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The Best Music in Film
David Hirschfelder
Original music for Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (1998) and Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom (1992)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "My all-time favourite film score is Ennio Morricone's for The Mission (1986). I love it because Maestro Ennio not only fully embraces the concept of melody, he also imbues that score with such great choices with regard to orchestration, featuring a totally non-gratuitous use of world music elements, which was really ground-breaking for its time. Thus, the music composed for that film stands alone, whilst it also propels the narrative so effectively yet unobtrusively."
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "Music enhances a film best when it succeeds in creating a hypnotic underbelly that literally keeps the audience in a trance, so that a simple audio-visual experience can be transformed into a metaphysical journey."
- S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
- "I would have to say The Mission is a score I wish I had written because of it's powerful narrative enhancement combined with it's elegance as music in its own right. But then, I could say the same thing about so many other fine scores, including Miklós Rózsa's Ben-Hur (1959) or Herrmann's Psycho (1960)."