrument. During this first tale, the violin is constantly being played in the background showing the starting stages of the violin. A relationship that I found to music in the first tale was when the mother and father were talking about how their child will live for music and will bring beauty to the world and bring the parents pride. The ironic part after this was that the mother was singing tunes, a similar tune to the violin tune that was going on in the previous scene. As soon as she was done with humming her tune she started to go into labor. Just as she went into labor the clock started ringing for the next hour. This was very similar to any song and it felt as if everything was right on beat and followed a great rhythm which is always important in music. I believe that the reason the movie is called the "red" violin is because when the person that made the violin had painted it was a mix of varnish as well as the blood of his wife and he loved his wife very much. I think this theme carried throughout the movie because the red blood represented pain and in almost every scene there was some link to pain. After gaining more knowledge of music through this class and reading the book Listen I realized that there are many parallels from the movie to different times of western music. There is a part where I believe it is music from the 1820's to the 1900's in which romantic music was popular and the movie was trying to depict that. There was also a scene with the Chinese person who played the violin and I believe that he represented a rough attitude about music composition which had started to evolve toward the end of the 19th century. I also saw many parallels with the baroque and classical musical periods as well.

Another interesting relation throughout the movie to music was the fortune teller. She would come in and out of the movie at very constant intervals. This was similar to the chorus of songs. As soon as a stanza is done, which in this case was the different tales, the fortune teller would come in. I found it interesting how