Alien: In Space, No One Can Hear Your Score

Oh, The Internet. If there's something obscure, unreleased, suppressed, or otherwise hard to find, and more than one person is interested in seeing it, it's a guarantee that somebody has dug it up and put it on the Internet. And if you know where to look, you can find where it's been posted and share in the unique joy of having stuff others don't have.

I was lucky enough to land with a roommate in college who knew where to look. He introduced me to MP3s -- in 1997, before most people even had CD burners. He found lots and lots of interesting stuff out there online, well before even Napster came along and made illicit sharing of materials accessible even to the AOL-using crowd (a.k.a. the short bus on the Information Superhighway). I still have some music on my hard drives that iTunes had a hell of a time categorizing when I installed it, since it isn't tagged with any of the information that helps catalog music now that there are procedures for that kind of stuff. Just filenames.

During my college years, though, Alex gave me access to all sorts of stuff that found its way onto the intertubes, or Teh IntarWeb, or whatever stupid hipster label you want to apply. Software, music, games . . . you name it. I even have, on a hard drive somewhere, scans of some of the early drafts of Star Wars. I have no idea where the heck those came from, but they're fascinating -- and it's lucky that none of them were ever filmed.

One of these little treasures was a bootleg of Jerry Goldsmith's original score to Alien.

If you can't remember the music from Alien, don't worry. You've probably never heard it. Much of the original score that Goldsmith composed was altered, replaced, or dumped in the final film. Ridley Scott and company were fairly merciless with the music, tracking in some of Goldsmith's material from other films, and even throwing in some stuff from another composer. Various soundtrack releases over the years have included some of the music as Goldsmith wanted it heard - but never quite all of it. Leave it to somebody to find that stuff and put it on The Internet. And man, is it unsettling.

The material that was left in the movie - and there still is a fair bit of it - is mostly atmospheric, atonal stuff that gets under your skin without causing you to take notice of it. It works very well in that context. Can you hum anything from the score to Alien? Do you remember hearing music in it at all? Nah, probably not.

Do you remember being really, really creeped out for most of the film?

But Goldsmith did write a lot of unused original material that had more of a sweep and emotional heft. Why, there are even scraps of melody, like the haunting solo trumpet that plays the main theme -- which was never heard in the film, re-recorded with a sequence of rhythms and noises that are more . . . well . . . alien. It's really interesting that, two years after Star Wars, the producers actually resisted a big orchestral score to this space-based film very strongly.

Personally, I like the lonely sound of that unused main melody. The filmmakers ultimately thought it was too much. Some of this score may indeed have been too much, like great honking cacophonies of orchestral instruments and hard-to-identify sounds for Ripley's battles with the full-grown alien warrior at the end of the film. It sounds weird and scary and awful, as it should but together with that moment in the film, it may have been like dumping ketchup all over a great steak. I do wonder, though, how this nearly-perfect film might play differently with the original Goldsmith version of the music. Could it have been even better?

Unfortunately, this being a bootleg taken from multiple sources, most of them old and analog, it sounds mushy and rotten. Over the years, I've replaced a lot of the music I had originally obtained illegitimately with the real McCoy, and I will probably do that with this score - since now there's apparently a fully restored CD version of the complete score, both original material and what ended up in the film. That's what the cover is at the top, from which you'll find a link to the album's page on Amazon. Bootlegs prod the owners of the real music to release a better-quality official version. So I'm happy to have had the bootleg for so long, and maybe now I'll hear all of what I've been missing.

Alexander Nevsky: How to Score a Big Honking Battle Scene

I stumbled across Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky at just the right time in my teenage love affair with big, bombastic, epic movie scores. I had just bought the Leonard Slatkin/St. Louis Symphony Orchestra recording of Carmina Burana - still the best version yet recorded - and inside the disc was another CD, a sampler of classical offerings on the RCA Red Seal Label. I've never seen packaging like that before or since, though of course I've heard plenty of sampler discs.

It was a date with destiny. I'd bought Carmina Burana in the first place because of the quintessential choral bombast of the O Fortuna movements. We had used those in our high school production of Frankenstein, to great effect. Park Tudor had a terrific theatre department, one that was able to pull off a pretty impressive scene of the destruction of Frankenstein's lab while blasting that trademark Carl Orff vocal apocalypse. I still remember the tech director shouting, "More Carmina! More Carmina!" during one of the dress rehearsals.

So, after plunging my way through Carmina Burana's outlandish vocal landscape of vulgar Medieval bawdry and fatalism, I threw on the sampler disc and discovered the music for "The Battle on the Ice" from Nevsky in the very first track. From the eerie, hesitant strings at the beginning, all the way to the all-out choral frenzy at the end, I was hooked. By the time the track dissolved into audio from the 1938 Sergei Eisenstein film, clanking swords and horses and shouting men above howling winds . . . I knew that I had to track down both the film and the soundtrack.

I discovered both, eventually. The re-recorded soundtrack album fulfills the potential of Prokoviev's massive score and detailed orchestration, subtleties that were completely obliterated by '30s Soviet recording technology. In the same year that Hollywood released Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, with beautifully recorded soundtracks, the score to Alexander Nevsky in the original print sounds like it was recorded through a tin can from the other side of a thick wall. The 1996 re-recording by Yuri Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra rectifies that, and then some. I absolutely love it.


The film itself is mostly a disappointingly one-dimensional piece of thinly veiled Soviet agitprop, a tale of a medieval Russian hero who smacked down a Teutonic invasion. Obviously, it was designed to psych up the Russian people for the storm that was a-brewin' with the Nazis in the late '30s. (Nothing unique or even wrong with that, necessarily; Olivier did almost exactly the same thing with his WWII-era production of Henry V, though Shakespeare has to be given credit for creating some slightly more well-rounded characters.)

Nevsky is remarkable in its imagery and editing, though, as you probably don't need to be reminded if you're familiar at all with Eisenstein. The man literally wrote the book - several, actually - on the marriage of sound, image, and editing in film. What Eisenstein created in his scene of the battle on the icy Neva river created the template for big cinematic battles. Check out the scene here with some observant commentary on the construction of tension leading up to the battle . . .



Look familiar? That's because nobody has yet figured out how to do it better. Just about every big, old-fashioned frontal army battle ever filmed has followed this pattern visually, and often musically: Shot of the "good" army, shot of the "bad" army, shots of the leaders of the armies and close-ups of the troops, back and forth and back and forth, faster and faster until the moment when it all hits the fan and the two armies collide. You can see it in everything from Gladiator to Braveheart to Spartacus, and even the stupid Gungan battle in The Phantom Menace. (All of those are video links for comparison . . . and yes, you really should click on the Phantom Menace video link. It's been "improved" with some fan editing.)

Also, for comparison, here's a video of the same scene with the original soundtrack recording of the score: Nevsky Battle on the Ice The full score is a revelation compared to that tinny mess.

Man, do those Teutons look mean with their big, face-obscuring helmets, and their creepy hooded priests. Speaking of Star Wars, take a look at those guys and tell me they didn't influence the likes of George Lucas when he was creating his stormtroopers and Sith lords. Just sayin' . . .


As for Prokofiev's score, it's emotionally manipulative, epic scoring at its very best, and you can hear its influence clearly in many, many scores that have come since -- including a few that are in my collection. You can be sure I'll make a note of it when the time comes.

The Abyss: A Score out of Water

Context is everything. A clown at a kid's birthday party or at the circus is harmless and sometimes even entertaining. A clown at a bus station is scary. A penguin at the zoo is a delightful attraction for children. A penguin in Antarctica is just another flippin' penguin. Ringo Starr as drummer for the Beatles was just peachy. Solo Ringo Starr is . . . well, kinda pathetic.

You get the picture.

And when you don't get the picture, sometimes a soundtrack just doesn't sound like much. This is what keeps The Abyss from getting a lot of rotation on my playlist. I really like the movie; I think it's every bit as good as Aliens or the first two Terminator flicks and full of everything that James Cameron excels at doing. I just haven't seen it for a very long time, which leaves me with the problem of not having very specific visual anchors for a lot of Alan Silvestri's soundtrack album, and on its own, it doesn't have enough to hook me.

I used to think of Silvestri as a poor man's John Williams. That may be unfair; I think he clearly has his own strengths, especially after a good 20 years more of development. But listening to this, one of his earlier efforts, you can tell the vast difference between their styles. This is all stuff that works gloriously when you're watching the movie: complex rhythms, wild brass flourishes, ominous clunking sounds from the very lowest note on the piano, wordless chorus, and tinkly strings and flutes for emotional moments. Outside the film, it's all a little disjointed. A Williams cue from the same era would tell a whole story musically all by itself. Both are perfectly valid approaches to film scoring, but one is a whole lot more fun to listen to.

So, there's not a lot to say about this album. (I'm not even quite sure how I ended up with a copy.) It's just fine, but if I want to listen to a Silvestri score, I'll probably go for something with a more consistent through-line, like the manic cartoonishness of Back to the Future, the lyrical schmaltz of Forrest Gump, or the sheer testosterone binge of Predator.

2001: A Space Odyssey/Alex North's 2001: Triumph of the Temps

If film composers have the equivalent of the "actor's nightmare" - you know, where you're supposed to be putting on a show but don't know your lines/don't have your props/are naked, etc. - I imagine they'd go something like what Alex North went through in 1968 at an early screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey . . . .

The story is legendary in film music circles: North went to the screening expecting to hear the hour or so of music he'd been asked to compose, with the rest of Stanley Kubrick's three-hour epic unscored or accompanied with classical selections. What he heard was all the classical temp tracks that Kubrick had used to edit the film, and none of his own work.

I find this version of events a little hard to believe. North was a veteran of many film scores by that time - including at terrific contribution to Kubrick's Spartacus, presumably how he came to work on 2001. He must have suspected something fishy when he was just asked to stop working on a half-finished score. But the grievance of the director who's a little too in love with his temp score is a common one among film composers, so it's no surprise that North's unused score became something of a cause celebre for the film scoring world.

North's 2001 became a mythical, Grail-like object for film music aficionados, since the original tapes were lost and very few people had ever heard it, let alone seen the score. It's down to North's friend Jerry Goldsmith and Robert Townson, a producer for Varese Sarabande records, that we have the re-recording of the unused North score available today, since Goldsmith recorded it in 1993 with the National Philharmonic Orchestra.


This segment is supposed to be about both the official soundtrack album and North's version. Honestly, the selections present in the official recording of the 2001 score need little comment. They work for me, and for the film, on a visceral and intellectual level that is nearly impossible to imagine differently. I could write an essay about the use of music in 2001 and its revelation of the thematic content of the film . . . actually, I have, but I'll spare you those ten or twelve pages. They're full of stuff about Nietzsche and other people that undergraduates like to talk about to seem super-smart.

With this score CD, though, it is possible to imagine how different some scenes may have sounded, with a little bit of creative manipulation of a home entertainment system and a quick finger for the "play" button -- a little more DIY than the Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon experiment, but do-able.* We did just this one day in the class on Stanley Kubrick's films that I took (fittingly enough, in 2001) from James Naremore at IU. (That's the class for which I wrote the essay.) I told Prof. Naremore that I had a copy of this recording, and he proposed that we do a little experiment in class with some of the scenes and North's score. The verdict was nearly universal: Stanley Kubrick made the right choice.

You only have to listen to North's proposed substitute for the Richard Strauss Also Sprach Zarathustra theme over the opening credits (Track #1) to realize that it just isn't quite right. Maybe that's unfair, since Zarathustra is so thoroughly embedded in our synapses as the "theme from 2001." But North's fanfare, while structurally similar - right down to the lingering pipe organ in the last few instants - and actually more musically sophisticated, just seems too courtly and refined for that awesome and soul-shaking shot of planetary alignment. Strauss' primal C-G-C is just impossible to top.

Prof. Naremore was perhaps a little unkind to the shreds of score that we attempted to match to the picture in 2001. Of the drum-heavy, Stravinsky-esque score that North wrote for the "Dawn of Man" sequences (Tracks #2-6), he remarked, "it sounds like Spartacus II." I think the music deserves a little better than that. It's good stuff, really. (It's a little similar to what Goldsmith himself did that same year on Planet of the Apes, actually.) It's just not the right stuff (ahem) for Kubrick's magnum opus.

Some people in the world of film score buffs - including Jerry Goldsmith himself, apparently - insist that North's score would have worked better for the film, since it's more thematically and stylistically unified, while still capturing the essence of the musical ideas in the temp tracks that eventually became the score for 2001. (Goldsmith knew a thing or two about having scores rejected, so he may understandably have been a little bitter about the whole business.) Even the liner notes sound pretty defensive. For Track #9, "Moon Rocket Bus," the notes state that "North's music would have underscored thee scene just as effectively while being more interesting as music."

I'll concede the fact that North's composition is more consistent. But again, watch the space station docking sequence with North's cue "Space Station Docking" (Track #7). North's music shimmers prettily, but Kubrick's choice of The Blue Danube waltz shows a sly sense of humor, marrying the trite with the miraculous. Kubrick was up to something with music as metacommentary, and he never did go back to using an entirely composed score in the rest of his film career - not always with such great results. (Just think of that stupid repetitive piano in Eyes Wide Shut. Or don't, actually.)

As with the deleted scenes and often-way-too-long "directors' cuts" of movies themselves, I can understand why cuts and deletions were made, including entire scores like this. I love having them to see and hear what might have been, but ultimately I think they end up justifying the choices of film editors -- and in this case, its director.

*Gee, speaking of this, the plot thickens -- Somebody has discovered that Floyd's song "Echoes" lines up nearly perfectly with the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence in 2001. It's on YouTube, of course: Judge for yourself. Personally, I think this may just be proof that it's easy to convince stoners of nearly anything.

3:10 to Yuma: the Enni-Phant in the Room

. . . But first, let's talk about Ennio Morricone. How can you avoid it? The modern notion of a "Western" movie has been wrapped indelibly in Morricone's musical signature - not to mention the imagery of the Spaghetti westerns of Leone and others - for forty years now. The eerie whistle from the main theme of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is perhaps the most widely recognized cinematic motif, behind only the infamous Jaws ostinato. (Yeah, I deliberately linked you to the cheesy Hugo Montenegro pop version of the TGTBTU theme.)

Morricone's Western music is in our collective unconscious, just as big a cliche now as Clint Eastwood's flinty eyes and unshaven jaw. Film and popular music alike were rocked by Morricone -- I don't know if bands like Calexico or Devotchka would exist if he had never written a note. Quentin Tarantino has slathered his last few films with liberal dollops of Morricone, whether they needed it or not. I even went to a show by a new Indy burlesque company over the weekend, in which a dancer's "cowgirl" routine was set to the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - and there she was, with a serape, wide-brimmed flat hat, and cigarillo (and little else).

Okay, I've made my point. Every Western movie made since the '60s must confront Leone's legacy somehow, and every Western score must deal with Morricone. You have to make a decision to embrace or resist the Morricone sound if you want to score a Western -- which is why it's so interesting that Marco Beltrami appears to have chosen to do both with his score to 3:10 to Yuma. (Even Eastwood himself, and his composer Lennie Niehaus, consciously chose to push against the Morricone style with Unforgiven.)

James Mangold's 2007 version of 3:10 to Yuma reaches back past the "spaghetti" tradition to an older Western story, a morality play with black hats and white hats, about the choices that men make, and that make men. Beltrami's score, for most of the film, follows along with the clenched jaws and husky whispers of its two "Westerners" by way of Australia and England. You can hear echoes of a spaghetti-ish style in the restrained guitars in the background of the opening two tracks . . . At 2:34 of Track #2, "Ben Takes the Stage/Dan's Burden," the film's main theme makes a statement on electric guitar that's still chastely held back from the rock-operatic style that it echoes.

Beltrami's instrumentation tells the real story of where he's going with this score. Along with the strings, brass, and guitar, he throws in a hammered dulcimer to accompany quieter moments, and embraces all kinds of unorthodox percussion. The very brief but intriguing Track #4, "Bisbygliando," begins with percussion that sounds like some object scraped across a wood floor, and later throws in crazy rhythms punctuated by a Jew's harp. These folk instruments and improvised sounds are simultaneously older and newer musical choices than the '60s spaghetti style. The music of the 21st century is wildly open to pastiche -- you'll hear sampling from a surprising variety of sources coming from producers of Top 40 music, let alone the kooky niche genres like gypsy punk or 8-bit techno -- and this is a 21st-century Western score.

So, Beltrami throws a wild bunch of very well-selected instruments and styles to throw into the base of Morricone's spaghetti sauce . . . then he boils it all waaay down, into a sound that jangles and echoes and swirls dissonantly, with occasional bursts of percussive violence and glimmers of vintage badassery. Even when the trumpets blaze into the action track "Chinese Democracy*," (Track #8) they're offset from one another in a strangled echo. Beltrami has made a new kind of Western score out of the old, by reducing it to its essence. I won't call it "minimalist," since that's a label only properly applied to people like Steve Reich and early Philip Glass and anything else that induces seizures after the 14th minute of hearing the same three notes. But it's "minimal" in its choice not to exert itself too obviously upon the film.

I won't say that this is my favorite score album, though. Beltrami's music does make a terrific accompaniment to the film - which I have not seen for a few years now and don't own - but as a stand-alone album it has a tendency to fade into the background. (As I listen to it right now, it's lending an unusually suspenseful air to my office work, despite the cheerful, sunny day.) That's somewhat typical of the trend of action film scoring in the '00s, actually. (We'll get to my love/hate relationship with the new Batman scores soon enough.) Seriously, how many movie themes from the last ten years can you hum from memory?

All the tension and restraint does pay off, though, when Beltrami finally builds to an action-packed climax in the two penultimate tracks, "Bible Study," and "Who Let the Cows Out*?" and the denoument in "The 3:10 to Yuma." When a big, bold trumpet melody comes soaring in over the end of "Bible Study," my goose bumps tell me, "Yeah! That's what we've been waiting for!" (Clearly, my reflexive sensory reactions to film scores have been primed by the musical collective unconscious. Thanks, Ennio. And Carl Jung.)

Now I return to another exciting day of email-slinging . . .

*One thing I love about certain contemporary composers is their sense of humor in naming cues. Chinese Democracy is, of course, the long-delayed Guns 'n' Roses album that was finally released in 2008, for which Beltrami provided orchestral arrangements. I haven't heard that album, but I bet John has.

Music in Film (National Public Radio Milestones of the Millennium)

Any compilation, collection, or "best of" list is always at least as notable for what's omitted as for what's included. The collection that I've chosen to kick off this blog is no different. You won't find some noteworthy composers here: No Max Steiner, no Ennio Morricone, no Jerry Goldsmith, no Maurice Jarre, no Lalo Schifrin . . . among many others. But for one disc that purports to cover all of film music history and has just 80 minutes or so to do it, it's not so bad.

As this release was made through Sony Classical under the aegis of NPR and released in 1999, all of what appears here is stuff that Sony Classical had available to them through their own catalog at the time, I suspect. That accounts for the appearance here of several 20th-century composers who were much more famous for their concert and ballet works than for their film scores: Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein. I'll deal separately with Prokofiev's blasting and highly influential choral score to Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, represented here with a song of breathless praise for the film's titular Russian hero (Track #2).

Aaron Copland did just a few film scores, including the film adaptation of Steinbeck's The Red Pony, heard on this disc (Track #5), but his style defined what "American" classical music sounds like to most ears of the 20th century, and was arguably one of the biggest influences on film scoring for Westerns, before Leone and Morricone rewrote the book and the music forever -- or at least to date. Listen to the main theme from The Magnificent Seven (Track #12) by the other Bernstein, the prolific film composer Elmer (no relation to Leonard) and you can hear echoes of Copland's Rodeo all over the place. (Most people probably know a bit of Rodeo nowadays as "The Beef Commercial Song." Copland. It's what's for dinner.)

This makes me want to pause to grouse about the general way that film composers are treated within the world of classical music. With a very few exceptions, those composers who earn their stripes by scoring films as opposed to "serious" concert compositions are regarded with barely concealed condescension by the classical music cognoscienti. Their works draw huge audiences to pops concerts by major symphony orchestras, including lots of people who otherwise would have no interest in showing up at a classical concert. I'd venture a casual bet that orchestras have played and recorded the main theme from Star Wars (Track #18) as often as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik in the last 30 years. Yet few composers have switched with ease between the concert or opera hall and the movie theatre. The only one I can think of in recent memory would be Philip Glass.

Back to the CD - that Film/Classical schism opens the disc, actually -- the great Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Jewish Austrian expatriate who practically invented scoring for Hollywood sound films, is represented here with a rollicking suite from The Adventures of Robin Hood. (If you haven't seen the classic Errol Flynn film, do yourself a favor and watch it. It's a barrel of fun.) Korngold was unfairly pooh-poohed by critics for his gorgeous violin concerto, into which he wove themes from some of his film scores.

Most of the first two-thirds of this CD is in fact a great introduction to the world of film music from about the '30s through the '60s. Some of the other patron saints of the genre are included, like Bernard Herrman (Vertigo and Psycho in Tracks #13-14), Nino Rota (Track #15 from 8 1/2), and a brief fly-by of an intriguingly jazzy piece by Franz "Bride of Frankenstein" Waxman, from A Place in the Sun (Track #6).

This is also the only place in my collection - unless I buy something during the course of writing this blog - that you'll find anything by Alfred Newman. ("Captain from Castile", Track #4.) Despite his nine Oscars, 40 nominations (four in the same year!), over 200 film score credits, and the fact that he was music director for 20th Century Fox for twenty years, I've got nothin.' Nothing, that is, besides his expanded version of the 20th Century Fox fanfare that appears on all my Star Wars CDs, as re-recorded by John Williams (who is the only human being with more Oscar nominations than Newman).

Oddly enough, the last quarter of the 20th century is represented very poorly on this disc. Perhaps in 1999, the selectors just didn't have enough perspective to judge the best of the years between about 1975 and the present. Otherwise, why would there be not one, but two tracks dedicated to music from the Star Wars trilogy (Tracks #17-18), but only two tracks at all of any music written after 1980. Certainly a few more years' perspective might have caused someone to think twice before including a track from Titanic (Track #20), which isn't even James Horner's best score (that would probably be Krull, actually). It definitely wouldn't deserve to be included before anything by Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman's Batman theme, Vangelis' Blade Runner or Chariots of Fire . . . et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Fortunately, that accounts for the largest portion of my own collection.

But we have to start somewhere, and this is at least a good place to get the lay of the land.

Here's the score . . .

Okay, I really don't have a lot of time to do this right now, but I'm doing it anyway, just for a writing outlet if nothing else. (See my "about me," and that part about being an inveterate overachiever.) After all, I can't rely solely on clever Facebook status updates. But, since I'm listening to scores and soundtracks all the time anyway, it's something I can do with a minimum of additional effort. That's good, since at the moment I'm involved in a major project at work, planning to direct a play in a couple of months, shopping for a house, and planning a wedding for the fall with my lovely fiancee.

In order to facilitate that, here are the ground rules of what you can expect from this blog:

1. I'll be going through my catalog of film and television music in alphabetical order by album title, from A-Z.
   
2. Numerical titles will be right up front, so you can expect to see 3:10 to Yuma and 2001: A Space Odyssey coming up really soon.
   
3. Compilations by various artists will fall into the same order.
4. I'm interested almost exclusively in original music for films, i.e. stuff that musicians have created exclusively for a film. Despite the title of this blog, I have never really been interested in those "Music From and Inspired by . . ." albums, which are mostly compilations of crappy pop music with little to no relationship whatsoever to what you'll hear in the movie. So, even though I own the "soundtrack" CD to Wayne's World*, I won't be writing about that.

With that said, I'm going to break Rule #3 right out of the gate, and begin with an entry for a compilation called Music in Film (National Public Radio Milestones of the Millennium). On to the next post! Follow me . . .


*It was the first CD I ever bought, when I was 13 years old. Don't judge me! And actually, that CD has more claim to being a legit "soundtrack" than some, since most of that music does actually appear prominently in the film. But I don't really have anything interesting to say about Alice Cooper's "Feed My Frankenstein."