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The only piece of music I miss on the soundtrack is the exciting pursuit up the mountain. Exciting track, that.
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I just watched the Coppola dracula- with remastered sound- the music sticks out more- and is amazing. But the soundtrack doesn't have any of the good cuts- ANY!!!!!!!!!! what a traggety.
I wish this would come out.
I wish
What cuts, other than the mountain chase, are you missing? To the best of my ear, everything not on the album is essentially a loose reprise of the core material. The score is certainly the best thing about the movie, and actually my pick for the best Dracula score period (though the competition is strong). It manages to draw in everything that resonates from the core material - the Slavic roots, the gothic romance, the dissorienting avant-guarde undertones, the searing emotions - into an organic whole that's somehow even more than the sum of its parts. Granted, the movie itself is an extremely mixed bag; love the sets and the cinematography, but why-oh-why did Coppola think Gary Oldman could play a seductive romantic hero, and what on earth is going on with those discount-halloween animal costumes? But the score is aces all around.
Pedestrian Wolf
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It's a pity the chase up the mountain isn't there. It could have replaced the cue where the horse shrieks, perhaps.
I also find the contrast between Kilar and Lennox to be too strong at the end of the album. The song would have been better positioned at the start, before we'd gotten used to Kilar's sound.
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Posted: |
Oct 9, 2007 - 12:36 PM
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By: |
KOP
(Member)
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This is what Coppola has to say about the score in his new DVD/Blu-ray commentary:
Choosing a composer for a movie is always a very important thing in any project. But for me in particular; being the son of a composer, being raised in a musical household, I very much wanted a classical score.
And my knowledge told me that some of the greatest classical composers were in the East European world, particularly in Poland, partly to do with the state sponsorship of classical music.
And for a long a time the composer I really wanted to do it was a great Polish composer named Lutoslawski. I eventually tracked him down at a concert where he was conducting his own work.
And when I proposed that he might consider doing a score for me, his reaction was sort of, like, at the level of -- I mean: “Young man, do you know how many hours it takes me to write one minute of music?” And that -- the implication being that, at that level of classical music -- and it’s not only the composition, it’s the orchestration -- it is a very arduous, time-consuming job to compose so many minutes of music.
It’s not as we think of it, where you get a motif and possibly bring in an orchestrator. And you play the theme over and over again. So at that level of hand-made music it’s incredibly time-consuming.
And basically, what he was saying is, you know, that he wouldn’t be able to devote the time to write whatever it is, thirty minutes, forty minutes of new music. And actually, in truth, he died not that long after that brief meeting.
But I continued researching Polish composers. And I was very interested in Ligeti, Górecki, many wonderful composers, some of which I heard in Stanley Kubrick’s last film, although it was not an original composition. I believe he used existing work of those composers.
But ultimately I was led to consider the notion of Kilar, another Polish composer, to write this score. And I approached him, and he was willing.
And what I noticed from that experience -- what he wrote was very, very effective and, in fact, really has weathered time very well. And for years I would see trailers of movies coming out that had just used his music for Dracula in the trailer.
And what I noticed was he wrote about three or at the most four cues. I think it was three; a love theme, a kind of initial very dramatic theme, and then a third theme. And he gave me these three themes, and we recorded them, and that was all he gave me.
And we had a whole movie that we had to score.
And we had these three themes.
And I said, “Well, can you give me some variations? For example, could we play the love theme this way and that way, this orchestration, that orchestration?” And he tried and tried and tried, but ultimately, when it was all said and done, he wrote those three cues.
They sounded great, and he was giving it to me, and that was it.
So when we actually finished the complete movie, we found that we had to take these three cues, and fortunately, we had the original recordings which were recorded with a number of microphones, so we could play the cue and, you know, not play the string section or not play the brass section, or the music editor had to find ways that we could, like, make these three very, very impressive cues work for the whole movie without just repeating them over and over again.
And that was an interesting experience; very, very positive, and yet somewhat troublesome with, like, a really classical musician-composer.
I guess it comes down to that, you know, every minute of music is the result of a lot of hard work, weeks and weeks of hard work. And you just don’t have, you know, twelve cues and do it this way and do it that way, and have enough for a whole movie.
(The commentary is subtitled--I didn't have to transcribe the whole thing.)
Pretty peculiar comments; sounds like Coppola is saying that the score as heard in the film was edited from three cues (though he seems to use the terms 'cue' and 'theme' interchangeably).
One other thing, Kilar had already scored well over a hundred films by the time he did Dracula.
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That sounds... really strange.
While it is obvious that some of the cues from the film were achieved editorially, most of it sounds rather naturally scored - and not to dissimilar in terms of film/music interaction from other Kilar-scored films.
Now... if he's saying that it is only three themes, well... there are actually four I can think of off the top of my head: the Dracula theme, the Mina/Elisabetha theme, Lucy's theme and the Vampire Hunters theme. I know that there are a few other motives floating around in the score as well.
I honestly feel that it sounds strange that a composer as prolific as Kilar would have been so difficult to get music out of. I don't know exactly what Coppola is saying here, but it sounds a little odd... like there's a side to the story that might be missing...?
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Coppola's probably simplifying things a bit in hindsight, but I'd say there's some truth what he's saying. One thing about Kilar is that he does tend to do a handful of extended variations on a few themes. This is very clear in PORTRAIT OF A LADY and DEATH AND THE MAIDEN, and to a lesser extent, clear in DRACULA as well.
The thing about the 100 scores he might have done prior to Dracula - Swashbuckler - is that if Kilar was operating in a more European scoring framework, it's not unlikely that this way of working would have been common to him - writing a few themes which then get edited around in the film. Many of the Sarde, Delerue, Morricone and Legrand scores of fame consist of a few basic pieces worked over again and again.
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