Filmtracks: The Magnificent Seven (James Horner/Simon Franglen/Simon Rhodes)

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Written 12/17/16

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Buy it... if you consider yourself any enthusiast of James Horner whatsoever, for The Magnificent Seven is a very competent, faithful assembly of the composer's rough ideas into a remarkable postmortem tribute.

Avoid it... if you have nightmares that Horner's stylistic recycling habits are so powerful that they outlived his corporeal being, because any detractor of the composer will consider this work one more defiant punch from the grave.

Horner

Franglen

The Magnificent Seven: (James Horner/Simon Franglen/Simon Rhodes) Filmmaker Antoine Fuqua struggled mightily with how to translate the love and respect for 1954's Seven Samurai and 1960's The Magnificent Seven into 2010's cinematic sensibilities, and many critics assailed his 2016 version of the tale for remaining predictably morbid in its outcome without embellishing enough of the heroism in its midsections to remain a satisfying tale. Indeed, the "grittiness" of 2016's The Magnificent Seven was necessary but possibly the element of the film's undoing, though it still managed to draw substantial box office returns. The story of a gang of seven gunslingers in the Old West saving a town from a ruthless industrialist is nothing new, of course, and the execution of the character depth and fighting sequences are the point of interest in the 2016 Fuqua telling. Ultimately, the film will not likely be remembered for its merits, but the situation with its soundtrack will remain an important point of emphasis. Fuqua had overcome doubts about taking on The Magnificent Seven in part because of insistence by composer James Horner during their collaboration on Southpaw. Naturally, when Fuqua decided to proceed with the Western project, Horner was slated to join him. The famed composer had grown disillusioned with mainstream Hollywood projects in the 2000's and had taken to writing concert music and scoring only obscure films that spoke to his personal interests or, in many cases, simply turning down major assignments not involving directors whom he considered a friend. His sudden increase in film music output in the mid-2010's marked a celebrated return to his 1990's level of activity, though that rejuvenation was cut short by a airplane crash that took his life in 2015. Horner had taken to flying as an escape mechanism, and by all reports, he simply conducted a maneuver at too low an altitude in Southern California when his vintage aircraft hit the ground. Because of the immensely busy schedule that Horner had signed for between 2014 and 2016, he was stacked with projects in various states of completion and release on film and album at his death, and The Magnificent Seven represented the one score for which he had written material but not had a chance to tailor it to completed footage.

The story of how Horner's rough sketches for The Magnificent Seven came to exist in the final film are well told but deserve repeating. Knowing he would be swamped with work on Hacksaw Ridge and The Great Wall in 2016, not to mention the Avatar sequels always lurking around the corner, Horner decided to start hashing through themes for The Magnificent Seven during the week of his preparations in London for recording his concert piece, "Collage." After that recording, he returned to California to escape to the skies in his airplanes. Upon learning of Horner's death, his team of arrangers, editors, and orchestrators decided to arrange and record the fledgling themes with a London orchestra as a gift to Fuqua. This group of frequent Horner collaborators was helmed by Simon Franglen, veteran synthesizer arranger who had worked with Horner since Titanic. Also involved were editors Simon Rhodes, Jim Henriksen, and Joe E. Rand, orchestrator and conductor JAC Redford, and performer Tony Hinnegan, who had yielded many of the most famous woodwind performances throughout Horner's recordings. All of these men dated back to the late 1990's with Horner, and Rand, Henriksen, and Hinnegan go back further. Understandably, Fuqua was overwhelmed when hearing what was literally the final composition by Horner, and he insisted, with the surprising backing of MGM, upon an ensemble arranging effort by the team to flesh out this Horner material into a final score over the subsequent nine months. The two Simons made the bulk of the compositional arrangements; Franglen's background extended from synthesizer programming for James Newton Howard and Alan Silvestri in the early 1990's while Rhodes has become a renowned recording and editing engineer and got his feet wet with Trevor Jones at the same time. Both, along with Redford, have a history with Thomas Newman, and that comes to play in The Magnificent Seven as well. They decided to treat the film organically, recording an 80-member ensemble together and only electronically manipulating live recording of specialty elements with sparing frequency. They desired a gritty environment to match Fuqua's passion for Horner's music from Thunderheart but sought to produce that effect with real instruments and voices. The film ultimately featured 107 minutes of music, making the score almost a wall-to-wall presence on screen.

Horner's only major reservation about The Magnificent Seven before his death was how his music would be perceived against that of Elmer Bernstein for the 1960 film, a significant worry given the memorability of the famous classic theme and its major-key heroism that quite frankly wouldn't fit into Fuqua's version (or modern Hollywood). As Franglen and Rhodes started work on arranging Horner's ideas for the remake, they ran into the same problem, testing drop placements of Bernstein's theme into various places in the movie. Ultimately, while you hear hints of the rhythmic foundation of the classic tune in a few cues throughout the score, the only obvious placement is saved for the end of the film. Even in these interpolations, the switch to the major key will be potentially jarring for some listeners. Fortunately for the team, Horner's annoying but lovable habit of self-referencing throughout his career made the task of interpolating his compositional style into the score a comparatively straightforward task. Some listeners might view this music for The Magnificent Seven to be a rather tedious copy and paste job, taking passages from a plethora of Horner works and layering them with the composer's usual performance elements. But, ironically, the consistent voice within Horner's writing style is what made this score possible, and, for better of for worse, this final work is a tribute to those dozens of prior Horner scores referenced, the ultimate Horner copy and paste job that ends up functioning quite well as a score on its own because of the precision with which the team accomplished the emulation. The instrumentation and texturing of The Magnificent Seven is all very familiar, soloists on acoustic baritone guitars, banjos, qenas, shakuhachi, and horsehead fiddle joined by various vocalists ranging from across the sonic spectrum to provide tones common to many Horner endeavors. Every instrumental application is carefully included to recall a prior Horner work, from the military snare rips to the ethnic woodwinds, the twinkling piano to tapped cymbals, the echoing trumpets to the noble French horn layers in the finale that inspired his "Collage" work. Banjos and guitars, manipulated and "distressed," as Franglen explains, are largely the basis for the grittier tone of the work, and for the two minorities in the gang of seven, you hear echoes of the composer's ventures into Latin and Eastern realms. The only Horner staples totally absent from the soundscape are his applications of fuller, upper-tone choir and the realm of electronics.

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The stylistic connections to Horner's past are too constant in The Magnificent Seven to identify in full in this review, but a few choices made by Franglen and Rhodes are particularly poignant. The return to Horner's early 1990's atmospheric suspense mode for much of the first half of the score is no surprise given the tone of the film and Fuqua's desires. A combination of Thunderheart, Patriot Games, and In Country, among others, eventually heightens with rhythms and coloration from Avatar, The Four Feathers, Windtalkers, and Black Gold and stops briefly along the way for dramatic influence from The Spitfire Grill and Legends of the Fall and a touch of nobility from For Greater Glory and Apollo 13. Although the four-note "danger motif" of Willow fame appears in "Lighting the Fuse" as a pace-setter, the more interesting singular tribute comes in the echoplex trumpet technique heard throughout (and immediately at the outset) as a nod to Battle Beyond the Stars, originally a tribute to Jerry Goldsmith's Patton. The devastating solo voice at the end of "House of Judgment" extends from the composer's expanding applications of that tool, as heard in The Amazing Spider-Man. Fuller ensemble performances are not plentiful in The Magnificent Seven before the closing suite of action and drama cues, and none of them features the kind of sweep that graces Legends of the Fall. Some Horner enthusiasts will likely prefer the scope of grandeur in Wolf Totem as the closing expression of that mode for the composer. But these moments are sincere and arranged with a little more care as to avoid simple rehash. The themes of The Magnificent Seven are both a highlight and a frustration, as their development is careful and rewarding but not always obvious enough for a simple "good versus evil" tale like this one. This is an area in which Franglen has remained coy in his discussion of the score's development. At the time of the work's release, there was no way to know just how much the final themes resembled Horner's original ideas. Franglen only admits the natural evolution process of the ideas in any score, and that potentially suggests that the themes themselves share less of Horner's direct voice than the counterpoint, orchestration, and other rendering elements that are truly defining of the composer's style. There are few moments in The Magnificent Seven when the base melodies truly sound distinctly familiar as a product of a "Hornerism."

There exist three major themes in The Magnificent Seven, and other ideas meander through in lesser duties. Rather than assigning motifs to each of the main gang of characters, Franglen and Rhodes apply ideas for the heroes in general, the primary villain, and the townspeople and the oppression of them. A separate idea for the positive view of the genre is the only connection the score really has to the comparatively upbeat Bernstein, Jerome Moross, Basil Poledouris, and Bruce Broughton vision of the Old West, and you hear this identity in "Volcano Springs." Interestingly, in this cue and at the outset of "Seven Angels of Vengeance," the team of arrangers also very clearly betrays its connections to Thomas Newman, because both of these cues, along with parts of "So Far So Good," are dripping with Newman rhythmic figures led by strings. (The majority of these men were involved together with both Skyfall and Spectre.) Otherwise, expect the themes of The Magnificent Seven to more closely align with Ennio Morricone and Jerry Fielding's less rosy but occasionally melodic music for the genre; a little Goldsmith twanginess also resides in the softer moments. The theme for the town of Rose Creek and its general unhappiness is first introduced at 0:21 in "Rose Creek Oppression" with Patriot Games clearly in mind. This idea wanders through the background of much of the first half of the score, making a notable appearance "7 Days, That's All You Got," and it eventually finds its symphonic voice and its heroic resolution early in "Faraday's Ride." The latter half of that cue showcases the score's main theme for the gang of seven. Introduced gloriously at 1:57 into "Seven Angels of Vengeance" and hinted in "Volcano Springs," the melody doesn't get its full workout until the final confrontation. Grinding to life with resolve in "Pacing the Town," the idea dominates from the latter half of "Faraday's Ride" to "Seven Riders," adapted with remarkable emotional range in all the cues between. The outright heroic incarnations with rambling guitar rhythms and brazen brass counterpoint in "The Darkest Hour" and "Seven Riders" are balanced by somber string performances of the idea (with nearly Naoki Sato-like melodramatics) in "Horne Sacrifice" and the solo vocals concluding "House of Judgment." For sheer fun, however, the combination of the two main themes in "Faraday's Ride" represents the fullest and most engaging, snare-ripping orchestral performance in the score. It includes one remarkable, seemingly synthetically-altered Courage Under Fire effect at 2:11. The slight presence of the Bernstein rhythms underneath the main theme are a nice touch.

If the The Magnificent Seven music has a clear weakness outside of its annoyingly odd (and one must suspect unintentional) insertion of Tom Newman mannerisms into what otherwise stands as the ultimate Horner tribute, it's in the sinewy and understated villain's theme. Heard on violins over tortured banjo and guitar in "Devil in the Church," this idea was clearly meant to slither in the background of the character's conversational scenes. That may function in this cue and "Sheriff Demoted," among others, but the theme doesn't get translated into a clear action motif when needed. An attempt is made to take this action in "Army Invades Town" and "The Darkest Hour," but the connection isn't transparent enough for a common movie-goer to make. The use of the theme in "House of Judgment" seems to lack any depth for the character; if ever the theme needed a more forceful emotional punch, that cue would be the place. Additionally, the theme for the town receives no final send-off at the end. Still, the themes are solid and consistent enough to suffice, and their execution, especially late in the score, is where this soundtrack's highlights are to be found. Otherwise, The Magnificent Seven is merely a fascinating academic study, a thoughtful expression of love for a composer lost before his time. You can clearly tell that this project was one of personal impact for Horner's team, a final thumbing of the nose to those who believe Horner's era to be of yesteryear. Franglen even went so far as to say about society today, "They forget that four chords played in repeating sequence, tutti, fff with the 'blastomatik epic' patch in D minor for ten minutes does not always an Oscar-winner for best score make," an unmistakable shot at the contemporary Hans Zimmer phenomenon. For Horner enthusiasts, The Magnificent Seven may represent the most pleasing farewell to the composer one could ask for, but unreleased nuggets remained. Horner's concert works and music for obscure, short, flight-related films of the 2010's were rushed to listeners, and his collectors must not forget about the reportedly gorgeous hidden gem of a romance score he recorded with Sissel Kyrkjebø for 2013's Romeo & Juliet that was rejected and shelved, still awaiting a deserved release after his death. Along those lines for Sony Classical, don't be surprised if The Magnificent Seven receives expanded treatment on album to add the remaining 30 minutes of unreleased material and, more importantly, the original thematic suites recorded for Fuqua at the outset of the process. It's a shame that such a 2-CD album wasn't offered up front for a composer who meant so much to the industry and his collectors. The score is a fitting tribute to one of the most memorable voices we'll ever hear in this genre. **** @Amazon.com: CD or Download

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For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15 (in 108 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.23 (in 203,547 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

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