Five-by-Five for 2005

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, January 12, 2006

The year 2005 was a good one for bombastic soundtracks, just as it was a pretty good year for bombastic action films, but there were also a number of profoundly affecting introspective dramatic scores as well. Here's my recap of my Top Twenty favorite new scores from 2005 mostly genre works of the kind that Cinescape focuses on; but I've taken the liberty of including a few outside these parameters that I feel are notable enough for inclusion. Next week's column will examine the best reissues and restorations of older scores and my favorite game soundtracks of '05.

1. CRASH (Mark Isham, Superb Records SPB-CD-2512)
I'll admit it, my favorite film of the year was Paul Haggis' CRASH, a brilliant and heartfelt rendering of clashing personalities, values, and perceptions in Los Angeles.

The film was enhanced beautifully by Mark Isham's score, which is definitely one of the composer's finest. Its use in the film, wherein it often takes all of the emotional resonance of a given scene, with sound effects and dialog muted for dramatic effect, is a marvelous and intimately powerful fusion of vision, music, and directorial aesthetic. The score echoes with psychological underpinnings and mysterious evocations; this is the quiet tonality of the mind, in all its mingled darkness and subdued wonder; this is the music of the furtive, often misunderstood yet yearning interactivity of personalities; this is the music of random circumstances evolving into fated predestination a musical delineation of random events and personalities that become intertwined through a collision of emotions and events. The score, which contains enough sampled textures to belie its mostly keyboard origins, is spellbinding throughout.
www.superbrecords.com  

2. MUNICH (John Williams, Decca B0006093-02)
2005 was definitely the year of John Williams, who scored four major motion pictures

and hit the mark on each one of them. While his music for STAR WARS and WAR OF THE WORLDS were spectacular action scores rippling with raging muscles and roaring bombast (and rest assured, we will visit them later in this column), I found his persuasively delicate score for Spielberg's MUNICH his most affecting work of the year. MUNICH is a quiet score, emphasizing solo performances more than the full orchestra, providing moments for reflection and observance, and proffering warm and introspective orchestral textures than retain the richness of their tonal atmospheres. The heart of Williams score is associated with the film's subtexts, exploring the heart of tragedy, passion, and vengeance, while also echoing the personality of the character whose journey from justice to retaliation lies at the heart of the film. In its action and suspenseful moments, Williams associates the music with these facets, retaining the human element explored by the film even in its midst of visual violence, rendering a score that is at once melancholy and confident.
www.universalclassics.com  

3. STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH (Sony Classical SK94220)
With REVENGE OF THE SITH, Williams comes full circle, migrating back to where he began with the story that ends where the first STAR WARS (and its musical design)

started out. The score both recapitulates previously-delineated themes from EPISODES I and II and, of course, the seminal themes from the first trilogy of EPISODES IV, V and VI). Williams has turned much of what we have heard before on its head, and in so doing set the stage for the musical magnificence of the second trilogy. By calculated design, "Anakin's Theme" morphs into "The Imperial March;" "The Force Theme" of the first trilogy becomes the Main Theme of the second trilogy, exemplifying how the benevolence of the Force has patterned an ultimate victory not presently visible during the events of EPISODE III. As for the score's brand new material, "Battle of the Heroes" is a tremendously energetic composition heavy in epic brass writing embellished by a powerful chorus, while The Sith's music is savage, relentless; where even Darth Vader's theme captures a dark eloquence, the music of the Sith is grotesquely malicious, scattering shards of rough-edged tonality from side to side as it maneuvers unevenly across the orchestral playing field.
www.sonyclassical.com  

4. SIN CITY (Robert Rodriguez, John Debney, Graeme Revell, Varese Sarabande 302 066 644 2)
The music for Robert Rodriguez's brilliantly conceived and designed visualization of Frank Miller's SIN CITY contains a breathtakingly inventive and absorbing musical score combining the talents of three composers, including the director, each one taking a separate section of the film to score. The result is a jazzy, nonmelodic mysterioso that seethes with bluesy passion, sultry sensuality, and brutal candor. From the dark, percussive noir of Revell's music for "The Hard Goodbye," to Debney's Herrmannesque tonalities for "The Big Fat Kill," and Rodriguez's sweltering accompaniment for "That Yellow Bastard" as well as his terrific overarching SIN CITY

theme music, the soundtrack is an evocation of sinister psychologies and ruthless acquiescence. Characters rarely seek to better themselves or find a way out of dire circumstances or unpleasant environments; rather they thrive in their midst, driven by the tempestuous confidence of the music. Rodriguez's "Yellow Bastard" music eventually assumes a carnival-like sensibility, as if the flaxen-tinged ghoul of the segment were gifted with a tone poem composed for a skull's malicious grin; the score is otherwise relentlessly grim. This is black and white music with occasional glimmers of coloration that are rarely allowed to shine; only in Debney's section does the music briefly reach any height of hopefulness. The score adopts the gloomy sensibility of gothic metal without guitars (until Rodriguez's End Titles, at least) and without rock and roll; but it captures a similar emotive resonance and flavor, a sensation of sensual despair that is as enlivening as it is depressing. Even in its sonic desolation, the music evokes a noir environment so alluring in its brooding austerity that we plead for more, even as we are drawn helplessly in.
www.varesesarabande.com  

5. HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (Patrick Doyle, Warner Bros. 49631-2)
Adapting John Williams' themes from the first three POTTER movies and adding them

to his own considerable musical pallet, Patrick Doyle crafts his POTTER score with graceful energy and heroic confidence. Doyle brings an elegant gift for melody and thematic interaction, providing both plenty of customary pomp and circumstance for the Hogwart's schoolyard pageantry and plenty of vigorous action/adventure/danger music that's correlated with the various challenges and eventual horror that Harry confronts in the process of competing. With it's diversity from lyrical melody to dark dementia, Doyle has succeeded in crafting a worthy follow-up to John Williams' signature HARRY POTTER music, as well as one of the most provocative and powerful scores of his own filmography.
www.warnerbrosrecords.com/  

6. BATMAN BEGINS (Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard, Warner Bros., 71324)
A compelling collaboration from two composers whose styles are far different from

each other, and who have merged to create something entirely unique: a mixture of pathos, dark atmospherics, and vigorous adventure. Howard's gift for melody and large orchestral composition is combined with Zimmer's gift for passionate, emotive rhythms and electronic tonalities to achieve an outstanding score as rich in passion as it is in somber, brooding heroics and massive, powerful energies. Unlike scores like CONSTANTINE, SIN CITY, or SHARKBOY, where the efforts of collaborating composers are kept fairly distinct, the BATMAN BEGINS soundtrack is a complete merging of both composer's efforts, the score is an amazing composition that becomes a tone poem for the Dark Knight, emphasizing not so much distinct showpieces of scene scoring, but a developing psychological atmosphere for Batman.
www.warnerbrosrecords.com/  

7. THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED (Brian Tyler, Hollywood Records 2061-62541-2)
Brian Tyler's poignant score for Disney's feel-good movie about a young man from the wrong side of the tracks who winds up winning the 1913 US Open golf tournament is

breathtakingly melodic and beautifully, capturing the spirit of believing-in-yourself and ultimate triumph that is so evidently portrayed in the film. The score unshackles Tyler from the action-oriented and horror-oriented scores he has often been associated with in the past (as wonderfully effective as they have been) and allows him to soar with unabashed orchestral melodies in a way he hasn't been permitted in the past. Tyler's purely orchestral music, with touches of old-fashioned Americana and youthful exuberance, is beautifully expressive, surging with magnificent emotion while also sparkling with intimate fragility.
www.hollywoodrecords.com  

8. MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (John Williams, Sony Classical 82876747082)
John Williams' score for Rob Marshall's romantic drama MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA

(produced by Steven Spielberg), is unlike almost anything he's written before. It is an intensive and intimate mostly ethnic score, embracing Japanese musical mores and eschewing almost every style that we've come to know and define as "John Williams." Featuring the interplay of virtuosos Itzhak Perlman on violin and Yo-Yo Ma on cello, GEISHA is a remarkable musical score, evocative and provocative in its ethnic intricacy. This is Williams at his most reflective, providing thought-provoking music that is more suitable to the solitude of a Zen garden than the raging conflicts of extra-terrestrials.
www.sonyclassical.com  

9. WAR OF THE WORLDS (John Williams, Decca B0004568-02)
William's music for Spielberg's spectacular retake of

George Pal is a tremendous score, viciously and relentlessly aggressive. It's not a horror score, per se (although there are elements of quite horrific atmospheres in the music), but a brutally forthright orchestral accompaniment for invasion, emphasizing musically the ruthlessness of the invasion and the corresponding hopelessness of humanity, broken in a few moments when the strength of humankind shows itself in the midst of the devastation.
www.universalclassics.com  

10. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN (Harry Gregson-Williams, Sony Classical SK 94419)
Gregson-Williams has crafted a potent and persuasive hybrid of orchestra, ethnic

acoustic instruments, electronics, choir, and the deeply resonant vocal of popular vocalist Lisbeth Scott. The crossbreeding of the music ties in both lyrically and texturally with the clerical nature of the Crusades, while a typically Zimmer/Gregson-Williams kind of hybrid riff becomes the film's primary rhythmic action motif. This is truly an epic score that captures the scope and tonality of the film with a broad wash of colorations and textures that range from muted to vibrantly clarifying. The mix of choir and orchestra is especially effective in creating both a sonic semblance of the film's time and place, and in rendering its emotive undertones and provisioning its ambitious engagements with potency and power.
www.sonyclassical.com  

11. SERENITY (David Newman, Varese Sarabande, 302 066 682 2)
David Newman's expressive and expansive score for Joss Whedon's big-screen

incarnation of his short-loved TV series, FIREFLY, is as quietly passionate as was the director's epitaph to his series. Musically, there's very little relation between the TV show and the feature film. Eschewing the modern-folk music style of FIREFLY composer Greg Edmonson, Newman brings a stirring orchestral atmosphere that provides an unusual ambience beneath the film's drama while also heightening its dynamic. Newman crafts a musical fluidity amid an intricacy of texture and tonality, tinged by moments of poignancy and feeling. The score, in fact, is defined by its intimacy; it has as much to say in its quietude as it does in its comparatively less frequent activity.
www.varesesarabande.com  

12. CRAB ORCHARD (Alan Williams, Silverscreen Music SMCD 017)
Alan Williams has provided an eloquently beautiful score for CRAB ORCHARD, a gentle drama about a family torn apart by the September 11, 2001 attacks on

America. The score's instrumentation embodies a kind of American roots music flavor lots of nylon and steel acoustic guitars, woodwinds, and piano. The gentle melodies are heartrending, providing a subtle Americana background to the film while echoing the human consequences and connections that lie within the heart of the film. The music is at once reflective, melancholy, hopeful, and resolute in its motific delineation of a family that is determined to whether together the worse that life will bring. Williams generates a convincing and immediate rapport with the American family, which is exactly what this film needed) is clearly echoed in the music's tonality and texture.
www.alanwilliams.com  

13. HOSTAGE (Alexandre Desplat, Superb Records 72051-2)
French composer Alexandre Desplat has provided an eloquent

and compelling score for Florent Siri's action film, HOSTAGE. Centered upon a broodingly atmospheric vocal theme that runs throughout even the score's hypnotic action sequences, Desplat emphasizes the subtexts beneath the situations, His score, especially on CD, is an amazing composition, rich in challenging atmospheres and passionate, yearning ambiances. Thoroughly tonal and melodic, the score conveys its emotive flavorings with both poignancy and extraordinary yet restrained power.
www.superbrecords.com  

14. SORSTALANSAG (Ennio Morricone, EMI 7243 860308 [Hungary])
Ennio Morricone proves he is just as powerful a composer in 2005 as he was forty five years ago when he started writing film scores. SORSTALANSAG (FATELESS), a Hungarian film about the Holocaust, contains a provocative orchestral score, as moving and persuasive as that of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, with

which it shares a similar choice of instrumentation. The soundtrack was released only in Hungary and Italy. Featuring chorus and operatic vocals by Lisa Gerrard, the music both captures the dismal scene of the Nazi concentration camps while echoing the humanity of those attempting to survive within, yet it avoids stereotypical music that might have been associated with films on this topic. The music is gorgeously lyrical and could have come out of Morricone's most fertile period of the late 60's and early 70's. It's primarily a disconsolate score favoring long sustained violin chords, powerful charges of horns, and harmonies of orchestra and voices that create a powerful ambiance that is both melancholy and passionate. It creates a brooding and hauntingly lyrical atmosphere that is almost heartbreaking, given the film's subject matter. That is all to the favor of both film and score.
www.emimusic.hu  

15. THE BROTHERS GRIMM (Dario Marianelli, Milan M2-36136)
Newcomer Marianelli has stepped up to the plate and smashed a home run out of the

park with his wondrously compelling score for Terry Gilliam's delightful fantasy. The music is as provocatively flavored and richly hewn, achingly classical in tonality. Thick arrangements of strings, echoing chorale, and sinewy mysterioso abound, punctuated by surges of engorged orchestration and not a few moments of stunning musicality. The score emphasizes the brooding darkness of the Grimm legendary tales, lending a coherent and consistent level of fascination to the myriad textures and atmospheres of the score.
www.milanrecords.com  

16. AEON FLUX (Graeme Revell, Varese Sarabande 302 066 707 2)
Graeme Revell's take on the futuristic lady assassin is a uniquely textured pattern of

electronica/techno fused with sinewy melodies, painful introspection and accentuated by harsh, percussive action material that propels the action forward with musical patterns as lithe and limber as those performed by Charlize Theron on screen. It's Revell's musical score that infuses Theron's sexy performance with its soul, providing the character with its self-confidence, emotive passion, and larger-than-life heroism, and makes Aeon Flux the tortured champion than she becomes. The result is an effective and very likable score that, in its rhythms, textures, and subtle melodies, provides a perfect backdrop for the story's action and environment, as well as the pained passion of its central character.

17. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE (Harry Gregson-Williams, Disney 5008 61373-7)
This classic fantasy adventure might be described as LORD OF THE RINGS Light, for it shares similar sensibilities and invented fantastic environments yet without Tolkein's pervasive darkness. Harry Gregson-Williams provides a score for the first epic NARNIA

film that is both heroically adventurous while also fairly complex. The music evokes the magic and the wonder of the Narnia environment and the creatures that live there without flying into traditional thematics at the drop of a hat; the score develops with subtle variations and more modernistic turns, often capturing moments of quiet reflection, appropriate to the film's overarching themes of loyalty, honor, and sacrifice. It's a heroic adventure score that plays more on the film's subtexts in its motivic development than on its energetic swellings and surgings, although those are there too. The theme for the children dominates the score, but as they are flawed characters, their theme remains rooted in imperfection as well. Only Aslan's Theme is allowed to soar with unrestrained victory; when it becomes associated with the children as they emulate the great Lion, so their theme achieves a similar grandeur.
http://disney.go.com/DisneyRecords/Soundtracks/original/index.html  

18. KING KONG (James Newton Howard, Decca B0005715-02)
Despite having had only five weeks to conceptualize, compose, orchestrate, record and mix the score after stepping in to replace Howard Shore as composer, Newton-

Howard's score for Peter Jackson's lavish new take on KING KONG is a fertile and dramatic score, ranging from poignant passion to roaring savagery and chest-beaten dissonance, resonating broadly with the sensation of Adventure. The music both conveys the necessary passion and sympathy for the Great Ape that the story demands, but enlivens the film's various battles with potent and assertive orchestral writing. The animal battle music is pungent and percussive, heavy laden with raspy trumpets and echoing horns, the pulse of monsters' ferocious footfalls felt in the music's rapid percussion. "Tooth and Claw" is furious battle music, its dissonant laced with snippets and echoes of the Kong and Skull Island themes.
www.universalclassics.com  

19. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, SEASON ONE (Bear McCreary, La-La Land Records LLLCD-1032)
Bear McCreary's music for the revival of Glen A. Larson's campy 1970s sci-fi series provides a rich textural basis, adopting the cultural instrumentation popular in World Music, with minimal orchestral accompaniment, and a capable understanding of thematic interplay and a creativity willing to embrace sonic textures not usually

associated with a science fiction setting. McCreary's The music is at once fresh and appealing, with a timbre and a depth and grain that is constantly persuasive. The themes interlace between the various musical atmospheres and textures, but it's the instrumental choices that make the score as intriguing and likable as it is, from uilleann pipes to the various use of exotic percussion, Irish and Middle Eastern pipes, operatic soprano, classically performed violin passacaglia, and a myriad of other elements all combined into a carefully calculated composition that maintains its forward motion through ongoing reinterpretation. The music provides a depth of instrumentation and melodic poignancy that invests the series with a powerfully resonant emotion; McCreary scores not so much the events or the environments we see on the screen (although the music is appropriate for those visual elements as well), but the subtexts, the character interplays, emotional resonance, and subtle story arcs, which music underplays so well and so eloquently.
www.lalalandrecords.com  

20. MIRRORMASK (Iain Ballamy, La-La Land LLLCD 1031)
Composed by saxophonist and composer Iain Ballamy

in this his first feature film score, the music to the exotic fantasy MIRRORMASK is a sonic delight. It's an inventive, jazz-based score that is as varied, articulate, and adroit as any Cirque de Soileil performance, and just as impossibly agile and attractive. The music is alternately circus-like, cabaret-like, and old fashioned European jazz-like - often in the same cue. It develops not atmospheres but an almost magical intensity through its incessant vim and vigor, occupied by absorbing rhythms, inspired textures, and haunting performances.

Former editor/publisher of CinemaScore magazine, Randall Larson was for many years senior editor for Soundtrack Magazine and a film music columnist for Cinefantastique magazine. He is the author of Musique Fantastique: A Survey of Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema (Scarecrow, 1984) and Music from the House of Hammer (Scarecrow, 1995). In addition to Soundtrax and Music News for Cinescape.com, Randall reviews soundtracks Music from the Movies, writes for Film Music Magazine, and in many other fields.

Recommended Soundtrack sources:
www.buysoundtrax.com  
www.intrada.com  
www.screenarchives.com  
www.footlight.com  
www.arksquare.com/index_main.html (Japan)
www.intermezzomedia.com/ (Italy)
www.moviegrooves.com  
www.moviemusic.com  

For questions or comments, contact the author at Soundtrax@cinescape.com