All great epics have stirring, emotional soundtracks. Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Orion isn't an epic, but I gave it a soundtrack anyway...and then gave it a second one just because I could. As it stands, downloading the various songs listed here is difficult...as you no doubt realize, hosting mp3s on the web is always a pain. As of now, none of the songs listed are available for download from here. However, you could always buy the CDs... or obtain them by other, less than legal means, which I of course would know nothing about.
A special treat for you: the first BSSO Winamp skin. Despite its name, you can use it in XMMS as I do (a popular Linux mp3 player). I don't know how things work on the Mac front, so you're on your own there. Anyway, this skin was made by my good friend Plasma on the occasion of Eileen's birthday, which is of course the Fourth of July, and up until now he and I have had the only copies. Well, that's pretty stingy of me, so I've finally gotten around to uploading it. Hope you like it. 252 KB, zipped.
This is version 1.5 of this document. To do for future versions: times for the first soundtrack. lyrics and release dates for all songs.
Thus, without further ado:
...I was again aware, that it was his destiny to sum up the whole story
of Austro-Germanic music, to recapitulate it and tie it up-not in a pretty
bow, but in a fearful knot made out of his own nerves and sinews.... Ours
is the century of death, and Mahler is its musical prophet.... His Ninth
Symphony offers us a crucial, semantic explanation, an infinitely broader
interpretation of what we've been calling the twentieth century crisis....
Mahler foresaw it all. That's why he so desperately resisted entering the
twentieth century, the age of death, the end of faith. And the bitter
irony was that he did succeed in avoiding the century only by himself
dying prematurely in 1911.... What was it that Mahler saw? Three kinds of
death. First, his own imminent death of which he was acutely aware. (The
opening bars of this Ninth Symphony are an imitation of the arrhythmia of
his failing heartbeat.) And second, the death of tonality, which for him
meant the death of music itself, music as he knew it and loved it. All his
last pieces are kinds of farewells to music, as well as to life... even
that Tenth remains for me only the one completed movement, which is yet
another heartbreaking adagio saying Farewell. It was one farewell too
many; I am convinced that Mahler could never have finished the whole
symphony, even if he had lived. He had said it all in the Ninth. And
finally, his third and most important vision; the death of society, of our
Faustian culture....
The Ultimate Ambiguity is clearly to be heard in the finale of Mahler's
Ninth symphony, which is a sonic presentation of death itself, and which
paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it. As you listen to this
finale, try to be aware of what has just preceded it: three other gigantic
movements, each one a farewell of its own. The first movement in itself
has been like a whole novel, a saga of tenderness and terror, of tortured
counterpoint and harmonic resignation; it has been a farewell to love, to
D major, a farewell to the tonic. In the second movement, a scherzo which
is a sort of super-Laendler, we have experienced a farewell to the world
of Nature, a bitter reimagining of simplicity, naivete, the
earth-pleasures we recall from adolescence. Then the third movement, again
a kind of scherzo, but this time grotesque: a farewell to the world of
action, the urban, cosmopolitan life-the cocktail party, the marketplace,
the raucous careers and careenings of success, of loud and hollow
laughter. And all three of these movements have been trembling on a tonal
precipice, on the edge of death.
Only then comes the fourth and last movement, the adagio, the final
farewell. It takes the form of a prayer. Mahler's last chorale, his
closing hymn, so to speak; and it prays for the restoration of life, of
tonality, of faith. This is tonality unashamed, presented in all aspects
ranging from the diatonic simplicity of the hymn tune that opens it
through every possible chromatic ambiguity. It's also a passionate prayer,
moving from one climax to another, each more searing than the last. But
there are no solutions. And between these surges of prayer there is
intermittently a sudden coolness, a wide-spaced transparency like an icy
burning --a Zen-like immobility of pure meditation. This is a whole other
world of prayer, of egoless acceptance. But again, there are no solutions.
"Heftig ausbrechend!" ["Breaking out vehemently"] he writes, as again the
despairing chorale breaks out with greatly magnified intensity. This is
the dual Mahler, flinging himself back into his burning Christian prayer,
then again freezing into his Eastern one. This vacillation is his final
duality. In the very last return of the hymn he is close to prostration;
it is all he can give in prayer, a sobbing, sacrificial last try. But
suddenly this climax fails, unachieved-the one that might have worked,
that might have brought solutions. This last desperate reach falls short
of its goal, subsides into a hint of resignation, than another hint, then
into resignation itself. And so we come to the final incredible page. And
this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art,
to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness
of this page is terrifying: Adagissimo, he writes, the slowest possible
musical direction; and then langsam (slow), erterbend (dying away),
zögernd (hesitating); and as if all those were not enough to indicate the
near stoppage of time, he adds äusserst langsam ["with utmost slowness"]
in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of
sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and
submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life
melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. We cling to them
as they dematerialize; we are holding two-then one. One, and suddenly
none. For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand,
a broken strand, two strands, one...none. We are half in love with easeful
death
...now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no
pain... And in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained
everything.