Fantastic Voyage (Leonard Rosenman, 1966): Leonard Rosenman provides a moody and often dissonant, but also sometimes melodic and thematic, score for the popular science fiction adventure about a team of miniaturized scientists exploring he innards of the human body.  It is an unusual and experimental score, but also distinctive and effective.

The melodic aspects of the scores are primarily built around a haunting and evocative central theme.  The theme is fairly short, primarily characterized by a short fanfare-type motif, although its statement usually leads to fairly dissonant and, at times, atonal material.  The score finally goes fully-melodic, and becomes recognizably Rosenman’s style, during the dramatic finale cue, entitled “Optic Nerve/End Cast”.

The soundtrack CD opens very strangely, with a minute and a half “Main Title Sound Effects Suite”, which is exactly what the title suggests.  It includes a variety of beeps, buzzes, clicks, and electronic hums with no melody involved.  The early part of the film (up until the scientists first enter the body) was left unscored, so this sound effects suite is representative of the opening of the film.

Film Score Monthly released a CD of the score back in 1998, the first release separate from the film.  This is a complete presentation with a running time of a little over 45 minutes.  The CD is out-of-print and is now a bit expensive, but not difficult, to locate.

Far and Away (John Williams, 1992): While the film was not a big hit and the score isn’t extremely well-known to the mainstream public, John Williams’ music to Ron Howard’s 70mm epic Far and Away has become a favorite of film music enthusiasts and is frequently featured at Williams’ live concerts. The epic scope of the film provided Williams with an opportunity to showcase a wide range of highly-thematic material, including Irish/Celtic flavored melodies, western-tinged Americana, and rousing action cues.  The result is one Williams’ richest and most diverse scores.

The film’s focus on the relationship (and romance) between Irish immigrants played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman made the use of Irish-influenced melodies an obvious choice that Williams certainly embraced.  The first cue on the soundtrack, “County Galway, June 1892” establishes the main theme, which incorporates bagpipes along with the orchestra and is both distinctly ethnic and also an example of Williams’ strong gift for rich, thematic melody.  As the film transitions into American settings, the more ethnic elements of the theme are pushed more into the background in favor of a distinctively Americana orchestral flavor.

The strength of the main theme from Far and Away, which isn’t fully dependent on the Irish arrangements, led to a very effective violin arrangement of the theme that Williams arranged for the “Cinematic Serenade” album that he did with Yo Yo Ma, and which is now a frequent showcase for the lead violin player at some of Williams’ live concerts.

The ethnic components of the score are further strengthened through the participation of the popular Irish band The Chieftains on several of the scores cues.  On the soundtrack, these are the cues “The Fighting Donellys”, “Fighting for Dough” and portions of the end credits suite.  Their energetic strings and percussion are expertly blended with the orchestra. 

Williams provides some exuberant, orchestral action music in such cues as the rich, string-centered “Blowing Off Steam”, “Fighting for Dough”, and “The Big Match”.  Williams sticks with grand, very melodic material for the action segments of the score, eventually culminating in the absolutely thrilling 5 minute cue “The Land Race”, which is one of the score’s highlights. 

The score also features richly dramatic components, including the cue “Am I Beautiful”, which is highlighted by an especially effective piano rendition of the score’s central theme.  Another distinctive, quietly dramatic cue is “Inside the Mansion”, where Williams mixes tender strings with bell-like piano to create an almost dreamlike quality to the music, eventually leading into another tender piano rendition of the theme.  This cue then transitions into the more darkly-dramatic “Shannon is Shot”.

In addition to Williams’ music, the soundtrack album also contains the song “Book of Days”, written for the film and performed by Enya.  I admit that I tend to find that Enya’s songs all sound fairly interchangeable to me, although I generally find them pleasant enough.  I do like this song and it blends in fairly well with the score.  The song’s presentation on the album is between the film’s finale music and Williams’ end credits suite, but it doesn’t really feel out of place.

The soundtrack album to Far and Away isn’t a complete presentation of the score and isn’t entirely chronological, but it perhaps one of the best arguments out there in favor of an album arrangement over a complete and chronological release.  The listening experience on the album (which runs just under an hour and ten minutes) is simply superb, with expertly edited cues and transitions. While I would likely purchase an expanded release, I am also pretty sure that I would both retain and still frequently play the original album.

Far from Heaven (Elmer Bernstein, 2002): Far from Heaven has the bittersweet distinction of carrying Elmer Bernstein’s final score for a feature film.  The film was designed to closely resemble a 1950s melodrama, meaning that Bernstein ended his career with a score that was designed to resemble the style he employed with his earliest scores.  It is a fitting and distinguished ending to an impressive career.

As expected with its Golden Age roots, the score is orchestral with a lushly melodic approach.  Piano greatly dominates, with the score’s main theme introduced via solo piano in the opening cue, “Autumn In Connecticut”.  The full orchestra joins in later in the cue, bringing an attention-grabbing fullness to the presentation.

For some cues, Bernstein focuses on a smaller range of instruments, particularly piano and solo strings, in order to give the score a subtlety jazzy feel at times.  The cue “Prowl” is a good example of this, with music that is actually fairly evocative of the cue’s title.  A solo saxophone features prominently in the cue “Cathy and Raymond Dance”, another strongly jazz-influenced piece.  This aspect of the score stands out next to the more lush style of the rest of the music, and does lend it a certain period authenticity.

While I find the score to be a very pleasant one that works well as a bookend to Bernstein’s career, this is a case where I haven’t seen the film itself and feel that to be something of a disadvantage to the evaluation of the score.  The period nature of the score leads me to expect a lot of significance to how well it actually works in the context of the film.  This is a movie I probably should try to see at some point in order to better understand what Bernstein accomplished.

Farewell My Lovely (David Shire, 1975): David Shire composed a very melodic, jazz-oriented score for this mid-70s Philip Marlowe detective film.  The score is largely horn and piano centric, built around a distinctive principal melody, introduced in the soundtrack’s opening cue and incorporated liberally throughout the rest of the score. 

Shire also provides some darker suspense cues as well as some lively action music, both of which are particularly well-represented in the cue “Amthor’s Place”, one of the score’s highlights.  The score also includes some more song-like melodies, including the full-borne, swing-style  “Mrs. Floridian Takes the Full Count” and the lively, jazzy “Three Mile Limited”, which has some great solo horn playing.

An original soundtrack LP was issued at the time of the film’s original release.  The album was arranged by Shire into a very pleasing listening experience, which Film Score Monthly retained for their 2002 CD release, which also added one additional, previously-unreleased cue.  Due to the relatively short (about 33 minutes) running time of the score, it is paired on the CD with Shire’s score to Monkey Shines.

The Fastest Gun Alive (André Previn, 1956): While André Previn is very well known as a composer, conductor, and songwriter, his compositions for film during the 1950s and 1960s are not as widely familiar.  For the western The Fastest Gun Alive, Previn provided a robust and exciting action score.

The soundtrack opens with a “Main Title” cue that is dominated by majestic brassy fanfares lending the theme a nobly heroic quality.  These form a main theme that dominates much of the score, sometimes presented in brass but also very effectively in string arrangements.  The score also features a highly-melodic, string-focused love theme.  Both themes have an Americana quality that fits well with the western setting.

Film Score Monthly released the score on CD in 2004, paired with Previn’s score to House of Numbers.

Father of the Bride (Alan Silvestri, 1991): While Alan Silvestri is best known for big action-adventure scores, he has also contributed a number of strong and effective scores in the comedy genre.  One of the best of these was for the Steve Martin re-make of the classic romantic comedy, Father of the Bride.

The score is highly melodic, with a mix of grand, ceremonial themes, more tender, emotional segments, as well as some lively comic scoring.  For the score’s most prominent theme, introduced right at the beginning in the “Main Title” cue, Silvestri deftly incorporates the initial fanfare from Mendelssohn’s familiar wedding march, transitioning into a sweeping original melody.  This theme serves as the main emotional anchor to the score, reappearing in more tender arrangements in cues such as “Annie Asleep”.  The excerpts from Mendelssohn’s march also appear pretty regularly in the score, particularly towards the later part of the film as the action turns to the wedding itself.

While the main theme has a classic orchestral sound, the score also includes a number of more pop and jazz oriented cues, often harking back to the electronic scores that dominated the earliest part of Silvestri’s career.  Cues such as “Drive to Brunch” and “Snooping Around” prominently feature a pop styling while “Basketball Kiss” has a jazz style, including a solo saxophone.

The soundtrack album only features about 20 minutes of Silvestri’s score, with the rest of the short (under 30 minutes) album filled out by two performances of the Jerome Kern standard “The Way You Look Tonight” performed by Steve Tyrell (the song is prominently featured in the film) as well as a performance of Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon”.

Father of the Bride Part II (Alan Silvestri, 1995): The sequel to the 1991 version of Father of the Bride received a longer soundtrack album than its predecessor, but the album once again only featured a little over 20 minutes of Alan Silvestri’s score. 

The rest of the album is filled in with another Steve Tyrell performance of “The Way You Look Tonight” (a different arrangement than the versions on the first soundtrack) as well as Tyrell performing “Give Me the Simple Life” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street”.  The album also has familiar recordings of “At Last” by Etta James and “When the Saints Go Marching In” by Fats Domino.

Silvestri’s score revisits the main theme from the original film and introduces a major new “baby” theme, which dominates much of the new material.  Although he wisely avoids the Mendelssohn excerpts (other than briefly in the end credits suite), which wouldn’t really make sense in the context of the second film, serving a similar purpose in this score are very brief bits of Brahms’ lullaby, which fits the sequel’s baby-focused plot. 

At least on the album, the score’s focus is much more on the tender, melodic aspects of the original and less on the pop or jazzy elements, although those aren’t completely absent from the sequel.  Particularly nice is a simple piano melody that is prominently featured during the mid-section of the cue “George Walks”, transitioning into a more fanfare oriented conclusion.

One stand-out score cue is “Remembering Annie (Basketball Montage)”, which features a wordless vocal rendition of the score’s most prominent new theme, performed by musicians Phillip Ingram and Randy Waldman.  It has a wistfully nostalgic tone and is an interesting alternate take on Silvestri’s melody.

Both of the Father of the Bride scores are good ones and the available soundtrack albums are fairly satisfying releases, despite their fairly short length.  I’m not really sure if there would be enough substantially different music in the films to justify expanded releases, although it might make sense to at least repackage the two scores on a single release.

F/X (Bill Conti, 1986): I remember really liking this mid-80s thriller about a special effects artist that gets caught up in real life intrigue, but I also admit that I don’t really remember very much about it.  While Varese Sarabande released a soundtrack LP at the time of the film’s release, I never bought it and the score didn’t particularly stick with me after seeing the film.  As a result, I ended up essentially re-discovering this score with the 2007 Varese Sarabande CD Club release.

Bill Conti provides a moody, vaguely noir-inspired mixed orchestral and electronic score with several melodic main themes as well as fair amount of suspenseful, string-dominated music.  The "Main Title" cue actually opens with a bit of suspense-driven piano and string music before shifting into a brassy, percussive fanfare.  About a minute and a half in, it then transitions into the score’s main theme, which features a string melody overlaid with a repetitive piano motif.

The more melodic aspect of the score first comes into play in the cue "Rollie’s Diversion", which is primarily a piano-driven version of the main theme, although with some strings joining in towards the latter half of the cue.  The theme continues to provide a melodic line throughout the score, although the darker, more-suspenseful music tends to dominate the soundtrack.  Conti does occasionally provide some of the brassy, fanfare type music that is often his trademark.  In addition to the brief fanfare during the main title, the cue "No Loose Ends" also is a very brassy, action-oriented cue and is very recognizably Conti.  Horns are used more sparingly here than in most of Conti’s scores, but that just tends to make them a bit more impacting when they do appear.

The score is primarily orchestral, but Conti does make sparing use of electronics, such as in the cue "The Wrong Hit".  The electronic elements are typically used to ratchet up the suspense a bit.  Another change of pace comes with an extended militaristic drum solo during the late cue "Lipton’s Last Ride".

Fahrenheit 451 (Bernard Herrmann, 1966): The CD that I have of this classic Bernard Herrmann score is not actually the original soundtrack recording.  Instead, it is an excellent re-recording of the score by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, conducted by William Stromberg.  This re-recording was released by Tribute Film Classics in late 2007 and also includes music from Herrman’s score to the "Twilight Zone" TV episode entitled "Walking Distance".  The music from Fahrenheit 451 runs a little over an hour in length and is billed as being complete.

Herrmann’s score uses an interesting mix of fairly light-touch, vaguely fantasy-inspired melodies along with some darker, fairly oppressive music.  The lighter portions are dominated by piano as well as frequent use of xylophone and harp.  The darker material features aggressive, lower-register strings as well as some slower, vaguely-sad melodies.  The two styles of music are often presented side-by-side, reflecting Ray Bradbury’s story’s depiction of a society that is characterized by a surface happiness masking an underlying oppression.

There are some faster paced, action-oriented cues as well.  Herrmann makes especially effective use of very fast paced violins in these segments of the score.  Really good examples of this aspect of the score can be found in the cues "Fire Alarm" and "The Hose".  Occasional bits of xylophone and harp overlaying the strings add an especially appealing bit of color to these cues.  Herrmann also includes some emotional, melodic material, particularly in the later part of the score.  "The Reading" is a particularly emotional cue.

The score is presented as 47, generally very short cues.  The longest cues run a little over 3 minutes while many are well below a minute in length.  Despite this, the score does not seem choppy or disjointed.  The music is arranged so that the cues typically flow cleanly into one another, making for a very effective listening experience.  The large number of cues mainly makes it very easy to connect each bit of music directly to the appropriate part of the film.

Family Plot (John Williams, 1976): Family Plot is an historically significant film as it was the final movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  It is also significant to movie score fans as the score was written by John Williams, the first and only collaborator between arguably the most popular director of the movies’ golden age and arguably the most popular film composer of the modern age.  This collaboration also came at the start of Williams’ rise to fame, sandwiched between his scores for Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977.  Despite this pedigree, surprisingly the score to Family Plot remained unavailable (except for short excerpts on a few compilation albums) until it was released by the Varese Sarabande CD Club in late 2010.

The score is very recognizably in Williams’ distinctive style.  The album opens with a cue called "The First Séance", which has a mystical sound complete with choir.  It is reminiscent of some of the music that Williams would provide for Close Encounters of the Third Kind a year later and, especially, themes he would write years later for Empire of the Sun and A.I., although those later scores certainly present this style in a more serious light than here.  Williams provides a fairly simple, but distinctive main theme melody which is prominently presented in the second cue,  "Blanche’s Challenge", prominently featuring both harpsichord and synthesizer in order to give it an unusual flavor.

The entire score has a whimsical, offbeat nature to it, although intermixed with Williams usual strong melodies and distinctive brass and strings.  Both the harpsichord and a number of synthesizer elements help to give it this tone.  Williams also occasionally incorporates some dark, crashing piano to further provide a little bit of thematic darkness to the score.  These aspects of the score pre-shadow a style that the composer would more fully develop a decade later with The Witches of Eastwick.

One thing that is interesting about Williams’ one and only score for Hitchcock is that there is really no attempt to really even give a nod to Bernard Herrmann’s iconic scores for Hitchcock’s earlier classics. Just two years later, Williams would jump pretty much full force into his take on that style with his score to Brian DePalma’s The Fury, but the Family Plot score remains much more distinctively Williams’ style.

The CD ends with two bonus tracks.  The first is "Family Plot Theme", which is a pop-instrumental variation on the film’s primary theme.  This was created for a planned soundtrack album that was never released back in 1976.  It definitely has a 70s pop feel to it, but is a reasonably good presentation of the main melody and not an unwelcome addition to the album.  The last cue is a source music cue entitled "The Stonecutter" and it has a jazz/disco style that was very much of its time.  It is fun to hear this somewhat different side of Williams, although at 6 1/2 minutes the cue kind of wears out its welcome.

Varese Sarabande was, unfortunately, only able to locate masters of the score that were somewhat limited in quality.  The material is monaural, although the mixing makes a best effort to create a semi-stereo depth of field to the score.  The result is more flat sounding than other better preserved recordings from the era, although I do believe that they did the best they could with the elements available.  Still, I would consider this CD to be a must for any serious fans of Williams or film music in general.

Fantasia (Various, 1940): For his third animated feature (following Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio), Walt Disney shifted in a markedly experimental direction.  Fantasia used eight familiar works of classical music as accompaniment to animation in order to tell dialog-free stories via the melding of music and visuals.  The result was Disney’s first box-office failure, but one that has ultimately become highly appreciated due to its tremendous artistic merit.

To record the music for Fantasia, Disney teamed up with conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.  At the time, Stokowski was among the most popular classical conductors, with a style and personality that helped to bring a lot of public attention to the art of classical music.  Reportedly, he was very instrumental in convincing Disney to take on this project to begin with and was a major collaborator throughout.

As you would expect, the 2-CD soundtrack album to the film contains the recordings used in the film.  The pieces used in the film were Bach’s "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor", Tchaikovsky’s "The Nutcracker Suite",  Paul Dukas’ "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" (featuring Mickey Mouse in the film’s best known sequence), Stravinsky’s "The Rite of Spring", Beethoven’s Symphony Number 6 ("Pastoral"), Ponchielli’s "Dance of the Hours", Mussorgsky’s "A Night on Bald Mountain", and Schubert’s "Ave Maria".  Of course, some of these are presented as excerpts, particularly "Nutcracker" and Beethoven’s symphony.  The finale’s pairing of "A Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria" is probably the most striking arrangement for the film.

Certainly, other recordings of every one of these pieces are readily available.  In most cases, one or more recording of each is probably pretty likely to be in most substantial classical music collections.  My own collection contains other recordings of pretty much all of these as well.  The actual recordings from Fantasia certainly do have a personality of their own, though, making the soundtrack a worthwhile purchase for fans of the film.

One notable aspect of Fantasia was that it was the first major motion picture to be recorded in stereo sound.  A specially designed surround sound system called "Fantasound" was installed into theaters showing the film in its initial road show release.  These presentations were the very first time that audiences experienced the kind of dynamic, multi-channel sound that we come to expect in movie theaters today.

Because of this, the music was recorded with extremely active and prominent stereo effects, all of which are reflected on the soundtrack.  This can make the playback of the score a bit disconcerting, particularly through headphones, although it also can be pretty impressive on home surround sound systems.  These stereo effects are definitely a reason why some may prefer other recordings of these pieces, but they also provide the soundtrack an original personality.

In the early 1980s, Disney commissioned a new digital recording of the music under conductor Irwin Kostal.  At the time the original recordings were thought to have aged too badly for an acceptable restoration and Disney felt that they were better off doing a new recording.  This was never well received by purists and even general audiences seemed to have a bit of a sense that something was a bit off.  They reverted to the original recordings with the film’s next re-issue and all subsequent releases.  This re-recording was released on LP at the time of the film’s re-release in the early 1980s and was briefly available on CD in the early 90s. It is somewhat difficult to find now.

Fantasia 2000 (Various, 2000): Walt Disney’s original idea for Fantasia was to regularly update the film for re-issues, replacing some segments with new ones.  After the relatively poor reception of the original film, it took 60 years for a version of that vision to become a reality.  The follow up was first released with great fanfare as an Imax-exclusive on January 1, 2000, serving as Disney’s celebration of the new millennium.  The film featured seven new segments, plus a reprise of "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice."

The new pieces featured in the film were the opening to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Respighi’s "The Pines of Rome", Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue", Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2, the finale from Saint-Saens’ "Carnival of the Animals", Elgar’s "Pomp and Circumstances", and Stravinsky’s "Firebird Suite".  Most of the new segments were performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under conductor James Levine.  The one exception was "Rhapsody in Blue", which was performed by The Philharmonia Orchestra under Bruce Broughton and featuring soloist Ralph Grierson.

As with the soundtrack for the original film, the Fantasia 2000 soundtrack doesn’t contain any music that can’t be found elsewhere.  In fact, "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" is the exact same recording that is found on the original Fantasia soundtrack.  Still, these recordings are crisp and lively and are generally top-notch performances of an excellent selection of classical works.  Being newer recordings, these recordings do not have the showy stereophonic effects that were included in the original.  Even the mix on "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" has been toned down for this version.

Once again, some of the pieces are abbreviated versions of longer works, especially the Beethoven piece which is only the 3 minute introduction to the full symphony.  I certainly would recommend seeking out more complete versions of the works that are abbreviated here, but this is still a fine collection of music.  The original film’s limited popularity (even as its reputation has grown) was often thought to have at least something to do with its length.  As a result, Fantasia 2000 was designed to be a shorter film (by more than 1/2 hour) with each segment generally shorter as well.  The Beethoven segment is only 3 minutes long while the Saint-Saens is only 2 minutes.  This probably was a right decision, as the new film does have a faster pace and is somewhat easier to absorb in one sitting.

Another nod towards accessibility was the use of some selections that are very familiar even to those that otherwise aren’t overly interested in classical music.  This kind of applied with both "Nutcracker Suite" and Beethoven’s "Pastoral" symphony in the first film, but even those may not be as instantly familiar to most as the opening to Beethoven’s 5th, "Rhapsody in Blue", and "Pomp and Circumstances".  The last was an especially interesting choice, since it took a piece widely known in a specific context (graduation ceremonies) and adapted it to a new context (Noah’s Ark) in a generally impressive manner.

Disney released two different versions of the soundtrack CD, a standard version and a collector’s edition (shown above), which was exclusively available at The Disney Store.  The musical contents of both versions is identical, with the collector’s edition coming in fancier packaging.  Some may prefer the standard edition as it comes in a regular jewel case instead of the oddly folding, thin plastic cover used for the collector’s edition.

Fantastic 4 (John Ottman, 2005): John Ottman uses a traditional, predominantly orchestral and choral-based approach to scoring the financially successful but not especially well-regarded adaptation of the Fantastic 4 comic book series.  The result is a very bombastic, typically energetic score.

It is a style that is pretty obviously inspired by John Williams’ landmark Superman score, which Ottman would directly adapt for Superman Returns a year later.  While he obviously didn’t have direct access to Williams’ themes with this score, many of Ottman’s compositions here pretty closely resemble the original music that he would later contribute to the Superman sequel.

The soundtrack opens with a main title march that is rousing, although a bit darkly shaded.  Choral material is mixed in with the central brass and percussion, giving it a touch of added grandeur.  I don’t really find it to be an especially memorable theme, although I have a hard time placing exactly why that is.  It could be that it is just a bit too derivative or it could come from the lack of a memorable film to associate it with.

The score is dominated by very bombastic action scoring, although Ottman does provide a few quieter, nicely-melodic moments.  The main theme of this type is introduced right after the main title in the second cue “Cosmic Storm” and is also particularly well used in the early part of “Changing”.  Some more playful bits figure occasionally, such as in the cue “Unlikely Saviors”.  Even here, the Williams’ influence is pretty evident with some obvious stylistic nods to the theme for Ned Beatty’s Superman character.

The Varese Sarabande soundtrack album for the film runs about 45 minutes and is probably a sufficient representation of this score.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (John Ottman, 2007): The soundtrack to the sequel to Fantastic 4 immediately opens with the “Silver Surfer Theme”, the most prominent new theme introduced in the sequel.  This theme is stylistically very much in keeping with the themes from the first film, with a mix of some march-like bombast with stately, grandiose brass and string melodies.  Its immediate introduction in a concert arrangement right at the start of the CD works well as a quick intro to the most important new element to this score.

The rest of the score largely sounds like an extension of the first film’s score, although electronic elements did seem a bit more prominent this time in cues such as “Chasing the Surfer”.  I generally consider musical consistency in a sequel to be a positive, although this score doesn’t really feel like it expands the material all that much.

I think part of the problem here is that Ottman took a more repetitive approach to the music this time.  There isn’t as much thematic variation, with the new Silver Surfer theme and the main Fantastic 4 theme as the only real stand-outs among a lot of fairly anonymous action scoring.  The new theme is certainly nice, but otherwise there really isn’t much to latch onto with this score.

Executive Decision (Jerry Goldsmith, 1987): The score to the Kurt Russell/Steven Seagal action thriller Executive Decision is not one of Jerry Goldsmith’s more memorable efforts from the late 1980s.  It certainly isn’t helped by the Varese Sarabande soundtrack CD’s exceptionally abbreviated 30 minute running time, something all to common at the time due to union re-use fees.

The score certainly isn’t bad, though, even if it doesn’t stand with his best work. As was commonly the case for Goldsmith’s action music late in his career, the score is orchestral, but with a pretty substantial assist from synthesizer elements.  Brass and percussion are highly dominant in the score, underlining the military focus of the film.  In these ways, the score somewhat resembles Goldsmith’s much more familiar Air Force One score, but without that score’s much more memorable main theme.

The Executive Decision score is certainly a competent effort on Goldsmith’s part and, perhaps, would be better served if an expanded soundtrack album were ever released.  With only the abbreviated presentation available, though, it seems like a minor and mostly forgettable effort.

Explorers (Jerry Goldsmith, 1985): Jerry Goldsmith’s score to Joe Dante’s Explorers is high on my list of scores that I would most like to receive an expanded re-issue on CD.  The existing Varese Sarabande soundtrack CD (a port of the old LP release) only contains a little over 30 minutes of Goldsmith’s score, as well as a handful of pop songs.  It is also fairly rare and expensive to obtain.  What is there is quite wonderful, though, and I’d absolutely love to have much more of the score on CD.

The score’s infectious main theme is established in the album’s opening cue, entitled “The Construction”.  It opens with a rhythmic, synth-driven baseline that it then overlaid with a distinctive, playful melody.  Both of these components of the main theme are frequently revisited throughout the score, sometimes separately and sometimes together.  The score is primarily synthesized, helping to bring a bit of an otherworldly quality to what is still a largely melodic presentation.  This is one of the best of Goldsmith’s synth-dominated scores.

The entire score has a strong sense of wonder as well as a frequent romantic quality to it.  One of the strongest cues is the soaring “First Flight”, which is built around the main theme, but with slow builds to crescendos, representing the sense of excitement and adventure central to the accompanying scene in the film.

The film takes a very quirky turn towards the end, which is heavily reflected in the last couple score cues on the CD.  The score becomes much more blatantly electronic, with the otherworldly tone moving fully into the forefront.  These portions of the final two cues take on a bouncy, kind of swing-style that is both unusual and exceptionally appealing.  Goldsmith very effectively interweaves this with the more melodic style that played in the earlier part of the score, bringing these two aspects of the story together in a way that Dante was not otherwise entirely able to do in the film itself.

The soundtrack CD ends with three pop/rock songs that were used as incidental music in the film.  These are “All Around the World” by Robert Palmer, “Less Than Perfect” by Red 7 and “This Boy Needs to Rock” by Night Ranger.  The original LP release interspersed these cues with the score cues, but Varese Sarabande wisely grouped them at the end for the CD version.  All three are pretty decent songs, in my opinion, but they are very easily skipped if you want to hear score only.

The Extra Man (Klaus Badelt, 2010): On his website, composer Klaus Badelt has taken the unusual step of offering “name your price” lossless digital downloads of several of his more obscure scores.  Basically this means that you can download the entire soundtrack album and pay as much or as little (or even nothing) as you wish.  This is an intriguing way to get some exposure for scores that otherwise probably wouldn’t be widely heard.

The Extra Man score may come as something of a surprise to anyone that is only familiar with Badelt’s contemporary-style action scoring (often in collaboration with Hans Zimmer’s stable of composers)  for films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.  Instead, this is a gentle, melodic classically-styled score with a strong Italian ethnic flavor.  Violins and piano tend to dominate the score.  Accordion and xylophone are  also featured on a number of cues, providing a lot of ethnic flavoring.

There is a little bit of contemporary, pop styling that peeks through alongside the more old-fashioned ethnic material.  The cues “Opera Entrance” and “Lagerfeld to Gallery” are particularly sharp examples of this.  The blend of old-world ethnicity and more contemporary styles (including occasional bits of synth) is an interesting mix.

One slight down side to the album presentation of the material is the decision to present the music primarily in very short cues.  Many are less than a minute and only one cue, “Homeless Montage”, exceeds 2 minutes.  This gives the album something of a choppy sound and I think the music would have been better served by assembling some longer suites.

With the unusual “name your price” approach, this is a very low risk score to obtain and is definitely worth checking out.

Extreme Close-Up (James Horner, 1990): Intrada released this now sold-out limited edition CD of James Horner’s score to a relatively obscure early 1990s TV movie.  It is a very low-key score and an interesting change of pace from the generally bigger scale, more action-oriented scores that dominate Horner’s career.

The soundtrack opens with a title theme that is performed on solo piano (possibly actually an electronic keyboard).  The entire score is dominated by piano/keyboard, although with occasional string support as well.  The score is very atmospheric, with a very sensitive and non-overbearing quality, although admittedly it is also fairly downbeat.  The material is largely non-thematic, instead going more for a mood-driven approach.

While this is unquestionably a minor effort compared to Horner’s many better known scores from that time period (and beyond), it still is an interesting opportunity to hear a less often heard side of the composer’s style.  I think this is a CD that is worthwhile to seek out, particularly for Horner’s fans.

Extreme Measures (Danny Elfman, 1996): The soundtrack CD for Danny Elfman’s Extreme Measures is another of the 30-minute abridged CD releases that Varese Sarabande frequently put out during that time period due to the high re-use fees charged by the musician’s union.  Typical of these releases, the CD gives a taste of the score, although feels fairly incomplete.

While Elfman’s scoring projects in the mid-90s still were dominated by his trademark quirky fantasy and action films, he was also increasingly taking on more straightforward dramatic projects.  Extreme Measures is one of those, although it mixes in more of Elfman’s more offbeat conventions than is often found in his dramatic scores.  This includes the use of wordless vocals as a rhythmic instrument or, as in the case of the cue “Cokie”, to introduce an ethereal element.

The score is dominated by strings and piano, with a melodic main theme that is introduced right at the beginning of the “Main Title” cue.  The theme, like much of the rest of the score, has a dark quality to it.  The darkness in this case tends to be more on the ominous suspense side, rather than the macabre darkness found in many of Elfman’s better known scores.

Extreme Prejudice (Jerry Goldsmith, 1987): This little-remembered late 80s action film from director John Milius featured a strong, synthesizer-driven score by Jerry Goldsmith.  It is pretty reflective of the composer’s approach to action scoring in that time period, with its mix of driving bass rhythms anchored in a melodic main theme.

While the score is dominated by the electronic elements, Goldsmith does use an orchestra as well, although it is mainly the horn section that makes a significant impression here. The core melodic and percussion components are primarily synthesized and strings are largely kept in the background to the degree that it is often difficult to distinguish them from the synthesized melodic material.  The film is essentially a western, which makes this a somewhat unusual approach.

The opening “Arrivals/Main Title” cue is pretty hard driving and percussive, setting the tone for the Goldsmith’s approach to the action scoring.  The fairly simple but melodic main theme is introduced here, mainly as a synthesized overlay presented over the top of the percussion.  The most recent CD release of the soundtrack opens with an unused trailer score, which is actually the most complete and fully-developed presentation of that main theme until the end credits suite that closes the album.

The more melodic aspect of the score comes into focus during the second cue, “Cash”, which opens with moody, semi-romantic melodic material, still dominated by electronics.  This is a lengthy cue that eventually adds in some percussion, particularly electronic rhythmic clicking (for lack of a better descriptive term) that periodically is isolated from the melodic material.  The main theme does make another appearance here, including a distinctive horn presentation.

The rest of the score continues in a similar style, with the harder-driving, percussive music generally making the strongest impression.  In particular, the lengthy multi-part cues “The Bank (Pts 1, 2 & 3)” and “The Bank (Pt 4.) provide an especially strong showpiece for Goldsmith’s electronic action scoring.  In the late cue “Fighting and Dying”, the score takes a bit of a surreal turn, with some of the electronics shifting closer to sound effects.  This is kind of jarring, but thankfully remains infrequent in the score.

The soundtrack was originally released by Intrada on LP and CD at the time of the film’s original release.  This program had a pretty generous (for the time) 50 minute running time.  In 2005, La La Land released an expanded CD version, which added about 15 minutes of additional material, including Goldsmith’s logo music for Carolco, the film’s production company. This was not a limited edition and is still readily available.

F.I.S.T. (Bill Conti, 1978): This action film was Sylvester Stallone’s first movie after his breakthrough success with Rocky and it re-teamed him with Bill Conti, who scored that previous blockbuster.  For the film, Conti provided a brass-heavy orchestral score with a very rousing, militaristic main theme, which is introduced fully developed in the “Main Title” cue.  Another full presentation has a strong impact in the cue “Convention and Election”, where it follows an exciting trumpet fanfare.

The score is dominated by action cues heavy on brass and percussion.  Blaring trumpets dominate action cues such as “Torching the Tent” and “The Big Strike” while a solo French horn is used very effectively in “My Friend Abe”.  Strings are most noticeable in the cue “Johnny Goes to Washington”, where they join in with the brass to create a majestic sound.  Strings also are surprisingly dominant in the end title suite.

A soundtrack LP issued at the time of the film’s release featured a relatively short 30 minute album presentation of the score.  In 2005, Varese Sarabande released a limited edition CD (now sold out) of the same LP program coupled with another 1978 Conti score, “Slow Dancing In the Big City”.

The Enemy Below (Leigh Harline, 1957): This golden age action score is highlighted by a stirringly militaristic and melodic main theme, dominated by trombone and other prominent brass instruments.  It is a thrilling attention-grabbing theme that establishes the composer’s very dynamic action approach to the score.  This theme is particularly dominant in this score, repeating frequently, but with many variations in orchestration and pacing.

As is frequently typical with this type of action score, there are some darker, more suspense-oriented passages as well.  One of the earliest in the score is the cue “Charting Tables”, which tends to use slower pacing and lower brass to present a darker mood, while still remaining centered around the melody of the primary theme.  Action is definitely central to the score, though, with plenty of fast paced action cues, such as “Abandon Ship”, which contains some aggressive piano underlying the expected brass.

The score ends on a somewhat surprising note with a gently melodic end title cue, which is mainly string oriented.  Coming right after some much more fast paced action music, this cue provides a pretty effective winding down of the score.  While much of this cue is somewhat disconnected from the other parts of the score, it does work up to a bold, fanfare-style statement of the main theme as an ending flourish.

Intrada’s limited edition CD release is now sold out at their site and rare enough that I couldn’t even find an Amazon link.  It contains a little over 40 minutes of Harline’s score, plus another 8 minutes of bonus cues of source music.  The bonus cues include a number of vocals by Theodore Bikel, a military band march, and various “radar blips” that were composed by Harline essentially for sound effects.

Enterprise (Dennis McCarthy, 2002): The most recent (to date) “Star Trek” TV series mostly inherited the same musical style that was established with “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and continued through each of the subsequent TV series.  It was not surprising that Dennis McCarthy, one of the most frequent composers on the previous series, was brought in to score the pilot as well as other later episodes of the series.

One strange, and controversial, choice that was made by the series’ producers was to deviate from the usual orchestral main title themes and instead use a pop/rock song.  Even stranger was the decision to use a re-worked version of “Faith of the Heart”, which was written by Diane Warren and performed by Rod Stewart for the movie Patch Adams. 

The version of the song used for “Enterprise” was re-titled “Where My Heart Will Take Me” and performed by Russell Watson, essentially copying Stewart’s rough voiced style.  While this decision was, I suppose, fairly bold, it wasn’t really a good one.  The song felt terribly out of place over the series’ nostalgic opening title sequence (which featured visuals giving the history of space exploration) and it certainly didn’t fit with the musical approach used for the actual episode scoring.

The series was never a big hit (it only lasted 4 seasons, compared to 7 each for the previous three series) and only one soundtrack CD, containing the pilot score, has been released so far.  The CD also contains two versions of Russell Watson’s performance of “Where My Heart Will Take Me”, a longer version that opens the CD and the shorter version used on the show, which closes the disc.

McCarthy provides a primary theme that is incorporated frequently into the episode score.  The theme is dominated by majestic brass along with some soaring strings, which nicely evokes flight while also presenting a bit of a nostalgic flavor.  This theme was originally intended to be the opening title theme and the full arrangement written for that purpose is presented on the CD as “Archer’s Theme”.

As with any “Star Trek” incarnation, the show provided opportunities for a mix of dramatic, somewhat-cerebral scoring as well as some faster, more percussive action music, such as “Klingon Chase-Shotgunned” or “Phaser Fight” and darker suspense cues as in “Morph-o-Mania”.  The action cues, in particular, tend to have quite a few synth elements to supplement the otherwise orchestral presentation.

ER (Marty Davich, James Newton Howard, 1996): NBC’s medical drama “ER” was an enormous hit for the network and something of a ground-breaker when it came to its pacing and style.  The series distinctive synthesizer-driven musical scoring was a key stylistic component of the series.

The series’ opening title theme and the pilot episode score were written by James Newton Howard.  After that, Marty Davich took over as the series’ composer, scoring all of the subsequent episodes of the show’s 15 season run.  While Davich used Newton Howard’s theme as a starting point, it is definitely reasonable to give Davich the bulk of the credit for the show’s overall musical identity.

The main theme is dominated by a synthesizer background that is designed to be evocative of ambulance sirens, while still remaining squarely in the realm of music rather than sound effects.  Newton Howard then layers on a strong melody that plays over the ever-present synths.  The theme includes a solo saxophone that adds a jazzy component as well.  Much like the series itself, it is a busy and highly kinetic theme that somehow manages to stay under control.

Davich’s episode scores are primarily electronic, with very percussive scoring for the series’ many fast-paced, emergency sequences.  The particularly action-oriented episode “Hell and High Water” is represented on the CD with four different cues, providing perhaps the strongest overview of Davich’s approach to action scenes.

More melodic scoring, often dominated by keyboard, is used for the character-driven segments, such as a plaintive, jazzy horn melody in the cue “Goodbye Baby Susie” and a piano-driven romantic theme as heard in “Doug and Carol”.  This more emotional type of scoring is fairly prominent on the CD, although it is reasonable to say the action-oriented scoring was probably more dominant on the series.

The only available soundtrack release for the series came out in 1996 and featured music from the series’ first two seasons.  The album opens with an extended version of Newton Howard’s theme music, with the arrangement actually used in the series at the end of the disc.  Davich’s 12 score cues come from eight different episodes.

The CD also includes 3 songs: “Healing Hands” by Marc Cohn, “Reasons for Living” by Duncan Sheik, and Mike Finnegan’s arrangement of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”.

Eragon (Patrick Doyle, 2006): One of the best ways to add a touch of high-brow sophistication to pretty much any movie is to hire Patrick Doyle to write the score.  Doyle’s score for the film adaptation of the popular fantasy novel Eragon is an especially good example of this.  The film wasn’t particularly well received (I haven’t actually seen it), but Doyle provided an exciting and sophisticated, classically-themed score that is a real thrill to listen to on CD.

The album opens with a stirring and soaring title cue that establishes the score’s main theme.  This cue features Doyle’s usual mix of very dynamic strings with regal, extremely well-placed brass.  A rich, sharply-defined central melody is established with this cue and that melody then remains as a central anchor for the remainder of the score.  Doyle does a good job of continuing to develop this melody over the course of the score, with well matched secondary themes.

This is not a subtle score, by any means.  Doyle maintains a big, bold sound throughout.  Strings and brass are overwhelmingly dominant here and many of the cues are very action-oriented, although always with a vividly strong sense of melody.  Choral elements are added effectively in some cues, such “Fortune Teller”.  Cues often evoke a sense of flight, particularly through the powerful use of strings.  Battle music is best represented in the lengthy cue “Battle for Varden”, which proves to be one of the score’s highlights.

Some may actually find Doyle’s score a bit over-the-top, but I admit that I tend to respond very positively to this type of bold scoring, at least when listening to it separated from the film.  The running time of the score is about 47 minutes, which is probably about right for this one.  It might have started to wear out its welcome at a much longer running time.

In addition to the score, the album ends with two vocal songs: “Keep Holding On” by Avril Lavigne and “Once In Every Lifetime”, performed by Jem.  The Lavigne song was an attempt to have a hit single and did get some radio airplay.  The Jem song was co-written by Doyle and is based around the melody of his main theme.

Eraser (Alan Silvestri, 1996): Alan Silvestri supplies one of his darker, more menacing scores for the Arnold Schwarzenegger action thriller Eraser.  La La Land Record’s limited edition CD release of the score provides a complete presentation.

The album opens with an unused opening title cue that establishes the score’s fairly dark tone.  This initial cue actually brings to mind Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien score in its moody, atmospheric sense of dread.  Silvestri then establishes the score’s main theme in the second cue “Need a Lift”.  This theme has a brassy, percussive, action-centric pace while still having low tones that maintain the darker tone.

The second prominent theme to the score is a more melodic, string-focused darkly romantic theme that figures prominently in the more character-oriented portions of the score.  Once again, Jerry Goldsmith seems to have had some influence on Silvestri’s approach to this score, as this theme resembles some of Goldsmith’s similarly dark romantic themes, particularly his main theme to Basic Instinct.  Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Silvestri copied Goldsmith’s themes.  I just couldn’t help but notice some stylistic similarities.

Silvestri uses a rock-infused, synthesizer driven approach for some of the action music as heard first in the third cue, “You’ve Been Erased”.  At times, this includes some electric guitar and electric drum effects, such as in the cue “It’s a Jungle”.  This aspect of the score gives it a pretty modern sound that contrasts interestingly with the orchestral material.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (Jerry Goldsmith, 1971): After creating the highly acclaimed score for the original Planet of the Apes, Jerry Goldsmith returned to the series only one time, for the third movie in the series, Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

While Goldsmith does revisit some of the themes from the original score, the presentation is often lighter, frequently with a 70s pop sensibility.  The score is also surprisingly melodic much of the time, in pretty stark contrast to the famously atonal approach taken with the original.  The “Main Title” cue immediately establishes this change of pace by presenting a pop-styled variation on Goldsmith’s original theme, this time with steel guitar as a key instrument.  Cues such as “Shopping Spree” have a romantic side, in a pop instrumental way.

That isn’t to say that the percussive, atonal approach that Goldsmith took with the first film is completely absent here.  Darker cues such as “A Little History” and “Interrogation” are very much in line with the approach used in the first score.  The action cues also continue the highly percussion-focused style.

For a long time, the best available music from Escape from the Planet of the Apes available on album was a 16 1/2 minute suite included on Varese Sarabande’s release of the original Planet of the Apes score.  While this suite covered the highlights and was probably a sufficient representation for many listeners, an expanded stand-alone release was finally put out as part of Varese Sarabande’s CD Club series in 2009.  This CD still only runs a little under a half an hour, but is complete as the film did not contain a lot of music.  This 3000 copy limited edition is, somewhat surprisingly, still readily available.

Ever After: A Cinderella Story (George Fenton, 1998): I was very surprised by how much I enjoyed Andy Tennant’s live action, non-fantasy variation on the Cinderella story starring Drew Barrymore.  I found the film to be charming and romantic.  George Fenton’s lush score, the first of several collaboration with director Tennant, contributed greatly to the film’s success.

At the heart of this score is a charmingly melodic main theme for strings.  It is a memorable and infectious theme that aptly represents the film’s strongly romantic qualities.  The theme is introduced during the “Main Title” cue and used frequently throughout the score, generally to underscore the more romantic parts of the story.  It is occasionally overlaid with some horns and piano to give the theme a bit more richness in some of its orchestrations.

The score overall has an interestingly whimsical quality, pretty effectively reflecting the film’s somewhat precarious mix of a medieval period setting with more contemporary characterizations and plotting.    Gentle woodwinds and pipes are well used occasionally to emphasize the period setting, such as in the cue “Homecoming”.  Another interesting stand-out cue is “The Royal Wedding”, a nicely-written, religious choral piece.

While lush strings tend to dominate the score, Fenton also uses some regal brass fanfares effectively as well, such as during the lively cue “The Girls, the Prince, and the Painting”.  A particularly effective fanfare opens “Danielle’s Wings”, signaling her arrival at the ball.  The brass also plays well in the closing “Happily Ever After” cue.

At the time of the film’s release, London Records released a soundtrack CD containing nearly an hour of score from the film.  The album closes with the end credits pop song “Put Your Arms Around Me”, performed by a group named Texas.  It has a kind of new-age style to it.  It isn’t a bad song, although it doesn’t fit exceptionally well with the score and I would have preferred an orchestral end title suite.

Evita (Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, 1996): From the moment it was announced, the film version of Evita was controversial, mainly due to the casting choices.  The selection of Madonna and Antonio Banderas to play the roles made famous by Patty Lapone and Mandy Patinkin on Broadway pretty clearly seemed like casting for celebrity.  Looking back with some distance from the controversy, it is now easy for me to say that both did credible jobs in the role.  If you only want to own one recording of Evita, definitely get the Lapone/Patinkin cast album, but I do consider the movie soundtrack a valuable alternate presentation with merits of its own.

Madonna’s performance in Dick Tracy had previously shown that she was vocally capable of handling Broadway-style songs, but the biggest doubt was whether or not she could handle the vocal acting required for the role of Eva Peron.  For the most part she does fine with it, although she definitely doesn’t bring the emotional range to it that Lapone did.

She handles the songs well vocally, but doesn’t quite bring the full level of emotion required for some of the songs.  This was most evident in “Another Suitcase In Another Hall”, a song that was transferred to Eva (instead of Juan Peron’s mistress) in the film version in order to give Madonna another solo.  The song had much more of an edge in the Broadway version.  She does much better with the musical’s most famous song, “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”, which is a sung speech.

Banderas was much more of a surprise.  His take on the character is very different than Patinkin’s, but works rather well.  The combination of his fairly thick (and not suppressed) accent and his somewhat rough vocals brings a very raw edge to the character that definitely contrasts with Patinkin’s more slickly sarcastic version.  His style works particularly well with the rock-oriented “The Lady’s Got Potential”.  He certainly does not come close to Patinkin’s vocal range (who does?), but he gives an interesting, and generally effective, performance.

The casting for the third lead, the role of Juan Peron, was much less controversial.  Veteran Broadway star Jonathan Pryce was cast in the role and was definitely a good choice.  He has a much less showy role than the other two leads, but it still is a nuanced role that calls for a mix of bemusement, calculation, and subtle nervousness.  Pryce has a unique vocal style that manages to convey this range of emotions very well.

The 2-disc soundtrack contains pretty much the entire audio track of the film (essentially all the dialog is sung).  The film included pretty much all the music from the Broadway show, plus one new song that was written specifically for the movie.  The new song, “You Must Love Me”, gives Madonna one final solo ballad very late in the film.  It isn’t unusual for a new song to be written for film adaptations of stage musicals in order to qualify for an Academy Award.  In this case, the song works well in the film and did win the Oscar for that year.

The Egyptian (Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, 1954): The Egyptian is one of the most important scores of its era.  The score was a collaboration between two of the true giants of Golden Age film scoring, Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann, working together on a large-scale historical epic.  The score was a true collaboration with each composer composing key segments of the score, but with shared themes and effective blending of both composers’ styles.

While a few re-recordings were available, the original recordings were long thought to be destroyed, until Film Score Monthly obtained access to preserved stereo tapes in 2001, allowing them to release a 72 minute limited edition CD (still available) containing all the surviving portion of the score.  It isn’t complete, but it is does cover the most important portions of the score.

As you would expect, this is a true epic score with dynamic action music, intimate romantic themes, and pretty much everything in-between.  The score features a full orchestra and chorus, giving it a fittingly large scale.  For the most part, the composers tend to handle the parts of the score that are most appropriate to their styles.  Herrmann was often most comfortable with darker, more brooding music and that is on display here in cues such as “The House of the Dead/The Burial”.  His talent for thrilling, fast paced action scoring is present as well, particularly in the exciting “The Chariot Ride/Pursuit” and the frantically stark cue “The Homecoming”.

Newman’s contribution tends to focus more on the romantic side as well as the score’s sense of nobility.  While Herrmann’s segments often tended to emphasize brass and percussion, Newman’s is dominated by lush strings and gentle woodwinds.  This aspect of the score is particularly well represented in the lengthy (7 minutes plus) cue “Valley of the Kings”.  Newman’s portion of the scoring also tends to be the strongest contributor to giving the score a distinctively middle-eastern flavor.  Newman also provides a religious hymn (with Biblical lyrics) that is presented first in “Hymn to Aton” and later reprised in “Death of Merit”.

While the above comments almost sound like two separate scores, the two portions actually blend very well.  There is a fair amount of thematic overlap and there are quite a few places where music by one composer is designed to flow right into music by the other.  On the soundtrack CD, quite a few cues contain portions by both composers.  Even in most single-composer scores, there can be a fair amount of variation in style based on what is needed for individual scenes.  This is simply a prime example of two top composers splitting up the film in such a way that each is able to contribute to the parts that are the best fit to his style.

Eight Below (Mark Isham, 2006): Mark Isham’s score to Eight Below was one of the early cases of Disney’s recent trend toward download-only releases on soundtracks that are primarily score.  This title was released exclusively to iTunes and it continues to be only available from that service.  Unfortunately, this does mean that the music is only available in iTunes’ compressed AAC format and not as a lossless recording.  Unfortunately, this pretty good adventure score is marred somewhat by the less than stellar sound quality.

The album opens with an overture that provides a pretty good overview of the key themes.  The most prominent theme is a fairly simple, brassy fanfare.  It is effective, although its relatively spare use in the score is something of a surprise.  Isham tends to pull out the theme as sort of a periodic crescendo, while often tending towards more subtle scoring during much of the rest of the running time.

The score is largely orchestral with a definite emphasis on brass and percussion.  Guitar is also featured during many parts of the score, giving it a bit more of a contemporary sound without moving it substantially towards a modern rock/pop sound.  The main guitar riff becomes a key secondary theme for the score, particularly playing up the more playful aspects of the score.  The score’s more sensitive side is played up with solo piano melodies in a few cues, most notably “Southern Lights”.

Eloise at the Plaza/Eloise at Christmastime (Bruce Broughton, 2003): In 2003, ABC’s “The Wonderful World of Disney” series aired two made-for-TV movies, starring Julie Andrews,  based on the popular “Eloise” series of children’s books by Kay Thompson.  Both films were scored by Bruce Broughton and Intrada released a 1,200 copy limited edition (now out of print) 2-CD set, with one disc dedicated to each of the two scores.

Broughton establishes a charming and memorable main theme, which primarily features a solo saxophone.  It has a bit of an old-fashioned, Gershwin-inspired Americana style to it, which is a good fit for Broughton’s own sensibilities as well.  The theme debuts during the “Main Title/The Plaza” cue that opens the Eloise at the Plaza score and appears regularly throughout both of the scores, serving as a strong connecting tissue for a fairly wide variety of thematic material.  The rest of the musical material ranges from the charmingly manic to touchingly sensitive.  The latter is especially well represented by a gentle piano theme that serves as a core of the score’s more emotional components.

The score to Eloise at the Plaza tends to build on the style established in the main theme, maintaining a generally jazzy tone through much of the music.  Solo saxophone is used in quite a few variations that riff on the main theme.  Piano also tends to stand-out quite a bit, including some very dynamic playing in cues such as “Breaking the Boredom” and “Eloise’s Stuff”.  On the latter, there is some impressive violin counterpoint, an example of some interesting strings that also pop up periodically.  The result is a kind of upscale sophistication that reflects the film’s setting.

As you might expect, the score to the Christmas-themed second film adds interpolations of various common Christmas carols and other melodies associated with the holiday season.  This aspect of the score presents itself right up front with brief excerpts from “The Nutcracker Suite” kicking off the score’s overture before transitioning into reprises of some of the key themes from the first score.  The bits from the “Nutcracker” reappear in other parts of the score as well, including a fairly front-and-center performance in the cue “Doggie in a Tutu” as well as more subtle interpolations in quite a few other cues.

Broughton introduces a fair amount of new original music as well, further developing the earlier themes while often adding a holiday-themed overlay with common elements such as sleigh bells or brief statements of Christmas melodies.  At times, this includes using chimes or other seasonally-associated instruments for original melodies, such as in “Mrs. Thornton’s Story / Troubled”.  The substantial holiday influences tend to overtake the jazz influences of the first score, resulting in two distinctively different scores, although built around some of the same themes.

The Emperor’s New Groove (John Debney, Sting, 2000): Something of an oddity among Disney’s animated features, The Emperor’s New Groove started production as a fairly serious animated musical to be called “Kingdom of the Sun” before eventually being transformed into a largely slapstick (but, somewhat surprisingly, very funny) comedy.  Sting was brought in to write several songs, but only two of them ended up making it into the final version.

The two songs that made it into the film were “Perfect World” and “My Funny Friend and Me”.  The first was a snappy, fairly humorous lounge-style song performed by Tom Jones.  The song was featured at the start of the film in a montage that essentially introduced the main character.  “My Funny Friend and Me” is a soft-rock ballad performed by Sting himself.

The soundtrack album also includes three additional songs that Sting wrote for the film, but which were not ultimately used.  These additional songs give a bit of a taste of what the film was intended to be in its earlier incarnation.  The most interesting is “Snuff Out the Light (Yzma’s Song)”, a villain’s song that is performed in-character by Eartha Kitt.  The song and Kitt’s performance of it are tremendous fun.  It is a shame that it didn’t stay in the film, although that wasn’t really feasible as the lyrics focus on a key plot point (the character’s plan to blot out the sun) that was no longer part of the film.

The other two songs are less distinctive.  “Walk the Llama Llama” is a kind of funky, vaguely doo-wop styled song performed by Rascall Flatts.  The other is a fairly generic pop romantic duet performed by Sting and Shawn Colvin.  Both songs are ok, but their removal from the film doesn’t really seem like too much of a loss.

The first of John Debney’s instrumental score cues is “Run Llama Run”, an amusing, fast paced swing-music style cue, featuring extremely active brass, crashing cymbals, and even voices yelling out “Run!”.  This cue is featured during the portion of the CD otherwise devoted to the song cues and is probably better thought of as a source cue than a really key part of the score.

The rest of the score is much less distinctive, although definitely adequate to the film.  It is orchestral, but with a largely understated quality.  Debney does provide a main theme that is melodic with a cheerfully romantic quality.  The score also includes some pretty active brass at times, sometimes in the kind of on-the-nose matching of on-screen action that occasionally occurs in animated films to an extent that it is commonly referred to as “Mickey Mousing”.  Considering the film’s Middle Eastern setting, the score is surprisingly lacking in ethnic influences.

Empire of the Sun (John Williams, 1987): Several years before Steven Spielberg made the highly acclaimed World War II dramas Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, he directed his first serious drama set in the war, an adaptation of author J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun.  The film received a mixed critical reaction and was not a box-office hit, but I found it to be a powerful, emotionally engaging film.  John Williams’ expressively emotional scoring definitely was a key asset.

The soundtrack album (and the film) opens impressively with a choral and orchestral performance of the traditional Welsh hymn “Suo Gan” featuring the Ambrosian Junior Choir, lip-synced in the film by young Christian Bale, who was making his film debut.  While not a John Williams composition, the song generally sets the musical tone for a fairly up-scale, sophisticated score.

The second cue on the soundtrack, entitled “Cadillac of the Skies” is a soaring, wistfully melodic piece with very active brass and strings early on, leading into a wordless choral conclusion.  This cue is one of the score’s most distinctive orchestral pieces and is often included in compilation albums or concert performances.   The film has a subplot involving the main character’s love of airplanes and there are a number of cues that have this kind of a soaring, aerial quality to them.

This is immediately followed by “Jim’s New Life”, a fast-paced, brassy piece with a bit of a playful edge which then gives way to a darker tone in the cue “Lost in the Crowd”.  These cues together represent a pretty strong expression of the score’s fairly extensive emotional range.  The score’s most distinctive original theme is a gentle, beautiful string-dominated melody that is best represented in “Toy Planes, Home and Hearth”.  In that cue, it eventually transitions into a gorgeous wordless choral rendition.  Williams also very effectively incorporates a couple existing classical pieces into the score, including an orchestral arrangement of “The British Grenadiers” and solo piano performances of Chopin’s “Mazurka Opus 17 No. 4”.

The score’s most impressive original Williams composition is the choral piece “Exsulate Justi”.  In fact, I consider this piece to be towards the top of my list of favorite of all John Williams compositions.  It is a robust and regal piece for full orchestra and chorus, with the choir performing Latin lyrics.  The piece is excerpted within the film during a fairly critical sequence and then is played in full over the end credits.  I believe this cue alone justifies buying the soundtrack, with the rest of the score as very good icing on the cake.

Enchanted (Alan Menken, 2007): Disney’s mixed animation/live-action hit about a fairy-tale princess transported to modern day New York City was a rare case of a film that worked both as a satire and as its own self-contained story.  The songs by Alan Menken and lyricist Stephen Schwartz as well as Menken’s score also succeed in the same way, working both as gentle send-ups of the genre conventions as well as working really well on their own.

Menken and Schwartz’s approach to the songs is to transition over the course of the film from fairly traditional animated fairy tale songs to a more contemporary (and less satirical) style, which also reflects the story arc.  As part of this approach, the film’s star Amy Adams (in a star-making role) performs primary vocals on the first 3 songs while the last two feature vocals by contemporary recording artists. 

The first song, “True Love’s Kiss”, is a very old-fashioned romantic duet that would sound completely at home in most of Disney’s classic fairy tale films.  In fact, the style is old-fashioned enough that the song is closer stylistically to the music from Snow White or Cinderella than to Menken’s own songs from Disney’s big animated hits from the late 80s to mid-90s.  The song’s satirical aspects tend to be subtle, including a certain over-the-top quality to its romanticism as well as some clever lyrics, particularly having James Marsden as the prince sing “You were made to” and Adams follow with “finish your duet!”

The most clearly satirical song is "Happy Working Song", very obviously expired by "Whistle While You Work".  In the film, Adams sings the song while cleaning a New York apartment with the help of local wildlife: mainly cockroaches, pigeons, and rats.  The song has a charming absurdity to it and includes some clever situational lyrics, including one reference to the helpers as being "vermin".  The song is funny, but still doesn’t stray too far into parody.

The third song, "That’s How You Know" is my pick as the film’s best. It accompanies a big, showstopper production number in Central Park, with Adams’ vocals joined by a variety of the types of street musicians found in the park.  The song has a highly infectious tropical reggae rhythm and a very appealing melody accompanied by a mix of  instruments, including some great solo horns and even a steel drum. This song is on my list of most favorite Menken compositions.

“So Close” is a very appealing romantic ballad that is performed by John McLaughlin (who actually appears on-screen in the film) during the film’s climactic ballroom sequence.  It is a generally modern ballad that fits the scene’s mix of romanticism and melancholy absolutely perfectly.  This song is completely straight without a hint of parody, which is very appropriate to the tone of the scene it accompanies.

Finally, the final song in the film is “Ever Ever After”, a very peppy contemporary pop song performed by Carrie Underwood during the “happily ever after” montage that closes the film.  It is a fun song and I really commend the producers for recognizing Menken and Schwartz’s flexibility as songwriters instead of bringing in pop songwriters for this closing son.  The result is maintenance of some musical consistency, even incorporating a brief quote of “True Love’s Kiss”, as the style turns fully contemporary at the close of the film.

Menken’s instrumental scoring skill has improved dramatically with experience.  While he still occasionally incorporates his song melodies into the score, he now longer relies on them nearly as extensively as he did with his first couple scores.  Enchanted requires a pretty wide range of scoring, with scenes of romanticism, comedy, fantasy, and action.  He finds the right musical tone for each of those aspects of the score. 

The score tends to be pretty fully orchestral, with pretty extensive use of brass as well as some very well placed wordless choral.  One interesting exception to that is “Girls Go Shopping”, which is mainly a pop instrumental version of “Ever Ever After”, primarily featuring guitar, bass, and other traditional pop/rock instruments.  It sticks out a bit in the midst of the whole

Some of the score’s strongest thematic material is provided for the romantic aspects, particularly a nice woodwind and piano theme that Menken blends well with the melody of “So Close” during the cue “Robert Says Goodbye”.  For the villain, he provides a suitably over-the-top brassy theme, complete with bold, choral chanting.  This theme is front and center in the cue “Narissa Arrives” and also figures heavily during the impressive 11 minute finale cue, “Storybook Ending”.  This cue largely ties together all the main scoring themes as it covers the film’s climactic sequences.

For the most part, the score is played straight without satirical elements.  The one big exception comes during the cue “Nathanial and Pip”.  One clever inside joke in the film was cameos by the voice actresses that played Belle, Ariel, and Pocahontas in Disney’s hit animated films.  Paige O’Hara (Belle) appeared as a character in a soap opera that the prince was watching on TV and this cue opens with a melodramatic, soap-opera style arrangement of the most recognizable score melody from Beauty and the Beast.

One major highlight of the soundtrack CD is the 4 1/2 minute “Suite from Enchanted”, which also played over the film’s end credits.  This is a terrific instrumental arrangement of the melodies from all of the songs.  It is a great summation of the music from the film and it was really wonderful that the producers allowed Menken to prepare this suite instead of ending with a radio friendly pop song over the credits.

The soundtrack ends with James Marsden’s performance of “That’s Amore”, which is essentially a piece of source music from the film.  It is amusing, although perhaps a bit out of place after the suite provides really the perfect closing to the album.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (John Williams, 1982): E.T. is a film that is very special to me.  I was 12-years-old when the movie came out and I found it especially easy at that age to relate to the central character (Elliot) and the central story of friendship and the importance of home really connected.  Despite 3 huge preceding blockbusters, this was really the film that made Steven Spielberg a household name and, even now, it still feels like his most intimately personal film.

My first time seeing the film was also an especially memorable one.  We went to a sneak preview showing 2 weeks before the film’s general release.  There really hadn’t been a lot of buzz about the movie and we went solely on the basis of the ads that promoted it as coming from the same director as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  We really knew nothing about the story or what to expect.  The theater was completely full, to the extent that they had even over-sold and were offering free movie passes to people that would give up their seat (we didn’t).  Seeing the movie with so little advance knowledge was amazing and, to this day, it remains the only time that I have seen an audience give a film a spontaneous standing ovation at the end.

John Williams’ Oscar winning score is, of course, widely considered to be one of the composer’s top-tier masterpieces.  The “Flying” theme is one of his most instantly recognizable and is a staple of compilation albums and film music concerts.  The score is thematically very rich and that familiar theme is only one of several very distinctive musical ideas that Williams weaves together into a truly magical and thrilling work that perfectly matches the film’s impressive range of emotions.

The score opens with what is effectively ambient noise over the opening credits.  As the credits fade away, the first of the film’s musical themes is introduced with a simple, plaintive 6-note melody played on the flute.  This simple theme both opens and closes the film, with the simple flute rendition replaced by a bold brass statement of the theme at the end.  The statements of the simple theme are typically expanded to include additional strings and deep brass.  This effectively serves as a primary theme for the titular character and the sense of wonderment connected with the presence of an alien visitor.

The famous “Flying” theme doesn’t actually appear until around the middle of the film and doesn’t get a full-blown performance until “The Magic of Halloween” when E.T. makes the bicycle fly for the first time.  One brief, earlier performance of the theme does make an impression.  During the cue “Frogs”, the theme receives a sweepingly romantic statement as Elliot (who is emotionally linked to E.T.) kisses a female classmate while E.T. is watching a observing a romantic movie on the television at home.

The third very distinctive and familiar theme from E.T. is “Over the Moon” (using the title of the concert arrangement on the original soundtrack release), which is typically featured prominently during the films chase sequences.  This is actually perhaps the most beautiful and uplifting of the themes in the score and Williams chose to use an impressive solo piano (eventually joined by full orchestra) arrangement over the end credits.  The theme makes its first strong impression in the cue “Searching for E.T.” and reappears during most of the subsequent action scenes.

Williams also provides the score with a bit of a darker side, primarily represented by a very deep, brassy theme that is used during the key sequences involving the government agents that are pursuing E.T.  This theme very effectively conveys the sense of menace surrounding those sequences.  This theme somewhat resembles the primary E.T. theme structurally, connecting it as kind of a darker analog to that main theme.

The score’s finale brings all of the themes together into one of the most impressive cues ever written for a film.  The piece, which is entitled “Escape/Chase/Saying Goodbye” on the complete score album and was named “Adventures On Earth” for the original soundtrack LP, runs for just over 15 minutes.  Spielberg has mentioned in interviews before that Williams made the unusual choice not to record the piece directly to the film and that Spielberg ended up editing the film to fit it.  This complex piece is often played in full at Williams’ live concerts.

There have been 3 major releases of the score and, to be frank, any fan of this score needs to have 2 of them.  The original 1982 LP release (which was later released on CD in 1986) contains a re-recording of the score.  This album runs around 40 minutes in length and is especially notable for the excellent concert arrangements of “Flying” and “Over the Moon”.  In 1996, MCA Records released an expanded soundtrack containing the original film tracks, except for an alternate version of the end credits that was missing the “Over the Moon” theme.

Finally, a “20th Anniversary” edition was released in 2002.  It contains the complete score, including the previously unreleased “Main Titles” (as noted earlier, this is mainly ambient noise) and the film version of the “End Credits”.  It only added a little under 5 minutes of music that was missing from the 1996 release, but the difference in the end credits cue alone justifies it.

The “20th Anniversary” release is definitely the version to get if you want to limit yourself to a single release of the score, but I think that it is worthwhile to own the 1982 LP program as well, principally for the concert arrangements.  Both versions are easy to obtain at low prices (copies can be found for well under $10), so I see little reason not to have both of them.

Earthquake (John Williams, 1974): The disaster movie formula established in the 1970s is built around a mix of soap opera style personality-driven melodrama and fast paced, fighting-for-your-life action sequences.  John Williams proved to be a particularly good choice for scoring those films as the composer has proven to be equally adept with both styles of scoring.  His score for Earthquake demonstrates those skills pretty effectively, although the soundtrack album (which only runs a little over 30 minutes) tends to be dominated somewhat by the more melodramatic scoring.

The score features a distinctive main theme, which is first heard over the film’s main title and is given a concert arrangement in the cue entitled “City Theme”.  The theme is peppered throughout the soundtrack, although the composer holds it back enough that it never becomes tiresome.  The other dominant dramatic theme is a romantic theme that is heard during the cues “Love Scene” and in a concert arrangement in “Love Theme”.

If you are looking for a soundtrack album to use to test out a subwoofer, this is a pretty good choice.  As you would expect from a film entitled Earthquake, the more action oriented part score has some segments with some pretty deep bass and the soundtrack CD even ends with a sound effects cue.   The soundtrack opens with some low percussion right at the start of the “Main Title” cue and the bass-heavy scoring especially dominates the cue “Cory in Jeopardy”.  In addition to expected percussion, Williams makes very effective use of some minor-key piano and deep strings.  The cue “Something for Remy” directly incorporates sound effects towards the middle of the cue.

The soundtrack includes a couple of disco/pop style instrumentals that do tend to date it a bit.  These are composed by Williams and are still recognizable as fitting with his usual approach to melody, but they definitely are very much of the era when the score was composed.  This aspect of the score is mainly heard in the cues “Miles on Wheels” and “Something for Rosa”.  Williams also includes some jazzy, saxophone dominated music, notably in the cue “Medley: Watching and Waiting/Miles’ Pool Hall/Sam’s Rescue”.

East of Eden (Lee Holdridge, 1981): This score comes from a big-budget TV miniseries based on the classic John Steinbeck novel.  Lee Holdridge provided a suitably epic scale, melodramatic score that is richly steeped in Americana.

Holdridge score is lushly orchestral, featuring a sweeping main theme that is introduced during the “Main Title” cue.  The music is dominated by rich strings and some very front and center and effective woodwinds.  Brass is understated but frequently present as well.  Some parts include some fairly dramatic piano as well, particularly on the cue “Enigma”.

The main theme sets the tone for richly wistful and romantic melodies that appear during parts of the score.  Holdridge does also include some darker melodies such as the one introduced in “The Sons” or the melancholy style used in the cue “Home”.  Particularly in the mid-section of the score, these qualities become more dominant.  The cue “Conflict and Resolution” is especially a standout, opening with one of the darker melodies, before shifting into a more upbeat brassy section that then leads into a particularly full-blooded rendition of the main theme.

Intrada’s now sold-out limited edition (1000 copies) CD release features the contents of the original 1981 LP program in stereo, followed by an additional 26 minutes of previously unreleased monaural score cues.  This adds up to a very generous running time of nearly 80 minutes.

East-West (Patrick Doyle, 1999): The French/Russian period drama East/West (Est/Ouest in the original language) was little seen in the United States, but fortunately its soundtrack album is readily available.  The film was scored by Patrick Doyle, in his third collaboration with director Régis Wargnier (the previous collaborations were Indochine and Une femme française).  Doyle provides the film with a big scale, ethnically-appropriate score in the composer’s distinctive, classically-influenced style.

While the score includes plenty of Doyle’s usually expert string compositions, this score also includes some very powerful and prominent piano, expertly performed by well-known pianist Emanuel Ax.  Despite the participation of such a distinguished soloist, Doyle is actually very selective in the use of the solo piano, making it all the more impactful in the cues where it does appear, such as in a brief segment of the cue “You’re Doing It For Us”, where Ax’s piano briefly and aggressively takes the focus from the previously dominant strings.  Ax’s piano is finally given its best showcase in the impressive and exciting back-to-back cues “The River” and “The Race”.

Doyle’s considerable songwriting skills are on display in several distinctly ethnic songs that reflect the film’s Russian setting.  These include the noble “Farewell of a Slav” as well as the spirited, celebratory tune “Smuglianka”.  The song “Nightingales” effectively adapts a theme used elsewhere during the score (most notably in “The Church”) into an operatic piece for male soloist and chorus.  A reprise of this closes the album in the cue “The Land”.

Ed Wood (Howard Shore, 1994): Due to a temporary falling out between Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, Ed Wood is one of Burton’s only two films that was scored by someone else (the other was Sweeney Todd, which used the Stephen Sondheim music from the musical).  Howard Shore was hired to score the film and delivered an absolutely terrific score that fit the film wonderfully.  Although it is hard not to wonder what Elfman might have done with this film, it is also hard to imagine a better score for this film than the one Shore provided.

Shore’s score is a pretty much perfect re-creation of the classic 1950s science fiction and horror scores, just like the ones that were found in Ed Wood’s actual films.  The score has a tongue-in-cheek sensibility to it but, just like the film itself, it is humorous in a loving manner that comes closer to homage than parody.

Shore’s main theme is a fast-paced, kind of warped lounge music tune featuring aggressive bongos and plenty of Theremin.   The main theme plays over the “Main Title” and receives an even better concert arrangement in the cue “Ed Wood (Video)” which closes the soundtrack album.  The score has its fair share of more straightforward orchestral music, including a surprisingly classical theme with lilting brass and strings used in the cue “Glen or Glenda”.  Another highlight is the triumphant, brassy march featured in “Ed Takes Control”.

Other portions of the score take on a bit more of a sentimental strain, particularly for the romantic aspects of the film as heard in “Ed & Kathy”.  Shore also very cleverly weaves bits of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” into some portions of the score, as in the cues “Eddie, Help Me” and “Sanitarium”.  The score even includes a mambo (“Kuba Mambo”), complete with accompanying vocals.

Honestly, the score is kind of all over the map in styles (appropriately), so I could really go on and on here describing each variation, but those discoveries are probably better made by listening to the album or, better yet, seeing the film.  The album features a mix of well-developed themes for pretty much every aspect of the story as well as a variety of original source cues, making for a decidedly unusual listening experience.

I’m not usually a fan of dialog excerpts or narration on score albums, but I see this album as being an exception.  The album includes a couple of very aptly and appropriately chosen bits of narration that really fit exceptionally well with the bits of music that they accompany.  It certainly doesn’t hurt that the narration excerpts are exceptionally amusing and completely capture the film’s bizarre sensibility.

I will state outright that I absolutely loved the film Ed Wood and consider it to be Burton’s 2nd best film to date (#1 will come later in this post).  Howard Shore found exactly the right musical accompaniment for every part of the film and I enjoy this album tremendously.  I do admit, though, that it would be an extremely puzzling (at best) score to anyone that does not know the film.

Edge of the City (Leonard Rosenman, 1957): This early Leonard Rosenman score has a very short running time (only 14 1/2 minutes), but features some impressively brassy and exciting themes.  The score was released on CD by Film Score Monthly, paired with Rosenman’s score for The Cobweb.  This same pairing was released on LP closer to the time of the films’ original release.

The main theme to Edge of the City is an energetic, very brass dominated march which is paired with a melodic counterpoint.  The soundtrack opens with a “Main Title” cue that starts with some fairly dark, atonal music before quickly transitioning into a full presentation of that main theme.  The score’s other distinctive melody is a romantic, string-dominated theme that is well represented in the cue “Love In the City”.

Rosenman’s style often has a distinctive atonal approach that is on display during much of this score.  A particularly strong example of this aspect is on display in the cue “Violence In the City”, where the use of wild brass along with dissonant strings and piano create a sound that is fitting of the cue’s title.

The Edge (Jerry Goldsmith, 1997): On the surface, The Edge appeared to be a fairly straightforward survival thriller that followed the experiences of plane crash survivors trapped in the Alaska wilderness and struggling against a black bear.  With a screenplay by David Mamet and starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin, the film actually was a much deeper drama that was as interested in the characters’ psychology as it was in the thriller aspects.

Jerry Goldsmith’s flexibility as a composer made him an excellent fit for this film.  He was able to provide appropriate musical accompaniment for the action sequences, the psychological drama, as well as the majestic vistas of the film’s Alaskan setting.  This score is apt to be more appealing to the fans of Goldsmith’s majestic orchestral compositions and his darker, brassy thriller music.  There is occasional action, percussive action music (such as in the cue “The Ravine”), but that tends to be fairly infrequent.

The focal point of the score is a hauntingly beautiful main theme for horns.  The theme is first hinted at during the opening cue, “Early Arrival”, before getting a full presentation in “Lost In the Wild(s)”.  The theme is majestic in scope and perfectly reflects the film’s setting as well as the relatively big ideas at the core of the storyline.  Goldsmith incorporated the main theme into more of the body of the score than he often did with his main themes, giving it an especially strong prominence.  A variety of orchestrations and various derived themes helps to avoid repetitiveness. The soundtrack ends with an unusual, jazz piano arrangement of the main theme.  It doesn’t quite fit with the orchestral approach of the score, but still provides an intriguing take on the melody.

Somewhat unusual for a score from the later part of Goldsmith’s career, the score is pretty much entirely orchestral without frequent (if any) use of synthesizers or other electronic instruments.  This approach feels right for the rustic, back-to-nature setting of the film.  Particularly during the action cues, Goldsmith sometimes uses the orchestra to create an approximation of some of the sounds he usually created via electronics, an approach that is surprisingly effective.  The score to The Edge is an especially strong presentation of Goldsmith’s considerable skills with orchestration.

With the film’s original release, BMG Classics/RCA Victor released a CD soundtrack containing a little under 40 minutes of the score.  This wasn’t a bad representation of the score’s highlights, although it was definitely incomplete and the sound quality was a bit mixed.  The CD also went out of print fairly quickly and became somewhat difficult (and expensive) to obtain.

Fortunately, La La Land Records released a CD of the complete score in 2010.  This CD is re-mastered for much better sound quality and contains over an hour of score, including a little over 5 minutes of bonus tracks presenting some alternate takes.  This release is a limited edition of 3,500 copies, but is still available from their website.

Edward Scissorhands (Danny Elfman, 1990): In my comments about Ed Wood above, I mentioned that it was my 2nd favorite Tim Burton film.  My favorite is his other film that starred Johnny Depp as a strange outsider named Edward.  While several of Burton’s other films have been more popular and, arguably, more ambitious, I truly believe that none has been as personal or heartfelt as Edward Scissorhands.  The film really moved me and it remains not only my favorite Burton film, but one of the titles on my short list of all favorite films.

Danny Elfman’s score is also my favorite of the composer’s many scores for Burton’s films.  The film’s story is unquestionably a fairy tale and Elfman’s score is really nothing short of magical.  The score is romantic and melodious, packed with gentle charm and ethereal emotion.  Before this score, Elfman was mainly known for superhero action scores and comedies and I really feel that this one propelled his career to a new level.

The “Introduction (Titles)” cue establishes the score’s main theme.  It starts with a simple, music-box style piano melody that is then joined first by lush strings and then by a wordless choir.  The choir takes the lead for much of the melody in both the main theme and throughout the score, effectively allowing the human voice to anchor the score’s emotional construct.

The theme, and in fact the whole score, has a strongly balletic quality with obvious Tchaikovsky influences.  In fact, the score was in part later adapted to a ballet based on the film.  The idealized suburban world that serves as the story’s main setting is represented by a peppy cue called “Ballet De Suburbia (Suite)”, which very directly (as the title suggests) evokes the ballet style of the score.  The theme also receives a very prominent and expressive performance in the cue “Ice Dance”, where it is directly used as dance music in the film itself.

Elfman carefully develops the main theme over the entire length of the score with much of the music being based on variations.  This makes the score unusually cohesive thematically, actually making it feel much like a single long work.  The choral elements as well as the piano and strings are pretty much ever present in the score.  Brass is certainly well used in some cues, especially some deep brass in the cue “Cookie Factory”, but even then it still maintains the same melody.

As the later part of the film turns darker, Elfman’s score also introduces a more menacing quality, while still retaining the same basic melodies and instruments.  He very effectively weaves in more brass and percussion as well as sharper strings and more urgent choral elements in cues such as “The Tide Turns (Suite)” and “Final Confrontation”.  The continuation of the same thematic core even in these darker segments gives the score a definite arc.

The soundtrack CD contains a little over 45 minutes of Elfman’s score and covers most of the significant musical moments from the film.  The album also ends with Tom Jones performance of the song “With These Hands”, which is a bit of a jarring conclusion, even though it was used in the film.  An expanded version of the soundtrack will be included with the mammoth (and expensive) Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box which is scheduled for release later this Spring.

Part 1: Introduction and Hardware
Part 2: User Interface, Launcher, and Multitasking
Part 3: Synergy (Calendar and Contacts)
Part 4: Phone, Web, E-mail, and Messaging
Part 5: Camera, Photos, and Maps/Navigation

While the current version of webOS does an adequate job as a media player, I think it falls short of what it could, or should, have been.  A lot of commentators have noted that Apple’s success with the iPod means that the iPhone’s media capabilities should be expected to exceed those of their competitors, but I think there were opportunities for Palm to pull ahead here in many ways.  Instead, the media capabilities not only fall short of the iPhone, but, in some ways, also fails to match older competitors such as Windows Mobile and even the Palm OS.  I haven’t seen strong indications yet that HP is targeting these issues with webOS 2.0, although maybe there are partnerships to be announced in February.

The greatest opportunity would have come from countering Apple’s infamous adherence to a closed ecosystem by working to make WebOS  compatible with as many audio/video formats as possible.  Instead, Palm only included support for pretty much the same formats that Apple did, mainly variants on MP3 and AAC audio and H264 and MP4 video.  I think that Palm seriously missed the ball by not at least licensing the Windows Media formats from Microsoft and/or including support for common open-source codecs like Ogg Vorbis and Flac.

A big disadvantage on Palm’s side is a complete lack of support for any kind of protected formats at all.  That isn’t a huge deal for music, since most online stores have now gone to distributing unprotected files, but it greatly limits the available support for commercial movies and TV programs or for audiobooks.  I strongly think they HP should make every effort to get support for Audible.com audiobooks and for Windows Media protected video onto the platform as soon as possible.  In fact, I think seem support for protected video content will be absolutely essential for the tablet that they are expected to announce next week.

One of the biggest advantages Apple has is their tight integration with iTunes, which is now the largest music retailer in the US.  Palm wisely partnered with Apple’s most aggressive online competitor, Amazon.com, to include a nicely designed application for locating, purchasing, and downloading music.  I didn’t really expect to use this much, but I have actually ended up purchasing quite a bit of music this way.   It is nice to be able to purchase and very quickly start listening when I hear about some music of interest while away from home.  The music is the same quality as the downloads purchased from Amazon via the desktop and, since it is unprotected, you can easily transfer the tracks to a computer via the USB connection.

Possibly the single biggest miscalculation that Palm made early on with webOS was hacking synchronization compatibility with iTunes by having the phone attempt to impersonate an iPod.  This put Palm into a war with Apple, which they simply couldn’t win.  For a while, every update to iTunes intentionally broke this feature, with Palm having to quickly code a new hack into their OS updates.  The synchronization has now been broken for over a year and Palm finally gave up on the feature early.  The 1.4 update disabled the “Media Sync” option by default, requiring those still trying to sync with an older version of iTunes to go into the settings to re-enable it.  I’d be surprised if the feature is still present at all in Web OS 2.0.

That war with Apple was a monumental waste of time and resources on Palm’s part that left them with some damage to their reputation (the USB committee even cited them for using Apple’s USB ID) and a missing feature for their users.  It isn’t remotely surprising that Apple didn’t want Palm doing this and it created an ethical grey area at best.  Palm would have been much better off either partnering with a more willing maker of music management software or building their own synchronization tool, possibly making use of Apple’s published API’s for accessing the iTunes library.  Web OS still needs a viable media sync capability and hopefully HP is working on a sustainable solution.

Music

The music player on the Pre has an attractive and easy user interface, but is also limited in a lot of ways.  It provides a touch-friendly interface for locating songs or albums and playing them back as well as the usual forward and backward navigation.   One particularly nice feature is the inclusion of a large “shuffle all” button right at the top of the main screen, making it very quick and easy to start playing random selections from all the tracks on the phone.

The initial menu allows you to select tracks by artists, albums, songs, genres, or playlists.  All of these selection methods only go down a single layer, meaning that once you select an artist, album, or genre, you are then given a list of all the songs that fit that tag.  There is no way to select albums by genre or artist or artists by albums, for example.  It also doesn’t allow you to populate the “Now Playing” list from multiple searches, such as to cue up multiple albums for uninterrupted play. Once you select a song, it simply starts playing all the tracks in the returned result set starting with the one selected.

While the music player does support playlists, there is no mechanism available to create one or to add or remove tracks directly on the phone.  Instead, it expects you to create playlists in iTunes and then transfer them using the no longer supported media sync feature.  I’ve never really been a user of playlists (I tend to listen to entire albums), so I haven’t really explored any alternatives to getting them onto the Pre, but it certainly seems clear that some on-device playlist management is needed.

The audio application doesn’t remember state once you close it meaning that you can’t easily resume playback where you left off unless you are willing to keep the music player application open in the background until you are ready to use it again.  I would prefer for it to at least remember the tracks in the “Now Playing” set and which track you are on.

The player will automatically bookmark the last position played in tracks that are tagged with a genre of “audiobook” or “podcast” and will resume playback from that point the next time that track is selected.  The precision on this isn’t down to the second as you would expect, though, and it often resumes playback as much as a minute or so before or after the actual point where you left off.  The forward and backward seek buttons are similarly imprecise, making it very difficult to find the correct spot.  In fact, scanning forward or backward within a track is an exercise in frustration due to lack of responsiveness and a nearly useless slider on the track position indicator, which only is visible when scanning.

This issue with resuming playback is symptomatic of general problem with accurately keeping track of the correct time code on long files like audiobooks or podcasts.  It always stops playback when it thinks it has reached the end time, which causes it to usually cut off a couple minutes at the end of the track.  I now always use an audio editor to add 10 minutes of silence to the end of audiobooks before transferring them to the Pre in order to accommodate this problem, a fairly ridiculous requirement that is pretty certainly beyond the technical capabilities of most casual users.

The various issues mentioned above add up to some rather serious shortcomings in the music player that HP/Palm really must address.  Even with a nice user interface, it falls pretty far short of what is available on other platforms, even including the Pocket Tunes software that had become pretty much the standard music player on the Palm OS.

Some, but not all, of these issues are addressed in third-party music players that are available from unofficial “homebrew” application stores.  Due to official API limitations, these aren’t available in the official application store, although webOS 2.0 reportedly does open up the necessary APIs to make these applications official.  I have found that even third-party music players do not address the time code accuracy problems, though, meaning the problem is inherent to the webOS music playback functions.

On a more positive note, there are some pretty good streaming audio applications on the Pre that work really well.  Pandora, Slacker and Grooveshark have well-designed applications available and there are also a couple good applications for accessing Shoutcast stations.  A free application called RadioTime provides a good mechanism for finding and listening to the online simulcasts of online radio stations.  Finally, many web-based audio streams will play back just fine in the built-in audio player if you navigate to and select them via the web browser.  This method can be used to access home libraries via Orb or other similar services.  Obviously, the quality of streaming audio is very dependent on the strength of the wireless connection available, but these applications work well with wi-fi or when you have a strong cellular data connection.

Video

I’ve never been too much of a viewer of video on my cell phone.  I typically find a cell phone screen to be too small for most videos and I generally am much more apt to watch anything I’m interested in either on our big screen TV (if possible) or on the laptop or desktop computer.  As a result, my experience with the video playback features of the Pre are somewhat cursory.

The Sprint version of the Pre includes three primary applications for playback of video: the general video player, a YouTube player, and Sprint TV.  There are also included NFL and NASCAR applications that I haven’t really tried, but apparently provide some access to related sporting event videos.

The main “Videos” application has an interface very similar to the “Photos” application.  It provides a simply system to organize videos into albums or to select from a complete list.  The application can play back videos that were recorded using the camera application or videos that are copied to the device via USB or downloaded from web sites or email attachments.  The only video formats recognized or supported are MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264.  During video playback, it automatically switches to landscape mode.  Controls for pausing or navigating through the video appear when you tap the screen.  As with the photo application, any organization into folders has to be done by connecting the phone to a PC with USB.

The YouTube application provides access to pretty much the entire contents of Google’s popular video sharing site.  Videos can be located via search or you can navigate through lists of popular or most-viewed videos as well as through a history of the videos you have viewed previously.  As in the video application, playback is in landscape and the video quality is generally acceptable, although dependent on the strength of your Internet connection (either wi-fi or cellular).  One very nice feature is that embedded YouTube videos on web-sites show up as thumbnails in the browser.  Tapping on them launches that video in the YouTube application.

Sprint TV provides access to a variety of video content from commercial sources contracted with Sprint.  This includes a number of the major broadcast and cable networks as well as various movie studios.  Short form videos (such as movie trailers or clips from TV shows) are included in the monthly plan, while some longer-form content (including feature films) are on a pay-per-view basis.  The biggest negative is that Sprint’s deal only covers programming delivered over their network, which means that the video can’t be streamed over Wi-Fi. The result is mediocre video quality that is very dependent on the strength of the cellular signal.

Coming up in part 7: Third-party Applications and Patches/Homebrew

Dragonheart (Randy Edelman, 1996): Randy Edelman’s main theme to Dragonheart has been used in so many trailers for other movies that it is likely to be instantly familiar to most people even if they have no idea what it is from.

The theme is introduced during the opening cue, entitled  “World of the Heart (Main Title)”.  It is a primarily string-driven theme with a warmly noble quality to it.  The theme has a definite grandeur and sense of importance, which is obviously the reason why it has become so popular to re-purpose it.  In some parts of the score, starting with the album’s 2nd cue “To the Stars”, Edelman adds a wordless choir to the theme as well, giving it an even broader scope.  Much of the score continues in the same vein as the theme, usually strongly melodic with strings generally in the forefront.

The score does have occasional darker patches, such as the very prominent percussion and chant-like vocals found in the cues “Einon” and “Bowen’s Decoy”.  The former cue also introduces some distinctive ethnic elements to the score, with some old-European styling to some of the melodies. This includes some prominent use of acoustic guitar in this and a number of other cues.

Despite the highly melodic, fairly large-sound to the score, Edelman actually makes pretty extensive use of synthesizers during much of the score.  During some of the bigger orchestral segments, synthesizers are used to enhance the percussion and give the score a bit more active bass.  Some of the lighter, more comedic sections of the score place the synthesizers more up-front, as in the cue “The Last Dragon Slayer”.

The soundtrack to Dragonheart was released on CD at the time of the film’s release and is still readily available.  The album contains a relatively generous 45 minutes of score and is generally a solid representation of the score, although I suspect there would be plenty of material for an expanded release.

Dragonslayer (Alex North, 1981): This big-budget Disney/Paramount co-production (unusual at that time) wasn’t a big hit at the time of its release, but it has increased somewhat in stature over the years.  It isn’t considered a classic by any means, but it is now generally fairly well-regarded as one of the better entries in the sword & sorcery genre.

The score to Dragonslayer came fairly late in Alex North’s distinguished career and it was really his last score for this type of epic, action-oriented period piece, the type of film in which the composer often exceled.  He delivered a dark, minimally-thematic score that is often a bit difficult to listen to separate from the film, despite the score’s obvious artistry.  North’s score is an avant-garde, often biting effort that lacks the generally upbeat sense of fun that is usually associated with this genre.  It isn’t for everybody and has long been a controversial score among fans, but it is a complex and always interesting score.

While North never really establishes much in the way of strong, distinctive themes that carry through the score, he does introduce melodic material, although it is often surrounded by very active, often dissonant music.  For example, the cue “Maiden Sacrifice” introduces a distinctive, tender melody, but generally overwhelms it with intense strings, brass, and percussion.  This type of approach is repeated fairly often throughout the score.

It is fairly well known that North repurposed portions of his rejected score to 2001: A Space Odyssey for Dragonslayer and those familiar with the either or both of the recordings of that score will certainly recognize its echoes here.  In particular, the waltz that North wrote for the space station docking sequence is clearly reproduced in the cues “Burning Village” and “Dragon Sore-ing” as well as during the finale and over the end credits.   It becomes the most thematic part of this score, although I’m not sure I would think that had I not heard the 2001 score.  In each cue, North builds on his already existing music to build something distinct to this score.  The two scores really make for interesting companion pieces.

While the score did receive a fairly limited LP release as well as an earlier CD release (of dubious legitimacy), the first truly official CD release came from La La Land Records in 2010.  It is a limited edition of 3,000 copies, although still readily available at the time I’m writing this.

Dreamer (Bill Conti, 1979): This fairly obscure Bill Conti score opens with a “Main Title” cue featuring a pleasantly old-fashioned Americana swing-music style, which figures prominently in other parts of the score as well.  Towards the end of the cue, it transitions into more of the late-70s pop style that is more typical of Conti’s scores during that time period.

The score is kind of all over the place stylistically, with some cues featuring the old-fashioned style, others in the more pop style, such as the romantic pop cues “Double Image”, “Blurry” and “Alley Cat”.  The cue “Pool Room” even has a country instrumental style while “Waitress Walking” is pretty much pure disco and “Racking Pins” has a bit of a Mexican mariachi style.

The soundtrack also includes a catchy, 70s pop song entitled “Reach for the Top”.  The song was written by Conti and performed by Pablo Cruise.  It certainly isn’t as memorable as Conti’s famous “Gonna Fly Now” which was written for Rocky just a year earlier, but it still has the same triumphant, anthem style.

The score for Dreamer was released by Varese Sarabande paired with Conti’s The Scout on a 1,000 copy limited edition “CD Club” release, which is now sold out.  The music from Dreamer runs around 40 minutes.  Note that the above image is poster art from the film as there was no Dreamer cover art with the CD.

Duel at Diablo (Neal Hefti, 1966): Neal Hefti was a composer best known for contemporary films, particularly comedies, and Duel at Diablo was his only western.  He mostly avoided the common western conventions of the era, instead going for a smaller-scale, somewhat more pop oriented style.  There are certainly parts of this score that do suggest a western score, but the genre isn’t immediately evident if listening blindly.

The score opens with a “Main Title” cue that establishes a catchy main theme.  This theme really doesn’t sound like a western at all and, in fact, would probably seem fairly at home in a 1960s contemporary comedy.  A vocal version of the theme (simply called “Duel at Diablo on the soundtrack) was performed by Ernie Sheldon.  According to the liner notes, it was not used in the film.

Other parts of the score do have a more rustic feel, such as the fairly lush melodies introduced in the cue “The Earth Runs Red”.  Some parts of the score suggest a bit of a Mexican ethnic influence as well.  While the main theme has an upbeat quality, many other parts of the score are much darker and more menacing, particularly during the “Prologue” cue.

A soundtrack LP containing a re-recording of the score was released with the film and was later included by Film Score Monthly as part of their now sold-out (and very expensive to obtain) “MGM Soundtrack Treasury”.  The soundtrack runs a little under half an hour in length.

Dumbo (Frank Churchill, Oliver Wallace, 1941): Disney released an excellent CD of the songs and score from the classic animated feature Dumbo as part of their “Classic Soundtrack Series”.  As is the case with most of those releases, the CD is now out of print, but still pretty easily available.   It is also available as a download from Amazon or iTunes (and probably other stores as well).

The film is, of course, the story of a circus elephant who learns how to fly using his oversized ears as wings.  The circus setting mostly sets the musical style of the score with lots of brass and cymbals, whistle, and the appropriate use of a calliope.  As you would expect, most of the score has a very upbeat, cherry quality, although the film has some darker passages towards the middle and the composers provide appropriately melancholy melodies when needed.

There were a number of songs included in Dumbo and on the soundtrack they are often presented in the same cues alongside relevant score.  Probably the most famous song from the film is the very emotionally-driven lullaby “Baby Mine”, sung by Dumbo’s mother to her son after she has been imprisoned in a cage.  The song has a huge emotional impact in the film.  On the soundtrack album, the song is presented at the end of the generally sad score cues that precede it in the film, which results in more of the song’s emotional impact being retained than is the case with the stand-alone version of the song typically heard on compilation albums.

Other well-known songs from the film include “Casey Junior”, ““Pink Elephants” and “When I See an Elephant Fly”.  The first of those is very effective at musically capturing the familiar sound of a train.  The second accompanies probably the film’s oddest sequence, a borderline psychedelic dream sequence after Dumbo has accidentally become intoxicated.  It is a highly entertaining sequence, although one that probably wouldn’t be too likely to make it into a current children’s film.

The second is possibly the most prominent show-stopper number in the film, performed by a quintet of crows, voiced by Cliff Edwards (well-known to Disney fans as the voice of Jiminy Cricket) and the Hall Johnson Choir.   This sequence has become controversial as many critics have noted that the crow characters are portrayed with African American stereotypes.  The criticism does have merit, although it is important to also keep in mind the time period when the film was made and the stylistic similarity of the song to others from the period.

Other songs on the album include “Look Out for Mr. Stork”, “Song of the Roustabouts” and “Clown Song”.  These certainly aren’t as well known as the others from the film, as they each generally are more focused on establishing atmosphere than advancing the story.  They play well on the CD, though, as they all blend well with the surrounding instrumentals.

The soundtrack album ends with a demo version of an unused song entitled “Spread Your Wings”.

Dune (Toto, 1984): The score to David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of the classic science fiction novel Dune was the only film score created by the popular pop/rock band Toto.  The all-instrumental score features a hybrid of the band’s usual pop/rock with orchestral portions performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.  In the film, the score is credited to the band as a whole and the individual cues on the soundtrack are all credited to some combination of the band’s members at the time: Jeff Porcaro, Mike Porcaro, Steve Porcaro, David Paich, and Steve Lukather.

The film was one of the bigger box-office bombs of that time and suffered from such substantial editing that the story was nearly impossible to follow for anyone that didn’t have the novel essentially memorized.  The score was also pretty drastically edited in the film, with the sound mix and construction varying quite a bit between the film, the original 1984 soundtrack album release, and the 1997 expanded soundtrack CD.   The original release contained a reasonable sampling of the score, but did omit quite a bit of music and also had bits of dialog over a couple cues.  The expanded release added back a lot of the missing music and removed the dialog, but had some sound quality problems and mistakes in the cue listings.  Both releases are out of print now and this still a score that could use a definitive re-issue.

The soundtracks open with a short “Prologue” piece that segues directly into the “Main Title” featuring the  score’s anthem-like opening theme.  On the 1984 album, the film’s opening narration is played over the prologue while the 1997 version is music-only.  The opening theme is a dark, but sweeping melody featuring electric guitar accompanied by the full orchestra and a wordless choir.  This theme quickly establishes the rock/orchestral hybrid approach.  An orchestra-only version of the melody is later presented as “Leto’s Theme” and variations of the tune are used throughout.

The other most prominent theme is noble theme for the titular planet itself, which is built around a distinctive, descending progression.  Excerpts from the theme are heard in “The Fremen” before it is given a powerful, largely electronic rock presentation in “Riding the Sandworm”.  A concert arrangement of the theme is featured in the cue “Dune (Desert Theme”) and it also figures prominently during the score’s end credits cue, entitled “Take My Hand”.  Interestingly, a kind of warped, electronic presentation of the desert theme is also used as the villain’s theme in the early cue “The Floating Fat Man (The Baron)”, which is the other cue on the 1984 album release to feature dialog.

The chorus is most prominently used with the “Destiny” theme, which is used to underscore the more religious aspects of the story.  This is a grand, fairly large scale theme and the one aspect of the score where the composers chose to pretty fully suppress the rock and electronics in favor of a fairly old-fashioned epic style orchestral approach.  This theme isn’t used frequently in the score, but tends to make a pretty strong impression when it does appear.

Composer Brian Eno contributed one theme that was used periodically in the film and is credited as the “Prophecy Theme”.  There is some uncertainty about whether Eno originally composed a rejected score for the film or, if not, how he came to contribute that one theme.  I don’t think it is a particularly distinctive or interesting composition.  Eno’s theme was included as a stand-alone cue on the 1984 album, but is completely absent from the 1997 release.

Dutch (Alan Silvestri, 1991): Although Alan Silvestri’s most popular scores tend to be for big action and/or adventure films (like Predator or Back to the Future) or for large-scope dramatic films (like Forrest Gump or Contact), he also has done some very good, smaller-scale scores for comedies.  One of his lesser-known scores in that genre was for the 1991 John Hughes production Dutch, which featured Ed O’Neill as an ill-tempered step-dad bonding with kids during a road trip.

Silvestri’s approach to the score starts off more jazz/pop oriented before eventually picking up his more familiar orchestral sound.  The “Main Title” cue has a catchy main theme with a small jazz ensemble sound, dominated by piano.  The second cue, entitled “Party”, then presents a lengthy instrumental that is primarily dominated by solo piano, with only occasional small ensemble accompaniment.

The full orchestra finally kicks in with the 4th cue on the CD, entitled “Trouble on the Home Front”.  The orchestral cues on the soundtrack are recognizably Silvestri’s style, including his typical aggressively dynamic strings as well as the tender piano melodies that are common to his scores for less action-oriented films.  Some of the cues are surprisingly short, including several that are under 2 minutes and even one (“Dad!”) that is only 16 seconds long.  The longest orchestral cue, “The Shelter” clocks in at 4:38.  This approach gives the score a bit of a choppy quality, although this is far from a fatal flaw.

Sprinkled throughout the CD are several source cues, including a solo violin version of a Brandenburg Concerto, a couple brief choral pieces (each identified as alternates of “Campus Choral”), and a lengthy unused “Fireworks” cue that basically is brassy circus music.  These cues are interesting, although I think the CD might have played better had these source cues all been grouped together at the end.

Silvestri’s score to Dutch remained unavailable commercially until 2010, when La La Land Records released a 1200 copy limited edition CD of the score.  At the time that I’m writing this, the CD is still available from their website.  While this is really a minor Silvestri score, it is still worth getting for fans of the composer, particularly if you have a fondness for his smaller scope scores.

The Dirty Dozen (Frank De Vol, 1967): The 1967 hit The Dirty Dozen was an early example of the more edgy, revisionist approach to war movies that would eventually largely dominate the genre.  The film is an all-star action/adventure about a squad of hardened criminals that are sent on a suicide mission during World War II. 

Composer Frank De Vol, who is probably better known as a songwriter (including the famous “Brady Bunch” theme) provided a very upbeat, traditional war movie score that was intentionally designed to be somewhat in conflict with the film’s very violent, and even cruel, depictions of war.  Separated from the context of the film, the score loses its ironic component and, instead, simply plays as a fun, old-fashioned war movie action score.  I consider it to be a fascinating and impressive aspect of this score that it plays so differently in the film and on an album.

Central to the score is a fairly simple, 4-note motif that sounds like it could easily be matched to the four syllables of the movie’s title, although De Vol fortunately avoids that temptation.  Surrounding that motif is a score full of marches and largely dominated by brass and percussion.  The tone of the music remains generally light throughout much of the score and even occasionally takes amusing turns, such as the big band sound first heard during the cue “The Builders / Train Time”.  On occasion, De Vol also incorporates familiar melodies such as “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” and “You’re In the Army Now” in a few cues.  The score also has some fairly traditional suspense cues as well, such as “The Wire Cutter / Posey’s Fight”.

The soundtrack also features two original songs that were written by De Vol for the film.  These include a German folk-style song entitled “Einsam” and performed by Sibylle Siegfried and the pop song “Bramble Bush” performed by Trini Lopez.  The latter is pretty firmly steeped in the popular style of the late 60s and is the one part of the film’s music that does tends to date it.

Film Score Monthly released a limited edition CD (still available) of the complete score in 2007.  This CD release more than doubles the running time of the original LP release, which had received a couple previous CD releases paired with other scores.  The limited edition CD also contains the first releases of the versions of the two songs as used in the film.  It does also include the album versions of the songs as bonus tracks, along with a few pieces of source music and score alternates.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Miles Goodman, 1988): Miles Goodman was a prolific film composer during the 1980s and 1990s (until his untimely death in 1996 at age 46), although very few of his scores have been released to CD.  Goodman tended to specialize in comedies, many of which also contained a number of songs, which is likely the main reason for the relative lack of score soundtracks.  His frequent collaboration with director Frank Oz was a particularly fruitful one.

In 2010, La La Land Records put out a limited edition CD of Goodman’s score to Oz’s big comedy hit Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  While the release was a limited edition of only 1200 copies, it is still readily available at the time that I’m writing this.  The film was a farce starring Steve Martin and Michael Caine as con-men competing to woo a mark played by Glenne Headly.  The setting is a small coastal town in France, which provides Goodman with the opportunity to provide a lively, European sounding score.

The score is consistently upbeat, with an often jazzy style to it.  Strings and horns dominate, particularly in the fast paced, swinging main theme, which debuts in the opening cue “Prologue/Dirty Rotten Theme” and then figures prominently throughout the score.  The rest of the score continues in a similar style, with the string composition particularly conveying a European classical feel to much of it.  The aptly named “Ruprecht Tango” is a particularly strong example of the European influences.

The soundtrack also includes Goodman’s instrumental arrangements of a few well-known standards: Jerome Kern’s “Pick Yourself Up”, Irving Berlin’s “Putting On the Ritz”, and Harry Warren’s “We’re In the Money”.  Stylistically, these arrangements fit in very well with the rest of the score.

Doctor Dolittle (Leslie Bricusse, 1967): The 1967 big-budget (for the time), musical version of Dr. Dolittle was, at the time of its release, a notorious box-office failure that was also pretty widely savaged by critics (although the film was surprisingly nominated for the Best Picture Oscar).  While it isn’t quite right to say that the film has become a classic, it has played reasonably well on TV and home video over the years and some of the songs have endured fairly well. 

The most famous and enduring of Leslie Bricusse’s songs is “Talk to the Animals”, which was performed by Rex Harrison as the title character.  That catchy song won the Academy Award for Best Song that year and is now something of a standard that is likely to be recognizable even to those that don’t really know the film.  This familiar song is fairly typical of the lyrical style found on all of Bricusse’s songs for the film and the overall score does have a very coherent sound with the songs all fitting together well.

Harrison, who was best known as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, was the central performer and dominates the song score.  The songs are written to be well-suited to his distinctive style of speak-singing and he does bring a fair amount of charm to his songs.  Besides “Talk to the Animals”, he also is solo performer on “The Vegetarian”, “When I Look In Your Eyes”, “Like Animals” and “Something In Your Smile”.

The other prominent performers on the soundtrack are Anthony Newley as the doctor’s friend and Samantha Eggar as the love interest.  Newley was a very popular singer at the time and lends his expressive voice to  several solos, including “My Friend, the Doctor”, “After Today”, “Where Are the Words” and the title song.  He also duets with Eggar on “Beautiful Things”.  Eggar has the solo “At the Crossroads” and duets with Harrison on two songs: “Fabulous Places” and “I Think I Like You”.

The soundtrack was originally released on LP with the film and has been issued on CD a couple different times.  The content of all releases has been the same, with the full set of songs from the film, including “Where Are the Words” and “Something In Your Smile”, which only were used in the early road-show version of the film.  The only instrumental piece is the overture that opens the album.

Dolores Claiborne (Danny Elfman, 1995): In the 1990s as Danny Elfman became a more established film composer, he started to stretch quite a bit beyond his original comfort zone with quirky comedies and fantasy/superhero films.  This included taking on more serious, dramatic films such as Delores Claiborne, a Taylor Hackford directed adaptation of a dark drama written by Stephen King.  Scores like this one tend to avoid Elfman’s quirkier, more playful tendencies (which often are his trademark), while still reflecting his strong compositional skills and his excellent sense of mood.

The score for Delores Claiborne is darkly atmospheric and often emotionally tense.  It is mainly dominated by strings and piano, with some often fast, somewhat harsh string playing frequently countering more gentle piano melodies, such as in the cue “Vera’s World”, in order to build tension and create impressions of emotional turmoil.   Elfman also adds bursts of faster tempo music and the occasional minor key piano, as in the cue “Getting Even”, to strong effect as well.

The soundtrack CD was released by Varese Sarabande and, as was typical of many of their releases during that time period, it only contains slightly over a half hour of score.  The film was not overly popular and the soundtrack can often be found at heavily discounted prices.  Still, it would be nice to see this score re-visited for an expanded release as there is much more music in the film than was included on the album.

Dr. Kildare (Jerry Goldsmith & Various, 1961): Jerry Goldsmith wrote the familiar main title theme for this popular 1960s medical-themed TV series starring Richard Chamberlain.  He also scored five episodes, including the series pilot.  Film Score Monthly released a 3-CD set that contains the music that Goldsmith composed for the series as well as a representative sampling of scores by other composers.  Other than a handful of bonus tracks, the music is all presented in monaural, but the sound quality is otherwise quite good for the age of the recordings.

Disc 1 opens with the End Title music from Season 1, which is essentially the most familiar instrumental version of Goldsmith’s theme for the series.  The theme opens with a brassy fanfare before transitioning into a very melodic primary section.  The other two discs contain alternate versions of the theme, including other season’s titles as well as various bumpers and transitions.  Disc 3 opens with “Three Stars Will Shine Tonight”, a pop song that was based on the series’ theme with lyrics performed by Chamberlain.  The song was actually a fairly big hit on the pop charts during the height of the series’ popularity.

The rest of the disc features Goldsmith’s 5 episode scores.  Goldsmith periodically incorporates the main theme into his scores and also builds on the theme stylistically for the rest of his scores.  His music tends to be very melodic, with a definite emphasis on emotional dramatic impact.  The music is recognizably Goldsmith’s and tends to reflect his usual musical approach for that time period.  As is typical for a TV series, the music can vary quite a bit depending on the content of the episode.

Some parts of the scores include some effective use of brass and lower strings to build suspense, such as in the tense cue “The Motel/Discovery” from the episode “The Lonely Ones”.    On the opposite end of the spectrum is more upbeat, almost bouncy music as heard in the opening part of “Early Curtain/Julie’s Symptoms” from “Shining Images”, although that cue later shifts in a darker direction. Other cues from that same episode do pick up the lighter tone again.  Another difference in style is the jazzier approach Goldsmith takes for the episode “A Million Dollar Property”, which features a lot of saxophone and piano.

After Goldsmith moved on, the most frequent composer for the series was Harry Sukman and disc 2 and 3 both feature a sampling of his scores for the series.  Sukman style is recognizably different than Goldsmith’s, although his approach still emphasizes the mix of drama and suspense.  Sukman didn’t make use of the series’ theme the way that Goldsmith did in his scores, instead choosing to create a new central theme for each episode score. 

Sukman’s scoring approach varies from episode to episode, as the storyline demands.   A couple examples: Sukman provides a jazzy, horn-driven theme for the episode “The Soul Killer”, while a much folksier melody is used for “The Gift of the Koodjanuck”.  Another particularly notable style is the 60s pop sound for the episode “Tyger, Tyger”, which includes a surf-guitar style main theme.

Also on disc 2 is a short medley from one episode scored by Richard Markowitz.  Disc 3 includes scores composed for the series by Morton Stevens, Lalo Schifrin and John Green.  Stevens compositions tend to be very fast paced and dynamic, with a definite action-oriented style.  Morton’s score for the episode “Rome Will Never Leave You” incorporates a love theme that was written for the episode by Burt Bacharach.  As you might expect from his typical scoring approach, Schifrin’s scores are strongly jazz influenced.  The Green scores are very melodic.

Disc 3 ends with several stereo cues from the score to an unused pilot for the series.  This score was by Alexander Courage, based on the main theme that Bronislau Kaper wrote for the 1956 film The Power and the Prize.  It would have been a very different approach, going for much bigger, broader composition, very heavy on the piano and soaring strings.

Dr. No (Monty Norman, 1962): The soundtrack album to the first major James Bond film doesn’t much resemble the others from the series, other than the inclusion of the famous main theme.  Most of the album is a collection of calypso music, some vocal and some instrumental.  For the most part, the included music was source music written for the film.  Some of the cues were not even used in the actual movie.  The album doesn’t feature the orchestral action and suspense cues usually associated with a James Bond movie or the jazzy instrumentals that were often associated with the movies.

Even the actual score tracks tend to have a tropical, exotic sound to them.  “The Island Speaks” and “The Boy’s Chase”, for example, are very percussion driven, highly rhythmic cues, with guitar providing a bit of a melodic line.  “Dr. No’s Theme” has a somewhat more swing style with electric guitar and percussion.  Late in the album there is a cue called “James Bond Theme” that is another percussion and guitar piece with no connection to the famous theme that opens the album.

Of course, the famous James Bond theme opens the album in its most familiar rendition.  The theme is credited to the John Barry Orchestra and it is very widely known that Barry’s arrangement played a substantial role in creating the theme’s familiar sound.  The true extent of his contribution continues to be debated and has even resulted in a couple court cases over the authorship of the theme.  The producers obviously valued Barry’s contribution as he would go on to score 11 of the subsequent films in the series.

Most of the vocals on the album are performed by the group Brian Lee and the Dragonaires.  A couple of the vocals were reportedly performed by Norman’s wife, Diana Coupland, who is uncredited. 

Dragnet (Ira Newborn, 1987): The soundtrack to the 1987 Dan Aykroyd/Tom Hanks spoof of Dragnet features 20 minutes of Ira Newborn’s score as well as five songs from the film.  Newborn (who appears to be retired from film composing) most frequently worked on comedies, which typically had a lot of songs, and his scores were pretty rarely released.

Dating back to the original radio (and later television) productions, Dragnet has one of the most familiar and iconic musical themes.  The distinctive opening motif and the march were originally created by composer Walter Schumann, although the opening so closely resembles a cue from Miklós Rózsa’s score to The Killers (1946) that Rózsa is now routinely credited as co-composer.  The theme is heavily incorporated into Newborn’s score and is also given an electronic pop arrangement (including dialog samples) by 80s synth group The Art of Noise.

Newborn’s score is very upbeat and fast-paced.  Brass and percussion are front and center throughout, with an authoritative sound that does bring to mind the film’s police setting.  Newborn definitely takes his stylistic cue from the familiar Dragnet theme and even his original compositions readily bring the theme to mind.  Although the film was a comedy, Newborn’s compositions are kept serious. 

Most of the score is orchestral, although Newman does use electronics prominently at some points, particularly in the opening portion of the cue “Dairy Apologies”.   A distinctive jazz-influenced component is heard with a strong saxophone solo in the cue “Joe Gets Fired”.  The “Dragnet End Credits” presents a particularly dynamic march although, oddly, the album closes with the cue “Kill me Instead”, which starts out suspenseful before transitioning into a repeat of the solo saxophone and finally a more pop-styled electronic instrumental.  I believe that swapping the last two cues actually provides the best listening experience.

The pop songs are pretty typical for an 80s soundtrack, although they did tend to connect more directly to the film than was often the case during that era.  The album opens with “Just the Facts”, which is performed by Patty LaBelle, a frequent contributor to soundtracks around that time.  The title of the song obviously refers to one of the best known Dragnet catch phrases and also contains samples of Aykroyd reciting the line.

The most straightforward of the songs on the album is “Helplessly in Love”, a ballad that is performed by pop group New Edition.  This is the one song on the soundtrack that doesn’t really include any direct references to the film itself.

“City of Crime” is a rap song that is actually performed primarily by Aykroyd and Hanks with Glen Hughes and Pat Thrall joining in mainly for the choruses.  This is an amusing oddity, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the two actors would rather it be forgotten.  Aykroyd and Thrall teamed again on the fairly strange song “Dance or Die”.

Die Hard (Michael Kamen, 1988): Today, the original Die Hard is considered to be an iconic action film.  Not only was it a blockbuster that kicked off a major franchise and established the film careers of Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, it essentially served as the prototype to an entire sub-genre of action movies that are now regularly described with a phrase starting with “Die Hard on a …”  At the time it came out, the film was viewed as having more limited potential, though, particularly due to it headlining Willis, who at the time was primarily a TV actor and mainly known for romantic comedy.

Likely due to the limited expectations for the film as well as the prominent use of non-original music, no soundtrack album was released along with the film.  Although the sequel scores were released with the films, Michael Kamen’s score remained unavailable (at least officially) until Varese Sarabande finally put it out on a 3000 copy limited edition “CD Club” release in 2002.  That release sold out fairly quickly and used copies today fetch prices well in excess of $100.  The soundtrack seems to be a pretty obvious candidate for a re-issue, but right now it remains one that is costly and difficult to obtain, if you don’t already have it.

Kamen’s original contributions to the score were dominated by stark, intense themes dominated by deep brass, vivid strings, and some very effective acoustic guitar.  The most recognizable component is a brief, guitar motif that is essentially the Die Hard series’ musical signature.  This motif is really too short to truly classify as a theme, but it is a distinctive element that is instantly associated with these films. 

A particularly interesting element to this score is Kamen’s use of the film’s Christmas time setting.  Kamen occasionally integrates sleigh bells or bell choir into the score as well as brief samples of familiar Christmas tunes such as “Winter Wonderland”.  These brief excerpts are presented in an almost chillingly menacing way.  The use of familiar holiday-associated melodies and instruments presented in this way makes for a very interesting effect.  The film memorably ends with the upbeat holiday classic “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” playing over the end credits and the song also closes the soundtrack CD, although in an instrumental version rather than the traditional version used in the film.

The most prominent and memorable non-original music used in the score is the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.  Bits of this familiar melody are regularly integrated into the score, essentially serving as a primary theme for the film’s villains.  The melody is then presented in full accompanying the key scene where the villains manage to open the safe that they came to the building to rob.  The disconnect between this emotionally full and usually joyful music and the temporary triumph of the bad guys is a bold, memorable and remarkably effective musical choice.  While “Ode to Joy” is not traditionally associated with the holidays, its use still served to vividly underscore the film’s unusual juxtaposition of festive/joyful elements with violence and peril.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder (Michael Kamen, 1990): For the first sequel to Die Hard, the filmmakers (led by new director Renny Harlin) didn’t stray too far from the formula established in the first film.  The sequel once again takes place during the holiday season and again has Bruce Willis fighting back against terrorists in a fairly enclosed complex (this time an airport instead of a skyscraper).  The film even included a few bits of dialog that directly addressed the implausibility of Willis’ character facing two such similar situations.

Michael Kamen was brought back to score the sequel and provided a score that is contains some similarities to the original, although with a few key differences as well.  One of the most obvious differences right from the start is that this score seems a bit more fully orchestral than the original.  Even the familiar Die Hard signature motif is generally performed by the orchestra’s violin section this time instead of on acoustic guitar as in the original.

The airport setting provided a more expansive setting, including considerably more outdoor sequences, so the somewhat larger scale of the score is fitting.  The first score tended to be dominated by stark, tension-filled cues, and there are similar ones here as well, the new one provides more opportunities for more dynamic, high-octane chase type music as well.  The cue “Snowmobiles”, which accompanies an almost James Bond style chase sequence late in the film, is a particularly good example of this side of the score.

Kamen did not repeat the use of “Ode to Joy” or the Christmas carol excerpts from the first film.  He does once again incorporate an existing piece into the score, though.  This time the piece that he uses is “Finlanda” by Jean Sibelius, which is certainly not as well-known or familiar as the Beethoven piece.  A full performance of the piece closes out the soundtrack CD, which was released by Varese Sarabande at the time that the movie came out.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (Michael Kamen, 1995): The third film in the (increasingly silly titled) Die Hard series departed quite a bit from the formula of the first 2 films.  Although it marked the return of original director John McTiernan, the only returning cast member was Bruce Willis.  In addition, the 3rd film was set in the summer instead of the holidays and the action took place all over Manhattan instead of in a single, enclosed venue.

Michael Kamen returned once again to score what would be his final entry in the series.  Unfortunately, the available soundtrack CD is a pretty poor representation of the score.  Only a little under a half hour of Kamen’s music is included, with the rest of the CD taken up by a variety of songs (only incidentally used in the film), much of it rap.  Some of the rap music uses raw language that actually gets the album a parental advisory warning.  The CD also contains a 9 minute recording of the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, which included the “Ode to Joy” that was incorporated in the first movie but wasn’t used in this one.

The Kamen music featured on the CD is very similar in character to what he provided for the previous films, with a closer match to the more orchestral approach used in Die Hard 2.  In fact, the film tracked in a fair amount of music from the previous sequel in place of original cues.  As with the previous scores, Kamen made pretty extensive use of an existing work, this time a specific melody from the 4th movement of Brahms’ Symphony #1, best known as the basis for the folk song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”.  While a full 15 minute recording of the Brahms’ piece is included on the CD, Kamen’s use of it within the score is almost entirely absent from the CD.

This is a score that desperately needs to be re-visited with an expanded CD release.  Much of the best material (including most of the key action sequences) is missing from the currently available release.  The current album is, I suppose, better than nothing, but hopefully one of the labels will eventually release a better version.

Live Free Or Die Hard (Marco Beltrami, 2007): There was a 12 year gap between the 3rd and 4th films in the Die Hard series.  Sadly, series composer Michael Kamen passed away in 2003.  Marco Beltrami was brought on board to take over scoring for the new film.  While a little bit of Kamen’s previous thematic material (most notably, the signature motif) is incorporated into the score, amazingly Kamen is not credited on the film or the soundtrack album.

Beltrami does appear to have studied Kamen’s scoring of the previous films and there is an overall similarity in style.  As with the Kamen scores, strings tend to be dominant with occasional blasts of brass and percussion.  Beltrami does make more substantial use of electronics than Kamen did, but otherwise the score doesn’t seem overly far removed from the previous entries in the series.

One big difference is that Beltrami did not incorporate any existing music into the score like Kamen did with each of the previous three films.  That key deviation does make the score seem a bit more generic than its predecessors.  Hearing a Die Hard score without the carefully interweaving of an existing piece as a key theme really underlines how creative Kamen’s approach really was.

Dinosaur (James Newton Howard, 2000): Dinosaur was Disney’s first attempt at producing a computer animated feature without Pixar.  It featured an unusual approach where CGI characters overlaid live action backgrounds, which resulted in a visually very impressive film.  Unfortunately, the film was weakened by a much too conventional storyline that particularly seemed way too close to Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time.

Besides the visuals, one of the film’s bigger strengths was James Newton Howard’s lively and exciting score.  Howard’s score is highly melodic and thematic, impressively performed by full orchestra and choir.  African-influenced rhythms and vocals are particularly well used during many parts of the score.  Much of the emotional resonance in the film is heavily enhanced by the musical accompaniment.

One problem that the film had, which is somewhat echoed in the score, is that it featured an exceptionally impressive opening sequence that the rest of the film was not able to live up to.  This sequence introduced the movie’s dinosaur world and then followed a lost egg as it was carried across the landscape by a variety of methods.  The music from this sequence is featured on the soundtrack in the cue “The Egg Travels”, which also contains the first introduction to the score’s soaring primary theme.  While the rest of the score is excellent, it never quite repeats the peak that it reaches during this very early cue.

Dirty Dancing (Various, 1987): The soundtrack album to Dirty Dancing was one of the top selling song soundtracks of the 1980s and even ranked pretty high among pop albums in general.  The album also came from one of the more unlikely hits of the era, a small independent film that ended up as a major blockbuster.

The soundtrack contains several original songs (several of which were hit singles) as well as some fairly well known oldies that were used in the film.  The movie is essentially a musical and the songs included on the soundtrack album are generally featured pretty prominently in the foreground of the film as accompaniment to big dance numbers.  None of the score (by John Morris) is featured on the album, but the film didn’t have much instrumental score.

The best known original song was “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” performed by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, which accompanied the big dance at the film’s finale.  The song was a huge hit single and also won that year’s Academy Award for Best Song as well as Grammy and Golden Globe awards.  While it is hard to deny that the song is kind of sappy, it is also pretty undeniably catchy and it was exceptionally effective in the film.

Two other big hits from the film and soundtrack are the ballads “Hungry Eyes” by Eric Carmen and “She’s Like the Wind”, co-written and performed by the film’s co-star, Patrick Swayze.  Both are fairly generic pop songs, although pretty good for what they are.  Swayze’s singing voice is competent, although it isn’t hard to tell why he didn’t have any significant singing career outside of the one hit.  Other less-known originals on the album are “Yes” by Merry Clayton, “Overload” by Alfie Zappacosta, “Where Are You Tonight?” by Tom Johnston and a cover of the 1960s song “You Don’t Own Me” performed by The Blow Monkeys.

A 20th Anniversary Edition of the soundtrack was released in 2007.  This CD combines the contents of the original soundtrack and a later “More Dirty Dancing” album (which I didn’t have) plus one additional cue into a single CD with the music presented in film order.  Priced as a single disc (Amazon sells it for $10.34), this is obviously the version to get if you don’t currently have any of the albums for the film.  In fact, I was unaware of this release until I looked up the album while working on this review and I ordered a copy of it after discovering its low-cost availability.

The majority of the additions are pre-existing songs that are pretty readily available elsewhere, including such often heard songs as “Wipe Out”, “Do You Love Me”, “Some Kind of Wonderful” and “These Arms of Mine”.  It also includes four instrumental dance numbers performed by Michael Lloyd and the “Kellerman’s Anthem” farewell song that is used towards the end of the film.  Perhaps one of the biggest selling points for the new release, though, is that it contains the film version of “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” which runs almost 2 minutes longer than the single version, which was included on the original soundtrack album.