Have you ever felt like you’re going to win over the world as soon as you hear the majestic violins of The Ride of the Rohirrim play from Lord of The Rings? Or have you ever felt the heartbreak and the need to cry your eyes out when the orchestral score from Me Before You stars to play? If you have, then you would surely understand why I consider background scores to be one of the integral, or probably the most important part of films.
Anyone who understands movies knows just how important music can be to the overall quality of the film. No matter whether you're talking about a blockbuster action movie, a sweeping romance, or a cerebral drama, a strong score changes everything. A skilled composer can tell a story with sheet music in the way a director can with actors or a screenwriter can with a word processor.
Describing the crucial effect of music in film, composer Bernard Herrmann once said:
“I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.”
Below are four magnificent background scores that portray four entirely different themes and emotions.
1. James Horner’s score in the 1997 film Titanic is everything this film is. It’s big. It floats. It crashes. It rises. It freezes to death in the middle of the ocean. Wait… scratch that last one. James Horner is no slouch and neither is James Cameron, who knew exactly the man for the job to score this masterpiece. The foundation of the score is built upon five primary themes and four motifs. The first is the Titanic Theme, which serves as the score’s Main Theme, and speaks to its enormity, magnificence, and grandeur. It resounds with unbridled optimism and glorious questing confidence.
Of all the Titanic’s themes, Rose’s Theme has become indelibly woven into humanity’s collective consciousness. It serves as her identity, and although it presents with a major modal graceful gentility, we discern with the choral element’s minor modal strains of melancholia, which speak to the unhappiness of her gilded caged existence. It has certainly taken its place as one of the most loved and timeless themes in cinematic history.
2. One of the strongest scores of the year 2019 might also be the simplest — as well as the most integral to how the movie was made. Joker was scored by Hildur Guðnadóttir, an Icelander who made her big Hollywood splash by musically embodying this famously devious clown as played by Joaquin Phoenix. There’s no question the score elevated every moment of Joker. Along with the cinematography, it was the most beautiful and immersive part of the movie besides Joaquin Phoenix’s towering performance. Guðnadóttir crafted a score that perfectly captured the inner life and journey of Arthur Fleck. It’s saddening and haunting until the final track, “Call Me Joker,” which communicated Arthur’s self-discovery in the end amid the riot and fire. It’s a beautiful, unnerving score that made the audience feel more of Arthur’s inner turmoil. The score particularly nails the “descent into darkness” aspect of the movie, and you almost feel that the music itself is turning evil throughout the album’s forty-minute runtime.
3. The original soundtrack to Ridley Scott's Gladiator features an original score composed by Academy Award-winner Hans Zimmer and Golden Globe nominee and former Dead Can Dance member Lisa Gerrard. The duo's dramatic music incorporates traditional orchestral elements, ancient and indigenous instruments, and Gerrard's haunting vocals to create a timeless and evocative backdrop for Scott's tale of an avenging gladiator in ancient Rome. Cleverly, Zimmer’s theme gets straight to the heart of the film – it does not dwell on the action, or the violence that goes with it, but instead conveys the tremendous heartbreak felt by Maximus at the loss of his family, and the redemption he seeks before returning to them in the afterlife. At its core, Gladiator is not about a film about violence: it’s about loss – of one’s family, of one’s status, and of one’s freedom. For Gladiator, Hans Zimmer uses a simple but stirring melody throughout and, as a result, the film joins the ranks of those movies for which the music is a key part of its success. Lisa Gerrard’s haunting voice added a timeless and atmospheric quality.
4. There aren’t a lot of soundtracks that can take you into a different world. Most are designed to create emotion, but only a few can mentally transport the listener into another realm entirely. Ramin Djawadi's score for the epic fantasy series Game Of Thrones is integral to its success. Huge percussion, sweeping strings, and bombastic themes make it a truly exhilarating listen. Djawadi crafts music that doesn’t place you in this different world, but sends you soaring over it. Of all the huge moments in the show, the game-changing scene in the season six finale is driven by Djawadi’s score The Light Of The Seven for 9 minutes as it starts with the isolated piano and builds to unsettling choir boy vocals, organs, cellos, and violins as King’s Landing is left in ruins. Unforgettable. And that is only one score from the myriad of eight seasons’ worth of glorious & breath-taking scores.
In the end, the goal of a score is to blend into the background while still achieving the necessary effect. This might not be a revolutionary statement, but classical music makes everything significantly more dramatic. Filmmakers know this, and use it to their advantage to heighten the intensity and drama in their films. And sometimes (all the time for geeks like me), background scores become an essential part of the music we listen to daily. Music can evoke powerful emotional responses such as chills and thrills in listeners. And instrumental scores certainly do this job, as we would’ve experienced while watching films & TV shows. The aforementioned soundtracks surely do show that scores can amplify multiple forms of emotions – be it sorrow, love, grandeur, or agony – and therefore are a fundamental part of filmmaking.
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