Thanks to the joys of DVD boxsets, I’ve been catching up on loads of great TV shows over the last six months: Battlestar Galactica, House, The Wire. They’re all amazing shows, the cream of modern TV, but they all make me realise I still haven’t seen anything to top what is (for me) the greatest TV series of all time.

I watched The Sopranos all the way through during its run on TV, and then watched the whole thing again when it came out on DVD. Apart from having the sharpest writing and dialogue of any TV show I’ve ever seen, one thing that really stuck out through the whole series was the use of music.

There’s no score, just songs, but they fit so perfectly it’s hard to imagine anything else working as well. The music supervisors did such an amazing job, some of the tracks feel like they were written just for the show.  Some of the music highlights for me were:

I could only find a few examples on Youtube, but the John Cooper Clarke track is one of my favourites. Sublime. Ever since watching the show, I started wondering what songs I might have picked if I’d had the dream job of The Sopranos music supervisor. These would be a few on my list:

Man, I miss that show…

For promo purposes only: here’s another ‘rescored’ video, this time for the trailer of John Carpenter’s classic 1982 movie The Thing, rescored with my instrumental music track Outpost 31.

John Carpenter has always been one of my favourite directors (and composers). His soundtracks to films like Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 are iconic genre soundtracks and inseparable from the films.

Outpost 31 was written as a sort of imaginary alternative soundtrack to The Thing -- I always had the epic icy visuals and claustrophobic imagery of the film in the back of my mind when writing this track. You can hear the full preview and buy the track from my mp3 music download shop here:

Buy Outpost 31 mp3 from thebluemask.com shop

As promised in the previous post, here’s a great featurette showing how composer team Asche & Spencer created the beautiful and hypnotic soundtrack to the film Monster’s Ball, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry.

The video shows how the team of composers worked to create a classic ambient and highly atmospheric score using guitar drones, piano and atmospheric soundscapes -- a real favourite of mine.

Following on from my post about ten inspirational moments in film scoring, I decided to follow it up with a second imaginatively titled installment. I enjoyed going through my mental list of key film music moments and if nothing else, it’s a therapeutic way for me to make them a bit more tangible. As before, these aren’t necessarily critically acclaimed or “the best” scores – just soundtracks I love which provided me with inspiration and that I think are well worth listening to. For this post, I’ve also added short audio clips from the soundtracks – they’re only about a minute long to give you an idea, but hopefully they help illustrate the music:

The Insider (1999)
Director: Michael Mann
Composer: Lisa Gerrard/Pieter Bourke/Gustavo Santaolalla
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Gustavo Santaolalla : Iguazu

Although the majority of this film’s score was actually provided by Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke, it was Gustavo Santoalla’s haunting track Iguazu that completely sold this film to me. It sits so perfectly with the desperate paranoid tone of conspiracy and cover-up that it sends chills up my spine every time I hear it. To be honest, you could put Iguazu over an episode of Hollyoaks and it would make it seem epic but it’s used here to such mesmerising and ominous effect. In some ways I could just have easily picked Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Babel, as that film also featured Iguazu along with several other Santaolalla tracks and is a more eclectic collection of tracks (plus it’s also another great film), but The Insider got to me first.

Monster’s Ball (1999)
Director: Marc Forster
Composer: Asche & Spencer
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Asche & Spencer : Opening Title

If Asche & Spencer sounds like the name of a brand of consultants or designers, that’s because, in a way they are. Actually, more a collaborative team of audio artists, Thad Spencer (Mark Asche left the firm many years ago) leads a team of composers who come from a background of producing music for advertising. While on paper this might sound like a cold and clinical choice, it actually works beautifully and organically. The creative team produced a haunting ethereal score, consisting largely of piano and sustained delayed guitar drones and swells. The result is a rich and evocative ambient and textural score that really emphasises the gaps between the notes and like the film itself, is contemplative and considered (there’s a great feature on the making of this score that I’ll post soon). Another of their scores in a similar tone to this one is Stay (2005) and also Mark Isham’s beautiful and subtle Crash (also from 2005).

Syriana (2005)
Director: Stephen Gaghan
Composer: Alexandre Desplat
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Alexandre Desplat: Driving In Geneva

A mixture of solo minimalist piano, deep pulsing synths, marcato strings and ethnic flavoured percussions combine to give the score a sense of desperate urgency. Again, a score that works well with its eerie electronic-tinged minimalism subtly highlighting the film’s storyline of political corruption and terrorism in the oil industry. Having scored a multitude of films in his home country of France, Alexandre Desplat has also shown his diversity over a range of higher profile international features including Hostage and Firewall.

The Player (1992)
Director: Robert Altman
Composer: Thomas Newman
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Thomas Newman : Funeral Shark

A tough choice with Thomas Newman; he’s written so many great scores and in doing so he’s kind of defined a certain type of piano sound that’s immediately recognisable. His piano voicings are strangely unique; usually soft, simple and muted but often approaching melodies from a skewed, leftfield perspective. I almost chose American Beauty but that’s probably had enough coverage already so I went for his score to Robert Altman’s fantastic The Player instead. Refreshing, sly, discordant but still fresh sounding, The Player uses similar percussive elements that he also used in his theme to Six Feet Under. Other excellent Newman scores (but going more towards his trademark piano sound) include Road To Perdition, The Shawshank Redemption (though the film itself is well overrated), The Green Mile, and Meet Joe Black.

The Bourne Identity (2002)
Director: Doug Liman
Composer: John Powell
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John Powell: Main Titles

John Powell’s score to Doug Liman’s 2002 spy thriller combines contemporary electronica and percussion with orchestral instrumentation to create an instantly identifiable score. The simple repetitive string ostinato of the main theme, although now sounding a bit over familiar, has gone on to almost define a certain genre in the same way as Thomas Newman’s piano style (see above). That type of tense repetitive string line is cropping up everywhere these days (I can even hear its influence in the next room in the BBC’s Survivors as I’m typing…) Another Media Ventures protégé, Powell went on to successfully score the two Bourne sequels, as well as another of my faves, the sensitive and emotional soundtrack to Paul Greengrass’ 9/11 feature United 93.

28 Days Later (2002)
Director: Danny Boyle
Composer: John Murphy
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John Murphy : In The House, In A Heartbeat

John Murphy’s tense, claustrophobic and mounting score is centred on the cyclic, slow-building mix of ominous guitars, bass and piano of “In The House, In A heartbeat” that builds to a cloud of minor-key melodic rage. The darkness and impending danger of the music perfectly fits the film’s apocalyptic story of a handful of survivors from a viral outbreak fighting against the infected victims. You still hear it all over the place on film trailers and TV promos and it’s almost become a cliche for it, but that’s not the track’s fault – blame lazy trailer makers ;) Murphy has also contributed memorable music to some other films that I think work well including, surprisingly, Miami Vice and (with Underworld) Sunshine.

Training Day (2001)
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Composer: Mark Mancina
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Mark Mancina : Money

Another dark, atmospheric, almost ambient score. Ominous like the approach of distant thunder or a heartbeat pulse, Mancina’s score adds layers of minimalist atmosphere to the brooding sense of foreboding of Denzel Washington’s cop gone bad. Nicely underplayed with some occasional modern electronic percussive textures that you might expect from a former composer of the Media Ventures stable.

Dirty Harry (1975)
Director: Don Siegel
Composer: Lalo Schifrin
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Lalo Schifrin : Scorpio’s Theme

As I mentioned in my previous inspirations post, I love the jazz and funk inspired scores of the great 70s cop/heist movies (like The Taking Of Pelham 123) and this one’s no exception. Lalo Schifrin’s iconic score of crisp breakbeat style drums, wah wah guitar, Fender Rhodes and fuzz bass conjures up the electric cool of downtown San Francisco as well as sounding influenced by the electric jazz experiments of the era (see Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew). Other great scores in a similar style are Dave Grusin’s Three Days Of The Condor, Dominic Frontiere’s Brannigan, Charles Bernstein’s Gator, Don Costa’s The Soul Of Nigger Charley, Quincy Jones’ Smackwater Jack, Isaac Hayes’ genre-defining Shaft plus of course all the classic Italian Giallo scores from the 70s. Big guns.

Red Dragon (2002)
Director: Brett Ratner
Composer: Danny Elfman
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Danny Elfman : Main Titles

On Red Dragon, Elfman got to channel some of his love of Bernard Herrmann’s work with Hitchcock into a score that’s full of weight and gravitas. I’m not really a massive Elfman fan, but I do generally like his music and you can always tell when you’re hearing an Elfman score. Certainly his big superhero scores do the job with just the right balance of bombast and camp. He plays this one pretty straight though, with no room for playfulness or lightness. I love the way some of the cues have a feeling of a heavy weight being dragged along before the low brass comes crashing in like a relentless killer. I also really liked his heavily percussive score to the Planet Of The Apes remake (though the film was botched).

The Hours (2002)
Director: Stephen Daldry
Composer: Philip Glass
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Philip Glass: Dead Things

Philip Glass’ music invokes a love/hate reaction in many listeners. His style is heavy on building repeated motifs and rhythms, that slowly grab the listener’s attention. Here it produces a lulling and hypnotic effect that works perfectly with the film’s often dark and melancholy subject matter. Personally, I think this score is one of his best and is the perfect soundtrack for rainy Sunday afternoons. Also worth checking is his score to Koyanisqaatsi, although its repetitive minimalism is probably best experienced in conjunction with the dazzling visuals of the film.

Looking back at these selections, I’ve picked modernish scores, but that’s probably more to do with me having started scoring music around the same time. If there’s a lack of ‘classic’ composers (Williams, Goldsmith, Steiner etc.) it’s not because I don’t enjoy their work; love ‘em all, but these scores are ones that really resonate for me.

Here’s a post about 10 films which were massively influential on my decision to write music for moving images. I could easily have picked another 50 films, and some of these might seem a bit obvious, but they’re all classic examples of what inspired me (and continue to inspire me) to write music for visuals. So, not in any order at all:

The Taking Of Pelham 123 (1974)
Director: Joseph Sargent
Composer: David Shire
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David Shire: Main Title

Massively funky & gritty 70’s score with an unbelievably dirty low-end in the horns and fat bass ostinatos. One of my all time favourites. Aiming for a sound that was “New York jazz-oriented, hard edged”, Shire ended up basing the score on the twelve tone method which gave the sound a kind of organised chaos without a definite tonal centre. Basically, a dirty funk score that just tears it up. There’s something about the vibe and music of movies from this period that I’ll always love: The French Connection, Serpico, Dirty Harry, Capricorn One etc. I guess it also started me off on my quest for collecting blaxploitation soundtracks and rare funk/library music. A hugely underrated composer, I also love and highly recommend Shire’s haunting, melancholy, slightly discordant piano-based score for Coppola’s excellent The Conversation starring Gene Hackman (1974).

Memento (2000)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Composer: David Julyan
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David Julyan: Memento Main Theme

Proof that every so often, independent cinema can come up with a modern classic on a shoestring budget (well, $5m, but that’s allegedly peanuts by industry standards). David Julyan’s score to Memento is a fitting combination of glitchy nervous sound effects and slow haunting melancholic strings (which became a recurring sound in much of his successive work on other films with Chris Nolan, eg The Prestige, Insomnia etc.) For a while it seemed to be almost de facto for independent directors to cite this score as an influence in what they were looking for when on the lookout for a composer. In fact it still crops up as a musical inspiration on many film job briefs to this day, the sign of a highly effective score.

Naked (1993)
Director: Mike Leigh
Composer: Andrew Dickson

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Andrew Dickson: Naked Title Music

Still my favourite Mike Leigh film, Naked is, let’s be frank, a fairly bleak tale. Dark, brutal and unsettling but bristling with amazing fast-paced dialogue and stellar performances from David Thewlis and Katrin Cartlidge (much of the final dialogue was improvised in character during rehearsals). The music by Andrew Dickson, an English composer and longtime musical associate of Leigh’s (scoring Meantime, High Hopes, Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake) is seemingly impossible to track down. Lots of mournful and desolate violins, cellos and harp, it’s a beautiful and dark companion to the stark and uncompromising subject matter.

Solaris (2002)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Composer: Cliff Martinez
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Cliff Martinez: Is That What Everybody Wants

Perfectly matching the understated visuals and narrative of the film, Cliff Martinez’ score is an exercise in pure artistic synchronicity. Using Javanese gamelan, celesta, muted steel drums and slow shifting tone colors along with more traditional strings and horns, the score perfectly captures the remoteness and subtle poignancy of the film’s narrative. A bit of a departure from the former drummer for Lydia Lunch/Captain Beefheart/Red Hot Chili Peppers. It’s a beautiful and sublime piece of work and like the score for Memento above, still a touchstone soundtrack for indie directors looking to appropriate some of that ambient existential angst for their own projects.

Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) / Halloween (1978) / The Thing (1982) / Escape From New York (1981)
Director: John Carpenter
Composer: John Carpenter (Ennio Morricone for The Thing)
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John Carpenter: Assault On Precinct 13 (Main Title)

I love John Carpenter – but I’m not even sure why – his films are often extremely patchy in quality (apart from Halloween which is definitive) but I think it’s just the overall atmosphere and auteur spirit of them. I have distinct memories of watching his films on VHS when I was a kid and there’s just something very moody about his opening credit sequences that take me right back to being 13 again. It’s that whole minimal atmopsherics thing (which was actually largely due to budget and time constraints at the time) that gives me the chills. I couldn’t really pick one film in particular, but the scores for the above four are probably my favourites. Maybe Escape From New York for consistency, big warm vintage synths and lyrics like “…stab a priest with a fork, and you’ll spend your vacation in New York”.

Blade Runner (1982)
Director: Ridley Scott
Composer: Vangelis
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Vangelis: Fading Away

I suppose it’s a bit of an obvious contender but this score is just so damned evocative and lush. And I’m not a particularly big Vangelis fan either (a bit too new-age for me sometimes). But as with the John Carpenter scores above, it could be the powerful childhood memories attached to watching the film that trigger things in me. Either way it’s another great example of music matching the visuals perfectly. So much so that I tracked down several other versions of this score, just so I could get all the extra tracks that you don’t get on the original release version (the Amazon box set link above is excellent and contains 3 CDs with 36 tracks).

The Shining (1980) / 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968)
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Composer: Various Artists

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Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind: Rocky Mountains

It was a toss up between these two Kubrick masterpieces. In the end I went for The Shining, but both are equally fantastic combinations of image and music. Stanley Kubrick had a tendency to not use one specific composer but rather just the individual pieces of music that fit the film, regardless of who wrote it. Using a mix of experimental electronic Moog soundscapes and modernist classical music, The Shining features artists including Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind, Kryzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgi Ligeti and Bela Bartok to create a deathlessly iconic soundtrack and movie. There’s a continuous unsettling air of dread and disturbing atmosphere throughout the entire film, from the initial flyover of the Rocky Mountains to Jack’s gradual breakdown into insanity through to the (literally) chilling finale. It’s one of those films that are just inseparable from the soundtrack.

Pi: Faith In Chaos (1998)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Composer: Clint Mansell
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Clint Mansell: 2 Pi R

Another pivotal moment (for me at least) in modern independent cinema, Aronofsky’s moody and atmospheric film probably has a few holes in the mathematical technicalities (“A paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature”) but is full of beautiful grainy noir visuals, conspiracies and Clint Mansell’s hard edged distinctive electronic music (Mansell was frontman with late 80s alt/techno/industrial band Pop Will Eat Itself and has gone on to become a highly regarded modern film composer). Also, another good example of a successful director/composer partnership (Mansell went on to score Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain).

Ghost Dog (1999)
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Composer: RZA
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RZA: Ghost Dog Main Titles

When RZA nails it, he really does nail it. Although much of his work can be a bit patchy, on Ghost Dog he gets it right from the off (and some of the Afro Samurai soundtrack is also pretty cool). Those ghostly lo-fi hip hop beats and spectral string samples are his trademark sound and put here to stellar use against Jarmusch’s existential story of modern-day assassins and Japanese mythology. The opening titles set the subdued tone perfectly for the rest of the movie – I suppose I definitely have a pull towards films where not much appears to be happening on the surface. Also, I’ve been listening fervently to hip hop for over 20 years now and it’s always been a perfect genre for cinematic imagery and wordplay – yet it still amazes me that even today, there are a few who refuse to even acknowledge it as a valid musical form, especially other film composers who would prefer it to be all quill and manuscript still. Do wake me up when you’ve caught up.

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Director: Andrew Dominik
Composer: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
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Nick Cave & Warren Ellis: Falling

After a short period of being generally uninspired by recent films and scores, this beautiful elegiac and atmospheric film brought it all back home again. Again, it’s one of those films where large sections just drift by with not much apparently happening, but the camera is allowed to linger on the actors’ faces and stunning photography. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provide a haunting and intimate close-sounding score of piano, violin and guitar. Brad Pitt was on fine form in the film but I’d say the show was completely stolen by Casey Affleck who was mesmerising as Robert Ford and rightly nominated for several awards. One of the best films I’ve seen in a long time.

OK, that’ll do for now. Obviously, the above 10 are just an arbitrary selection of some of my favourites, so here’s a few more that could have been contenders:

Monster’s Ball : Asche & Spencer
The Hours/Koyaanisqatsi : Philip Glass
The Player/American Beauty : Thomas Newman
Syriana : Alexandre Desplat:
Alien/Capricorn One : Jerry Goldsmith
Red Dragon : Danny Elfman
Taxi Driver/Psycho : Bernard Herrmann
Thunderball/You Only Live Twice : John Barry
Amelie : Yann Tiersen
Get Carter : Roy Budd
Lawrence Of Arabia : Maurice Jarre
Paris, Texas : Ry Cooder
Three Days Of The Condor – Dave Grusin
The Usual Suspects – John Ottman