Intrada Soundtrack Forum

Which score in your collection would you say is the most Unique /Innovative score?


There are many Great Innovators of film score music. Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone to name a couple but of the scores I own I would have to pick Denny Zeitlin's score from the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" So Creepy,futuristic and off kilter it really enhances the film. It's a shame that it was the only film score he ever composed.

It would be hard to beat The Andromeda Strain for innovation, and it was innovative in a most intelligent way.

As for fondness for the uniqueness of a composer's overall musical voice, I can't get enough of the Thomas Newman sound.

If innovation means that composers have created a musical trend that have been massively followed by other film score composers, then it would be Star Wars (1977) from John Williams.
But if innovation means something very new then Star Wars doesn't fit anymore because of its roots in the past of film music (Erich Wolfgang Kornold) and concert music (Holst, Stravinsky, etc).

But then a new fresh musical idea is hard to find in film music, because it's so inspired by what's been done in other fields of music. The romantic trend of the 30's-40's came from the Romantic concert music, the pop trend of the 60's came from what was going on in popular music, atonal trend of the 70's came from the atonal concert music, electronic trend of the 80's came from the electronic music emergence, etc.

So what's really innovative in film music ? not much really. Even the narrative aspect of it comes from the Opera. Film music is an opera without singing, according to Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

But I believe that the musical inventions of film music are much more subtle than just a pure innovative musical genre. Maybe it's the unhibited blend of genres that was clearly not allowed in the concert music area, nor in the popular culture, and specifically the apparition of new synthetic sounds inside the orchestra, next to the classical instruments, in the 20th century, coinciding with the birth of film music : Erich Wolfgang Korngold using the first ever synthesizer Novachord in The Sea Wolf (1941), Miklos Rozsa using the Theremin in Spellbound (1945), Jerry Goldsmith using the Blaster Beam in Star Trek the Motion Picture (1979), etc.

Now I realize that I've written three times the name of Erich Wolfgang Korngold in this post. Maybe HE is really the most innovative film composer of all times.

At one point, westerns were scored with pseudo-Copland and similar strains. Many composers had their say. Tiomkin brought his colorful Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov flavor to the American west. Friedhofer brought his sophisticated harmonic voice to Copland's big outdoors. Eventually, Moross seemed to nail it down with The Big Country. Then Elmer Bernstein brought to a similar vernacular his own unique interpretations of the western sound with The Magnificent Seven. All of these were given life by mostly the same orchestral requirements and through decidedly "American" folk melodies, harmonies and rhythmic devices. Even TV commercials used the music, literally in some cases, to sell products like cigarettes. The western sound was easily recognizable.

Then, just a few years later, Ennio Morricone turned it all on its head. Gone were folk melodies, expansive outdoor themes, swirling violins, big orchestral crescendos, Copland and anything else associated with typical western scoring. Instead there were whip snaps, Spanish trumpet solos, twanging guitars both electric and acoustic, harmonicas played in unorthodox manner, grunts and groans from male chorus, minor key oboe solos, spurs jingling, you name it. Within what seemed like just minutes, a brand new western sound was born. It still thrives today. If companies were to mimic a western sound in their commercials today, they would go straight for the Morricone "Italian western" sound.

I think that development made A Fistful Of Dollars (or something else around that time by Morricone) not only unique but certainly innovative.
--Doug

I believe Morricone's innovation came from a restriction. He couldn't have a big orchestra for these small budget early Leone's westerns or maybe he couldn't write for a big orchestra at all (just like Alan Silvestri on early projects in his career). So he just had to deal with these issues and create a new sound for the western genre : trumpet solo (derived from the mexican mariachi genre), harmonica solo (to set the west with actual folk sounds) and electric guitar (to follow the pop trend of the 60's) were certainly more a way of getting around the musical limitations than a thoughtful decision to re-invent the western score. It was eventually inventive in the end, because it sounded so fresh and new.

That's why he couldn't have sit down and written an entire "The Big Country" fully orchestrated. ^^

From within my personal favorites, I'm going with either ALIEN or COMA. Jerry really seemed out to reconceive what film music could be, every time he made a move in this period. COMA especially, with scarcely a note of scoring in the first hour of the film, the austere orchestration, and the harmonic language straight out of 1918.

A lot of his innovation, to me, was in creating such unique sound environments for the tensions onscreen but to use such lyrical beauty right there on the same canvas.

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Randy Wilson
Dallas, TX