Holden Mui’s Moon River and the sound of magic
What I see, what you might see
This is the best arrangement of Moon River I’ve ever heard.
Disclaimer: hi, if you're an academic I've referenced here to my substack for Official Reasons™, this isn't what I meant lol—this is indicative of a part of me for sure, but also definitely not academic in nature. Please don't pick this as your average sample of my work and writing!
It’s the soundtrack to the most magical ten summer days I’ve ever had, and now I can’t help but think about all the poetry attached to that time whenever I listen to this arrangement, particularly crystallised in the brilliant ending it bursts into. I will forever be grateful and mortified at the memory of Andrew playing this in my last few moments at SPARC on the kind of janky El Dorado piano; the feelings in my chest so uncontrollable and heady, yanked firmly out of its buried compartment in my gut thanks to the stupidly good evocation of this music.
Of course, this would make the above a deeply biased take. Still: I want to assert that this piece, with all its beauty and brilliance, is a worthy down to wrap all those memories in. It doesn’t have to stretch to encompass them, doesn’t warp around the edges of the facets. I think there’s something special in that.
So anyway. In celebration and gratitude of the official release of Andrew’s recording, here is my experience of Moon River’s ending.
Feel free to give it a listen first, or, sacrilegiously, listen while reading this.
4:05 onwards—
That ending. That ending always gets me. Transports me.
The whimsy, but so spirited and extravagant and true at the end. It takes a enchanting melody and uses it to capture an intense optimism that rages against a world saying it should not exist, that burns so very brightly. The running passages, complex and extravagant and delighting in their own rapid wanderings around everywhere are the music of the first place that truly let my mind run free without restraint. That could handle the intensity, and energy, and branches, and fun of my brain.
O, for that place, that time. I remember singing this song spontaneously in four part harmony in Lassen. The kind of place strange place where people hummed and whistled while simply walking around or existing. They had a way about them that was just more at ease, more trusting in the spaciousness of every room to accommodate their sound and unrestrained presence—a way that stretched out anywhere they were, legs and back and arms, guts bared without fear at all of the relative strangers around them. There is such security in the ability to bare one's middle to the world like an indulgent cat. (I mean, no one wore shoes, either).
This arrangement is the soundtrack to me leaving that special place and time on earth, where I sobbed in the car and, for the first time ever, knew what it was to mourn something that was just good, to me. To be sad for the loss of something you loved, rather than something that could've been or was otherwise stained somehow. I cried as I had never cried for the majority of those forty minutes in the Uber. I continued ugly crying when it pulled up at my temporary stay, not bothering to explain to my parents why. I cried spontaneously a lot in the days to come. It was a kind of grief I had never known. I'm not sure I'll ever know it again.
The ending of this arrangement revels in what the heart of Moon River is, and what it can be, with competence, space, effervescence. There is a burden, such a cost, to learning the mechanics of doing this piece justice; yet surely (at least to me, if not to Andrew) there is such grand, sprawling transcendent beauty unlocked when you do right by it, too. Someone took the time to do that, in the summer of 2024, and I had the privilege to know it. To see not only that beauty such as this exists, but moreover, that there are people who can and will make the gardens to propagate it in the world.
These days, I'm not sure I believe it, yet I have been given that basket of irrefutable evidence leading to the undeniable truth: this must be possible. It might even be abundant in this world, somehow, in some ways of harvesting.
Most of the time, I can only consider these thoughts for so long each time before setting them down to go do something more pressing instead. But until I have the time to return, this Moon River will hold onto it for me.
Good music can become vessels of such exquisite memory. I hope you might experience such a relationship of give-and-take from this music, too. If it isn't clear enough: I hope you give this piece a listen.