In approaching the selection of music for this album, we have focused on my orchestral work, which reflects certain things I have had a chance to do in cinema. It does not provide a complete picture of what I have done in the realm of film music, which has to do with the original conception of orchestration as a whole, including orchestral music, electronics, vocals, and sometimes amplified rock elements. Those elements are not all represented here, but you are getting a purely orchestral treatment of this music.
It has been a wonderful opportunity for a composer to write music for film during a period in which the power of a large symphony orchestra was valued as a major production element in filmmaking. It was reminiscent of the way that same luxury was extended to late 19th-century and 20th-century symphonists. “Alien³” was an especially satisfying score for me in terms of writing for a conventional orchestra with experimental notational techniques where applied to coexist with and sound indistinguishable from electronic textures. I became familiar with some of these techniques through the scores of Krzysztof Penderecki and my teacher John Corigliano.
I was also very fortunate to have worked with directors that created a format where a composer could write musical scenes that had extended durations. In such pieces, musical development and emotional development are possible. The music itself can evolve over that amount of time, at a similar rate to a concert music listening experience. In other words, in a musical cue for a film you do not usually have the opportunity to develop a musical thought that is long enough to be comparable to that of a concert listening experience. In the film, some of those extended pieces – albeit a luxury – are sometimes marred by sound effects or covered by dialogue, and subject to the editor’s knife. So the opportunity to reconstruct the original musical intentions for those sections is a gift to the art of film music.
For example, take a piece heard on this album, ‘The Homecoming’ from “Cobb” directed by Ron Shelton. It is a very interesting example of a director wanting an old Baptist hymn, something that was nostalgic, homesick, that played on bittersweet reveries – the types of emotions that Mahler or late Strauss might elicit – sewn into one six-and-a-half-minute-long piece of music. Ron asked me to write an extended piece of music in which you have those elements co-existing with each other: the Baptist hymn being an example of Americana, and a type of 19th-century adagio that one would recognize as having its birth in Bruckner or Mahler – and it was all in a sports movie! But that is only a surface reading. When we see the character of Cobb during that scene, he is dying, and he knows he is dying. The music is about a dying man coming home, so the idea of weaving these disparate musical things in together is a pretty neat assignment for a composer.
Thus, when it came time to select the pieces for this new album, the first thought was about pieces whose duration allowed me to focus on this idea of musical development. In Alien³, there is the ‘Adagio’ at the end, for the scene in which Ripley sacrifices herself in a pool of lead, arms stretched out in the iconic Christian position of the crucifixion. It is the immaculate conception in reverse by having the alien choose Ripley as a vehicle for giving birth. The only way she could save humanity, including the thieves and criminals around her, is to sacrifice herself. In the story and in the music, she is the sacrificial Lamb of God. That is why the use of ‘Agnus Dei’ was so critical in this context. That piece is included in the ‘Lento’, which is the precursor to the ‘Adagio’.
This is connected with “Titus”. In the ‘Finale’, which we chose to record, there is somewhat a Christian reference as well. In Shakespeare’s play, there is no baby in a cage that young Lucius takes from the arena of murder and killing. During this adagio, the child walks carrying Aaron’s baby into the light, the sunset. This refers to the notion of caritas, as opposed to a more severe tradition of Roman justice. Early in the film, the Goth queen Tamara’s son is marked for sacrifice, and Tamara says “O cruel irreligious piety”, in reference to Roman law, whereas at the end, the innocent child is taken out of the Coliseum of human cruelty. The ending music relayed the philosophical feeling of caritas, of charity, and of possibility. It is not in the play, but director Julie Taymor encouraged me to convey that moral point, which is extremely important. She did not just say “write a piece of music.” It became a huge opportunity, because you see Aaron buried, being prepared to be eaten by birds of prey, with his child gone, but the boy picks up the child and takes him away, only a few moments before the end titles. The scene and its music – a fully realized composition that to that point had not been heard in the body of the film – represent a turning of the page of that cycle of violence.
For “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin”, Joel Schumacher’s vision was of a dazzling array of extremely contrasting characters. We start with Bruce Wayne, born out of the dark beginnings of his parents being murdered. The music is darkly chromatic, a series of minor chromatic chords followed by descending contrasting major chords, which is a kind of reduction of a whole movie of wild contrasts. That first theme, my Batman theme, is disguised in many forms, from high-speed perpetual mobility in the high strings to suggest power and flight, to its development as a dance – foxtrots, rumbas, a sultry tango. It carries my Batman theme into areas of whimsy to unabashed heroism and even eroticism.
Joel Schumacher allowed me periods of extreme heroism, expressed by a symphony orchestra. With my own whimsy, I called the ending ‘Batterdämmerung’, a play on Wagner. It is boldly triumphant – a torrent of strings with the brass playing the B-part of the Batman motive. The ‘Grand Gothic Suite’ is really a concert piece of theme and variations of my Batman theme in starkly contrasted episodes. Adapting that main theme as a sultry tango and to all its other forms relates to disposable American culture. The principle is that the Batman theme is a chiseled-out musical event at the outset, and then from that event, you can hang musical tapestries: erotic, heroic, seductive, destructive. Those pieces are all things unto themselves but connected through that main theme.
For the score for “Interview with the Vampire”, the concept was to turn the Catholic ‘Libera Me’ on its head. In the main titles, the first thing you hear (in Latin) is “save me from everlasting life”, since I changed the words for the choir from “morte aeterna” to “vitae aeterna”. It is a salient point in the conception of the music, having Christian and anti-Christian elements running at the same time as vampires sucking the holy blood out of people. Vampires are also no fans of light, and are being saved from the eternal light – lux aeterna. Director Neil Jordan and I talked about these things because he was very much weaving Anne Rice’s themes from the novel towards his own Catholic iconographic bent. The musical theme of ‘Lux Aeterna’ is presented here in ‘Louis’ Revenge’, in a kind of Beethovenian dance of death.
From “Frida”, we selected the piece ‘Still Life’, which can be heard in the film during the hospital scene, when Frida Kahlo is looking at her and Diego Rivera’s baby in a hospital jar after her miscarriage. The music reflects a doleful fragility of the moment. It is not just some waltz, but an emotional wrenching and vulnerable moment in her life. I played the original piece on the soundtrack on our piano at home. Julie Taymor and I did not intend it to be that way, but that is what ended up happening.
‘JD Dies’ is from the Michael Mann film “Public Enemies”. This piece was something Michael Mann liked from the outset, which was fortunate because we were running out of time at that point. It was one of the last things I wrote for the film. The strategy behind that piece was to have the flutes and clarinets play continuous eighth notes, which almost sound like a ticking clock. Whereas the unraveling of a person’s destiny, we ask “what is the last minute ticking down? What might it be? To die in your bed? In a hospital, or assassinated on a street corner?” In this case, for John Dillinger it was just on the street, after exiting the Biograph movie theater. You hear the ticking clock, the inevitability, the solemn curfew of a person’s life. There is also a tinge of the heroic in the brass because of the American lexicon of bank robbers possibly being heroic in popular mythology. But really it is about the solemnity of the myth of Dillinger. The idea of the piece is very clear when you hear it that way – the last minutes of a life against the heroic mythology.
When we came to the scene from “Heat” that ‘Of Helplessness’ underscores, I remember saying to Michael Mann at the time “don’t have drums and rhythmic pulsing music”, as we had had in other parts of the film. The music accompanies a despondent mother as she learns of the death of her daughter. Representing the mother’s pain, the longing in the orchestra is emotionally dignified and amplifies the mother’s grief without being maudlin. In this way, the music of “Of Helplessness” played against all the other music in the film.
So these are the things we thought about when discussing the selections for this album. We wanted to choose pieces that reflect something integral to the complete picture, universal emotions – things that humans share – or moments that contain important ideas, and which became wonderful opportunities to compose music for. It is with great joy and gratitude that I appreciate the mighty contributions that maestro Dirk Brossé, Robert Elhai, and the members of the Brussels Philharmonic have brought to this project.