Krull, Part 2: Under the Influence

Previously, I waxed rhapsodic regarding James Horner's score for Krull and how it's one of my very favorite film scores (I'm a brass player. Sue me.).

Awhile back something occurred to me about this particular score. One of the criticisms of James Horner's technique is that he's a little too liberal with his tendency to borrow from himself and others, past and present. Which is totally legitimate. He does it. A lot. Over the course of his career he's cribbed from a lot of folks (Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Pärt, Goldsmith and Horner, to name only a few). Krull represents something relatively unique in Horner's output. So far as I can tell, he doesn't make any direct quotations of other works. There are a lot of allusions to other works but since the history of music is built on such allusions, we can't fault Horner too much for this.

Before we get going, let's take another listen to the first cue from the film. This encompasses not only the title sequence (about the first three-and-a-half minutes) but the series of sequences that follows for the next four minutes):



This sequence is great in that it sets up nearly all of the thematic material for the entire score. In order of appearance, these themes/motifs are:

1. Women's chorus motif (0'17)
2. Four-note fanfare for the main character, Colwyn (1'11)
3. Colwyn's theme (1'48)
4. Rising four-note broken triad representing the Glaive (2'36)
5. Material for the Beast and his Slayers, mostly textural in nature (3'37)
6. Bits of the Love Theme which will be further elaborated in the next cue (5'01)

Those things in mind, let's break down the influences of those themes.

Gustav Holst - The Planets - At first glance this might seem somewhat obvious, but not necessarily in the ways that you'd expect. Much has been made about Horner's driving rhythms suggesting those of 'Mars'. The driving rhythms of 'Mars' are echoes through much of the score, though Horner never quotes anything directly¹. After 'Mars' the movement of The Planets that really get pressed into service is (as far as I can tell) 'Neptune', with its arpeggiated chords, mediant relationships, bitonality and wordless female chorus (more on that later).

Erich Wolfgang Korngold - The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood - Okay. so I suppose these might seem a bit obvious or unfair, but they are the archetypal Hollywood swashbuckler scores. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean though.






You can hear a similarity in both the bold, brassy fanfares and the long-line melody that characterizes both scores and how Horner's themes (though with somewhat more modern orchestration) place the heroic themes of Krull squarely within the Korngoldian (Classical film score) tradition².

Wagner - "Zauberfeuer," Die Walküre ("Magic Fire," The Valkyrie, Für Menschen, die nicht Deutsch sprechen.) - This particular piece comes into play as an influence on the score when Colwyn is retrieving the Glaive from a river of lava (in the highest cave in the tallest mountain...). The "sparkling" or "effervescent" nature of the orchestration along with striking harmonic and rhythmic similarities make for an interesting comparison and I think Horner both captures and modernizes it rather nicely.






"But Herr," you say, "What about the women's chorus?" I'm glad you asked. The material performed by the women's chorus seems to have its origin in several works. Most notably it seems to be derived from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Debussy's "Sirènes" from Images, Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 7, Sinfonia Antartica, and Holst's "Neptune" from The Planets.
So there you have it. What my ears hear when I listen to Krull. Actually that's not true. What I hear is Horner filtering other works through and weaving it with his own musical language.

1. The primary driving rhythm of the score is dotted-quarter/sixteenth/eighth/eighth cell. Though on it's own a fairly banal figure, it can be traced (among other things I'm sure) to the third movement March of Holst's First Suite in E-flat for Military Band. Don't forget that Horner spent a good deal of time in England as a youngster and even studied at the Royal Academy of Music for a time. The English are pretty proud of their music and Horner would've heard a lot of it.

2. Many (critics mostly) have complained over the years that Korngold's music "sounded like Hollywood." You can imagine why this is a flat and feckless case against his music as there was no such thing as a "Hollywood sound" until Erich Korngold and Max Steiner came along. Korngold doesn't sound like Hollywood. Hollywood sounded like Korngold!