This is something I blogged on a personal blog, but hey, I think it works here too! (Hope that;s okay, LK!)

As I listen to the "Cover Blown" cue from Hanover Street, I'm thinking about how composers like John Barry and Ennio Morricone beat out time as a way of eliciting tension and then play with the listener's perception of time. There's nothing like a regular, 'gets louder but refuses to get faster' ding! ding! ding! to really wind up the tension.

The classic Barry example is perhaps the "Count Down" cue from Goldfinger, which accompanies James Bond's entrapment with Goldfinger's atomic bomb. (Sorry, did I spoil the plot? James Bond wins, everybody, okay?)

Morricone, of course, used the device more overtly, like the real clock tick in My Name Is Nobody and the watch chime in For A Few Dollars More. I wanna mention that brilliant cue "Out Of Time" from 5 Man Army, too. That's a crazy cue and it gets me every time.

But let's get back to that "Cover Blown" cue again. I love that bit where Barry paces and then "stops" one's perception of time as Harrison Ford and Christopher Plummer enter Gestapo HQ. (At least in the non-replaced cue.) Now that's film music doing way more than just "being music".

Film music is so like other advanced forms of communication. Existing in what you might call peripheral hearing, the effect is somewhat subliminal. You might even say hypnotic. It builds, maintains and releases emotional states. It anchors them with motifs and fires them off later. With themes and theme fragments, it opens and closes loops. And, with tricks like this, it plays with time.

So film music is just about putting appropriately sounding tunes on a film, huh? Pish!

Cheers