"A question for those concerned: what, in your opinion, is Goldsmith's best Fantasy score? What is his best sci-fi score? What is his best score not in those two genres? Same question for James Horner? Same question for one film composer of your choosing."First of all, Reed, you're a dirty bastard. Second of all, a great set of questions that may actually (*gasp!*) generate some honest-to-goodness discussion (though I won't be holding my breath).
Today I'm just going to focus on the Jerry Goldsmith question. I figure that's enough to get us started.
By my count, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 scores that one could classify as "science fiction". Among these are: Alien, Chain Reaction, Coma, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Explorers, The Illustrated Man, Hollow Man, Logan's Run, Outland, Planet of the Apes, Runaway, The Satan Bug, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Star Trek: Nemesis, Total Recall. The fantasy genre, as we all know, is more difficult to pin down because of the various blendings that can happen with so many other genres. Among others, I have: Baby: Secret of the Lost, Legend, Gremlins, The Haunting, Legend, The Omen Trilogy, Poltergeist, Poltergeist II, The Mummy, Powder, The Secret of NIMH, Small Soldiers, The Star Trek films (they fit both genres) Supergirl.
Before getting started though we have to address some problems that are central to trying to pick a series of "best of" scores by someone like Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith wrote music for film and television for nearly fifty(!) years beginning in the early days of television at CBS in the 1950s and scoring his first feature film in 1957. One of the main problems is that as the technique of film scoring changed over time, so did certain aspects of Goldsmith's scoring technique (pre- and post-Star Wars). In my view Goldsmith had essentially 3 compositional periods (with some line-blurring between periods). The 1960s and '70s more-or-less fall into a period of their own (I am, however, going to divide them by decade into two subcategories, because it's my blog.). The 1980s (what one might term Goldsmith's musical Wanderjahre because of the way film music was starting to change/be invaded by rock and pop musicians). Finally there was basically 1990-2004, during which he spent a few more years whittling his sound down to the essentials. Couple these with the fact that Goldsmith wrote great scores in literally every genre of film. Westerns? Check. Horror? Sports films? Check. Sci-Fi, fantasy, period film and drama? Check, check, check, check. Porn? How about Basic Instinct?
So by dividing his career into these discreet periods, I submit for your approval the following:
The 1960s:
Best science fiction score: Planet of the Apes. Yeah. You should've seen this one coming. Goldsmith wrote a lot of scores utilizing twelve-tone technique throughout the '60s and '70s including The Illustrated Man and The Satan Bug. This is his best sci-fi score of the '60s. Hands down, bar none. There are a lot of other good scores, but this is the pinnacle of his sci-fi work for the 1960s. In fact, Planet of the Apes may arguably be (one of) the finest example(s) of what concert composers of the time had been wrestling with for almost twenty years. Someone managed to combine Schoenberg's technique (freely adapted, like so many others) with Stravinskyian and Bartókian rhythmic inflections. It's possible that until John Corigliano scored Altered States that Planet of the Apes was the wildest orchestral film score ever written. The only use of electronics is the echoplex on the strings1.
At this point, though, I don't really have a fantasy score to pick because it hadn't become institutionalized in Hollywood the way it seems to be now. I could be wrong - my knowledge of the genre is pretty limited, actually - but it seems that at this point in time, "fantasy" meant Anything Ray Harryhausen Is Attached To such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Mysterious Island, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration. A bit.
The 1970s saw an influx of science fiction-oriented films and certainly an increase in the fantasy element (though, to be fair, isn't all science fiction fantasy to some extent?).
The 1970s:
My pick for Goldsmith's best sci-fi score of the 1970s is actually a draw. I couldn't choose between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien. I realize this may be cheating the rules a bit but, again, my blog. It also just happens that they were both made in the same year. If you really forced to pick, I'd have to go with Alien. Blasphemy, I know. But it's the more compositionally interesting of the two; and for me, compositionally interesting trumps more often than not. My runner up is Logan's Run, with its deft use of much of the same sort of elements that made Planet of the Apes so interesting plus heavy doses of electronic mayhem of the time.
As far as fantasy is concerned, I think I have to pick The Omen. But, Herr, it's a horror film. Okay, well it's not so horrifying anymore but I've heard it got the blood pumping back in the day. It's what would now be called a supernatural thriller more than an out-and-out horror film but it's about the Antichrist for cryin' out loud. It doesn't get much more fantastical than that! Besides, Jerry's score basically updated Bernard Herrmann's take on the horror film, adding - again - Bartókian and Stravinskyian rhythmic devices.
The 1980s:
The 1980s saw both the sci-fi and fantasy genres take off like a rocket as we became a post-Star Wars world. I think Goldsmith's best sci-fi score of the 1980s actually came in 1980 with Peter Hyams's Outland. It's a testament to the composer when three such distinct takes on the sci-fi genre can be rattled off in relatively quick succession when you put Outland together with Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It helps to reinforce what Goldsmith always said about trying to find the humanity in the film rather than rely on any gimmickery. Explorers is a really wonderful score, full of a youthful buoyancy.
In the 1980s the fantasy genre seemed to inspire some of Goldsmith's richest and most imaginative writing. The Final Conflict (the final installment of The Omen Trilogy) is rich with both music of light and darkness. The Secret of N.I.M.H. contains some of his most hauntingly lyrical writing. Both Poltergeist films let Goldsmith both reach back to his days in television (scoring several fantastic episodes of The Twilight Zone) and stretch his orchestral chops, creating music that is dense and terrifying yet never loses sight of the humanity of the story, embodied in the theme for the little girl, Carol Anne, and her mother who tries to retrieve her2. So what's my favorite? Legend. It was a toss-up between that and Poltergeist but there's something so...magical about this score. It simply shimmers and to my ear is probably Goldsmith's first truly successful blending of orchestra and electronics where you don't really "hear the seams" as it were. It also lays bare the fact that Bartók and Stravinsky weren't the only composers important to Goldsmith. If Legend - and Poltergeist for that matter - has a concert hall cousin, I would hazard a guess that it would be Ravel's Daphnis Et Chloé (not the suites, but the whole damned thing3.
The 1990s:
From 1990 to his death in 2004 my favorite sci-fi score of the period is a no-brainer. Total Recall. Is it completely over the top? Yes. Is it a great film? Maybe. Maybe not. Does it take a lot of liberties with Philip K. Dick's original story, rendering it nearly unrecognizeable? Pretty much. It also happens to be one of the most solidly developed scores in Goldsmith's entire career with nearly every cue developed from a single, audaciously simple musical idea and functions on multiple levels within the film4. My other favorite sci-fi score for this final period is Hollow Man (also directed by Paul Verhoeven). Compositionally, though, Hollow Man doesn't really sustain its musical interest beyond the first hour or so. Once everything goes to hell Goldsmith basically turns on the blood and guts scoring and goes straight for the musical throat of the film (It's still a wonderfully constructed score).
At first I was tempted to choose The Mummy as my favorite fantasy score of Goldsmith's final period. And I do love. How I love it so. I bought this score album the same day as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Guess which one got more play time in my CD player that summer? As I've mentioned before, it was reported that Goldsmith hated this score and the fact that director Stephen Sommers wanted him to keep going over the top musically and basically wanted Jerry to abandon all subtlety. Which he did. So I'm going to change midstream. The Mummy is my favorite over-the-top fantasy score of the period. My favorite subtle fantasy score? Powder. Nobody saw the film, and I'm not going to comment here about the "extracurricular activities" of the film's director, but it has a beautiful and tender score that just warmly draws you into the story of a boy who is an outcast because he looks different and has a unique gift.
So there you have it, dear reader(s). Feel free to weigh in as you see fit.
1. Even then, Goldsmith's score is far more listenable and - I think - more involved with the film's diegesis on a subtextual level).
2. Astute observers will note the similarities between Poltergeist and an episode of the original Twilight Zone series entitled "Little Girl Lost", in which a girl falls through her bedroom wall into another dimension - scored by Bernard Herrmann.
3. You don't know it? Go check it out. Right now.
4. One day I hope to get to that blog post.
9 comments:
Obviously, I can't hope to challenge you in the field of Jerry Goldsmith (yet), but I find myself mostly agreeing with your picks. I might have gone with Motion Picture of Alien if only becuase you really hear Jerry starting to seamlessly blend the electronic and the orchestral in it. And Total Recall is one of his best scores of the "Late" period, and I, for one, love the film. I really think it helped to bridge the gap between the muscle action film and the more cereberal action film. Yes, it was an Arnie film, but it still makes one think about that thin line between reality and illusion...the line that Inception made disappear.
I think part of the reason I lean more toward Alien over Star Trek: The Motion Picture is because I like the darkness of it. So there's a personal preference there. I also happen to think TMP, while a good score, is a very uneven score, whereas Goldsmith's craft is solidly displayed from beginning to end in Alien. That's my take on it, anyway.
What's interesting about Total Recall is that you can hear many of the ideas (particularly the rhythmic ideas) being developed throughout the decade beginning with Outland (which is a badass movie). In many ways, Total Recall would go on to influence action scores for a good chunk of the 1990s (I'm pretty sure I can hear that it was on the temp track for The Fugitive in several places). It just kind of goes to show that Goldsmith was still on the cutting edge of his craft at this time of his career.
Damn. I have so many scores to get (and listen to).
I'm sure none of the other posts based around this question will be quite this ridiculous.
I have a hard time with the Question for two reasons:
1) It turns out I only know about half of the scores you listed.
2) I don't think more than a couple of them qualify as "fantasy" to begin with. Sci-fi is not fantasy. Supernatural thriller is not fantasy. Fantasy demands more than a character or an idea being otherworldly. And your jab at the Antichrist, while gloriously funny, makes my point: if you call that fantasy, then anything with mummies, ghosts, aliens, gypsy curses, and whatever else is on equal footing. Fiction and folklore do not make something fantasy.
Legend is fantasy. The Shadow is not fantasy. So my mind has a hard time reconciling the question with its answers. Brain... hurty...
I share Tim's problem - where do you draw the line at what is and isn't "fantasy".
I was thinking of taking up the James Horner response on my blog on your behalf, but before I even attempted it, I'd have to have a clearer definition of what we all qualify as the fantasy genre.
You've covered a lot of what I'd have to say in regards to Goldsmith, but give me a little bit and I'll come up with something fresh I'm sure.
Do it. It doesn't look like this thread is going anywhere anyway.
Well, let's be honest - if someone were to put the 10 people on the entire earth that knew Jerry's music better than anyone else in a room together - you'd probably be in the group.
Make's discussion difficult to say the least.
that, and I'm so Goldsmith ritarded.
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