Batman: Freaks, Geeks, and Capes

Anyone who was alive in the summer of 1989 will vividly remember the ubiquity of Bat-paraphernalia in America. The full-court press of marketing surrounding Tim Burton's Batman was unprecedented, or at least it felt like it. Certainly, nothing that momentous for merchandising tie-ins had come along since the Star Wars saga wound down early in the decade, and I'm not sure anything topped it until the return of the Star Wars saga ten years later. It was perfect timing to whip a ten-year-old boy into a Bat-manic frenzy -- especially one who was beginning to think he could become a comic book artist, which I did at the time. I drew lots of pictures of Batman that year, and absorbed everything I could about the movie -- and of course, I got the t-shirt. I even soaked up a bunch of reruns of the '60s Batman TV show, which I was only beginning to realize wasn't entirely serious. More on that in our next entry.

The one thing I didn't do right away was actually see the movie -- my mom was worried because it was rumored to be quite violent. She relented later and let us rent it on VHS -- at least I think that's what happened. Oddly enough, she let me read the novelization of the movie, which contains descriptions of the movie's violence that are quite a bit more vivid than what appeared on screen, especially for a kid with a wildly overactive imagination.

Feeding that imagination was the hovering presence of Danny Elfman's churning, bombastic Batman theme, which was also everywhere that summer, thanks to all the TV commercials for the movie and all of its commercial tie-ins. I even remember a Taco Bell commercial featuring Batman in all of his Elfman-accompanied glory.

"Who are you?" "I'm Batman."

I was already a fan of Tim Burton and Danny Elfman at the time of Batman, though I didn't know it yet. I absolutely loved Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, the breakthrough film for both of them, so I was already primed for the style of Batman even though I hadn't put together the connection to the director and composer. It's a mark of the particular genius of both men that their wacky, carnival-like style could adapt itself successfully to the gothic noir universe of the Batman.

Burton and the writers of the 1989 Batman were the first screen adapters of the Caped Crusader to ask the question, "what kind of freak would actually dress up in a bat suit and beat up criminals by night?" Burton's films are always about outsiders, loners, and freaks anyway, and Burton's Batman/Bruce Wayne is unquestionably a freak, as played with crazy-eyed intensity by the improbable Michael Keaton. And of course, the film belongs just as much, if not more, to Jack Nicholson's Joker, a freak directly created by Batman's meddling and unhinged in a completely different direction.

As much as Burton and the actors contribute, it is Elfman who answers the question musically about what kinds of freaks engage in large-scale costumed crime and crimefighting. His musical treatment of both Batman and the Joker reveals their underlying psychological problems while providing a thrilling backdrop to their duels.

"You want to get nuts? Come on! Let's get nuts!"


The main Batman theme is more than just a rousing heroic statement; it's the story of a man who takes himself and his quest much too seriously. The rising minor key four-note phrase, most often stated by strident brass, tenaciously clings to a serious, brooding identity, before resolving itself with two descending notes into the fanfare of a hero, at least as he perceives himself. Elfman uses variations of the main theme and another sentimental theme for Bruce Wayne to maintain a tone of mystery throughout the film, as Vicki Vale and the whole city of Gotham strive to understand what Batman represents. Early statements of the Batman theme are grand but unresolved, accompanied by frenetic rhythms and grinding low strings, as in the first two action cues, "Roof Fight (Track 2)" and "First Confrontation (Track 3)." As the film progresses, the theme takes on a more openly heroic tone, as in "Batman to the Rescue," marking the first time Batman rescues Vicki Vale from certain death, or a fate worse.

The dark, brooding identity of Batman and the heroic identity evolve in parallel throughout the film, with the heroic themes coming more and more to the fore, even as the mysterious dark side manifests itself in full glory, perhaps never more so than in "Descent into Mystery (Track 10)." In this moment (accompanying the Batmobile's high-speed return to the Batcave, which I've always felt looks a bit like Tim Burton's version of a car commercial), Carmina Burana-inspired choral chanting gives rise to a harrowing brass choir statement of the main Batman theme, peering into the dangerous identity of Batman with a subtext that's buried deep in our musical heritage.

"Did you ever dance with the devil by the pale moonlight?"

If I were a music scholar, I could launch into a discussion of Elfman's use of whole-tone scales and the dark, scary interval known as Diabolus in Musica, i.e., "the Devil in music." But I'm not a music scholar, so I'll simply talk about how Elfman evokes liturgical music in cues like "Descent into Mystery," particularly the portions of a Requiem mass describing the horrors of Hell and Judgment Day, to emphasize the subtext of Batman as a demonic character. The nocturnal figure of Batman borrows imagery that the West has always associated with evil: bats are of course reminiscent of vampires, whose lifestyle Batman emulates, and Burton connects Batman consciously with gargoyles, both by literal juxtaposition in the final scene and through the sculpted style of his black costume.

Elfman continues to evoke religious associations, rather more obviously in the final cues of the film, which literally take place in a cathedral. He foreshadows Batman's fate at the cathedral in "Attack of the Batwing (Track 16)" with chiming bells to accompany the outlandish airplane's flight, and brings a massive pipe organ into the mix in "Up the Cathedral (Track 17)," which adds tremendous spiritual weight as the film builds to its climax -- a great dramatic contribution to a scene that's basically about trudging slowly up stairs. The threatening nature of much of this music taps into our well-programmed musical unconscious, and underscores the uncertainty of Batman's motives and modus operandi. Is he a hero or just a well-equipped psychopath on a suicidal revenge mission? Even Bruce Wayne doesn't really seem to know.

It's worth noting that Batman finally finds both revenge and redemption atop the church tower. His malevolent dark side is quelled by the death of the Joker, and the heroic theme emerges triumphant by the end of the film, when Gotham has acknowledged him as an ally. "Finale (Track 20)" leads the camera up a dizzying skyscraper, where it finds Batman, still a gargoyle-like figure, but for now, in a benevolent rather than a morally troubling posture. That's the beauty of Elfman's Batman theme: it's simultaneously grand enough to present a heroic image, and complex enough to express the fundamental tension of Batman's identity.

"You can call me Joker. And as you can see, I'm a lot happier."

Meanwhile, of course, we have Jack Nicholson chewing the scenery with ruby red lips and a latex rictus of a grin. Nicholson's Joker isn't so much a psychopath as a megalomaniacal narcissist. He's the kind of individual who's figured out that he doesn't have to play by society's rules, and he can get a lot of attention by dodging them, so he flouts them as flamboyantly and violently as possible. Basically, he's Lady Gaga with an adolescent sense of humor and a murderous streak.

The Joker encompasses a wide variety of musical styles - he accompanies himself with music within the film fairly often - but the one that Elfman seems to associate most closely with the character - or at least most ostentatiously - is a demented little waltz tune, befitting his clownish appearance, and offsetting his homicidal mania with a disturbingly gleeful twist.

The first time I heard the Joker's music in the movie, as he playfully blows away Jack Palance's absurd Boss Grissom (in "Kitchen/Surgery/Face-Off," Track 4), I thought it was all wrong. Being an adolescent at the time, I thought the film should have a more uniformly "dark" tone. I didn't quite grasp the satirical edge of Burton's style yet, and circus music suddenly blaring forth from the screen was a curve ball I wasn't ready to handle. Now, of course, I'm more than capable of embracing complexity, so I love the choice. (This is also why I despise the Hans Zimmer scores for the new Batman films, precisely because they do cling to an adolescent, unsophisticated notion of "darkness" from beginning to end. More on that later.)

Of course, that's the point. Between the insane waltz and the appropriation of "Beautiful Dreamer" as a faux-love theme for the Joker's infatuation with Vicki Vale, Elfman reveals a man with delusions of grandeur, reshaping his own life like a circus ringmaster calling everybody's attention to his bizarre antics. His imagination has fled to a childish, cartoonish world, in which everything is done with a flourish -- as in the grand full orchestra salute at the end of "The Joker's Poem (Track 12)."

By the end of the film, just as Batman's theme has evolved musically into an evocation of moral conflict and heroism, the Joker's grandstanding personality has developed into a full-blown Viennese waltz. Over the years I've grown to love "Waltz to the Death (Track 18)" almost above any other portion of the Batman score, because of its tight structure, its element of genteel formalism in a scene of brutal violence, and its perfectly deranged tone - just dissonant enough to let you know that there's something very wrong with this otherwise lighthearted ditty, and flexible enough thematically to accommodate Batman's strident theme as the freaks battle it out atop the church. It's one of those rare perfect cues - of which there are more than a few on this album.

"I just . . . like the sound of it."

I could type for hours about this -- well, actually, I already have. People have written books about this score alone. It's acknowledged as a modern classic for a reason. Elfman's score elevates, deepens, and expands Burton's film into a grotesque masterpiece. While it was a high-budget film, Batman was limited by the technology of its time. Elfman knew precisely where all the work on miniatures and soundstages was going in the film, though, and painted on a much grander canvas to lend the whole enterprise a feeling of operatic weight and drama. The achievement hasn't quite been equaled since, with the possible exception of Batman Returns. But we'll return to that later. Up next, I'm moving on to the next Bat-entry in the alphabet . . .a distinctly different take on the character from that silly period in his past.

Band of Brothers: Bridges across Time

Flash back 20 years:

I have a distinct and vivid memory from the fall of 1991 of dancing with a cute girl at a middle school dance to Bryan Adams' "Everything I Do (I Do it For You)" from the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves soundtrack. I use "dancing" loosely, of course; we were doing that clunky mutual stagger that you do at a middle school dance, arms outstretched like two zombies who have blundered into one another and are both still trying to stomp forward.

I remember commenting specifically on the song, though, partially just to make awkward conversation and partially because I really did like the song at the time. (I was just on the verge of discovering the grunge movement and real rock 'n' roll, but I wasn't there yet.) That was mostly because of the song's connection to Robin Hood, which I had seen at the Clermont Drive-In (may it rest in peace) over the summer and absolutely loved. It was the rest of that movie's soundtrack that I truly relished, though -- Robin Hood was my introduction to the composer Michael Kamen, who wrote the score to Band of Brothers, the album I'm actually talking about here.

Robin Hood was one of the first times that I remember specifically hearing and admiring the music from a movie -- Kamen's rip-roaring main theme for horns blasted its way directly into my 12-year-old heart as I watched the opening credits from the seat of Mom and Dad's car. It's not that I hadn't noticed and appreciated the music in other movies before; I grew up in the era of some of the great John Williams scores and music like Back to the Future . . . I just hadn't given a lot of thought to it yet specifically. But Michael Kamen's Robin Hood score sparked a specific passion that's been with me ever since.

I learned soon after that, from my school's band teacher, that Kamen was a multi-talented composer who straddled the classical and film genres, but also provided pop and rock orchestral arrangements for the likes of Metallica. This, of course, made him even more awesome to me in 1991 -- the year of the Black Album. I knew that I'd want to pay attention to Michael Kamen. I did end up getting both the Black Album and the soundtrack to Robin Hood on cassette that year. But more on Robin Hood when we actually get there . . .

Flash back 10 years:

I mostly ignored Band of Brothers when it came out -- and not just because I didn't have HBO at the time. I was working for a tiny theatre company in Bloomington, Indiana - the Bloomington Playwrights Project - after graduating from IU, and didn't have time or energy for much of anything beyond that. On top of that, there was the whole 9/11 thing, which distracted just about everyone, and the fact that the whole thing seemed to me like a cash grab to capitalize on the popularity of Saving Private Ryan anyway.

I was mostly wrong about that, of course, but it took me another five years or so to find out. One winter's day I casually flipped the channel to a marathon of Band of Brothers on cable at my apartment while doing laundry. I tuned in to the second or third episode, and I ended up dropping everything to watch the rest.

What I discovered, of course, was a work of historical re-creation that even surpasses Saving Private Ryan in the sensitivity and depth of its characterization of the second World War. While I'm not sure that any filmic depiction of war will ever trump the sheer terror, vivid chaos, and adrenaline exhilaration of SPR's opening scene of the Omaha Beach invasion, Band of Brothers has the benefit of being grounded in the stories of real men and nearly twelve hours of screen time to devote to those stories.

Flash back 67 years:

Michael Kamen's music for Band of Brothers is clearly influenced by the elegiac tone that dominated the famous John Williams score to Saving Private Ryan. Bookended by the main theme (Track 1) and a piece called "Band of Brothers Requiem (Track 20)," the score album evokes a suitably reverent and similarly lyrical tone to Williams' "Hymn to the Fallen." Kamen's work has arguably a lighter touch and a more optimistic tinge in these two primary thematic statements. That's appropriate, since much of the series itself deals with the troops of Easy Company as men, without getting into too much hero worship, speechifying, or "Greatest Generation" sentimentality.

Between these bookends is where most of the meatier material can be found, though. Most of the more heroic statements of Kamen's main themes for Band of Brothers is front-loaded into the beginning of the album in a pair of suites (Tracks 2-3) and an adventurous cue called "The Mission Begins (Track 4)." Kamen's broad, masculine theme for horns actually echoes the structure of his main theme from Robin Hood, jettisoning the swashbuckling tone for a more straightforward military style. It's the kind of music that I would expect to hear in pops concerts by orchestras for the Fourth of July -- in fact, I'd love to hear it in that context.

Kamen weaves other instrumentation in and around the main theme in those two suites to convey a jittery sense of anticipation One moment that never fails to evoke goosebumps comes around 3 minutes into Suite One, and is repeated several times through the cue: A few violins emerge in preparation for a statement of the main theme, with bows skittering across their strings in a little stuttering rhythm that seems to evoke the sputtering of the piston engines of the Airborne troops' C-47 airplanes as they come to life on the runway.

Much of the rest of the album is actually quite contemplative, when it isn't haunting and absolutely beautiful. Many of the main battle scenes are unscored, leaving music to fill in the quieter moments, when the men have time to think and breathe - or to wait, to walk, or freeze. Kamen's commentary highlights the places where beauty exists among the carnage, like the oddly exquisite image of diaphanous white parachutes deploying in daylight, which Kamen embroiders with Debussy-like grace in "Parapluie (Track 8)."

Of these contemplative, moody cues, the one with the most personal significance to me is called "Discovery of the Camp (Track 17)." This eleven-minute piece plays like an adagio over the men's discovery of a Nazi concentration camp, cruelly ignored by the people in a nearby German town. My own grandfather, who died long before I was born, not only landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, but also went all the way through Europe into Nazi territory in the last year of the war, and was involved in the liberation of one of the Nazi camps -- we think it was probably Buchenwald. I have held and seen his own photographs of that camp, which apparently he never spoke about during his lifetime. I think of those photographs every time I hear about someone who denies that the Holocaust occurred. There are many people alive who know better, though there are fewer of them every day.

Back to the Present

Now, Band of Brothers is additionally fun as a "spot the rising British acting star" game, since most of the show was filmed in England with British actors filling many primary and most of the secondary roles. You can spot James McAvoy, Tom Hardy, Simon Pegg, and Jamie Bamber, among others, in small roles peppered throughout. And of course, the show itself hasn't lost any of its power. I watched the whole thing again last winter and found it even more absorbing (especially with the pop-up historical details I can call up about scenes and characters on my Blu-Ray copy).

Michael Kamen died in 2003 of a heart attack, one of too many great composers who were taken from us in the last decade. Band of Brothers is arguably his last truly great score, and it serves as fittingly as a requiem for Kamen himself as it does for the hundreds of thousands of men and women who gave their all in World War II. We'll revisit him, though, through his music and in this space.

We will not revisit Bryan Adams, though. (You were looking a little worried.)

American Beauty: Marimbas, Time Dilation, and the Who

First of all, yes, this is moving backwards in the alphabet. That's because I acquired this CD since I took the blog on hiatus last September (thanks to the super-cool MaryAnn Johanson of FlickFilosopher for selling me a stack of used soundtrack CDs), and I'm backtracking to include it -- I couldn't very well skip this critical contribution to film scoring history.

My first exposure to American Beauty was its brilliantly crafted trailer, which I recall seeing in a movie theatre sometime during the summer of 1999. With its mantra of "look closer," glimpses of its prickly sense of humor, and the combination of fantastical and disturbing imagery, it stuck with me long past the memory of the actual movie I saw that day. I wanted to see this film immediately, because it didn't look quite like anything I'd seen before. And the sound helped, too -- arguably its most memorable aspect was its use of the Who song Baba O'Riley (a.k.a. the "Teenage Wasteland" song) in its second half:

If you don't remember it, you'll just have to trust me that this was an inspired choice for the time. Twelve years later, "Baba O'Riley" has been depressingly overexposed -- still due in large part to the influence of this very trailer, I think. Just as Quentin Tarantino's films were responsible for the re-insertion of several semi-obscure classic tunes into our pop culture*, the echoes of "Baba O'Riley"'s epic rock sound from this trailer continue to bounce through our commercial unconscious to the point of exhaustion. It's been used in everything from car commercials to the "theme music" for one of the innumerable CSI spinoffs, all of which have despicably co-opted and eviscerated classics by The Who, presumably to avoid having to pay a composer to write an original theme.

They're All Wasted

American Beauty came around at a time when raging against the machine had infected the American zeitgeist, at least at the movies. 1999 was also the year of Fight Club, The Matrix, and Office Space. Lester Burnham, the Narrator of Fight Club, Neo, and Peter Gibbons are all variations on the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit for the Clinton years. The homogeneous, fluorescent-lit cubicle mazes in which they waste their daylight hours could all practically be the same company, and each character, to varying degrees, ends up questioning the acquisition of brand-name stuff as an end in itself before achieving his liberation from the rat race. (Okay, maybe not Neo; he just ends up discovering that everything's free to begin with in a make-believe world, so bring on the Oakleys and pass the ammo.)

A couple of years later, of course, everything changed in America and our attention turned outward again, perhaps a direction where we're more comfortable looking in the first place. But for a while, before the tech bubble burst and the towers fell, there was a brief flame of introspection, wondering what all the irrational exuberance was about if it wasn't making us happier.

Out Here in the Fields

Into this introspective American mental space came Thomas Newman, with a score so unorthodox and so curiously appropriate for American Beauty that it came to infect the pop culture collective unconscious for a while, too. From the first track, "Dead Already," Newman's unusual instrumentation and endless loops set a scene that isn't quite fully serious but seems truly uneasy. The deceptively cheerful marimbas that open the film are soon joined by a jangling chorus of electric bass, detuned mandolin, electronic effects, ethnic drums, and piano that loop back on themselves constantly. Newman apparently built his score consciously on this notion of looping phrases. The effect both reinforces the seeming stasis of Lester's ordinary suburban home, and creates an anxious tension between incongruous sonic textures.

And like "Baba O'Riley," this unexpected sound rose to popularity in commercial music for some time. The AB score itself was used in trailers and similar sounds were heard in everything from car commercials to TV documentaries. (Commercially available sound loops for generating music on the fly are still chock full of jaunty marimba phrases.) Thomas Newman himself adapted and refined this style in many of his subsequent scores. In some ways it has become his signature now, as in the delighftul end credits sequence of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Let's Get Together Before we Get Much Older

In the case of Lester's fantasy scenes about Angela, Newman's looping score literally expands time, as real life opens into Lester's theatrically erotic dreams. Rattling percussion, chimes, and distorted low-end electronics draw out his moments of unrealized anticipation into a time-dilated fugue state, before he's jarred back into prosaic real time once more -- in this case by the clunky diegetic pep band playing "On Broadway."

Meanwhile, Newman reserves a much more heartfelt sound for the younger protagonists of the film, especially Wes Bentely's Ricky. Ricky's expansion of time is a different and purer sort than Lester's -- he chooses to pause to appreciate beautiful moments in time, as with the famous videotape of the plastic bag floating in the wind. I think it's actually these moments that reveal the fragile emotional core of the whole film, and of Newman's whole score. Newman has a magical ability to create impossible yearning with a piano and quiet strings, as he's done before and since American Beauty, especially in The Shawshank Redemption. In both cases, the piano is reserved for a character who is simply too gentle for his brutal surroundings -- it's the sound of his own heart breaking, inaudible to anyone who isn't listening.

I Don't Need to Be Forgiven

Where American Beauty diverges from the other 1999 movies I mentioned is in carrying Lester's anomie and isolation into his home life. He's the only one of these now iconic characters who has a family at home and therefore the most to lose from his escape from confining cubicles and consumerist conformity -- and perhaps tellingly, he's the one who does lose the most. That separates American Beauty from the male empowerment fantasies that each of those other films represents, and places it into the realm of tragedy. Lester ultimately has more in common with Willy Loman than with Neo. Perhaps that means AB is the only one of these films that really gets it right -- upending your own life and bucking the establishment is not something you can usually get away with unless you're in a fantasy land. That's depressing, but true.

Oddly enough, the music of American Beauty landed somewhere in that territory, too. By defiantly using the music of the Who in the trailer and deploying Thomas Newman's aggressively weird, surprisingly beautiful music, American Beauty won accolades, including a Grammy for the score album, and found its way into all sorts of lesser commercial incarnations as a generically whimsical musical sound. As such, it doesn't sound quite as fresh these days upon repeat listening, or repeat viewing. Even the movie has suffered from some critical backlash in recent years after receiving almost universal praise upon its release. But if you can jettison all that baggage and look with the open heart that Ricky embodies in the film, you can still hear, and feel, the music imploring you to look closer.



*QT's influence is sometimes just frighteningly tenacious. I even heard a string quartet rendition of Dick Dale's "Misirlou" as bumper music on NPR's Morning Edition last week. It's been 17 years since Pulp Fiction re-popularized that tune.

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.