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The Best Music in Film
Geoff Smith
(Recently conducted a live soundtrack on the hammered dulcimer to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "My favourite soundtrack is A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) by Ennio Morricone (directed by Sergio Leone, starring Rod Steiger and James Coburn). I love this soundtrack so much because I always find it extremely moving and uplifting: particularly the wonderful main theme. It gives me strength, hope and sustenance. For example, the scene (with the main theme) where the bridge is blown up captures something that is timeless and truthful yet unfashionable in the current climate: that is, that revolutionary moments, resistance and struggle can be spiritual, uplifting and beautiful. The special character of this main theme means that it is peculiarly suited for use in relation to various scenes in the film: scenes that, on the surface, are contrasting and might seem to be in need of very different themes. These scenes comprise violence, memories of friendship and carefree happy times as well as memories of tragedy - total personal and political betrayal. This same main theme works so perfectly for all these scenes. Most composers are not able to achieve this. That is, to encapsulate everything in one 'pan-theme', and so capture the essences, meanings and soul of the film. This is the nature of genius."
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "Music best enhances a film if it makes the viewer watch the film more intently and therefore experience it's intended essences more intensely (at any given moment) than if there was no music at all. And the greatest film music does even more than this: it enhances the film further by transcending it."
- S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
- "I wanted to compose a score for the expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), and this is what I did. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari particularly appealed to me because it is such a uniquely rich and multi-dimensional film with an immense dynamic of narrative, plot, design, undertones and nuances occurring within a specific historical context. I also chose it because I knew it would be extremely difficult, demanding and challenging: most importantly it gave me the possibility to explore my particular compositional approach. This utilises microtonal 'fluid' tuning (i.e. 'bespoke' microtonal tuning per composition) in a symbiotic trinity with diatonic and chromatic instrumentation: in this instance dulcimers. This new creative process would potentially give me a much wider palette of 'colours' to work with in order to relate to the extreme emotional and psychological spectrum of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. So, it was a prototype compositional methodology carried out on prototype instrumentation. It was a test and it's been very successful."