Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer’s Theme with David Linch

Angelo Badalamenti explains how he wrote Laura Palmer’s Theme with David Linch (sheet music).

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David Linch (1946-2025)

David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 15, 2025) was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. Considered one of the most important filmmakers of his era, Lynch was often called a “visionary” and was acclaimed for films often distinguished by their surrealist qualities. In a career spanning more than 50 years, he received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and an Honorary Academy Award in 2019.

Lynch studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film was Eraserhead (1977), which found success as a midnight movie. Lynch was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for the biographical drama The Elephant Man (1980), the mystery Blue Velvet (1986) and the neo-noir Mulholland Drive (2001). His romantic crime drama Wild at Heart (1990) won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His other credits include the space opera Dune (1984), the neo-noir Lost Highway (1997), the road movie The Straight Story (1999) and Inland Empire (2006).

Lynch and Mark Frost created the ABC series Twin Peaks (1990–91), for which he received five Primetime Emmy Award nominations, including Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Lynch co-wrote and directed its film prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), and a third season in 2017. He acted in Twin Peaks, Lucky (2017) and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022). He also guest-starred in TV series such as The Cleveland Show (2010–13) and Louie (2012). He directed music videos for artists such as X Japan, Moby, Interpol, Nine Inch Nails and Donovan, and commercials for Dior, YSL, Gucci and the New York City Department of Sanitation.

David Lynch also worked as a musician, releasing solo albums and a variety of collaborations; a visual artist, including painting, furniture design, and photography; and author, publishing the books Images (1994), Catching the Big Fish (2006) and Room to Dream (2018). A practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, he founded the David Lynch Foundation to fund meditation lessons for students, veterans, and other “at-risk” populations.

A lifelong smoker, he was diagnosed with emphysema in 2020, and died in January 2025 after being evacuated from his home due to the Southern California wildfires. The adjective Lynchian came into use to describe works or situations reminiscent of his art, with the Oxford English Dictionary noting his penchant for “juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace”.

David Lynch filmography (Wikipedia)

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“Referential”, “visionary”, “revolutionary”… adjectives that have been used on countless occasions to refer to David Lynch , one of the most important mass cult directors of modern cinema, as well as a more than occasional painter and musician.

The genius died last January due to pulmonary emphysema that he had suffered for years. Seventy-eight years and eternal life.

The patience of the artist

David Lynch never understood art as a creative process, but rather as a chance encounter. The American filmmaker, that mystical figure that we did not believe would ever leave us, defended that the only merit of the artist is that of patience, of knowing how to embrace the aesthetic value of waiting. You don’t believe your ideas, you may not even imagine them; one simply comes across his work by chance, the catch after an eternal morning waiting calmly on the bank of a river. Lynch’s career is an exhibition of goldfish, an immense glass aquarium full of creatures whose shapes, colors, movements and reflections are deformed by the crystals that contain the water of our memory.

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Remembering the images of the most influential artist of Western contemporary times as if they were fishing for them at this very moment, as if none of them belonged to a specific film, or even to a specific discipline, but rather to a mind in which cinema It has allowed me to sneak in, almost like Jeffrey Beaumont who observes the forbidden through the crack of a closet in “Blue Velvet” (86). This humble tribute to Lynch cannot be a tour of his filmography, but rather of a liquid world that many of us feel like we have dreamed of more than having seen. Where do your movies end and my dreams begin? Where do my nightmares end and their sequences begin? Have we dreamed of a feverish sitcom starring stuffed rabbits or did we rescue it from “Inland Empire” (06)? Where does art end and David Lynch begin ?

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The filmmaker who did not want to be a filmmaker

It cannot be a coincidence that one of the most influential filmmakers of the century did not want to be a filmmaker, but rather found his discipline in painting, that he captured the seventh art on canvas. After discovering his fascination with art in the studio of the painter Bushnell Keeler—whom he portrayed sailing in a small home movie titled “ Sailing with Bushnell Keeler” (67)—David Lynch inaugurates a dark but cathartic pictorial production capable of predicting the power dreamlike of his future images of movement. In fact, it would be the idea of ​​giving movement to a painting, of imagining the elements of a canvas being slightly shaken by the invisible force of the wind, that would give life to his first short film “The Alphabet” (68), an anachronistic vindication of the digital aesthetics of analog horror and Internet creepypasta from the perspective of the nightmarish childhood imagination that would so mark Lynch’s visual career.

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Childhood traumas and cybernetic terror coexist in the first work of a strictly timeless filmmaker, of an artist obsessed with what is hidden behind the neighbor’s wall and what is glimpsed through the windows of our mind (knowing perfectly well that both They are usually the same). That is why it is not surprising that the image of a naked woman wandering through a small American residential neighborhood that made little Lynch cry with terror—knowing, precisely, that that scene hid an unimaginably violent world—is the seed of many of his later works. images, of that powerful Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet” or that young woman who disappeared crossing the bridge in “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991 and 2017).

Cinema is music

But it is precisely the dreamlike sensation that every image of David Lynch is justified only by its relationship with the unjustifiable that pushes us to imagine his filmography from the logic of dreams, which invites us to wander his universe from a sinister familiarity. From this paradoxical relationship of antonyms is built what is for me his best sequence—his best work, his best dream—, the one in which two friends meet for a drink at a Winkie’s Diner in “Mulholland Drive” (01). Having already been in this dream, but equally fearing its outcome.

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Be fascinated by what we fear and be overwhelmed by how much of me there is in my own nightmares. It is no coincidence that this is the film that has ever terrified the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez the most, precisely because of her ability to work with “the terror of everyday life,” or that it was responsible for a filmmaker like Kyle Edward Ball, director of “ Skinamarink ” (22), dedicated himself to making films. He himself declared a few days ago that “What made him fall in love with Lynch’s cinema is that he behaves as if it were music.”

The chance meeting

Beyond Lynch’s musical side—remember that his last project was an album with Chrystabell titled “Cellophane Memories” (24)—we may have to understand his work as a symphony that sounds despite not being performed by anyone (“ There is no band, there is no orchestra. Their melodies continue to resonate in our unconscious, but we are not clear who continues to hum them there. Deleuze said about the painting of Francis Bacon – whose impossible faces took shape in “Eraserhead” (77) and “The Elephant Man” (81) – something that ends up involuntarily summarizing all of Lynch’s work: “is there another type of relationship between figures that is not narrative and from which no figuration is derived?” .

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It is at that precise moment when you have to give logic to the sensation, when you have to be able to visualize in a piano melody all the pain, the fascination and the indescribable unknown that Agent Cooper will have to face in ” Twin Peaks.” . For this reason we will always remember Lynch through the story of Angelo Badalamenti who, excited in front of a piano, made visible that relationship between David’s mind and his universe, spontaneously composing Laura Palmer’s theme. Because David Lynch never understood art as a creative process, but rather as a chance encounter. “Angelo, this is Twin Peaks.”

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