‘A lot of soundtracks are quite boring’

Abstract

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1986 about German electronic band Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack for Ridley Scott’s Legend, the late Edgar Froese, the band’s founding member, remarked that ‘a lot of soundtracks are quite boring because they just work with the picture. I think you should also be able to listen to it on record’ (Smith 1986). At that point, Tangerine Dream had already worked with the likes of William Friedkin and Michael Mann, on Sorcerer (1977) and Thief (1981) respectively, as their particular brand of sequencer-driven synthesiser music was deemed a particularly suitable accompaniment for films in a period when electronic music was coming to the fore culturally. Of course, Wendy Carlos had already produced a film soundtrack composed entirely on a Moog modular synthesiser for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which blended original compositions alongside adaptations of classical pieces by Beethoven, Rossini and Elgar. Famously, Carlos had recorded arguably the first truly pioneering electronic album in 1968 with Switched-On Bach, which raised the profile of Moog synthesisers to such an extent that musicians such as Kraftwerk, the aforementioned Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre would go on to popularise them and other brands of synthesiser with seminal albums such as Autobahn, Rubycon and Oxygène respectively in the mid 1970s. These albums would in turn inspire the likes of David Bowie, Gary Numan, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, The Human League and Depeche Mode in the late 1970s with the result that the synthesiser has become a staple instrument for musicians ever since. Whether we agree with Froese or not about the necessity for a film score to have a life of its own beyond the realm of film, there is little doubt that myriad classic films would have had much less impact without the composers’ contribution to the mix. It is no surprise, therefore, that the names of so many directors are inseparable from the composers who scored their films. Think of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann (North by Northwest; Psycho; Vertigo), Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone (A Fistful of Dollars; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West), George Lucas or Steven Spielberg and John Williams (Jaws; Star Wars; Raiders of the Lost Ark; Schindler’s List), and more recently Christoper Nolan and Hans Zimmer (The Dark Night; Inception; Interstellar). However, it is Zimmer’s recent work with Denis Villeneuve, which has brought him particular acclaim, winning the Oscar for Best Original Score for Dune (2021) at the 2022 ceremony, now forever overshadowed by Will Smith’s unfortunate confrontation with Chris Rock. In many ways, though, it is Villeneuve and Zimmer’s previous collaboration on Blade Runner 2049 (2017) that is especially interesting, inasmuch as both were responding respectively to the partnership between Ridley Scott and Vangelis on an iconic film with arguably one of the most influential original soundtracks of all time, namely Blade Runner (1982). For many years, the soundtrack was not commercially available, while the orchestral STUDIES IN EUROPEAN CINEMA 2022, VOL. 19, NO. 2, 93–95 https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2022.2074958