My wife has been avidly following the new Ken Burns documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Have you been watching? I keep hearing one of my favorite hymn tunes, Land of Rest, in various arrangements. The producers explain discernment behind the music choices:

In making the film, we wanted to infuse the story with music that matched the stories we were telling. Some of the songs we chose were taken from the particular times in popular culture during which our historical characters lived – from the hymnals early visitors to Yosemite would have known in the mid-1800s to the jazz of the early decades of the 1900s, from orchestral works inspired by the American landscape to the Rock and Roll of the 1960s. But throughout, we also wanted some thematic melodies that could span a century and a half of narrative and somehow capture the timeless emotions – from exuberant joy to hushed awe – people have consistently experienced when they entered these timeless places. We wanted melodies, what we call our film’s “emotional metronome,” that could as easily apply to John Muir, for whom the waterfalls of Yosemite sang an “exulting chorus,” to Adolph Murie a hundred years later, who felt that the howl of a wolf on a stormy Alaskan night was also “music…the voice of wilderness.”

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