Poignant, Touching, Soaring, Beautiful Piece Of Music

[Darrell]

I heard some music used in the documentary Asteroids: The Good, Bad and Ugly, tonight on Science Channel. The show was coproduced by BBC. I've heard the music before and have never been able to identify it. It was not listed in closing credits. I couldn't find anything about it online. It is piano, backed up by strings and maybe an orchestra. As the title says, it's poignant, touching, soaring, and beautiful. It may be from a movie soundtrack. I think I've heard it on the local classical FM station, though I didn't hear it credited there either. Anybody have any ideas??? I would love to know what it's called.

[Greg]

I haven't seen either, but discussion elsewhere has it as something from the 'Transformers' soundtrack.

[Kommander]

Challenge Accepted!

[Kommander]

After a bit of research my money is it being Adagio In D Minor by John Murphy. It first featured in the movie Sunshine for which it was written. It latter appeared in the movie Kick Ass during the strobe light gunfight. If that's not it you can listen to the whole soundtrack to the first Transformers movie here and see if you can find it. Also despite an ending that kinda comes from left field I do recommend that you see Sunshine. To paraphrase Tam it's a mix of Das Boot and 2001: A Space Odyssey. For that matter if you have not seen Kick Ass if you should watch that too.

[Darrell]

That's it, Kommander! Amazing! Thank you!!! John Murphy - Sunshine (Adagio In D Minor)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQXVzg2PiZw

ETA: Kommander, would you mind telling how you nailed it so quickly? I'm curious as the the search terms you used, your train of thought, etc. Thanks again.

[Kommander]

My super power is hunting down obscure soundtracks on the internets.

Actually I ran a Google search for the documentarys soundtrack. One of the hits was a Yahoo! page that mentioned John Murphys 28 Days Later being used in the documentary. The Sunshine theme is actually one of my favorite bits of music so when I saw Murphys name mentioned I immediately thought of the it. When I listened to it again to make sure it definitely fit your description and seemed a likely piece of music to appear in something spacey.

[Darrell]

Huh. I got as far as the 28 Days Later link last night, but didn't pursue it. I saw the first one (I think), but not the sequel(s). Never saw Kick Ass either.

It's funny the turns such a pursuit can take--I emailed one of my sisters about the music, she did some digging and came up with Perpetuum Mobile, by Penguin Cafe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E3znZoFnN8

Another of those pieces of music I'd heard a thousand times, but never knew its name. I told the story of this search to a coworker this morning, and he mentioned Adagio For Strings, by Samuel Barber:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQsgE0L ... re=related

Here's the wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adagio_for_Strings

It's been described as the saddest classical music ever written. And last but not least, here's the page for Sunshine the movie, where Adagio in D Minor was first used, I guess:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film)

The premise sounds silly--the sun is going out, and a team of scientists are going to relight it by dropping a huge bomb into the sun. Per Kommander's (and Tam's) description, though, and reading around, I wound up ordering the movie from Amazon.