Arvo Pärt – "Fratres" (1977/1992)

The critics loved Rectify, a four-season television series that aired on the Sundance TV channel between 2013 and 2016.  (You can click here to read the New Yorker’s review of the show.)

In Rectify’s first episode, a thirty-something man from a small Georgia town is released from prison after spending years on death row for the rape and murder of his high-school girlfriend when newly-discovered DNA evidence calls his guilt into question.  

But that DNA evidence doesn’t prove the freed man didn’t commit the murder.  Even he isn’t sure what happened the night the girl was raped and killed.

Here's the trailer for the first season of Rectify:



I’ve watched the first three seasons of the show and I’ll watch season four as soon as my local public library gets it on DVD.  

I don’t love the show, although there are things about it that I like and admire.  On the whole, I recommend it – but it moves very slowly, and I sometimes find it puzzling.  YMMV.

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I had never heard of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt until I watched the season two finale of Rectify, which features his quietly compelling 1977 composition, “Fratres.”

“Fratres” is a purely instrumental composition.  It’s rare that 2 or 3 lines features music without words, but I’m making an exception for “Fratres,” which has been aptly described as “a mesmerising set of variations on a six-bar theme combining frantic activity and sublime stillness that encapsulates Pärt’s observation that ‘the instant and eternity are struggling within us’.”

Pärt calls his approach to composing music “tintinnabulation.”  (A tintinnabulum was a Roman wind chime, and Pärt's music is built around the tones and overtones produced by ringing bells.)  He developed this compositional technique after suffering from writer’s block for several years.   

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt

According to conductor and music writer Paul Hillier, Pärt's tintinnabular music has two types of voice, “the first of which (dubbed the ‘tintinnabular voice’) arpeggiates the tonic triad, and the second of which moves diatonically in stepwise motion.”

It turns out that his music has been used frequently on movie and television soundtracks.  For example, you can hear “Fratres” in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and Terence Malick’s To the Wonder.

I have to think that whoever chose “Fratres” for Rectify is a Malick fan.  There are many sequences in Malick’s movies (including To the Wonder) that can be described as “dreamlike,” and the same is true of Rectify – including the scene that is accompanied by “Fratres.”  

There are some 17 authorized versions of “Fratres,” each of which features different instrumentation.  For example, there’s the original violin and piano version; a cello and piano version; versions for four, eight or twelve cellos; a version for trombone, strings, and percussion; and a version for saxophone quartet.

The There Will Be Blood soundtrack features the cello and piano version of “Fratres”:

The soundtrack of the last episode of season two of Rectify features the version for solo violin, string orchestra, and percussion:

Click below to buy that version of “Fratres” from Amazon:

Drones – "Shark Fin Blues" (2005)

You are all my brothers

And you have been kind

But what were you expecting to find?

The plot of the first season of The Affair – a Showtime series that premiered in 2014 – is pretty straightforward.  

While spending the summer on Long Island with his wife and four kids, a forty-something teacher and wannabe novelist (Noah) encounters a thirty-something waitress (Alison), who is also married.  One thing leads to another . . . hence, the title of the series.

But the plot of season two – which I just finished watching – is a hot mess.  

Noah (Dominic West) and Helen (Maura Tierney)

In season two, Noah leaves his wife (Helen), writes a best-selling book, and marries Alison, who promptly gets pregnant.  

A few episodes later, Alison goes into labor while Noah is living la vida loca at a spectacular party at the Long Island home of a Hollywood producer who wants to turn Noah’s book into a movie.  

While Noah is at the party, he climbs into a hot tub to join two naked young women who are making out.  But one of them turns out to be his crazy daughter (Whitney) – who had gotten pregnant by Alison’s ne’er-do-well ex-brother-in-law (Scotty) the previous season, then had an abortion.  

Alison (Ruth Wilson) and Noah

Noah is horrified, and tries to get the hell out of Dodge.  But Hurricane Sandy has hit the Hamptons while he was busy snorting cocaine and cavorting with supermodels, and the roads back to New York City are impassable.  Alison delivers her baby solo.

Alison then admits that she slept with her ex-husband (Cole) once after she and Noah were married, and that Cole could be the father of their daughter.  

In the last episode of season two, Alison is confronted by her shady ex-brother-in-law, Scotty.  They argue, he grabs her, and as she’s struggling to break free, she accidentally shoves him right into the path of Noah’s car . . . which Helen is driving.  That’s the end of good ol’ Scotty.  

The detective looking into Scotty's death knows that Noah had beaten the crap out of Scotty and threatened to kill him when he found out that Scotty had knocked up his daughter Whitney, so Noah is a prime suspect from the very beginning of the investigation. 

Noah's arrest

And when a witness tells the detective that he saw Noah washing off his car the night of Scotty’s death, Noah is arrested.

Season two comes to an end as Noah suddenly leaps up during his trial for vehicular homicide and shouts “I DID IT!” in order to shield both his new wife (the mother of his – or perhaps Cole’s – young daughter) and his old one (the mother of his four other children) from prosecution.

(Oops . . . did I forget to say SPOILER ALERT?  Sorry about that!)

As season-ending cliffhangers go, it’s not “Who shot J.R.?” but it’s not bad.  I'm counting the days until the DVDs of season three make it to my local public library.

Here's a trailer for the The Affair that includes scenes from all three seasons that have aired to date:

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The best song on The Affair’s soundtrack is Lucinda Williams’s “Changed the Locks,” but that song was featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines.  

So today we’re featuring “Shark Fin Blues,” which is the best song on the soundtrack of the Sundance TV series, Rectify.

“Shark Fin Blues” was released on Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, a 2005 album by the Drones, who hail from Australia.

Rectify is about a guy in his thirties who is released from prison after spending half his life on death row thanks to the delivery of some misplaced DNA evidence.  The show set in a small town in Georgia – not on Long Island – and is about as different from The Affair as it can be.

Here’s “Shark Fin Blues,” a hot mess of a song that tells a Moby Dick-like tale, except that the role of the great white whale is played by a shark “that's bigger than a submarine”: