Lawrence of Arabia by Maurice Jarre
Close your eyes. Hear the distant rumbling of the drums. Closer they come, closer, closer. The swirling winds catch the notes and send them soaring till at last they emerge from the desert clear and majestic, tamed yet still tribal. The bows sweeping across the strings giving grandeur to this world. And then....here come the fife and drums, British military precision cutting into the desert winds, clashing, battling, the two opposing forces becoming a single storm of movement till the drums demand the two forces remember they are merely the pawns controlled by nature. Then back to the clean, clear desert.
The Man Who Would Be King by Maurice Jarre
Military precision swept up into grand story telling. Again the strings saying "listen, feel the call of far away places and marvelous sights". And yet, a sadness, an elegantly constructed elegy to a time and place and a way of story telling confined to the past.
To Kill A Mockingbird by Elmer Bernstein
The soundtrack of childhood. A single piano plucking out individual notes, a student learning a lesson. Then the flute, an ethereal mother comforting her charges. And then the sweep of the entire orchestra, the father, solid, sure, the rock on which to build your character. Music that says he would be there in the morning.
The Magnificent Seven by Elmer Bernstein
The rhythm of the saddle and the horse, lone riders cutting across the vast panorama of the American west, singularly vulnerable, together a force. The brass adding emphasis to the adventure, the horns paying tribute to the righteous, now the strings becoming the wind underneath, pushing forward and morphing into the landscape upon which they ride.
The Right Stuff by Bill Conti
A quiet morning sunrise, the birds in the sky fluttering by. Slowly the orchestra builds louder and louder till the grandness of man and his invention fill the ears taking us upwards, always upwards where adventure and achievement hang on the stars. Themes from classical music ("The Planets") mixed with prosaic ("The Wild Blue Yonder"). The brass reminding us that there are still heroes in the world. And then the strings lifting them and us into the heavens.
The Natural by Randy Newman
The vast wheat fields of the Midwest meet the tingling power of the swing of a bat. But then there is mystery. Horns, sharp as knives, drums beating us downward. We must fail, we must fall, for we are merely men. But then Wonder (boy). We are guided up, up, into a clear night crazily daggered by a lightening bolt. Salvation, the strings giving us wings and supported by the brass so we can fly past time and space and become part of a spinning spheroid taking us....home.
Taxi Driver by Bernard Hermann
The music of the night. Something crawling out from the shadows. Cymbals crashing around us. Our brains unable to distinguish the instruments, just sound, the depths pulling us in. Plucked strings giving depth. But then a sultry saxaphone, or is it a woman's languid form, inviting, soothing. No, back into the shadows we must go, the woman calls out to us, but she is now sullied, a victim, the cymbals pushing us past her and back into the night. Someone must die for the night to end.
The Godfather by Nino Rota
A single trumpet. Mournful, haunting, a waltz deconstructed. Now a piano, but the deep end of that pool, foreboding. The piano now replaced by a single violin, what might have been as we remember back to the beginning. The orchestra now coming in, filling the sketches laid out by the single clarinet, flute, and again the trumpet. Power, richness, tradition, violence, what makes us human.
The Adventures of Robin Hood by Eric Korngold
Romance of knights and honor. What a classic Hollywood movie should sound like. A giant orchestra playing romantic classical music. Each movement of the characters accompanied by his or her own unique theme. Music that can make you taste the Technicolor.
The Third Man by Anton Karas
What is that sound? What kind of instrument makes that? A zither? Where are we, a place we know or a place we think we know? False gaiety plastered onto the rubble of a once great romantic city. Everything moves so fast, and yet nothing moves at all. At the climax, only beautiful silence, the score given over to the music of water rushing, the clip clop of feet running,voices rendered incomprehensible by the echo chamber beneath the street, and after an achingly long pause, one unseen gunshot.
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