January Meme: Favorite TV or movie score/music

[selenak]

yhlee asked me this. Well, you know, there's an eas(ier) answer for this, since I'm a Beatles fan. And several of the Beatles' albums were, among other things, movie soundtracks. Of these, pace Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour fans, I certainly would list A Hard Day's Night, Help and Let It Be among my favourite scores of all time. Hard to impossible to choose between these three, as it very much depends on what I'm in the mood for. Note that none of this is about the quality of the respective movies - general consensus, which I don't disagree with, is that A Hard Day's Night is best on the movie front - but Help has the title track, Norwegian Wood, If I Fell, and oh, yeah, good old Scrambled Eggs, aka Yesterday, and Let It Be, even in the Phil Spector'd version, has again the title track, Don't let me down, Get Back.... Nah, can't choose.

Excluding the Beatles, but still in the 1960s, there's the score for The Graduate, which has Simon & Garfunkle on top of their game, with Mrs. Robinson and Sound of Silence as the two standouts, but I can't say I remember much of the orchestral music, so it doesn't really count.

Let's go back in time: among the many aspects that are truly great about Citizen Kane even after decades of cultural hype and backlash is most definitely the soundtrack, which put good old (back then, young) Bernard Herrman on the musical landscape. Like most of the people involved in creating Citizen Kane, he'd worked with Orson Welles on the radio before, including arranging the music for the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, and composing it for various other Welles/Mercury Theatre radio productions, like Rebecca, and it shows in the best way. Citizen Kane was in fact his first movie soundtrack, and he pulled it off in great style, and in a great variation of styles, from the forbidding opening "Xanadu" theme to the engaging "Kane takes over the Inquirer" sequence (here it's conducted by none other than John Williams in a concert performance) to composing a bona fide Meyerbeer style opera aria for Susan to sing (or rather, fail at singing), which afterwards was and is still performed in concert by many a soprano; here is Kiri Te Kanawa doing the honors. As this is also a score where I love both the music and the movie, it definitely heads my list of non Beatles favourite movie scores.

Now upping the stakes to "score with not one sung word" - which excludes Kane because of not just the aria but also the "Who's the man?" song from the party scene - I have to move forward in time again, to all the Sergio Leone/Ennio Morricone collaborations. While the soundtrack for Once upon a time in the West probably objectively speaking is better, my own favourite among these is the one for Once upon a time in America. I'm only so-so about the movie itself, but I bought the vinyl of the soundtrack back in the day, and the cd was one of the very first cds I bought. So definitely this one, in that category. To this day, when I hear the pan flutes I get wistful and sad.

Moving on to tv: I still think overall Buffy the Vampire Slayer offered a superb mixture of original instrumental music by Christophe Beck and well selected songs by various artists to go with its episodes, even if you exclude the musical episode (which even many a year and competition later is still my favourite musical episode of a tv show). Beck's masterpiece was probably the score for Hush, aka the "silent movie" episode, but seriously, it's hard to single out one particular episode beyond that because the soundtrack was consistently good from start to finish, and it's definitely my favourite for tv.

The other days

Comments

[bimo]

Aw, interesting choices, especially the soundtrack for Citizen Kane, and good to see some Morricone on your list as well :-)

After reading your entry Cavendish and I have been thinking about some of our own favourite picks. Here's what we came up with in addition to Morricone's scores.

Movie scores:

Doctor Zhivago by Maurice Jarre
The Pink Panther by Henry Mancini. (Though I would say that one is a close tie with Charade)
Pirates of the Caribbean: CotBP, Klaus Badelt/Hans Zimmer

TV:

Murray Gold's work for Doctor Who
Christopher Franke's Babylon 5

And last but definitely not least Christian Bruhn's tracks for Captain Future

[selenak]

All superb soundtracks, though for Maurice Jarre, I'd go with Lawrence of Arabia over Doctor Zhivago.

And speaking of B5 and music, watch this lovely tribute.

[watervole]

The one that stands out in my memory is the final episode of 'Due South' which had 'North West Passage' as the closing music.

A great song, and perfect for a Canadian walking into the wilderness and snow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKF2uPx-d50

[watervole]

For context, Franklin was one of the early explorers of the Canadian north.

I'm assuming you know what the Northwest Passage is.

[selenak]

I do indeed, and while I first thought "Benjamin?" when hearing "Franklin", I did remember The Other Franklin - who was one of the Bronte's heroes - once the song went on. It is a great song!

[watervole]

Isn't it just!

The man who wrote it was Stan Rogers.

I fell in love with his songs around 35 years ago when I heard Artisan singing the Mary Ellen Carter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uirXFig0IQ

It's probably the best song in existence to make yourself willing to get up and fight again after being flattened by the system.

I got my brother in Canada to buy sets of Stan's cassette tapes for me, and was shocked when I realised that Stan was already dead - died young in an air crash. But the tapes were eventually replaced by CDs and then transferred to electronic form, and I learnt a whole batch of Canadian history en route.

[yhlee]

Really interesting, thank you!

[selenak]

You're welcome, and thank you for the prompt!

[iberiandoctor]

I think my TV answer is the BtvS soundtrack, too. Decades later, and I still have Walk Through the Fire written into my hindbrain ;)

[selenak]

Same here. Best tv musical episode ever.