Film Score Friday 7/23/99

by Lukas Kendall

Coming soon from Varese Sarabande: July 20: Wild Wild West (Elmer Bernstein), The Haunting (Jerry Goldsmith). July 27: Lake Placid (John Ottman). August 10: The 13th Warrior (Jerry Goldsmith), Bowfinger (David Newman plus songs), The Minus Man (Marco Beltrami), Muppets from Space (Jamshied Sharifi). August 24: The Iron Giant (Michael Kamen score album), The Sixth Sense (James Newton Howard), Deep Blue Sea (Trevor Rabin), Teaching Mrs. Tingle (John Frizzell).

Hip-O has released (or is releasing--it will be out soon!) Alfred Hitchcock Presents...Signatures in Suspense. Most of the tracks are re-recordings previously available, but there are some juicy original tracks: "Juke Box #6" from Rear Window (Waxman), two cuts from Marnie (Herrmann), the end credits from Family Plot (Williams), and three cues which Herrmann recorded of his unused score from Torn Curtain before Hitchcock put a stop to the sessions: "Prelude," "The Ship" and "The Radiogram."

The best film music I've heard all summer are the Joclyn Pook cuts from Eyes Wide Shut. The first two on the album are original to the film; the backwards singing and Vangelis-like Arabic one are from her previous works. Very nice string writing.

Varese Pondering

From: Julwest@aol.com

The new "Battlestar Galactica" album brings to mind a question that I believe has been pondered in this space before. That is, why do the Varese Sarabande re-recordings sometimes have a murky sound to them? Are they using a minimum number of microphones to avoid studio mixing time, thus cutting costs? That would be my guess. I was particularly struck by this on the "Galactica" album, where the brass and percussion often drown out the rest of the orchestra and there's a lot of reverb. Not that this is a bad album or a bad performance--actually it's quite good. I'm happy that Varese brought this score back, as I've always liked it. I was just wondering...

I think you're correct in your hypothesis. The Varese albums have aimed for a "live" aesthetic more akin to a concert than a film score -- it's worked great on albums like Body Heat, which features a better mix than the Barry original (mixed without the composer's approval), but much less so on things like Patton. All of these recordings are done on a fraction of the budget of the original film recordings -- but that's the only way they can happen, so what can you do?

Those Wacky German Charts

From: "RomanDeppe" <roman.deppe@metronet.de>

I just thought this is of some interest for your readers...

John Williams' STAR WARS EPISODE 1- CD is constantly climbing up the German CD-Charts. It already reached number 40, although the movie hasn't been out yet. That means probably for sure that it will reach the Top 10 when the movie is out (End of August).

More suprising is that Don Davis' score for MATRIX entered the charts at number 65 this week (the movie opened over here 3 weeks ago). I like the score, but I thought that it is hard to get through even for soundtrack fans, as it is so loud and dissonant (and didn't work in the movie). Probably it only sells so well, because all the stupid techno/heavy metal people buy the wrong CD ("Hey?!! What the F*@! is this ? What kind of crap is Marylin Manson doing now?!")... so... MATRIX is probably the most successful score album for Varese in a long time, isn't it?

Runner up last year was Goldsmith's STAR TREK INSURRECTION (besides TITANIC and BACK TO TITANIC).

Current Poll

Check it out to pick on the composer of your choice.

From: MHazotte@aol.com

About your poll, i answered Marco Beltrami. All the other composers included in the poll indeed wrote horror/thriller scores, but they also worked for another genre of films : comedy, drama, adventures, science-fiction...And because the success of the screams movies, i have the feeling that the gifted composer Marco Beltrami is trapped in horror/thriller movies (Mimic, Halloween : h20, the Faculty...). For me, he's wasting is talent and his score for The Faculty was uninspired and really weak! So i hope that in the future he will find another genre of films to score. Varese announced his score for the Minus Man movie for august, so let's see! (But don't forget he will also score Scream 3...)

Tarzan Letter

From: Andy Schmidt <neebix@yahoo.com>

I thought Phil Collins' songs in Tarzan were really annoying and out of place. They seemed to come out of nowhere and attack the audience, particularly in the early montage sequence where we see Tarzan learning from his human visitors. A Tarzan movie screams (?) for a solid orchestral score, especially since it's a period piece (or supposed to be, anyway). But also, the chance to do something musically subtle is totally ruined when you cram a movie with Phil Collins songs. Try to imagine Luke learning from Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back with a Phil Collins song on the track. Just doesn't work, does it? There were no songs in A Bug's Life, thank god, and the movie is all the better for it. Well, except for the crappy song over the end credits. They gotta get at least one in there, don't they? Big difference between the Disney of Fantasia and the Disney of today.

Solos in Film Music

Responding to the recent article:

From: Rgutowski <Rgutowski@nycds.org>

A very interesting and thoughtful article!

I was reminded of the use of a quote from Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini in the film SOMEWHERE IN TIME. The solo piano accompanies Chris Reeve's first glimpse of the photo of Jane Seymour, with whom he is fated to fall in love, despite their living in two different eras. The piano builds as he approaches the photo, framed on a distant wall. He's momentarily blinded by a display light, but continues on, the orchestra having entered, the music now underlining his sudden and absolute surrender and growing obsession. Neatly done, and it wouldn't have been nearly so effective if the orchestra had been there from the beginning of the sequence.

(Just for the record, you actually can see the knife make contact with the body in PSYCHO. Hitchcock himself found it necessary to perpetuate the myth that the weapon never touched the torso, just as he and Joan Harrison were determined to convince the censor that those were NOT two large, out-of-focus breasts visible behind the hand that reaches out to grasp the shower curtain after the attack.)

We're on Vacation!

Just a reminder for those emailing us -- we're gone, baby! We're back the first week of August, at which point we'll rev these Friday news columns back up to their usual extravagance.

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