Praise has long been showered down upon this score (despite no awards consideration), a result of its obvious, bombastic placement over the film's titles and featured action sequences. It has been released several times on album and represents Edelman's lone entry in many collections of casual soundtrack buyers. The music was positively mentioned in reviews of the film in 1993 and has since received almost unanimously glowing reviews from film score critics. That applause stops here. One of the reasons it took until 2010 for an editorial review of Gettysburg to be published at Filmtracks is because of this writer's immense admiration of Shaara's novel, respect for Turner's production, and fundamental belief that Edelman's score does an incredible injustice to both. Edelman and his simplistic style of symphonic and synthetic blend have a place in the industry. In a film like Kindergarten Cop, it's hard to imagine a better approach. For Gettysburg, however, the composer's badly underdeveloped structures and poor merging of electronic and organic elements is painful to hear on screen, an obviously cheap detriment to the production. It's hard not think that Turner, with his infinite wealth, could have afforded a top-tier composer for Gettysburg rather than settling for music that sounds like inexpensive filler material from a novice composer. You really can't blame Edelman for writing a score that fits snugly into his comfort zone, but both Gettysburg and Dragonheart beg questions of viability when compared to the far more intricate and expertly constructed scores by Edelman's peers. In the case of the latter score, the fantasy genre excused the sound to the same extent that Mark Knopfler's The Princess Bride was deemed a success. But with Gettysburg, there is really no way to reconcile Edelman's underachieving constructs and cheap instrumental tone when considering the topic of Shaara's novel. His themes are incredibly bare, and despite their decent manipulation throughout the score, they convey a level of simplicity that makes John Barry's bloated romance themes of the era seem complicated. A songwriter at heart, Edelman rarely instills his scores with compelling counterpoint, dissonance, or texture, restricting him to the basic kinds of harmony that have no prayer of scratching through the depths of Shaara's multitudes of character sub-plots. Without any subtlety in the constructs, this score is juvenile, mainstream, heroic fluff that has no business being in this film.

Even if you can accept the blindly heroic themes in the score for Gettysburg, their bold statements deliberately blasting away without any consideration of nuance or genuine gravity, the orchestration of these ideas is abhorrent. In the moments during which Edelman utilizes solo acoustic guitar or individual symphonic elements for quiet interludes, his music transcends into appropriate territory. But whenever he's attempting to emphasize the action (or prelude to it), he props up the symphony with his usual synthetic, keyboarded tones that defeat the historical atmosphere in return for beefing up the volume. At times, this music sounds as though it could have been recorded by Christopher Franke for a "Babylon 5" television episode. The electronic rhythms and extremely dry snare during the entirety of "Battle at Devil's Den," for instance, are so painfully misplaced that it might be appropriate in a trashy thriller on the Sci-Fi Channel. The all-around dry recording, with absolutely no reverb added to indicate a sense of importance in the battle, is inexcusable. At times, Edelman even completely misses the intended emotional impact of a scene, including the soft heroism of "March to Mortality (Pickett's Charge)." Was he completely incapable of applying the minor key or, for that matter, any sense of dread, fear, death, or sorrow into cues such as this? His score is so focused on capturing the noble spirit of the battle that no significant distinction in tone is explored for the opposing sides, each character, or even the progression of a battle that becomes ever so desperate in its third day. In short, Edelman damn near ruined Gettysburg with his excruciatingly disappointing score. The masses may love it, but it's doubtful that the same masses have studied Shaara's book and the gruesome conditions in which the Civil War was fought. At least this vast underachievement was thoroughly corrected for the 2003 prequel, Gods and Generals, which features a score that paired Edelman with John Frizzell, who turned towards James Horner's seminal Glory for better inspiration. Not surprisingly, like Hans Zimmer's later Pearl Harbor, Edelman's score does play much better on album, where it has been successful enough to produce a few follow-up products. The fact that this music makes for an alternately stirring and relaxing product can't excuse its incredibly poor placement in the film, and for those equally bothered by its inappropriate tone and texture for Gettysburg, there may be no escaping its shortcomings even on its own. The killer angels deserve better than this barely adequate, cheaply heroic rubbish.   @Amazon.com: CD or Download