Capsule Review: Source Code

Source Code reminds me of the kind of score that James Newton Howard might write if he were scoring The Fugitive in 2011 instead of 1993. And why not? Chris Bacon worked alongside Howard for some time before striking out on his own.

My first take on the score was that it was a little on the conventional side; somewhat derivative. As I began paying closer attention I started having a little fun trying to pick out the influences on it. It seems to me that there might've been a lot of things on the temp track for the film. Danny Elfman (Mission: Impossible), James Newton Howard (King Kong), John Powell (the Bourne scores, Paycheck), Michael Giacchino (Mission: Impossible 3, Star Trek) and Alexandre Desplat (The Ghost Writer) seem to all bring their influences to bear on this score. All this with the spectre of Bernard Herrmann hanging over much of it (the same way he does - in the best of ways - over so many of Danny Elfman's scores).

Musically, the score hinges on a couple of primary motives. The first of which is a chromatic figure that isn't all that dissimilar to one of the primary motives in John Powell's Paycheck score. The other bears more than a passing resemblance to the rising-falling theme in James Newton Howard's King Kong. The score bristles with tension but never to the point of overdoing it. On the album at least there seems to be a slow and steady building of this tension that sustains one's listening interest.

As derivative as elements of Source Code may be, there's something fresh about it and there are many things to admire. First and foremost is the score's orchestration. Bacon has the audacity to utilize the entire orchestra augmented by minimal electronics and a keen sense of how not to overuse the percussion, both acoustic and electronic (Adroitly handled by the experience of lead orchestrator and conductor Pete Anthony). The music seems to follow the ebb-and-flow of the drama in the film itself instead of trying to play against it or above it. There's a sense of shape and drama to the album that makes it a nice listen, too. If the album is sequenced in film order then that means that perhaps Mr. Bacon had the opportunity to think about how the score is structured and this is an encouraging thought.

 
Overall, I find much that is enjoyable about this score for what should be a breakout effort for a young composer that may have interesting things to say in the future as he continues to develop his overall sound.

Transitional Period

When I write a transition, it's usually the barest minimum that I need to get myself from one section to the next. I was in a master class in grad school once where the guest composer (a student of some rather well-known folks) offered the following "advice": "Spend your time practicing writing transitions." Even then I raised an eyebrow and thought to myself, "But, why?" I didn't know why I felt this way at the time. On reflection I think that many years of listening to and absorbing heaps of film music and realising that some of my favorite composers - like Stravinsky - seemed to have very little use for transitional material.To me it seems like a great deal of the affect of music like his is that it's more visceral - by design - without those transitions. That's one of the many things that actually makes it interesting to listen to. Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians? Few - if any - transitions. Just ideas butting themselves up to one another in a really logical and - to me, pleasing - way.

Long ago a friend quoted to me something to the effect of the following:

"Transitions are for people who don't know how to write music"

I may be misquoting and I can't remember who said it. I don't know if this particular person meant it literally that all transitions are useless, but I get the spirit of it. Don't spend all your time getting from one part of the piece to the next. You don't have to be in a constant state of flux. If you have a good idea, try to stick with it and see where it goes. And that's what I try to do.

Living Inside The Music

There are just certain pieces of music that stay with you. They work their way under your skin. You live with them and, for better or worse, they become a part of you. There's a lot of music I love and I'm not trying to create a "desert island" list.

I bought John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music when it was first released on CD in 2002. I bought it on a whim and was immediately taken with it. I had been enamored of Adams' music for quite some time and I'd been buying a lot of it for some time. I liked the piece a lot for a time but I don't think I really "got" it and more-or-less kind of shelved it, listening to it every once in a while.

Then - in 2006 I think - I bought the score. I've been reading it for over four years now and it's slowly revealing itself. Yes, it's a "desert island" piece but for me it's so much more than that. It's a piece that I could just crawl into and live inside for a while. I dare say that this piece might have changed my life. It never gets old, never grows tired. In a way it nurtures me. (It's a little disheartening to know that I'll probably never hear it in my hometown unless it's being played by a touring group.)

There are a handful of other pieces like this but Naive and Sentimental Music is probably the piece that means the most to me in this way.

What do you think? What pieces go beyond being "desert island pieces" for you? What works are a part of you?

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!

The Best of the Best of the Best...SIR! The Jerry Goldsmith Edition

So our own Reed posed the following question on my Facebook page and I thought this would be a good forum to elaborate.

"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.

Batman to the Rescue

I grew up listening to the music of movies by watching the movies. I wasn't able to listen to film music away from films until I was sixteen, got a job and started to have my own disposable income. I nearly wore out VHS copies of Superman, The Ten Commandments (yeah, seriously; as a ten-year-old), episodes of the late-eighties reboot of Mission: Impossible and today's particular special, Batman. My ears perked up the very first time I saw Batman. I didn't know why it resonated with me so much, but it did. (Interestingly, this is another one of those scores that's been on my regular playlist ever since I bought it in 1994). Perhaps even then I was able to subconsciously connect the gothic nature of both music and image.

So, as with Krull, the folks at La-la-land Records have seen fit to not only release Danny Elfman's complete score to Batman, they were good enough to include a second disc that was the original album release and scads of extras (including one very funny hidden track).

For over twenty years now there's been one cue I've been dying to hear separate from the film. It's the point in the film where Batman comes crashing through the skylight of the Flugelheim Museum Restaurant to rescue Vicky Vale from the Joker (the first time). It's the first truly bold statement of the Bat-Theme on its own, separated from being embedded in another musical context and is performed largely in the brass with powerful accompaniment from the strings and percussion. (You can watch the video here.) Sadly, it sounds like this particular cue was recorded in a hurry. Something sounds..."off" about it. There's a particular moment around 0:15 where the horns sound almost as if they're playing the wrong key. It's either scored badly, performed badly, or both. It's still one of my favorite scores ever and I would like to think it - along with a handful of other scores - was instrumental in the development of my musical awareness.