My favourite piece from the Firefly Official Soundtrack. Click title to listen (as well as the rest of the OST if you so wish. I also recommend The Funeral and Inara's Suite. I also highly recommend watching the show).
A bit of backstory: Firefly was a critically acclaimed tv show, the brainchild of Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel) that got canned by Fox, but not before muckings-about at the executive level led to schedule juggling and showing the series out of order (who shows the pilot episode only after the show has been cancelled?). The fanbase flocked to the DVDs once they were made available and Firefly was resurrected as the movie Serenity, which -- for those keeping track of such things -- never happens. Ever.
Firefly is, on the surface a sci-fi Western drama (with a splash of the self-conscious comedy recognizably Whedon). It chronicles life in the distant future (when the US and China have colonized space) aboard a small transport ship, Serenity, whose captain and crew are just out to make a living (legal and otherwise) and get by -- Millennium Falcon style. They pick up travelers for a bit of extra cash. Unfortunately, two of them are wanted criminals with bounties on their heads worth more than the ship they fly in.
Simon and River Tam are brother and sister on the lam. River, a genuinely gifted mind and dancer, was abducted by a secret government organization that sought to awaken her latent psychic abilities and turn her into a brainwashed weapon. Simon, a promising young trauma surgeon at the top hospital of the Core planets gave up his career and personal wealth to fund a network of contacts and spies that eventually led to him rescuing his sister from the government facility.
"Inside the Tam House" is a sparse and beautifully flowing piece that annunciates the longing for the life and home that the Tam's lost. The piece is supported by the rippling arpeggios of the piano at the base. Soaring above with the melody is the violin, punctuated and augmented occasionally by the woodflute.
Throughout the show (and thus the soundtrack), the combination of piano and violin are used as signatures for River and Simon (209, Goltz). Where other characters are signified by Western mainstays, like the guitar, the fiddle, and banjo -- portable instruments befitting nomadic lifestyles, the originally wealthy Tams are represented by instruments with classical and aristocratic connotations. At the base is the piano, a large, stay-at-home instrument, physically representing the nostalgia for a past life that cannot be reclaimed. The piano ripples up and down, in and out, in an omnipresent and pervading way (like some sort of river). It is supported by the elegant, but flighty violin, characteristic of River's psychotic tendancies as a result of experimentation on her brain. The violin melody is wistful and has an Asian flavour (note the Asian surname). The woodflute is a distinctly Asian instrument, further reinforcing the Anglo-Asian blend seen on the show. It evokes a sense of pastoral landscapes (important in Westerns) and of freedom from the urban Core planets (also important in Westerns).
The creativity, deliberation, craft and genius that went into the composition and arrangement of this soundtrack testifies to the overall creativity, deliberation, craft and genius of the show itself. The idea of a crew of rag-tag nobodies in a ship flying around avoiding the Alliance and just trying to stay in the sky became an apt metaphor for a show brimming with potential, vision and talent that did all it and its fans could to stay afloat, but ultimately failing.
Goltz, Jennifer. "Listening to Firefly." Finding Serenity. Ed. Jane Espenson. Dallas, Texas: Benballa, 2005. 209-216.
