Here’s Walter Benjamin’s ‘definition’ of the angel of history (courtesy of Wikipedia):

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Here’s the text (by Patricia Sykes), set for baroque mezzo-soprano, from the opera:

the red current swells and speeds
soon it will mouth their two feet
in a terrible hunger
my one wing alone
is useless the other, trapped in
the human storm, can free nothing
to watch and report is my curse
the cloth is all their care
bathed in moon-silver, one
shadow within another
they go forth to eat wind
—the eye’s ruby is witness
to the blood it makes weep

Sykes and Lim develop Benjamin’s (not to mention that of Paul Klee) vision into a turbulent blood-red scene in which time is capable of giving birth to something organic (in this case, arguably, the twins/lovers of the opera, The Beloved and The Navigator). The Angel of History, deprived of a wing (therefore wretched and flightless), almost vomits forth the narrative, being cursed to “watch and report”, unable to abate the “storm blowing in from Paradise”.

The techniques employed by Lim were selected in an attempt to give the angel a multi-layered vocal quality, transmitting its anguish through folds of reality, as well as invoking the idea of the angel of history being a kind of flightless bird-human-spirit creature.

If I were a film composer and was working in the horror/suspense genre, I’d be really grateful for post-tonality options. I hear so much horror/suspense music from the pre-sampler/synthesizer days (say, pre-90’s) and there’s Ligeti everywhere, of course, massive clusters of notes, fractured melodicism and other (now) cliches of serialism and the postwar avant-garde.

My favorite use of classical music, or at least classical music-sounding music in a movie is the way Franz Waxman evokes Salome very clearly in the final scene of the great Sunset Boulevard.