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| Goldsmith |
Alien: (Jerry Goldsmith) While Ridley Scott's 1979
space thriller
Alien is looked upon with high admiration thirty
years after its debut, the film owes James Cameron's 1986 sequel for
much of that praise. The Scott production wasn't the knockout
blockbuster of the summer season that 20th Century Fox had hoped, losing
the box office battle to several other major pictures. That said,
Alien has acquired significant respect through time, mostly due
to its conceptualization and the subsequent development of the idea into
further stories. From the depiction of Sigourney Weaver as one of the
big screen's first major female action stars to the design of the
terrifying alien creature itself,
Alien was a successful haunted
house-style of story set in the already perilous and unfamiliar setting
of space. The title character in
Alien, as well its strikingly
grotesque reproductive process, is about as memorable an adversary ever
to challenge a group of unsuspecting human beings. Despite all of the
accolades that Scott has received through the years for
Alien's
various production qualities, there remains one area in which the film
was a total disaster: its music. Scott was enthusiastic to work with
veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith, arguably at the height of his career
at the time, for this production. Equally pleased was Scott's former
sound and music editor and, for
Alien, his lead editor, Terry
Rawlings. Upon securing Goldsmith for the assignment, Rawlings, with
Scott's blessing, had assembled a wealth of Goldsmith's previous music
for employment as a temp track in the film. Goldsmith, who was never a
fan of temp tracking in the first place, was disdainful of these
placements and completely disregarded them when fashioning his music for
Alien. From there, matters only got worse. The composer completed
the recording of almost an hour of music for
Alien and moved on
to other projects, returning to the production for a handful of
re-scoring duties not long after. To his horror, the finished version of
Alien would only place one (yes, one) of his cues in its entirety
and in its proper place in the film. His music had been completely
mangled by Scott and Rawlings, chopped into pieces and moved
indiscriminately throughout the film. To make matters worse, significant
portions of Goldsmith's 1962 score for
Freud and a 1967 recording
of Howard Hanson's "Symphony No. 2" were interspersed between
Goldsmith's original
Alien material as well. It was, in short, a
nightmare.
In the long and illustrious career of Jerry Goldsmith,
there was perhaps no film score assignment that bothered the man more
than
Alien. While both Scott and Rawlings showered praise upon
Goldsmith for some of his efforts for the film (as well as his career in
sum), they never withheld the fact that they considered his approach to
some of the film's sequences to be plain wrong, claiming that the score
did not solicit the proper emotional response that Scott had desired.
Unfortunately, anyone familiar with Scott's career before and after
Alien will easily recognize that the director has never had a
keen sense for a cohesive musical arc in his films. His insistence upon
using any particular piece of music from any genre for any scene without
consideration to the overall musical identity of a film is a persistent
problem for him. Goldsmith claimed at the time that Scott simply didn't
know what he was doing in terms of musical direction because of his
youth. But that's too easy on Scott; instead, the man's inability to
gauge the musical needs of his films is plainly evident, and
Alien is the most clearly recognizable testimony to this fact.
Goldsmith's approach to
Alien was one that was far more
intelligent that Scott's. The composer handled the film's opening (and
briefly in it is closing) with a whimsical atmosphere of mysterious
fantasy. This was his way of defining the wonders of space travel
without forcing the horror elements down the audience's throats (insert
face hugger joke here as you see fit) from the very beginning. In fact,
Goldsmith maintains a level of fantasy without the burden of heavy
suspense for quite some time in the score as he wrote it for the film.
Only upon the fierce battle between the alien and the Nostromo crew does
Goldsmith truly emphasize his exotic instrumentation and stinger tactics
for the outright horror of the plot. He then returns to the somewhat
romantic tone of fantasy for the resolution and end titles of
Alien, creating a solid sense of cohesion. Unfortunately, Scott
completely refused all of these romantic leanings that Goldsmith had
assigned the score, insisting that the composer re-score the early and
late cues without the statements of the score's primary theme and
instead emphasizing the suspenseful motifs and instrumentation from the
start. Goldsmith complied with these requests, but even such alterations
didn't save the score from its ultimate butchering. The entire process
exposed Scott's refusal to recognize the intelligent (and, in
retrospect, obvious) progression of the composer's work.
One of the reasons why the music for
Alien has
taken so long to receive proper treatment on album (and, consequently,
be rewarded with much editorial discussion such as the review you are
now reading) is because of these extremely sticky circumstances of the
score's creation and dismemberment. Only in 2007 did
Alien
experience a proper album release (from Intrada Records, a foremost
champion of Goldsmith's work), and it is based upon this presentation of
all of the music that Goldsmith wrote for the production that this
review is based. The composer did manage to exorcise some of the demons
of this troublesome situation when he arranged the 1979 LP record of his
music for
Alien. For that album, he took 35 minutes of material
that included the major substance of his balance between mystery,
fantasy, suspense, and horror and created a listening experience that
was faithful to his thinking rather than Scott's. But even this
presentation was rearranged in many places, and only when hearing the 57
minute complete score as written for the film can Goldsmith fans (or
reviews of this work) get a clear idea of what the composer intended.
Evident on all the album releases, but not in the film, are three main
motifs that Goldsmith remains loyal to throughout
Alien. First is
the representation of his choice to handle the opening and closing with
a romantic sense of fantasy, performed most memorably by a solo trumpet.
The eventual swelling of this idea to the full ensemble in "End Title"
produces one of the composer's most notable science fiction concert
arrangements. It's a surprisingly thoughtful theme, extending into
"Hyper Sleep" and "To Sleep" as though to address the contemplation that
such a condition of stasis could yield. Goldsmith smartly mutates the
rising opening trio of notes in this idea for situations in which crew
members are startled during otherwise seemingly safe environments later
on. The second main motif is built around a descending duo of notes in
the upper woodwinds, heard immediately in conjunction with the title
theme and further representing an element of mystery. This versatile
idea was retained by Scott and appears extensively throughout. The final
motif is more of a sound effect for the alien itself, using musicians on
serpents, didgeridu, and massive conch shells, passing those sounds
though the composer's echoplex machine (of
Patton fame) to
produce truly eerie, otherworldly sounds. Scott was reportedly enamored
with this final recurring effect, and it is this sound that he
eventually encouraged for insertion immediately at the start of the
picture.
Outside of these motifs, Goldsmith's music for
Alien is distinctly unnerving and largely atmospheric. He
generates an intriguing balance between wonder and tension in his plucky
string techniques, often relying upon the electronic mutation of this
section as well for added suspense. The constructs are usually quite
sparse; outside of the predictably pounding and shrieking action
sequences, the composer was not afraid to leave a fair amount of open
space in his work. As such,
Alien is not often a very dense work,
tingling and groaning quietly in the treble region during most cues. The
composer's recording of several different stingers for brass was abused
by Scott, who used many of these short recordings (and the bulk of the
lengthier suspense cues) and simply utilized them like a library from
which to pull and rearrange individual sequences. Hearing Goldsmith's
score in its entirety, for a strict enthusiast of the film, may actually
come as something of a shock. An entirely different discussion is due to
the question of whether or not Goldsmith's original version (and, of
course, Scott's mutilation of the music) is palatable as a listening
experience. There is no doubt that the composition is a piece to be
admired in its original form. There is even ten to twelve minutes of
Goldsmith's whimsical material that makes for a very satisfying
presentation on album. But even as Goldsmith intended the music to be
used,
Alien isn't the kind of score you can readily enjoy out of
context. Without extended periods of density, the score doesn't offer as
many rambunctious highlights as James Horner's music for
Aliens
(which itself suffered in the editing room). Still, while
Alien
may not be a particularly enjoyable score on album, its technical merits
still stand. Goldsmith once commented that it would be too difficult to
try to go back and re-record the score because of all of the unusual
techniques used directly on the recording stage, techniques that would
be very difficult to recreate. Perhaps some of that unwillingness to
look back at
Alien with any hope was due to the composer's poor
decision to join Scott once again for
Legend. As if Goldsmith
hadn't learned his lesson, he produced a strong fantasy score for
Legend that was thrown out almost completely by the director,
cementing the composer's poor opinion of the director. In both cases,
Scott completely missed the mark when assessing the general tone that
the films needed to develop over their lengths, a circumstance even more
damaging to
Legend than
Alien for several reasons.
Given the composer's disinterest in revisiting
Alien and the lack of a discovery of decent master tapes until
the late 2000's, Goldsmith's efforts were represented for a long time by
his LP arrangement. This edit of the soundtrack was pressed to CD in
1988 by Silva Screen, a product that served as the lone digital offering
of
Alien for about ten years. In the late 1990's, fan-created
bootlegs began circulating, some of which including the music from
Freud and Hanson to recreate Scott's version of the soundtrack's
edit. In 2000, a DVD release from 20th Century Fox with two isolated
score tracks (original and alternate) assisted in these black market
endeavors, yielding relatively good sound and a second round of bootlegs
that consistently ran longer than an hour. A 1996 re-recording of
several cues commissioned by Varèse Sarabande was painstakingly
faithful on a strong
Alien-related album. In 2007, however,
Intrada Records finally worked with Fox on the newly discovered master
tapes to produce a definitive 2-CD edition of the complete score and a
plethora of additional related material for
Alien. The first disc
begins with the 57 minutes of music that Goldsmith had originally
intended to be placed in the film, in chronological order. Following
this are the seven re-scored alternative takes that Scott requested of
Goldsmith, mostly exhibiting the removal of the composer's primary
theme. The lack of a re-scored conclusion to the film may indicate that
Scott and Rawlings had already decided by that point to use the Hanson
piece instead. The second disc in the Intrada set includes the complete
35-minute presentation of
Alien that Goldsmith arranged for the
LP. This material was carefully recreated using the newly discovered
masters, so it will not be identical to the sound and edit that owners
of the Silva album may recall. Finally, a series of bonus cues is
included on the Intrada set as well, ranging from even more additional
performance takes to a series of stinger recordings (with Lionel Newman
and Goldsmith studio discussions in between) and a Mozart source cue
recorded for the film. Given that
Alien isn't the most attractive
listening experience to come from Goldsmith, the set may be a bit of a
case of overkill, though it's so rare that a score receives this kind of
treatment that you have to admire its production values. Perhaps the
inclusion of the
Freud and Hanson material would have made it an
even more fascinating study. As it is, though, there's really no reason
to retain the previous album incarnations of
Alien; the Intrada
set is a non-limited album, meaning that it has remained readily
available for reasonable prices for several years. Outside of its ten
minutes of romantic highlights, however,
Alien remains a
challenging score worthy of dutiful appreciation rather than casual
entertainment.
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- Music as Written for Film: ****
- Music as Heard in Film: **
- Music as Heard on Album: ***
- Overall: ***
| Bias Check: |
For Jerry Goldsmith reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.29
(in 113 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.32
(in 145,182 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert of the 2007 set includes extensive information about
the score and film.
