This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Tom Holkenborg’s 2021 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=122233
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
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Reminiscence (2021) - ***½
Ramin Djawadi; add’l music William Marriott; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman;
conducted by Michael Sobie; technical score engineer Garret Reynolds
For this New Orleans-based science fiction investigative thriller, Ramin Djawadi and director Lisa Joy went for “film noir without the saxophone, something organic and not synth-y or futuristic.” The music was a cool, hazy, Bayou blues mash-up of his earlier guitar-laced scores and his more sophisticated material for the first two seasons of Westworld. Ramin had his themes set in early 2020 “and then everything shut down. By the time the recording came around we were allowed to have a decent size orchestra in the room together. I know other composers had to record with the musicians all separated, so I was lucky.”
Eternals (2021) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; add’l arrangements Brandon Campbell; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman, Andrew Kinney,
Nicholas Cazares & Michael J. Lloyd; conducted by Gavin Greenaway; technical score advisor Garret Reynolds
Iron Man was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=111559
If the evolution in quality between the music of the first and eighth seasons of Game of Thrones wasn’t enough of an indicator of how much Ramin had evolved as a composer, then this entry in Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe would cement that maturation as a fact. Instead of the simple-but-effective guitar riffs from his score for the 2008 Iron Man film that kicked off the franchise, listeners were now treated to frequently fascinating fusions of orchestra, new age music, layered humming choir, organ, electronics, and imposing sound design infused into Ramin’s established heroic style. It was often gorgeous, and also occasionally quite contemplative for what was ostensibly supposed to be superhero music.
Infinite (2021) - **½
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Ho-Ling Tang & Ryder McNair; orchestrated by
Ladd McIntosh & Hal Rosenfeld; conducted by George Strezov; electric cello Martin Tillman
TBTF discovery #87.
Harry Gregson-Williams got the first cut of this action/sci-fi film from director Antoine Fuqua in early 2020 when the film was intended for an August 2020 release date, but then lockdowns shut down post-production for a while. He’d characterize the score he ended up writing as almost the opposite of his last score. “Whereas there were very few electronics involved in the score for Mulan, there’s very little orchestra in Infinite.” Several intriguing colors (Eastern winds and percussion, solo vocals, a twinkly descending motif) help the music stand out a bit from the intentional drabness of the Equalizer scores.
The Last Duel (2021) - ****½
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Ho-Ling Tang; add’l arrangements by Richard Harvey;
orchestrated by Alastair King & Stephen Barton; conducted by Gregson-Williams; featured soprano
Grace Davidson; featured countertenor Iestyn Davies; treble, tenor & bass viola da gamba William
Skeen; world woodwinds Chris Bleth & Pedro Eustache; lute & dulcimer George Doering
Shooting on this dramatization of a real-life medieval-era rape accusation told from multiple perspectives commenced in February 2020 and had to pause a month later. Sitting at home with only half a movie, director Ridley Scott called Harry and asked him for a piece of music. “I haven’t shot the final scene. In the script, it suggests the lead actress sing under her voice, whisper, hum, something like that to her child. Can you tell me what she might sing?” Harry, no stranger to one-off asks from Ridley after Prometheus and Exodus: Gods and Kings, would dig up a French text from the era and modify it into a song. Ridley loved it, and thankfully for Harry this request would morph into the opportunity to score the entire film. “I joined the process in a traditional spot for a composer, as they were chiseling away in the edit room. The first scene, the preparation of the duel, was eight minutes long; [now] it’s three.” Scott would opt not to feature any music in his action scenes, which to Harry “was a different way of doing a movie. You’re involved in the emotion, not the aggression. Actually, I was happy to do it. I wasn’t competing with hooves and sword clashing.”
The composer wrote an intimate cousin of what he’d delivered over 15 years earlier for the director’s Kingdom of Heaven, with the sense of the medieval now realized at different volumes. “On Kingdom, I used a huge ocean liner of a choir. [Here], I found this choir called VOCES8, who are literally just eight people, and I wrote music in eight parts, so it was one to a part, whereas on Kingdom probably 30 or 40 people to a part.” Also helping with the sound would be a “consort of viols which have an edgy, more nasal sound, something rather nebulous about them, and bring to mind early music,” as well as an instrument of chromatically tuned glass rods called a Cristal Baschet for textures. That latter instrument was actually made in 1952, but then the point was to evoke the era rather than double down on period accuracy. “Ridley said this isn't a documentary. In the 1380s there weren't too many instruments at one's disposal. I might have wooden flutes and a horn from a goat if I had tried to stick with authenticity.”
Harry would note during promotional interviews that his score was “a hybrid with very little synth in there, which is unusual for me,” but he did find one opportunity to inject some of that into the mix: a muted howl for Adam Driver’s character. “Some of the things he says after he’s assaulted this girl are shocking in the lack of understanding of what’s just happened. He needed something kind of haunting, a little unstable, [and vocal since] he’s got the clergy behind him. I used this countertenor, Iestyn Davies, on Kingdom of Heaven very briefly [as] we couldn’t find too many places to use him. In this movie, I had him start on a lower note and get to a higher note rather slowly, a bit like a synth, and I then put that into my sequencer and found I could layer this creepy sound.” This element is both intellectually appealing and also the one truly challenging aspect of the score when heard on its album.
That aforementioned song that Harry adapted would morph into a beautiful melody for Jodie Comer’s character Marguerite used in striking fashion throughout the film as well as during the credits piece sung by Grace Davidson in one of the film music highlights of the year. “We didn’t want anybody too warbly, not too operatic and not too much vibrato, but very pure voice.” Equally impressive was The Aftermath, the piece written for the prior scene. As the titular duel ends and the victor is heralded by the crowd, the composer eschews any kind of valiant heroism, instead building a sense of complex emotions and ambiguity over several minutes. You’re never quite sure if the music is providing resolution or not, and it lends an extra edge to the sequence. That the piece, one of the rare moments in the score where larger musical forces are mustered, is also powerfully dramatic and gorgeous is a testament to how much of a tightrope walk writing music for the finale must have been, and how exemplary a job the composer did. If the well-reviewed film’s box office performance hadn’t been so poor (Scott groused about “audiences brought up on fucking cell phones”), one could imagine material like that getting Harry a long-overdue Oscar nomination.
Encanto (2021) - ****½
Germaine Franco; orchestrated by David Giuli, Nicholas Cazares, Rick Giovinazzo, Jennifer Hammond, Andrew
Kinney & John Ashton Thomas; conducted by Anthony Parnther; score consultant John Powell; add’l orchestrations
by Christopher Anderson-Bazzoli, Brandon Bailo, Marshall Bowen, Valarie King, Martin McClellan, Aaron Meyer,
Melissa Orquiza & Susie Benchasil Seiter; MIDI orchestration & arranging by James Carroll; add’l synth programming
by Alvaro Paiva-Bimbo & Michael John Mollo; songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda; songs arranged by Mike Elizondo;
song orchestral arrangements & additional production by Germaine Franco; song vocal arrangements & add’l production
by Kurt Crowley; songs produced by Miranda & Elizondo or Miranda & Carlos Vives; world woodwinds Pedro Eustache
My wife in early 2023: “This is a Zimmer team score?”
Me: ”Germaine worked for John Powell for a while.”
My wife: “Oh, so it’s third generation!”
Me: “...yes!”
My wife: “Aren’t you proud I knew that?”
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Disney didn’t know what it had on its hands when it released this Colombian-set magical family musical in theaters around Thanksgiving without much fanfare, because a month later the animated film’s emergence on Disney+ turned it into an out-of-control hit, largely thanks to the densely worded songs by Hamilton star/songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda trending on TikTok. Its music would top Billboard’s album and single charts, and while there had been plenty of prior Hollywood cases where a so-so score was carried to success on the coattails of its famous songs, that was not the case here thanks to the stellar material written by Germaine Franco. Germaine was on John Powell’s team from 2003-2014 (“my mea culpa is that she was working for me for way too long”) and had since bounced between a variety of roles including helping on the songs for Disney’s Coco and co-writing music for Paramount’s live-action 2019 Dora the Explorer adaptation alongside John Debney.
There had also been plenty of Hollywood cases where a composer did lots of research but there was little evidence of that in the end product. The opposite happened on Encanto. “[SVP of Disney Music] Matt Walker was like, ‘What do you need?’ As a composer that’s a dream to hear. [And directors] Byron and Jared wanted an intimate sound. There are moments that get big, but they didn’t want this huge Hollywood score. So I got to experiment.” Germaine relentlessly studied Colombian music styles and rhythms, with many appearing in the film. A variety of regional elements lent specific textures, including a tiple guitar, a gaita flute played by Pedro Eustache, a Colombian harp, and the marimba de chonta. And listeners who’d loved the Latin percussion grooves of Powell’s music found much to enjoy. “I wanted to feel and play some of the instruments. Some that I recorded in my studio are on the soundtrack.”
Germaine spent almost a year on the project, and the result was some of the most colorfully catchy score material in years, especially the celebratory piece Antonio’s Voice which Germaine altered after being inspired by a concert at the Hollywood Bowl featuring vallenato-pop superstar Carlos Vives and his band. “[Disney] loved what I had. I didn’t have singers. I thought, we can make this better. I discovered this beautiful tradition of Cantadoras singers. They sing and play all the instruments where the slaves ran away from the colonizers. I called Matt Walker the next day and said, ‘Let’s record a Colombian choir!’ We did this eight-hour Zoom session, which was slow and in different time zones, and it’s hard trying to explain certain concepts over Zoom, but luckily it worked.”
Powell would be on hand occasionally as what Germaine would call her “composer coach” for musical storytelling and thematic development, though his sense of humor couldn’t be contained when Germaine asked him to help out. “Do you want me to do it? I'm even less Colombian than you are.' (Germaine’s mother is from Mexico) He would show little surprise that Germaine not only had written such a toe-tapping delight of a score but also had woven two stellar musical themes into it. “She's very imaginative rhythmically, but I think she has this hidden weapon, which is being a tune-writer.”
And all this despite Germaine recording under COVID constraints! “I’m used to working on my own. [And] the brass players were fine, they’re so used to playing by themselves. But I normally have the winds with the strings, so [their separation] was a challenge. You hope everything’s in tune, [and] we had to get everything edited in time for the winds to play on top. There were also rules about how many people could be in the control room, and everybody had to be tested all the time. That’s a lot on top of just getting the files to the stage.”
Unlike Coco, Germaine didn’t contribute to the songwriting process as Lin-Manuel finished that work before he asked her to come on board. But the composer would still write the instrumental backing for many of the songs. Some listeners would lament that the songs and score had no melodic overlap, but there was still a sense of them largely existing in the same sonic universe, which is a credit to the cohesion created by Germaine’s arrangements. And Lin-Manuel would have nothing but praise for how Germaine helped transform the film. “Germaine's job was to introduce us to the music in Colombia, but also the magic in this region. There's an ethereal, sometimes spooky, but always gorgeous evocation that she captured.'
As of this writing, Encanto has yet to lead to any major follow-up assignments for its composer. It would be a shame if that continues to be the case. Germaine Franco is a major talent who should be scoring major films. Full stop.
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Next time: “Normally with soundtracks, we get a lot of generic ‘aahs’ and ‘oohs’. The vocals [here] aren’t random. They’re supporting the storyline of the scene, like an opera.”
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