August Rush

The first track on the soundtrack album, Mancina's orchestral music carries on the mood of the opening, in which the boy conducts the wind in the wheat field.

• Rather than opening with a lavish melody, it unfolds as sound gathers little by little — much like the senses of a boy who hears music in the wind.
• Mancina wrote the final rhapsody first and planted its fragments throughout the film. Keep in mind the short melodic phrase heard here, and you will catch the moment it returns in the last piece.
• The texture — other instruments entering one by one over broad harmonies laid down by the strings — sounds in step with the image of the view opening wide over the wheat field.

Weaving cellist Lyla's Bach and rock singer Louis's band music into a single track, it renders in sound the moment the two worlds first touch.

• The cello part was played by session cellist Steve Erdody, and the vocals were sung by Jonathan Rhys Meyers himself, who played Louis.
• Bach's cello, standing on strict rules, and rock bursting freely forth are heard by turns, then overlap. The difference in temperament between the two future parents is the very structure of the piece.
• The way two different musics are joined within one piece sounds like a device that previews the music of the son who will inherit both.

Music for the scene in which a boy holding a guitar for the first time finds its sounds by tapping rather than plucking the strings, written by Mancina and Kaki King together.

• Tapping — sounding notes by striking the fretboard directly with two fingers — mixes with a percussive style that beats the guitar's body like a drum. This is where the impression comes from of an untaught child seemingly inventing the instrument's uses on his own.
• The “Bari” of the title appears to refer to a baritone guitar, tuned lower than a standard guitar. That a low, thick resonance comes from a young boy's hands is strange and striking.
• The hands shown in close-up are not the actor's but Kaki King's. She played most of August's guitar parts in the film.
• The progression — repeating the same figure while gradually adding sound — seems to transfer to a single guitar the hearing of the previous scene, which stacked city noise into rhythm.

A gospel song sung by young Hope and the choir in a Harlem church — the moment August first meets a community with whom to share music.

• Sung by the Impact Repertory Theatre, a Harlem youth performance group, and Jamia Simone Nash, who played Hope. The song was written by the group's leader, Jamal Joseph, among others.
• The exchange form in which one person leads and the group answers (call and response) is a deep-rooted idiom of gospel. It coincides with the scene in which a boy who had only ever heard music alone receives an answer for the first time.
• The lyrics carry a spirit of encouragement and faith — to lift one's head and raise one's voice even in hardship — as handclaps and chorus swell toward a climax.
• Nominated for Best Original Song at the 80th Academy Awards, it was also performed at the ceremony; the award went to “Falling Slowly” from “Once.”

In Washington Square, August and Louis, neither knowing who the other is, strike up an impromptu guitar duet.

• The exchange structure — one side tosses out a phrase and the other takes it and transforms it — unfolds just like the duel of the title. That two people meeting for the first time fall into step within a few bars speaks the hidden meaning of the scene.
• Unlike August's other guitar pieces in the film, this one alone was played not by Kaki King but by Heitor Pereira and Doug Smith. It seems the two guitars each needed a different touch.
• Pereira is a Brazilian-born guitarist and composer who has long worked as a guitarist on Hollywood film-score recordings.

The Elgar cello concerto Lyla plays in Central Park and Louis’s rock number are woven into a single track. For the first time in 11 years, the two stand on the same evening, on different stages.

• Lyla’s final performance opens with the slow introduction (Adagio-Moderato) of Elgar’s “Cello Concerto in E minor.” Written in 1919, just after the First World War, the piece is counted among the works most deeply steeped in the loneliness of Elgar’s last years.
• The opening, in which the cello alone scrapes out heavy chords, overlaps with the image of a player who had long set the instrument aside lifting the bow once more, and so it takes on a weight beyond that of a mere solo.
• Cello classics and the sound of a rock band are spliced together in alternation, letting the ear hear a cross-cutting that moves between different places at the same moment. It is constructed as a pair with the earlier “Bach/Break.”
• This Elgar concerto is especially well known through cellist Jacqueline du Pré’s recording, so for classical-music lovers it is also a choice that summons the memory of that recording.

This is the final piece August conducts in Central Park. The piece Mancina wrote first, scattering its fragments throughout the film, at last rings out whole.

• A one-movement piece that, unbound by form, freely strings together several themes is called a rhapsody (gwangsigok). It is a fitting form for threading into one the journey of a boy who has passed through wind, city, guitar, organ and gospel.
• Here the short melodic fragments that drifted through scene after scene each find their place. According to the composer, the reason a piece heard for the first time still feels familiar is that we have been hearing it, without knowing, all through the film.
• As the timbre of the guitar blends into the orchestra and choir, the parents’ two worlds, classical and rock, are brought to one place within this piece.
• It is also worth noting that the piece is written in C major (C major). The most basic of keys, made up only of the piano’s white keys, it evokes the brightness of a first state, free of any ornament.
• In Mancina’s own materials it is also introduced under the name “Rhapsody No. 1 in C major.”