Buy it... on the commercial album with James Horner's functional but mundane replacement score only if you have extreme patience with his tendency to recycle his own music, a technique actually made necessary by his last minute rush job for this film.

Avoid it... on the Horner album completely if you have a chance to somehow obtain the vastly superior rejected score by Gabriel Yared, the momentous crown jewel of his career that has haunted film score fans since its intentional leak to the public in 2004.

Horner
Yared

Troy: (Gabriel Yared/James Horner) In the arduous process of making what he deemed would be the biggest motion picture of all time, director Wolfgang Petersen spent $175 million taking over part of the Mediterranean island of Malta for the shooting of Troy. The 2004 re-envisioning of the Trojan War and attack on Troy by the armies of Greece had "epic" written all over its production values, including a variety of male leads led by Brad Pitt flexing his beach-appropriate muscles as famed warrior Achilles. Peter O'Toole's performance as the King of Troy, as true a nod to classic epics of Hollywood as anything in this movie, is made memorable by an unnatural, booming mix of his voice. Spectacular sets and costumes were betrayed, however, by the inane treatment of the story itself, alternating between boring conversational scenes and generic action involving special effects modeled after The Lord of the Rings. Critically, Troy has often been referred to as one of the most expensive flops in the history of cinema, though while it failed to recoup its budget domestically, lingering overseas grosses eventually neared half a billion dollars, at least earning Warner Brothers a fair sum of cash for its artistically flawed property. It has also often been said that no music score could have saved Troy from its much larger troubles, though its soundtrack has become its most famous production element. Petersen approached Academy Award winner Gabriel Yared more than a year before the film's scheduled release, hiring the classically-inclined composer despite the obvious fact that Yared had never written an epic battle score of this magnitude in his life. The director put a significant amount of faith in Yared based on the quality of music that he had heard in the composer's existing works, and Yared was eager to branch out of the romance and drama genres in which he felt himself trapped by his success in those modes (he sought Troy as means of expressing his action style and 1408 as an opportunity to finally tackle a mainstream thriller). In April of 2003, Yared began work on the score for Troy, researching source music necessary in the shooting of several scenes on location. Recording the rest of the score later in the year, Yared assembled a 100-piece orchestra in London, added layovers by a 25-member brass section, hired a Bulgarian chorus to produce authentic Eastern-European vocals and, most importantly, sought the help of Macedonian singer Tanja Tzarovska for a specific flavor of solo vocals.

The undertaking was immense, with considerable diversity in the recording sessions all dubbed into a nearly-finished product that was included as part of the film in test showings of Troy in March of 2004. Enthusiasm among all of those involved with the project was great (especially with the musicians and recording crew), including the strong approval of the music by the director. Hopes were sky high. In two test screenings in California, however, the film received very low marks, and the filmmakers claim that every viewer indicated that Yared's partially finished soundtrack was a primary reason for their dismay. It had been criticized as being "too brassy and bold," ironically too old-fashioned for the modern expectations of historical epic music. The studio went into a panic, and Petersen immediately sought help from other composers even before he summarily terminated Yared and expunged his score from the film. In general, rejected scores are a surprisingly frequent occurrence in Hollywood. High talent like Jerry Goldsmith and John Barry on many occasions had functional (if not exceptional) music rejected from a film for one curious reason or another. What happened with Troy, however, is an exception. Yared contended that he was offered no chance to remix or rerecord any of his music, with Warner Brothers executives very suddenly dismissing the entire work as being too incompatible with their newfound notions of what the score should sound like. Peterson, who was largely responsible for requesting the old-fashioned epic sound from Yared in the first place, did nothing to defend Yared despite his overflowing support for the composer prior to the screenings. Even as Yared still had orchestral sessions scheduled to put the finishing touches on the score, Peterson desperately called John Debney for last minute assistance and was turned down. The director then pleaded for help from James Horner, with whom he had collaborated on The Perfect Storm. Horner's reaction was one of smug, indignant disdain for how his score was badly mixed with the sound effects of the oceans in that prior work, but he accepted the challenge of scoring Troy in just ten days after viewing the same unfinished version presented in the screenings and being horrified by Yared's score. "I don't even know how to describe how atrocious the music was," Horner stated not long after. "It was like a 1950's Hercules movie. And it wasn't because Gabriel's not a gifted writer; it's because he just doesn't have any knowledge of writing film scores. Real film scores like that. It was so corny. It was unbelievable."

Citing Peterson's almost juvenile-seeming misdirection of Yared's "overblown" score, Horner continued, "Gabriel dutifully did whatever was asked of him by Wolfgang, and Wolfgang's musical tendencies are to overscore everything, like a Wagner opera. He's not into subtlety. Apparently it made the audience laugh in places during serious scenes. And this combination of this 'please do it bigger and bigger and bigger' and 'more is better' from Wolfgang and Gabriel's not knowing what big cinematic action music should be... they both came up with this score that was absolutely dreadful. Absolutely dreadful." He diminished Yared's Oscar-winning score for The English Patient at the same time, saying that it "was really very much based on Bach's music. I mean, if you listen to Bach's preludes and fugues and those things you'll hear Gabriel's score." Horner had also expressed irritation with not being tapped to score the film from the start. "I wasn't asked to do the original, which was sort of a bit of a twinge for me, because I did such a nice job, or he seemed so pleased on The Perfect Storm," he said. "Wolfgang was white. Completely shaken. Totally lost his confidence. I met with Wolfgang, and he of course, was completely cowed out, apologetic, embarrassed, and said I would be allowed to do whatever I wanted... 'would I please, please, please, do this, as a favor?' And how grateful he would be at that trouble." The fact that Horner churned out almost two hours of music in such a short amount of time is testimony to his talents. "I took it on as a challenge," he conceded, "I thought it would be a real challenge for me as a writer to see how much music I could write in nine days." His negative public comments about both Yared and Peterson (the latter justified, by all accounts) at the time didn't earn him many brownie points, though. He went on to criticize Peterson for not asking him to score Poseidon despite the fact that he remarked, "I would not have done Poseidon Adventure if you'd paid me 10 million dollars." His bitterness over his collaborations with Peterson caused him to conclude about Troy that "they're really not really grateful. They just want you to do it, help them out, and that's where it ends." Not long after this ruckus began, Yared stirred the pot in an unprecedented move that was also criticized by Horner: "Gabriel, meanwhile, in Europe, is furious. He's going on his website saying he was cheated and short-changed and they put his music in the film without the chorus and the chorus makes the difference. And you know, you're saying to yourself, 'this guy just doesn't get it.' The chorus would have made it worse."

Indeed, Yared was expressing his displeasure immediately in the summer of 2004 with total disregard for protocol. He had been fired twice before, first for Les Misérables because of a mutual falling out with director Bille August and with his own blessing when he was hired to replace Edward Shearmur for Wings of the Dove but had his replacement score dropped in favor of Shearmur's original (a choice Yared strongly agreed with). Troy was clearly different, however. He made sure that both fans and members of the industry were completely informed on the circumstances of his Troy firing by writing a lengthy open letter about the event that was most unorthodox and, some would say, a professional faux pas. Given the passion with which Yared describes the full year that he invested in the film and score in that letter, you can understand his frustration. "What shocked me the most was that I wasn't given the chance to fix or change my score or even to answer to any of the questions or accusations being leveled at my work," Yared wrote, "despite the fact that I had sessions booked to redo some cues to the new picture and new versions of other cues. Indeed, the decision to replace me had been taken and meetings with other composers had already taken place before I even spoke personally to Wolfgang. I was later informed that it was '...a problem with the writing' and that the score was beyond the hope of being fixed and they were happy to have a new composer write the whole score [in] just a month-and-a-half." Then, the composer did the unthinkable, following his statement of "I apologize to those reading this who will never get to hear this score" by releasing for download a little over 30 minutes of the rough edits of its highlights in MP3 format at his website. This caused extraordinary banter about the circumstances of Troy in the film music world, and it wasn't long before Warner Brothers demanded that the clips be taken offline. The quality of the score, despite continuing accounts that it does not fit the tone of the movie, spoke louder than Yared's letter, and the immediate bootlegs made from those thirty minutes of material became an extremely hot commodity throughout the rest of 2004. As Yared lamented, "In the end I am proud to say that with the great help and support of all my team I succeeded in producing what I firmly believe to be my finest score. It is original, musical, and every single cue is crafted with a great deal of thought, heart, and inspiration in a way that I feel works fantastically with the picture. My music was fantastically recorded and mixed, and the detail of each overdub layer gave a great and characterizing sound which was completely up-to-date, but with the scale and class of a great epic."

Comparing the Horner and Yared scores for Troy comes with many caveats, but it's not surprising that time and perspective has been much kinder to Yared's work. This review will first cover Yared' rejected score (attempting to address cues in both of their track listing variants as spanning the two leaks of the score to the bootleg market) and then touch upon the commercial release of the replacement score. Horner made a valiant effort to provide the film with an appropriate amount of noisy bombast but didn't enjoy the luxury of deeper development in his motific ideas. Yared's music, on the other hand, plays like a work of art that was considered and reconsidered, tested and retested, recorded and rerecorded over a great number of late nights and coffee breaks. The different amount of labor in the two scores is absolutely evident in the complexity and thoughtfulness of the finished products. If Horner's Troy is your average vanilla ice cream cone, then Yared's Troy is the awesome exotic flavor that you'd never expected to find when you walked into the ice cream store. When you contemplate Yared's work and immediately appreciate the depth of its character and performance, then you know exactly why he broke professional protocol and issued his open letter. That is, in short, because Yared's work for Troy is outstanding on every level. It is a score that holds little resemblance to his soft, piano-driven scores and instead unleashes a side of Yared that few film music fans could honestly have stated that they knew he had. Troy is easily the pinnacle of Yared's career, utilizing the kind of research and painstakingly complicated classical-styled writing that obviously takes a year to assemble. In its entire length, Yared's score is constructed to sound Eastern-European, with the style of far away, historic adventure that may remind you of Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings scores and Jerry Goldsmith's The 13th Warrior in portions. The beauty of Yared's score, though, is that his work is truly three-dimensional. Aside from the expected brass fanfares, Yared utilizes no fewer than four other distinct stylistic approaches with Troy that round out its overall effect. First, the personalized conflict scenes, such as "Achilles and Hector Fight," are scored with only a diverse array of percussion. The drums and metallic objects struck in this cue offer a textured authenticity of combat that Horner is simply incapable of producing when he doesn't think outside of his usual box. An unorthodox sound of mourning Macedonian female vocals comes from Tzarovska and other vocalists in "Hector's Funeral;" this cue may be the only detraction from Yared's score for some listeners who are not accustomed to the sounds of such wailing.

A deep male chorus both chants and sings in free-flowing fashion throughout the Yared's music for Troy, including "Greek Funeral Pyres," another highlight. These performances were sometimes tracked up to three times on top of each other to increase their mass, and Yared stated that the lyrics for these sequences were invented specifically for the effect of emphasizing the performers' Bulgarian tones. Ethnic woodwinds are another aspect of the score not overlooked, a flute in "Helen and Paris" elegantly conveying their love theme (in form and progressions ironically all too similar to Horner's Willow). This fateful similarity fades in the end credits performances, though, when the very lyrical performance of the theme by Tzarovska (this time in Macedonian language) builds from a solo into a fully orchestral combination. The beauty and authenticity that Yared incorporates into the voices (both in ensemble and in solos) is refreshing compared to the typical stock applications that you hear in dozens of scores of this era. The care with which Yared tailors each section of the chorus makes such simplistic usage as in his Message in a Bottle score seem basic. Additionally, the insertion of 25-member brass ensemble exploding with singular force in several layovers creates a sound that fans of Elliot Goldenthal's The Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within will salivate over, the lower brass especially resonating in a way you almost never hear in modern film scores. Several of the vista shots in Troy were treated by Yared to bombast reminiscent of John Williams' sound for his Star Wars prequel scores. The amount of layering and counterpoint offered in these cues establishes an appropriate majesty for these fabled characters while also progressing at a size worthy of legends. On the shorter, original presentation of Yared's music, this material was highlighted by "A Prince's Welcome," though in the fuller version, you hear it in the latter halves of "Achilles' Destiny" and "Battle of the Arrows." To think that these snare-ripping, cymbal-crashing, chime-banging cues were the ones responsible for the sacking of Yared himself is outrageous though perhaps understandable if you have a test audience that doesn't appreciate such an unusually large presentation of orchestral power. The texture of his score is dazzling, spanning the range of tones from guilty pleasure ensemble fanfares of immensity to the challenging shades of highly foreign-sounding percussion and vocals. The Achilles and Hector fight sequence and aftermath alone spans all of these sounds in the matter of four minutes, the raw percussive energy suddenly joined by solo vocals as Hector is injured, and the full melodrama of the orchestra and choir conveying the drama of the "Achilles Drags Hector" cue.

Yared introduces and develops several outstanding themes, balancing well between modern lyricism and classical structure in their development. Immediately in "Approach of the Greeks," you hear the dueling identities for the Trojans and Greeks, the rising three note figure for the former taunting the churning Greek battle march by full ensemble and choir in the remainder of the cue. Yared continuously pits these themes in sonic battle later in the score, highlighted by a full reprise of the Greek march in "The Sacking of Troy." The three-note motif for the Trojans is just a action-mode sideshow compared to their fully development theme, a curiously devious and twisted romantic series of long progressions heard throughout "The Opening" and highlighted by the absolutely gorgeous choral flourish of the idea at 0:45 into that cue. The theme's most impressive statement is in the latter half of "The Sacking of Troy" (otherwise known as "Priam's Fugue"), where it is handed to layers of choral voices ominously reflecting the fall of the King and his city. This performance almost reminds of the grandiose, dark melodrama of Disneyland's original Haunted House music. Achilles receives the victorious theme most gloriously associated with the Greeks, bursting with its fullest brass performance at about 2:20 into "Achilles and Boagrius" and reprised several times late in "D-Day Battle." It receives grand choral treatment at the conclusion of "Thousand Ships" but perhaps saves its most interesting variations for when it informs the secondary love theme in "Achilles and Briseis" and its dying equivalents in "Achilles' Death and Finale." Hector enjoys a longer, nobler identity best conveyed in "Hector, Hector!" that sometimes informs the larger action scenes but is surprisingly absent from much of the score. His death has hints of the romance material for the movie and his funeral scene is treated to nebulous chanting. The final major identity in Yared's Troy is the aforementioned "Helen and Paris" love theme, the centerpiece of the Tzarovska performance in the "Closing Credits Chant" that will remind some casual listeners of Harry Gregson-Williams' equivalent cultural mode in Kingdom of Heaven. Yared often forces several of these themes over each other in ways that would impress Golden Age masters, the various battle themes presented on top of each other late in "D-Day Battle" (otherwise known as "The Flurry") and in the middle section of "Battle of the Arrows," where Yared even goes so far as to swap the instrumentation native to the Greek and Trojan themes in the midst of the bravado, the deep chorus taking on the Greek march while the high brass reinterpret the Trojan fugue. Aside from the source pieces, one of the major themes is constantly under development in this score, keeping it engaging at all times.

Overall, Yared's classical sensibilities were bloated to the maximum that his style will lyrically allow in Troy, and the resulting evolution of this music makes it a perpetual pleasure to hear. Comparatively, Horner's replacement score will struggle at times to maintain your attention. Even for a veteran such as Horner, this task was a daunting one, with the composer assembling his crew and favored musicians with great haste and keeping Yared's primary vocalist, Tzarovska, for his score as well. Horner also managed to arrange a song performance by rising singing star Josh Groban for the end credits, an ability that may have put Horner in favor with Warner when they went in search of music more accessible to American ears. Whether resale of the music on album was an expressed concern for Warner or not, they certainly ended up with an equation that they must have thought looks better on album. Even if you are the biggest fan of Yared's music in the world, you have to admit that Horner is a capable professional in his field, and his score for Troy reinforces that statement. For any composer to write such an intense score in less than ten days is astounding, and Horner, despite his inherent flaws, pulls off a functional and basically interesting score. Those flaws, however, seem to blossom into major problems when Horner is pressed to perform in a short amount of time. Any film music fan knows, of course, that his downfall is his own endless self-repetition of style throughout his scores. What was once brilliant in Willow in 1988 is now simple regurgitation in Troy. What we have here is Horner in a state of panic and autopilot all at once. Everything in his score is saturated with stylistic similarities from his previous works, but with a sense of urgency built directly into the recording. It's almost as though the fast-paced composition of the score was translated directly into the music's haphazard and frantic restatements of bits and pieces of Horner cues that fans have been hearing (and for some, enjoying) for 20 years. A rambunctious level of frenetic activity in brass and percussion is sometimes accompanied by Horner's heavy strings, sweeping in fewer parts than maybe expected. Keeping Tzarovska on the project was Horner's sole effort to produce a score that was at all relevant to the age and locale of the film, and her performances are not integrated particularly well into the mass of orchestral material. For instance, whereas Yared inserts Tzarovska's voice among a huge percussion array for a battle between Achilles and Hector, Horner instead presents Tzarovska's performances as more of the token "opening and closing bookends" to the score (similar in format to vocals in Beyond Borders from the previous year).

A lackluster love theme (informing the concluding song) also hinders Horner's effort. "Briseis and Achilles" barely registers, emulating David Arnold's Stargate theme and exhibiting none of the intelligent manipulation as Yared had done for the occasion. For both battle and love, the tone is Westernized for the subject matter, though there are highlights to Horner's efforts that need mentioning. The pair of "Troy" and "Achilles Leads the Myrmidons" is forcefully presented with magnificent bombast of typical Horner bravado. The "Troy" and "The Temple of Poseidon" cues offer welcome fanfares for any Horner collection. The opening of "The Trojans Attack" is an intriguing militaristic melding of choir and the composer's usual trumpet calls. For skeptical Horner critics, though, an over-reliance on tolling bells and a slurred form of the four-note motif of evil (both Horner staples) could render the music fatally irritating. This abundance of regurgitation starts in "Achilles Leads the Myrmidons" continues in "The Greek Army and its Defeat" and throughout the score. The mention of Willow earlier was no accident; there are countless similarities between Willow and Troy, but Troy exists without the personality of the former. Thus, it marches forward without much character of its own, even through the end credits song. It has been mentioned that "Remember Me" was the kind of marketing ploy that Warner was secretly seeking when replacing Yared, a sad and completely unrelated sound for the era and locale meant to push unit sales. The song is not particularly one to remember, either, with Horner reaching into the successful, foaming cauldron of his own pop sounds and pulling out another piece of grocery store and elevator cabin muck. He did attempt to provide this song with an identity, though, by using Tzarovska's voice as counterpoint to Josh Groban's. The combination of Groban's soft Western voice and Tzarovska's harsh Macedonian one are a foul pairing that will send you in search of the stop button, if, that is, the standard looped rhythm that hails from all of Horner's other overly-pleasant pop songs doesn't repulse you first. The very existence of the Groban song, topped off by the little Groban insert card that spills out of the CD when you open its packaging, is tasteless and should send any film music collector back in the direction of Yared's alternative. The greatest irony of Troy is that Horner clearly produced cues that, in their basic technique and some progressions, are similar to what Yared had already tried. The vaguely exotic choral shades of "3200 Years Ago," the layering of brass, snare, and choir in "The Trojans Attack," and percussion leading to solo vocals in "Hector's Death" are all inferior versions of Yared's similar approach. So, in the end, Horner's criticism of Yared was indeed truly baseless.

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On album, the Horner score's history is simple while the journey of Yared's music is an ongoing saga. A surprisingly redundant and anonymous 75 minutes of Horner's music is available commercially from Warner (although the two copies of the album received at Filmtracks have both had difficulty playing correctly with the firmware of multiple optical drives, perhaps adding insult to injury). The quiet portions of the score weren't mastered so that they are audible compared to the fuller sequences, so expect to adjust the volume frequently (much of "The Temple of Poseidon" and "The Night Before" may as well simply be silence). It's missing the long concert arrangement of the love theme that informs "Remember Me," a substantial flaw. The Yared score, of course, is owned by Warner and may never see the light of day on an officially licensed album, this despite the composer's insistence that he has lobbied for the studio to allow for such a release. Initially, the 33+ minutes of music on Yared's official website caused it to be nearly inaccessible due to heavy loads (and frustrated many with Flash plugin errors and those on Macs, which couldn't access the clips at all). Illustrious film score fans captured the streaming cues before Warner demanded they be removed, and MP3 bootlegs of those 33 minutes resulted immediately. Sound quality was quite poor, however, especially in the "End Credits" vocal performance. In subsequent years, lossless copies were filtered out to reviewers on CD, expanding the presentation out to over 75 minutes and offering what seems like a more refined mix of the score's elements. In some compressed versions of this presentation that were downloaded prolifically on the internet, lingering issues with the vocal mix (and especially the overall sound of the credits performance) hampered the listening experience. Sometime over the next few years, however, fully lossless versions of the 75-minute "promotional bootleg" (if anything could truly be deemed as such, this would be it) emerged. A few of these appended the nearly 5-minute concert arrangement of the main Horner theme missing from his score's album. For Horner collectors, that commercial album will be average to mildly entertaining (a novice collector might consider it a four star effort by not being bothered by the immense recycling). The Yared score, on the other hand, belongs in all film score collections, regardless of your opinion about whether it should have been rejected or not. It is music of rare intelligence and classical quality in an era dominated by derivative crap masquerading as truly effective soundtracks. Yared produced exactly what the director called for: a massive Golden Age score with enough modern sensibilities to suffice for the Digital Age. And he did it spectacularly. Someone should roll up Yared's manuscript and use it to lash Peterson's bare rear end repeatedly before giving a good whack to Horner's tongue with it, too.   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Music as Written by Gabriel Yared: *****
Music as Written by James Horner: ***
Music as Heard on the Yared Bootlegs: ****
Music as Heard on the Horner Album: **

Bias Check:

For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13 (in 98 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.