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I am very found of this score. Just so there is no confusion: the original MGM Records releases was in fact the original soundtrack, albeit quite abridged. FSM's CD is the complete score.
Lukas
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I have learned that trying to steer these conversations onto one topic or another is like trying to stop the ocean. As long as nothing breaks the few rules we have -- no politics/religion, no bootlegs, a general respect for one another -- let's see where it goes.
Lukas
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Well, I have to say that my interest (and, certainly, enjoyment) of the music for ICE STATION ZEBRA was triggered by the fact that it was the only film I've ever experienced on a huge screen, probably one-step down from the Cinerama process. This was at the Coliseum Cinerama cinema at Eglinton Toll in Glasgow, now long-gone.
As an impressionable teenager, it was overwhelming and I wallowed in it, loved it. The music? Great!
Let's not forget - Howard Hughes loved it too!
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All film scores stick out for me, because I listen for them. Whenever someone says "you shouldn't notice the score if it's done well" flies right in the face of my film watching experience. Actually, the better it is, the more I notice it (Star Wars - great score and everyone and his grandmother noticed it). If it becomes sonic wallpaper, then it's not something I enjoy.
Because this score stuck out, I fell in love with it. And it's one of those scores that made me go out to find more of Legrand's work...only to be crushingly disappointed in everything else he's done. This was the only score (that I know of) of it's kind he's written.
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Posted: |
Feb 8, 2009 - 10:17 PM
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By: |
peterproud
(Member)
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Scuzi 4 Going Slightly Off-Topic (but it's all Jeff's Fabulous Fault  )Department:
Quite an astute assessment there, Meester Bee, and one we usually wholeheartedly subscribe to.
Mind you, there are specific exceptions to that general rule. Fer instance, we were profoundly surprised at his muscular main title (and subsequent exciting flourishes) for
which, against all odds, remains our favorite of his. Your take on that? ... 
I would love to see a complete and remastered THREE MUSKETEERS someday...it is such a rich and playful score. As for ISZ, I find myself humming that sweeping horn theme at the oddest times, for no apparent reason. That's the sign of a good score, right?
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Well, I have to say that my interest (and, certainly, enjoyment) of the music for ICE STATION ZEBRA was triggered by the fact that it was the only film I've ever experienced on a huge screen, probably one-step down from the Cinerama process.
I also have vivid memories of seeing ISZ in 70mm on the huge screen in the Cooper Cinerama theatre in Denver (also long gone). I became a movie fan in that theatre growing up. Hearing Legrand's music in six track along with the wraparound visuals made a big impression on me, and the FSM discs bring it all back to life.
Yes, in that sense it makes for real "movie music". As young as I was, I thought that Michel Legrand was an odd choice as composer for this type of film. But he certainly triumphed!
- James.
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I think it's an unbelievably good score.
Legrand with this one is a bit like Previn or North, in that he's in a phase of, 'I want to write a big epic orchestral score, but I want nothing to be predictable, so everywhere I can, I'll take the expected chord and change the harmonic so it's always a little bit off somewhere else'. So it ends up not a Romantic score (as is a lot of Legrand, or a fugato-style one), but a post-impressionstic composition. It's full of surprises at every turn.
Maybe that's a stage everybody goes through in different fields, then they tire of it in case it becomes novelty for novelty's sake. But I wish Hollywood HADN'T tired of that style, because apart from the likes of Goldsmith and Rosenman who kept that sort of trick alive, when post-Star-Wars, everybody DID return to symphonic scores, it was the more predictable Romantic/Straussian type of composition that emerged at the top, which was probably a regression.
I wish Legrand and others had stuck to their guns, because that style of post-impressionistic, dissonance-embracing (but tastefully) phase was a pinnacle of film composition in my view.
Why do certain orchestrations and dissonances sound 'icy'? I don't know, but they do ... the aural equivalent of nippy gin or whisky rather than beer.
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