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Every year, during the first big snow of the season, I listen to Danny Elfman’s Ice Dance and have a good cry. (That swell at 2:12!)
It’s an extraordinary piece of music, composed for Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton’s 1990 classic about Edward (Johnny Depp), an isolated inventor’s creation with scissors for hands who tries to fit into suburban life after Peg (Dianne Wiest), a well-meaning Avon lady, brings him home.
The first time we hear Ice Dance, Peg’s daughter Kim (an especially doe-eyed Winona Ryder) — wearing that now-iconic white off-the-shoulder dress — is twirling in the sparkling flakes created by Edward, who is carving an ice sculpture of an angel in her likeness before he accidentally slices Kim’s outstretched hand open, precipitating the witch hunt that sends him back into exile.
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The gut-punch reprise comes at the end of the film. An elderly Kim tells her granddaughter that she believes Edward is still alive because it never snowed before and now it does.
“If he weren’t up there now, I don’t think it would be snowing. Sometimes, you can still catch me dancing in it.”
And sure enough, Edward is carving another ice sculpture — this one of a young Kim, in that dress, palm outstretched to catch the flakes of snow. As he remembers her. As she remembers herself.
It’s Elman’s score that elevates both scenes to ugly-cry territory. The stirring orchestral swells, the haunting, ethereal choir — it’s as perfect a movie score as they come, but it also works as a soundtrack to your own dark, snowy night of the soul. Ice Dance sounds like snow.
I’ve often wondered if Elfman was low-key inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker while composing Ice Dance. That composition also sounds like snow — staccato, twinkling flakes that become a crashing orchestral blizzard by the end. But it’s the use of a choir, again, that gives it that ethereal, heartstring-pulling quality.
The closest I’ve found to confirming this theory is a quote Elfman gave to Vulture back in 2015.
“I’ve always enjoyed using some kind of choir, or the boys’ soprano soloist; there’s just something about the sound of children that particularly gets me,” he said. “There was nothing to indicate what music should be played for this movie. I had two themes for Edward Scissorhands but no themes for anybody else. That’s just the way it came together.
“Frequently, my process isn’t really a process. It’s what scenes form in front of me and trying to explain it. I don’t know what made me want to use children’s voices other than telling the story and telling the fairy tale. I think that probably opened the door to Tchaikovsky and using a choir in that way, I’m sure. But it’s all very unconscious.”
The more I think about it, Edward Scissorhands and the Nutcracker Prince are also not dissimilar figures. They’ve both been animated by a mysterious old man who makes things — Edward by the Inventor (Vincent Price), Nutcracker by Drosselmeyer, a toy and clockmaker — and both fall in love with a beautiful young woman (Kim/Clara) they can’t really be with in their present form. Kim’s odious, jealous boyfriend makes for a decent Mouse King, too.
There are other songs that sound like snow to me. One is The Shins’ Phantom Limb with its imagery — “frozen into coats, white girls of the north” and “the milk from the window lights” — but also frontman James Mercer’s crystalline vocal melodies. Another is Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal, which makes me think of snow at rest — white-capped firs and still, sparkling fields.
What’s your snow soundtrack?
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