In Search of the Music

A long long time ago (ok, it was 1980) , I saw the movie, "Death of a Princess". That movie created a big stir in Saudi Arabia and different Muslim countries. I will not go into a socio-religio-politico-moralistic discussion about it, because that is not the point of this post. The movie was very bland and a pseudo docu-drama television movie. It was banned in all the Muslim countries. This made it a must see movie, and all the interested households in Kuwait managed to get a copy of it to see what all the fuss was about. The copy of the movie I got was a very bad reproduction on a VHS video tape. There was no Internet to download the movie at that time.

What grabbed me in that banned movie was the background Music. The soundtrack was mysterious, it was haunting, it had a sadness to it, the sound captivated and entranced me. I still remember it. I would have loved to have that music and listen to it again and again, it was that beautiful.

Back to the present day, I was scanning the different Kuwaiti blogs on Safat and found Error's post about Death of a Princess. He had a link to the imdb entry to Death of a Princess.

I read his post, and remembered that magical music. I felt like Robert Langdon looking for the Holy Grail, I became Hercule Poirot using his grey cells to catch the murderer. Error's post started my search, no, my quest to find that mysterious music that moved me.

I went to the imdb page about the movie, clicked to see the Full Credits for the movie and there was my first clue, the music was a Vangelis composition. I now had two clues, the Movie's title, and the composer. I googled vangelis death of a princess. I found as the third entry an Amazon link mentioning the theme song for Death of a Princess. I was hot on the trail. I went to Amazon and the first comment there said:

On this album, "Alpha" is the main theme song for the docu-drama "Death of a Princess" about a Saudi Royal Princess and this song was also part of Carl Sagan's Cosmos television series. This song alone is worth the purchase of the album..

I needed to establish and confirm that Music's identity. Amazon allows you to play samples of the album you are interested in, I clicked on Alpha, the music's title, and the music surged out of my computer's speakers. At that moment, listening to the brief sample, I understood Victor Hugo when he said "Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent."

Armed with the composer's name and the piece's title, Alpha by Vangelis, I searched all over the net for the full music. A brief sample could not satisfy me. I used all my search skills, looking in different blogs, web pages, ftp sites until I found my Holy Grail.

I will not list out all the false trails I followed. I eventually found that music.

I present to you Alpha by Vangelis.

Click here to get 'Alpha---Vangelis'