Back to the Future: What's up, Doc?

I don't know about you, but every time I watch Back to the Future, even though I've probably seen it a dozen times or more*, I get absolutely wrapped up in the tension of the clock tower sequence, to the point that I'm actually worried on some level that it may not actually work out this time for Marty and Doc Brown. It's ludicrous, but that's what a masterful score can do for a film. The scenes leading up to Marty's escape from 1955 are a rare example of a perfect marriage of editing and music to create a relentlessly thrilling extended sequence. Alan Silvestri can proudly claim this one.

When I was younger I thought for a long time, as many still do, that Back to the Future was a Steven Spielberg film, and that its score was written by John Williams. You could be forgiven for thinking both. Spielberg was the executive producer on BTTF, of course, and the film was marketed on the strength of the Spielberg name, as his protege Robert Zemeckis wasn't nearly as well known then. Spielberg's influence there undoubtedly played a part in giving us the score that Back to the Future ended up with, since Zemeckis apparently advised composer Alan Silvestri to write an "epic" adventure score to fit Spielberg's sensibilities.

It worked, undoubtedly, beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Silvestri didn't just write an epic adventure score; he created a work of infectious charm and magic that's entirely his own and left an indelible mark on movie score history. What's funny about that is that we don't hear a single note of Silvestri's orchestral score until nearly 20 minutes into Back to the Future!

We've already heard a lot of music by then, though, because music is at the very core of the film, grounding the time settings of 1955 and 1985 very cleverly with pop music and even affecting the plot of the movie as Marty McFly accidentally invents rock 'n' roll at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. If you're a casual viewer, you probably associate Back to the Future more with the Huey Lewis songs that bookend the film in the two different versions of 1985 than any other piece of music. It's tough to think of BTTF without "The Power of Love" coming to mind.

(Fun fact about Huey Lewis and '80s movie music: It was apparently because of his work on Back to the Future that Mr. Lewis turned down an offer to write tunes for another little movie called Ghostbusters -- so they called on Ray Parker, Jr. to write a theme song that sounded a little too much like Lewis' hit "I Want a New Drug." What a coincidence! Lewis sued, they settled out of court, and both movies' soundtrack albums were big hits. Everybody wins. Kind of.)

The depth of this film's musical personality reaches down even into the performances -- not just Marty McFly's on musicianship, but in Christopher Lloyd's unhinged portrayal of Doctor Emmett Brown. Lloyd has said on several occasions that he patterned his performance as Doc Brown on the mannerisms of the eccentric conductor and arranger Leopold Stokowski.

Stokowski

Doc

In his day, Stokowski was a bona fide celebrity as the conductor for the Philadelphia Orchestra, famous for his unruly shock of white hair and sweeping, dramatic style of conducting by hand. Now he's best remembered through cartoons, as the conductor of the orchestra in Disney's Fantasia - one of my favorite films of all time - and as a parody of himself played by none other than Bugs Bunny in a hilarious short called "Long-Haired Hare" from Disney's old rival Warner Brothers:

"Leopold!"

Pretty heavy, huh?

A famous conductor may seem an odd inspiration for a mad scientist, but it's a fantastic choice for the screen as Lloyd lurches and swoops through the entire movie with a relentless manic intensity. Where it gets interesting for me is the "cartoon" part of Doc's personality. I don't think it's at all coincidental that Doc's cartoonishness found its way into Silvestri's writing for Back to the Future. In fact, it's arguably the musical identity for Doc Brown that keeps BTTF light, fun, and utterly magical, even in the midst of some of the most rousing action-adventure scoring that's ever been accomplished. That identity goes straight back to the sensibility of Carl Stalling, the composer who gave so many classic cartoons their signature sound -- including the one in the video above.

It's no stretch to suppose that a Carl Stalling-like sound was on Silvestri's mind as he wrote Doc Brown's music. Silvestri consciously dove into the Stalling style with both feet in Zemeckis' next feature, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, so we know he was perfectly aware of its conventions. The versatility of a cartoony style serves Doc's mood swings and broad gestures perfectly, and allows the music to turn on a dime and incorporate new ideas every few seconds, just like a typical Looney Tunes scenario. In just a minute and a half in "1.21 Jigowatts (sic - Track 9)," the music's tone pivots five or six times, between silly little squeaks and flourishes in the woodwinds' upper registers and broad statements of mysterious science-fiction strings.

Silvestri's cartoony signature for Doc goes so far as to incorporate "Mickey-Mousing," so named for the early habit of cartoons to match every movement of the characters with musical notes -- like plucking strings when a character is tiptoeing, or accompanying an arched eyebrow with a violin bending a note sharply upward. As the clock tower sequence begins, strings follow Doc as he careens wildly across the frame, blasting out a crashing statement of his own three-note descending motif each time he stops to check one of his innumerable watches and shout, "damn!" Later on, when Doc is "revived" in the mall parking lot in 1985, a tinkling version of the same motif matches the motion of his blinking eyes.

It all comes together, in the end, to that clock tower sequence (Track 19). (I've got to wrap this up somewhere, after all, much as I'd like to go into an extended exploration of each track.) In an uninterrupted ten minutes of music, Silvestri ties together everything that's contained in the sequence on screen, just as the action on screen encapsulates everything about the movie: Suspense, sly humor, genuine warmth and emotion, sheer panic, and the thrill and bravado of sheer kinetic energy. (I just re-watched this sequence as I prepared to write this, and I'd like to pause just to appreciate what Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd did with that scene. How they managed to work so many layers of emotion into a scene in which they literally had to shout most of their dialogue is a mystery.)

It's refreshing to listen to that sequence now, when much of contemporary film music has become so blandly homogeneous. I've listened to extended action cues from recent scores that don't have a fraction of the personality of the clock tower sequence. First of all, Silvestri constantly varies his rhythms, keeping us forever off balance and never letting us become comfortable with where the music is going. He masterfully uses the entire percussion section throughout - I can't say for certain, but I'm sure even the triangle is employed inventively somewhere in there. Every musical theme or motif that Silvestri has developed comes magnificently into play here, from Doc's bouncy rhythm to the heroic main theme of the film that comes charging down the road with the DeLorean in the photo finish. A contemporary composer might just lay down ten minutes of constantly chopping eighth notes from the cello section, overlay a basic theme, and call it a day. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.)

In case I haven't made it clear, I'd rather listen to this ten minutes of music than many entire scores. Fortunately, though, the entire Back to the Future score is finally available now, thanks to the 2008 Intrada 2-CD set (link above from the album cover). For a long time, that wasn't the case -- the only soundtrack available officially consisted mostly of the Huey Lewis and other pop songs that were featured in the movie, with a couple of suites of Silvestri's orchestral score. A tinny bootleg of the whole score was available online for a while, which was unsatisfactory. Now the tables are turned and there's not only a CD of Silvestri's full 49 minutes of music for the final film, but an entire second disc of alternate cues as they existed before Silvestri re-worked the score to lighten the tone of the film. Not only is it the whole CD a glorious improvement in sound quality over anything that's been available before, but In case you wonder how the cartoony tone for Doc affected the mood of the entire picture, you have but to listen to the alternate cues on the second disc. Many of them are still quite exciting, but paint a darker, moodier picture.

Of course, something about the experience of Back to the Future does seem missing without the pop songs -- Yes, I do like Huey Lewis and the News, what's it to ya? I will probably end up acquiring those separately and inserting them into my BTTF playlist on iTunes. (Hooray for technology!) Meanwhile, the expanded score is more than worth its $30 price tag from Screen Archives Entertainment.

I could easily go on much longer about this relatively brief score. I've spent months thinking about this entry as I've prepared to re-launch this blog. If it were a baby, it would be born already. I'll probably have some more tangential thoughts soon, between now and the next full review. Stay tuned . . . there's (finally) more to come!

*Many more if you add up the partial viewings I've racked up whenever I catch it on TV and get sucked in to the very end, even with commercials.

Apollo 13: At last, Another Entry

As well as I can remember, America was feeling pretty good about itself in the mid-to-late '90s. The economy was moving along reasonably well, everybody was starting to discover this new "World Wide Web" thing, and the Cold War was over. Of course, that doesn't make for especially dramatic cinema, especially with the biggest adversaries of America for 50 years having fallen by the wayside. Meanwhile, we'd worked our way through much of America's post-Vietnam angst -- cinematically, anyway.

So, Hollywood started seeking dramatic stories elsewhere. James Bond, the archetypal Cold Warrior, limped along in the mostly uninspired Pierce Brosnan era with stories of rogue agents and megalomaniacal businessmen. Some filmmakers tried to get some topical material out with Internet-driven or related plots. It's best not to speak about most of those. Disaster movies started making a comeback, and alien attacks started cropping up in alarming numbers. Even in most of these, there was a distinctly - and fairly cheesy - "Yeah, America!" attitude: Independence Day, Deep Impact, Armageddon, etc. The not-too-deeply buries subtext of those seemed to be: See, all we need to whup menaces from outer space is a little American gumption and talent! Yeee-haw!

Elsewhere, filmmakers looked to the past. Spielberg finally brought his obsession with World War II to glorious fruition with Saving Private Ryan.* Mel Gibson reached all the way back to distort Medieval history - albeit with enormous style and gusto - in Braveheart. And of course, we got cheese on the high seas in Titanic.

Ron Howard seemingly found the perfect combination of all of these with Apollo 13 - history, space, and a crisis with a comfortingly certain conclusion, not to mention a true showcase of Americans at their very best. It's really a masterpiece of a film, one I'm eager to revisit now that it's on Blu-Ray. It's one of Ron Howard's very best films.

In fact, Ron Howard and composer James Horner are both very comfortably in their element with Apollo 13 - the kind of project that lends itself very well to both their talents. Both the film itself and its score are emotionally manipulative, but I mean that as a compliment here -- it's emotional manipulation in the grandest Hollywood tradition. Ron Howard and James Horner in the '90s were two of the best at delivering classic "Hollywood" products.

Horner wrote this the very same year he scored Braveheart, which I also love, for entirely different reasons. Both Apollo 13 and Braveheart follow the general pattern of Horner scores of the '90s: pick a compelling theme and swing for the fences with it in most of the big cues, preferably played on a featured solo instrument (bagpipe in Braveheart, trumpet in Apollo 13), and fill the rest of the cues with driving percussion at whatever pace the scene demands. Orchestration for these other cues often ends up featuring other solo instruments. Sprinkle with emphasis by wordless chorus and you've got a Horner score, circa 1995.

What I appreciate about Horner's score here is actually just how subtle it can be in its emotional manipulation, as funny as that sounds. Beyond the general (and admittedly oversimplified) stylistic similarities, I'm struck by just how different Apollo 13 is from Braveheart. (Horner was justifiably nominated for the Oscar for both scores that year, by the way.) Maybe it's because the style and tone of Apollo 13 are more grounded, starting with the film itself. The music for Apollo 13 is working within the boundaries of reality and a time period that quite a few of the film's viewers would remember directly. There's less room for romantic myth-making here, and perhaps less enthusiasm from the director to go to that mythological territory.

You can easily see how far Horner could have gone in the direction of grand, overblown scoring by listening to the "End Titles" (Track 23). I have to laugh when this track comes up, at the end of the score -- it sounds like every other typical '90s "cut to the pop song" end credits sequence for a few seconds before it gets into gear. There's a lot more synth happening here than elsewhere, and Annie Lennox wails all over the track, in that way that Annie Lennox does. Later, when the music settles back into orchestral mode, we get much more lavishly played, lusty statements of many of the film's main themes that are kept much more restrained for the most part in the film. It's almost as though Horner was just dying to let loose with a grander and more hyperbolic sound, but couldn't let fly until the credits rolled.

To his credit, the remainder of the score is both forthright and sophisticated, making voice, snare, trumpet, and piano the primary tools for creating the aural environment of Apollo 13, and layering in strings and other instruments where they can be of maximum use. It's probably one of the cleanest-sounding scores I own in terms of its production value. It sounds like it was recorded in a cathedral or some other sonic environment that allows a healthy amount of reverb, which makes every instrumental solo ring with a stirring force, beginning with the opening drums and trumpet stating the main theme beautifully. The echoing sound is also exciting when Horner brings the whole orchestra to bear on the grand moments, like the rocket launch cue ("All Systems Go," Track 9) and the final "Re-Entry and Splashdown" (Track 22) -- both presented in wonderful, uninterrupted long cues.

It's some of the individual cues within the action that really excite me, though. I especially love the tense piano and snare that drive the shortest cue, "Main Alarm" (Track 14) - here is one of my favorite little tricks with an instrument in any score. At about 1:00 into the panicked track, the piano just explodes in a series of fast chords that sound like the player is simply mashing his hands all over the keyboard in frustration -- this effect is repeated twice throughout the rest of the track, and it's there that you realize that this was a specifically scored passage that's just meant to sound like utter chaos.

Elsewhere, Annie Lennox's haunting voice is put to much better use in the eerie, quiet track "Darkside of the Moon" (Track 17). Countered with the solo trumpet representing the heroic astronauts, the layered Lennox vocals and Arvo Part-like strings seem to evoke both intense loneliness and the siren call of the enchanting alien landscape of the Moon herself.

This is one of those soundtrack albums that combines music from the original score with popular music selections and dialogue from the film itself - an overzealous bit of album producing that drives film score purists like me nuts most of the time. Here I don't actually mind it much, because the pop songs are all actually featured in the film and are fairly well-chosen, even if a few of them are a little on-the-nose for the subject matter. (The Who's "I Can See for Miles" makes an appearance, for example -- James Brown's rendition of "Night Train," though, is perhaps a bit cleverer.) I only wish they hadn't chosen to try to overlap the dialogue tracks with the score tracks. It's a minor quibble. We still get a great chunk of a great score to enjoy, and the overall construction of the album does undeniably create some pretty good atmosphere. And it's all in order, at least, which pleases the purist in me.

Finally, my apologies for the delay of the appearance of this post. It has been gestating for weeks, and meanwhile the pace of wedding planning has picked up and there's still that pesky "work" stuff. Hopefully I can still crank out a few of these in the chaos of the next month. Stay tuned!

*Of course, the best Spielberg WWII movie is probably still Empire of the Sun.

Amistad: At Last, Melody

And here we are, finally arriving at John Williams. For most people, if they know the name of one film composer, it's Mr. Williams. He's justly famous for the many, many indelible scores he's contributed to the genre, and for his general influence on popular culture.

In fact, his music is probably even more ubiquitous than you suspect. Beyond Jaws and Star Wars and Indiana Jones, he's contributed music to several Olympic games, as I've mentioned before and will again, and composed a new chamber piece for the inauguration of President Obama. He even wrote the theme music for NBC Nightly News that's been in use since 1985! It's called "The Mission" (not to be confused with Ennio Morricone's score to the 1986 film The Mission, or even a wonderful episode of Spielberg's unjustly forgotten TV series Amazing Stories called "The Mission."). Yeah, he can even make a TV news broadcast sound like an epic adventure.

I probably own more film music by Williams than by anyone else, though I haven't subjected that claim to serious scrutiny in several years. There was a time in the mid-90s when I just worshipped John Williams and figured he could do no wrong, so I bought a lot of his stuff. The only reason one of his scores hasn't appeared sooner in this blog is that I don't happen to own the scores to A.I. Artificial Intelligence (great music, but much of it is just too heartbreaking for repeat listening) or Always (remember this one? I didn't think so). Once, when I was a freshman in college (circa 1997), I even expressed to my friend Melanie that I thought he was the greatest composer of the 20th century. Melanie was already an accomplished violinist at age 18, starting a music major at Indiana University, and has likely forgotten more about music than I will ever know. She disagreed with me about as graciously as I imagine anyone could, given such a patently ignorant assertion to shoot down.

My musical palate is somewhat more sophisticated now, and I can place Mr. Williams in a much more realistic context of the whole universe of composers of both film and concert music. Nonetheless, Amistad came along roughly in the prime time of my musical idolatry (in fact, it was the very year I made that assertion) so I picked up this soundtrack.

Over the course of their collaboration, John Williams and Steven Spielberg have aged together like fine wines, and it's fascinating to track their progress as individuals and partners through those years. At any rate, some years of that collaboration created better vintages than others, and 1997 was an odd one.

The '90s were when Spielberg started deliberately making Very Important Films, but still kept one foot solidly in the blockbuster genre. In no year was this better demonstrated than in 1993, when the crushing, beautiful Schindler's List came hot on the heels of the jaw-dropping beasties of Jurassic Park. Between those two films' scores you get every kind of Williams you could hope for, from the gee-whiz grandeur and scary action of JP to the restrained and haunting solo violin of Schindler. Williams' score for Schindler's List won the Oscar, and if Jurassic Park had come along any other year but that, it probably would have been nominated as well. 1997 was a strange mirror image of that year, when Spielberg repeated with the duo of The Lost World and Amistad. Another summer blockbuster/Very Important Film one-two punch, with somewhat less success on both counts.

It is perhaps telling that both of these 1997 scores are currently out of print (or at least not currently in stock at amazon.com), while Schindler and Jurassic Park are readily available, and even though Amistad received (another) Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. For my own part, I haven't even tried to sit through all of the ill-conceived Lost World yet, and Amistad is pretty good, but not among Spielberg's best films, nor one that demands much repeat viewing.

So, what about the actual music, Brian? Well, like the film, it's a curious balancing act. Spielberg's film is really more about America than it is about the revolt and subsequent trial of the West African people on the titular slave ship, and their leader, Cinque. The story deliberately ties together figures that date from the nation's birth, i.e. John Quincy Adams, and those that would pave the road to the Civil War, like John C. Calhoun. Spielberg tries with varying success to frame the story in its larger American context, while delving into the horrors of the slave trade in Cinque's flashbacks. Likewise, Williams' score flips between exploring African themes and textures and reaching for a Copland-esque "American" sound with dignified horns and sonorous, but restrained strings.

The music actually does a much better job than the editing of the film in tying the whole enterprise together, since Williams has the freedom to interweave his musical themes and vary orchestration to bring together the foreign worlds of Cinque and America. There are extremes here, going from the dark, threatening chants of the brutal "Middle Passage" to the sober nobility of "Adams' Summation," and the "Liberation of Lomboko" cue feels as tacked-on in some ways as the unnecessary sequence in the film that it accompanies. Still, it's fair to say that Williams' music forms a kind of grout between the story components of the film.

I've read several reviews of both the film and the score to Amistad that are less than charitable in their judgment of Spielberg and Williams' tone here. More than a few of the Amistad reviews you can read at Rotten Tomatoes seem to feel that this score is over-the-top and emotionally manipulative. That's sometimes a fair criticism of Williams' work, but I just don't hear that in this score, besides perhaps the triumphant tone of the above-mentioned "Liberation of Lomboko" track -- in which Spielberg thought it fitting to include shots of a British naval vessel destroying a slavers' fortress, which is more or less totally unrelated to the main plot of the story. (Spielberg had an unfortunate habit for a while of tacking on totally unnecessary feel-good sequences to the end of every film.)

No, what I mainly recognize and appreciate about this score is Williams' traditionally grounded use of melody and rich symphonic sounds. After nearly a decade of film scores that drone and grate mostly in brooding minor keys, or provide little but rhythm and texture, hearing a John Williams score - of which there are fewer and fewer these days; he's pushing 80 after all - is a refreshing return to a symphonic tradition that actually makes for an enjoyable experience as music, apart from the film.

He may not be the greatest composer of the 20th century, but there's a good case to be made that Williams is indeed the greatest film composer of all time. We'll have plenty more chances to explore that, though.

Altered States: This is What Scary Music Sounds Like

At the end of my last post, I mentioned the curious Academy Award nomination for James Horner's Aliens. (As it turns out, Herbie Hancock won for best score that year.) Well, that ain't nothin' compared to the travesty that happened in 1981. More on that later.

For now, let's consider the marvelous piece of orchestral and cinematic insanity that is Altered States, delving deeply into the mind and primordial ur-being of a man relentlessly seeking a different experience of reality. It's one of those relatively rare instances of a composer who mostly works in the "classical" world of orchestral music coming over and scoring a film -- and it was an inspired choice in this case. I specifically waited to order this CD before going on with the blog, because I didn't want to leave out this masterpiece of (post?)modern, nerve-jangling, completely transformative music by John Corigliano. It's out of print, too, so it wasn't the usual two-day Amazon turnaround, either. I know you've just been on pins and needles waiting for this entry, too, haven't you?

My friend Richard introduced me to this film and music eight or nine years ago, and I haven't been quite the same since. If you're not famililar with the film, the first thing you need to know is that it's directed by Ken Russell. That goes a long way toward telling you what you're in for. Russell is a filmmaker who's totally unafraid to venture into risky, bizarre, outlandish territory, and happens to know quite a bit about music to boot. He's directed operas, music documentaries, and several biopics about famous composers, most notably about Mahler. According to the liner notes for Altered States album, Russell discovered John Corigliano at an LA Philharmonic performance of one of his pieces in 1979. Russell says:

Reading from my program that he was a contemporary composer I braced myself for thirty minutes of plinks and plunks that pass for music these days. I was in for a shock, a surprise, a revelation.
. . . .
If only he could compose the music for Altered States instead of some commercial Hollywood hack we directors are usually saddled with, I thought wistfully.

He got his wish. Altered States is one of just three film scores Corigliano has written. I have one of the others, The Red Violin, which in many ways could hardly be more different from what this disturbing score delivers. Richard knew I was interested in Corigliano because of his Red Violin score, and he had run into the composer himself at some point during his professional development - can't remember exactly how. (Yes, Richard, unlike myself, is a trained musician and composer, among his many other talents.)

Since I am assuredly not a trained musician, I can't hope to express in any useful way the structural and tonal sophistication of Corigliano's work for Altered States, except in very vague impressions. This is a score that perpetually keeps the listener off-balance but never loses its grip by delving too far into the atonal chaos that swirls around its melodic - dare I say, sometimes lyrical - core.

Those chaotic sounds have a lot in common with the kinds that audiences are used to hearing in many of the better thriller and horror scores: A throbbing, undulating miasma of dissonant strings, occasionally jarring electronic effects, harsh percussion intruments like ratchets. Many film composers will dip into this more modern, complex style of writing from time to time for dramatic effect, but seldom as the core of a score. John Williams, for example, excels at peppering his scores with these kinds of off-putting effects when he wants to punch up something scary, before returning to more familiar Romantic territory.

Corigliano's score, on the other hand, turns that model on its head. It lives in the unsettling, bizarre territory and hooks us in with occasional appeals to familiar melodic places we might rather go. Pretty appropriate for a film about a man venturing deep into the grip of mind-and-body-altering substances.

For example, in the first track, in the midst of swirling, menacing strings and low brass and oddly squawking woodwinds, a piano emerges playing a tune that could be derived directly from a Chopin nocturne. An especially rich, lyrical theme recurs throughout, a dramatic and romantic love theme that's featured most prominently in the tracks "Love Theme (natch, Track 2)" and "The Final Transformation (Track 9)."

Even in the grip of the chaos, though, Corigliano maintains a sense of melodic forward motion, even in the absence of anything a layman's ear (like mine) could pick out as a clear melody. It's not just a bloody mess, or deliberately ear-shattering noise. Within the swath of disturbing sonic soundscapes, Corigliano finds grandeur in deep, crashing chords and clear, lonely-sounding horns. It reminds me very much of the absolute apotheosis of rage he achieves in a non-film composition, the first movement of his Symphony #1 from 1990. Oddly enough - or perhaps perfectly naturally - that movement also features the eventual intrusion of a sentimental melody on a piano, played against the primal scream of the orchestra. I say "naturally," because Altered States itself seems like it would suit a contemporary concert hall just as well as a film. The only film composer I can think of who can spend as much time comfortably and competently exploring this dark territory is Howard Shore.

Despite the concert hall cred, Altered States clearly benefits from having this score specifically written for the film. When other contemporary non-film composers have their music used in films, for some reason, it seems simply to be appropriated and stuck in at moments that the director feels appropriate. Kubrick did this quite a lot, and other instances of it can be heard in works like There Will Be Blood, in which Arvo Pärt's "Fratres for Cello and Piano" makes a brief dramatic appearance in the midst of Jonny Greenwood's unconventional score. If you're going to use music by a living contemporary composer, why not try to get him to do something new for the film? Clearly it can work.

So, at the top I mentioned a travesty that happened at the Academy Awards in 1981. Travesties at the Oscars are nothing new or uncommon, but here's one that just boggles the mind. For the film scores of 1980, the nominations field included both Corigliano's Altered States and John Williams' score to The Empire Strikes Back -- which is perhaps the polar opposite of Altered States but still an indisputable masterpiece, a contender in my mind for the slot of Greatest Film Score of All Time. So, with two amazing powerhouse scores in contention, what score took home the Oscar?

Fame.



That's all I have to say about that.

Aliens: Copy-Paste Saves the Day!

I've been there. It's down to the wire on an important project. I have to produce something for the client, since the contract clearly says the report is due tomorrow. But there's precious little to use as the basis for said report. Survey results are anemic, the client hasn't provided any support for our research, and nobody's answered our phone calls for interviews. We've got publicly available statistics, a few analytical tricks up our sleeve, and not a lot to write that will be particularly insightful or even interesting about the client's situation. I know that we've had other clients in similar situations that have produced more successful reports. So, what do I do?

Yep. Copy-paste.

It's not a crime. If you have a backlog of usable material that's worked before, and your back is against the wall, why reinvent the wheel? Chuck in the pieces you can use, adapt as necessary to fit the information at hand, rinse, repeat until you have something resembling a respectable document.

James Horner is a composer known, and notorious, for repeating himself. I think there's fair cause to criticize him in many circumstances for recycling material. He seems to coast on the same ideas for a few years until he hits upon a new, intriguing innovation - like building the sound of the score around a particular ethnic instrument (or set of them), as he began doing with the terrific score to Braveheart, and then continued doing with Titanic, The Mask of Zorro, etc. I was prepared to take him to task for a particularly egregious instance of score-by-collage in Aliens, until I did a little more digging to figure out the circumstances of that score. As it turns out, Horner was thrown into a situation of unbelievable pressure with no time:



. . . So I feel the need to cut him a little slack here. (If rumors are true, he was literally up against a wall at least once, courtesy of an enraged James Cameron.) With just days to put something together, it's not surprising that Horner ended up with a patchwork score that features scraps of material from half a dozen other sources. It is surprising to hear those pieces if you're familiar with their sources, though, because he does very little to disguise them. Several action cues use his belligerent "Klingon" theme from Star Trek III without alteration, and there's at least one nearly verbatim quote of a fanfare from Star Trek II in the cue "Going after Newt." Plenty of the score consists of atmospherics that echo - literally and figuratively - the themes and techniques Jerry Goldsmith used in the original Alien: Trumpet sounds and clacking low strings bounce around the sonic environment, and solitary horns cut through the desolation in ways that somehow evoke both Goldsmith and Horner's own prior work.

The score obviously owes a debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey as well. (Hooray, I've reached a point where I can link back to my own previous blog entries. Let the self-reference begin.) Horner opens the film with a quoted phrase of the "Adagio" from the Gayane ballet suite by Aram Khachaturian, the very same piece with which Kubrick opened the "Jupiter Mission" segment of 2001, as Frank and Dave go about their mundane business. It's clearly an homage, as the spacecraft bearing the frozen Ripley slides into view -- but what Horner does with this theme throughout the film is more interesting.

Most of Aliens is decidedly lacking in thematic consistency, but the one thread that seems continuous throughout is the use of the borrowed Gayane Adagio theme as an unofficial theme for Ellen Ripley and later, her protection of Newt. It appears several times in its gentler incarnation, reminiscent of the original -- but then it reappears later in the relentless action of the film's second half, blasting forth in a stressed-out and strident form on horns and strings in the cue "Futile Escape." (I'm not including specific track listings for the album here because there are so many different versions of the Aliens album. I don't actually have the deluxe edition pictured above; I've not felt a compelling need to acquire more of this music.) It's perhaps the most interesting and inventive thing Horner does with the music for Aliens - and one of the most controversial, since Horner apparently didn't bother to provide attribution for his stolen theme.

Ultimately, the measure of a score is how well it serves the film, and Aliens gets a pass there, undoubtedly. From a functional standpoint, this score needs to set up the scary atmosphere, then keep its foot on the gas for the whole third act, stopping a few times to act as accomplice to the inevitable Cameron multiple fake-out ending sequence. It serves its purpose admirably in all respects, and the frenzied second half of the score is even pretty fun to listen to on its own.

As a footnote, it is especially ironic that this score, pasted together, artistically inconsistent, and messy as it is, produced Horner's first Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, though they had passed up several worthier candidates by that point. Copy-paste is a pretty handy trick - especially when you get away with it!

Brief Interlude: Tron: Legacy Music Surfaces Online

One of my geeky childhood film obsessions was Tron, and I'm discovering this year just how many people shared that obsession with me. I only had it on a VHS copy taped from TV, but I loved every weird, dark, absorbing, and stylish moment of it. It embraced computer geekery when computer geekery wasn't cool, and of course it's famous for breaking the digital animation barrier in film special effects -- even though there were just a few minutes of full CGI in the final film; the rest was done with traditional animation trickery and some complex photographic processes.

I never knew it was beloved by so many others until the word of a sequel started to spread online sometime last year. That sequel, Tron: Legacy will be in theatres on December 17. It will be a record for the longest time between an original film and a direct sequel featuring the original cast members: 28 years, for those of you keeping score.

Tron: Legacy is all over Comic-Con in San Diego right now. The new trailer premiered yesterday, and provides fodder for geeking out for an agonizing five more months before we can actually see this in the theatre. I'm getting more excited for this than for any movie since The Phantom Menace . . . and I'm hoping that this will not be another Phantom Menace-sized disappointment. This is one franchise from the '80s that's being mined hopefully for good and not evil.

Anyway . . . this is a film music blog, right? So, here's the interesting part. Some tracks from the score by Daft Punk have now hit the Internet, and I'm pretty fascinated by what I'm hearing so far.

First of all, Daft Punk was a pretty inspired choice for the scoring of this film. It's a perfect reflection on the current state of electronic music compared to where it was in 1982, when digital pioneer Wendy Carlos scored the original Tron. Carlos was a fringe personality, a maverick who'd been reinventing classical music with a synthesizer and turning in bizarre soundscapes for the avant-garde likes of Stanley Kubrick for a while. Geeks knew her, folks in the mainstream mostly didn't -- just about the same way that personal computers were mostly a geek hobby at the time. Now computers and digital technology are ubiquitous, and an electronic music group like Daft Punk are international megastars.

I'm hoping that the new film will also delve somewhat into the different position computers have in our lives now than in 1982, but anyway, this is about the music. So, several paragraphs in, here's the bloody link already, courtesy of a Seattle radio station called The End:

Daft Punk Tron music Go listen to this now. I'm not asking.

A few of these tracks bring to mind a somewhat cynical thought: "I guess the Dark Knight soundtrack was playing in the editing room a lot." But there's a lot more here beyond the generally Zimmer-esque brooding style and rhythm. Layered underneath is a gratifying texture of retro-electronica -- intentionally more primitive sounding synth riffs and soundscapes that call to mind some of the mood of Carlos' original score, and the nascent digital era of Tron 1.0. The second and third tracks shared here on The End's little collection of music really bring the retro-synth style to the fore. (Yes, in my last entry I was just complaining about how out of date the synth sound was for Vangelis in 1992 -- but here it's entirely appropriate. It's all about context. In fact, there's more than a little Vangelis influence in these tracks here as well -- more Vangelis, perhaps, than Carlos.)

The last couple of tracks simply are the compositions you'll hear in the two theatrical trailers tha have been released so far. I especially like the selections for the first trailer, once we're over the rainbow and into the Tron-scape. The intentional incorporation of a glitch in the score toward the end, when the digital pulse seems to fragment and stutter, is just cool. It's perhaps the 21st-century equivalent of the record scratch that's been a staple of DJ performances for thirty years, and it's not the first time that effect has been used, but it speaks to the notion that not all is well in the digital underground. (Sorry, I couldn't help it.)

I'm still excited. If you talk to me on December 18, I might tell a different story, but I have a feeling I'll be buying this soundtrack album when it's released anyway.

Soon, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

1492: Re-Hash of Paradise

Okay, let's get some business out of the way:

1. Yes, this blog is back! I took some time off to direct my show in May, as it was clear that I could not continue to fire on all cylinders as a new homeowner, director, and martial artist and still keep doing my "real" job to a reasonably high level of quality -- let alone write a blog that requires some measure of my cognitive faculties. And May became June and most of July. So, now Music From and Inspired By is making its triumphant return, and it's gonna be bigger, uh . . . bloggier, and more consistent than ever.

2. Yes, for the first entry after my return, I'm backtracking in the alphabetical order. I recently acquired the soundtrack to 1492: Conquest of Paradise, along with a bunch of others, thanks to the newly expanded catalog of soundtrack offerings at emusic, where I've had a membership since 2006. I promise this whole order-violation thing won't happen again. Or at least not much.

I had a high-minded notion to write this entry about the influence of Progressive rock on all aspects of modern music, using Vangelis as my jumping-off point. I quickly realized, though, that about two paragraphs would probably exhaust my ability to say anything interesting about Prog. Oh, sure, I can rattle off names like King Crimson and Yes and even Porcupine Tree, or maybe talk about early Genesis or Wishbone Ash . . . but what's the point? You probably know as much about them as I do.

I had a much different entry point for this album in the first place. I happen to own a great album called Summon the Heroes, produced for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and containing a bunch of Olympic music performed by John Williams and the Boston Pops. It includes all of Williams' own Olympic themes (from the '84, '88, and '96 games) as well as many other compositions from the classical or film music realms that evoke the pomp and circumstance of the games. Vangelis' 1492 theme is among them, in a bombastic arrangement for full orchestra and chorus. It's always been one of my favorites on the album.

Based on that track, I decided to pick up the full album from emusic, even though I haven't actually seen the Ridley Scott film. I adore Vangelis' music for Scott's Blade Runner, and I really do appreciate much of Vangelis' other work, especially his experimental electronica from the '70s. (Albedo 0.39 is still an amazing album, and I had "Pulstar" on my iPod running mix for a long time.) He was a true pioneer of electronic music, and popularized it in ways that paved the way for more adventurers to come. (He may also have played a part in spawning the 'New Age' sound movement. Jury's out on whether that's a good or bad thing. On the one hand, you have Dead Can Dance and Enigma. On the other, you have Yanni and John Tesh. It's probably about 50-50.)

What I didn't expect was that this album, written and produced in 1992, would sound so much like its predecessors in the late '70s and early '80s. I kept listening to this album, thinking it sounded so primitive and cheesily (I know it's not a word) synth-heavy. "Maybe it just sounds dated because of the period," I thought. But a moment's more reflection brought to mind the similarly synth-reliant score to The Last of the Mohicans, which came out the very same year, and hardly sounds dated now. The Last of the Mohicans - another adventure in the (not-quite-as) early years of the New World - often sounds satisfyingly rich and deep and organic, despite the synthesizers, in ways that 1492 just doesn't.

I can appreciate Vangelis' albums from the Seventies, and other similar period electronica, because I know that it represented the state of the art of the time, and they're just musically interesting. But in 10-15 years, you expect a musician to evolve and change somewhat. That's what I love about great artists, and in some ways, even demand of them. If I were interested in music that didn't change or evolve in a decade, I'd listen to Top 40. Or Hans Zimmer. (Geez, that Teutonic dummkopf irritates me. He's most of the reason why film music in the '00s was so boring. But more on him later, as I actually own several of his scores, for reasons I cannot consciously identify.)

But for some reason, most of this album just sounds like Vangelis isn't really trying -- which is odd, since he's usually a pretty obsessive composer. There were parts of this album that actually reminded me of The Princess Bride, of all things, and that just isn't good. The Princess Bride, while one of my very favorite films of all time, has possibly the most annoying score ever recorded.

1492 does exemplify - and maybe originated - one trend of '90s scoring: Tossing in "ethnic" instrumentation over the top of whatever you're doing. This was used most often, with varying effectiveness, by James Horner in the '90s. More on him later, too. Here, atop the dated synth, it's just an added dimension to a truly wrong choice for a period piece about a navigator from the late Middle Ages.

At any rate, the full orchestral recording on Summon the Heroes retains all of its power, and stands as a true improvement on the original. That's probably the version that will get the most play in the future.

Don't worry, some much better Vangelis music is on the way pretty soon, once I get to Blade Runner anyway. Until then, maybe I'll throw Albedo 0.39 or La Fete Sauvage on the Hi-Fi.