Buy it... the 2004 expanded album if you have never owned Dances With Wolves before, or if you believe that this score was the easily the best of John Barry's career.

Avoid it... any of the expanded albums if the original 53-minute 1990 album satisfies all of your needs for a score that has saturated the ears of many listeners.

Barry

Dances With Wolves: (John Barry) In the late 1980's, John Barry was already beginning to suffer from a lengthy string of illnesses that would largely sideline him as the 1990's progressed. After winning the Academy Award for Out of Africa, he would suffer a ruptured esophagus and would later dedicate his score for Dances With Wolves to the doctors that saved his life. Already, Barry's shameless self-repetition in style was beginning to take a toll on his career. With Raise the Titanic, High Road to China, and Out of Africa (among others) all beginning to sound very alike in structure, Dances With Wolves was really Barry's last attempt --whether he knew it at the time or not-- to take this broad string, simple theme style and parade it at its best. While Barry would continue scoring large-scale dramas and garner an Academy Award nomination two years later for Chaplin, the quality of his production after 1995 would decline rapidly and he would suffer from rejected scores, a nasty court battle over the ownership of the James Bond theme, and continued illness. That said, Dances With Wolves was a simple, yet classic score by any standard of the imagination, and is still recognized as such today. Three main themes --all of which memorable-- are combined to make a powerful, yet tender and epic score. The John Dunbar theme (the main one) can be heard in any elevator or department store atrium. Technically speaking, it is extremely similar to Barry's other heavily dramatic themes of the 1980's, but as fortune would have it, the theme was the right melody for the right film at precisely the right time (reinvigorating the entire of the concept of the Western for the 1990's). After a decade of endless performances and re-uses of this primary theme from Dances With Wolves, however, many people (and even a few Barry fans) seek out the more obscure parts of the score for their enjoyment. The love theme, for instance, extends from previous Barry scores as well, but manages to capture the same magic as the other themes.

Arguably the best of the themes is the journeying theme (associated with Fort Sedgewick), which can be heard primarily in the third track. Barry, in a curious composing manner, sometimes manages to write a small, secondary theme for his assignments that is actually better than the main theme for a film... and Dances With Wolves is no exception. This is not to discredit the John Dunbar theme, though. Any person who watches American football on television immediately recognized it mixed in during the United Way commercials for over ten years. As previously published by Jerry McCulley with great accuracy, "Utilizing Wagnerian structure, Barry's three main themes recur in magisterial symphonic form. The memorable "John Dunbar" theme alone has become an almost subconscious part of modern life, utilized as Muzak and underscore for public events great and small. Barry's skills as an arranger color his themes in subtly shifting orchestral hues, giving even the most repeated melodic passages new emotional weight. Barry's rich music is living proof that the art of orchestral film scoring is still alive and surprisingly vital in the '90s." Barry chose to score the film from Dunbar's point of view, dismissing any idea of recording authentic Sioux music and instead taking a strictly symphonic approach on a massive scale. Cynics have raised the point that Barry's only attempt at Native American music (White Buffalo) was by no means a success --in fact, many would consider it a monumental failure in his career-- and that Barry would have been incapable of any other type of score than the one he wrote. And yet, his approach worked wonders, and today, many of the tracks from the score have been re-recorded by various recording groups for other labels. The last recording of the 1990's came from the City of Prague Philharmonic, who performed the film version of the "Buffalo Hunt" sequence in stunning surround sound (available on the Silva Screen label). Again, however, the powerful journeying theme has remained unfortunately neglected in the majority of the re-recordings so far. The original recording by Barry has had its own long story on album.

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Several releases of the score are available. The original release that accompanied the film's popularity in 1990 contains all the necessary music, and is readily available many years later. The Gold release of Dances With Wolves in 1995 (the "Definitive Collector's Edition,") was one of a string of "gold" releases made available for highly popular, best-selling scores (eventually including Schindler's List and Apollo 13). This (supposedly) limited gold release has three additional tracks of music, none of which appear directly in the film. The last two tracks are pop versions of the themes from the film. The first one, encompassing the John Dunbar and journeying themes, is quite nice, but the second one is a rather awkward combination of James Bond style and John Dunbar substance. These two cues are the same tracks contained on a promo circulated to radio stations for mass appeal. The third previously unreleased track (at least on Dances With Wolves CDs, that is) is the "Fire Dance" track from the Narada album, Last Frontier, and it is very misplaced in the middle of Barry's score. In 2004, as part of a celebration of Barry's 70th birthday, Sony released Dances With Wolves once again, removing the pop tracks and featuring about twenty minutes of previously unreleased material and alternate versions of famous cues that were also previously unavailable in original form. The extended material is sprinkled through the album with a few negligible extra minutes in existing cues. The full film versions of the "Buffalo Hunt" and "John Dunbar Theme," as well as an extension of the love theme in "Falling in Love," are welcomed additions. Unless you are a serious John Barry collector, however, this expanded album may not offer you much more satisfaction than the gold one from 1995. Despite the press stating that the 2004 Sony album is the "entire" score, Barry reportedly recorded 100 minutes of music for Dances With Wolves, and thus it is likely not complete. Sadly, if you put all of the pop and other alternate versions of this music together on one set, it would have to encompass two CDs. No matter which version you find and enjoy, Dances With Wolves remains the crowning achievement in Barry's career, and stands as a score of historical and popular influence for an entire generation. *****

Bias Check:

For John Barry reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.87 (in 23 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.71 (in 20,815 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.