A Musical Mystery

Music is one of my favorite hobbies, and every once in a while I enjoy solving a mystery (especially when the consequences of not solving it are minimal). Recently I investigated two musical puzzles. The first has to do with the song "Bella's Lullaby" by Carter Burwell. This song was composed for the first Twilight movie and a slightly ornamented cover of the piano version can be found here:

http://j.mp/twilightbella

I am currently learning to play this song on the piano, and the rhythm is a bit tricky but I like the music. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion surrounding this track, though. When I searched on YouTube many of the videos titled "Bella's Lullaby" actually featured a song by a Korean pianist named Yiruma called "River Flows In You." As far as I can tell there is no official association between Yiruma and Twilight. I'm not sure exactly how these songs came to be associated in people's minds, but I read a few comments like, "This is what the song Bella's Lullaby should have sounded like." Here is a video of the Yiruma song:

http://j.mp/yarumi

The second mystery I investigated has to do with the song "Truman Sleeps," which was composed by Philip Glass for the soundtrack of "The Truman Show." The song is quite beautiful, but on almost every version I could find on the Internet the end is cut off. This intrigued me, so I tracked down the original on YouTube and finally understood why. It's possible that the ending made sense within the context of the movie, but listening to it by itself left me with the impression that Truman's sleep was interrupted by a nightmare. The original version of the song can be found here:

http://j.mp/tsleep

and a sheet music arrangement can be found here:

http://j.mp/tsleeps

I printed this music and played it a few nights ago. When I got to the ending my daughter, who was getting ready for bed, walked up to the piano and said, "Please don't play that while I'm trying to fall asleep." I actually couldn't blame her, because it is quite dissonant, and so I decided to throw away the second page and just end the song on an A-flat major chord after playing through the first page (making my own "cut off" version of the song).

So there you have it, everything you never wanted to know about the songs "Bella's Lullaby" and "Truman Sleeps"!