With the Oscars coming up this Sunday, Pitchfork is celebrating with our first Music & Movies week.
Now that we’ve looked at the best soundtracks in film, let’s turn to the best scores. We’re defining scores as original music composed for a film, with recurring motifs and almost always without vocals. This type of work is often the result of a collaboration between a composer and director, and created in tandem with a movie to steadily enhance the narrative onscreen. Put another way: Whereas a soundtrack highlights moments of a movie, a score blankets the entire film. (We’re only looking at narrative films in this list; we are not including documentaries.)
A great original score is an art form in itself: While it serves the director’s vision, it can also stand alone as its own immersive listen. As you’ll see below, the original score is a beloved medium for musicians, who often have a favorite one they can point to immediately. And sometimes, musicians who’ve found fame with their own songs can channel those same gifts into film work. So let’s raise the curtain by talking to two composers who are part of an innovative new vanguard that’s creating today’s most exciting movie music.
“The Weaker the Executive, the More Notes You Get”: A Conversation With Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury
In their film scores, composing duo Geoff Barrow (Portishead, Beak>) and Ben Salisbury shun many tropes of the form. Instead of saccharine strings and bright horns, they favor dense, swampy atmospheres and pulsing electronics, creating soundscapes that unsettle and fascinate. After their tense, brooding work for Alex Garland’s 2014 thriller Ex-Machina won widespread acclaim, they partnered again on Garland’s Annihilation, their surreal tones adding new layers of disorientation to the sci-fi mystery. Their latest film, Julius Onah’s Luce, recently premiered at Sundance. Here, they talk about the art of film scoring.
Geoff Barrow: It’s opened up a whole world for me that I never really thought existed. It challenges you every day. I love the idea of using sound to explore things like misdirection, to make a person come across as being victimized while knowing that they are the worst person in the world. I absolutely love it.
Ben Salisbury: For me, as simple as it sounds, it’s the combination of music and picture. I’m a frustrated filmmaker as much as I am a composer, and I love being part of the collaborative filmmaking process. Sometimes it’s not even about the big musical moments; there might be little moments where I know that I’m changing the audience’s temperature of a film—that you’ve twisted their melon. That is very satisfying.
Barrow: Ben and I really bonded over Planet of the Apes. John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 was big for me—what he managed to convey emotionally, yet so simply, was incredible.
Salisbury: Jaws, Star Wars, Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith. More recently: Solaris, You Were Never Really Here, Under the Skin.
Barrow: Quite difficult. I read something by a music supervisor the other day who said, “It’s nice when you don’t notice the music in a film,” and I thought, What a prick. But this isn’t an ego blast; you are working for the better of the film. It’s not about you and you have to get that into your head. I’m pretty honest in meetings. I don’t want to waste my time or theirs and, so far, it’s been OK. I’ve walked away from a few things, especially if they want anything like Portishead. I’m not going to try and copy myself.
Barrow: Don’t ever deliver anything you wouldn’t be proud of a single second appearing on film because sometimes, when you hand over a rushed rough version to test mood, you’re no longer in control of what gets done with that music. Also, the weaker the executive, the more notes you get about the music.
Salisbury: It’s quite easy to make a feature film compared to decades ago—you can make a film on a phone and get your mate in a band to do the score on a laptop. When I started, you needed so much kit to score films, it was quite an undertaking.
Salisbury: It definitely is, and we need to do whatever we can to change it—for equality reasons but also because you’re missing out on so much. It’s like cutting off half the creative ideas available to you. Why would you do that?
Barrow: It’s appalling but it’s going to change. There are so many more open-minded directors coming through that I think that change is already happening.
Barrow: Film makes the music industry look like a toy town. It’s frightening how absolutely pure evil some people are in the film industry. But I get a kick out of navigating through that world. When I make music with Beak> or Portishead, there is nobody telling me how it should be done, but there’s also more longevity in film. The music industry is basically a support system for new artists and most people expect you to quit being in a rock band by 35, but in film, people do it right until the end of their lives.
Interview by Daniel Dylan Wray
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
A landmark of Asian cinema, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the result of close collaboration between composer Tan Dun and director Ang Lee. Alongside famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Dun and Lee worked for four years to conceptualize a movie that would introduce Western audiences to martial arts as a historical form, rather than simply violent entertainment. Just as the film bridged the East and West—it remains the top-grossing foreign film of all time in the U.S.—Dun’s breathtaking score melds elements of his upbringing and traditional Chinese instrumentation with the classical training he received later in America.
The star here is Yo-Yo Ma; Dun would probably agree, as he’s called him the “spiritual glue” of the writing process. His performances breathe elegance across the entire score, and in the film, his percussive thumps and pizzicato strums are interspersed brilliantly between punches and kicks. The most powerful moment comes in “Yearning of the Sword,” where Ma’s cello concedes center stage to a Chinese erhu, a sorrowful two-stringed instrument. The two trade melodies, highlighting their distinctive timbral differences before eventually reaching a wistful harmony. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Tan Dun and Yo-Yo Ma, “Yearning of the Sword”
Trouble Man (1972)
As Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly and Isaac Hayes’ Shaft took Blaxploitation soundtracks to new heights, Marvin Gaye also found his groove in film music. The Trouble Man score serves the gun-toting, fist-flying, cheesy dialogue-spouting movie just fine, with its smooth grooves cushioning the action, and Gaye’s lyrics amplifying the bullish attitude of the lead character, but it’s most potent as a standalone listen.
Trouble Man was released between the politically charged What’s Going On and the sexually driven Let’s Get It On, finding Gaye at his artistic peak. The score is largely instrumental with suave horns, funky grooves, pulsing synthesizer, and sparse drums. Yet even when removed from its visual context, the music remains inherently cinematic. Gaye is so reserved with his own vocal contributions that when they soar through the honeyed instrumentations, they greet you like a long-lost friend. Gaye clearly took his role as producer seriously; he holds back his voice and lets the studio sing instead. –Daniel Dylan Wray
Listen: Marvin Gaye, “Trouble Man”
Teesri Manzil (1966)
Composer Rahul Dev Burman racked up over 250 film credits in his lifetime, making him one of the most prolific artists in the already bustling Bollywood factory. One of his most enduring scores is also one of his earliest: his crackling collaboration with director Vijay Anand for 1966’s Teesri Manzil, a Hitchcock-like thriller that remains one of Bollywood’s best-loved films. It marked the first time that Burman and Anand collaborated, a partnership that would last into the ’80s.
With Teesri Manzil, Burman paired Indian cinema’s lavish orchestrations with surf music’s whiplash guitar, then added rock’n’roll’s rollicking sax and booming backbeat. Burman also deployed iconic playback singers like Mohammed Rafi and Asha Bhosle to duet on the film’s biggest numbers. With dizzying choreography set against surreal set pieces, songs like “Oh Haseena Zulfon Waali” and “Aaja Aaja” remain beloved in India to this day. –Andy Beta
Listen: Mohammed Rafi, “Deewana Mujshe Nahin”
Batman (1989)
In his score for Tim Burton’s Batman, Danny Elfman starts somewhere appropriate for our hero: the minor key. The composer’s iconic “The Batman Theme” is fortissimo in all the right ways, with thunderous drums and a brass section so brash, it would make Mahler blush. It’s riveting and, most importantly, not at all menacing; it's just a bit dark, nodding subtly to Bruce Wayne’s antihero tendencies without taking him too seriously or squashing the invigorating feeling of watching him save the day.
“The Batman Theme” is also pure fun, befitting a story about an unhinged rich man who spends his free time spying on people from a cave. The playfulness shows up elsewhere in the film, such as when Elfman uses “Photos/Beautiful Dreamer” to soundtrack the Joker’s gleeful destruction, or turning the Joker’s demented rooftop dance with Vicki Vale into a “Waltz to the Death.” In contrast to the grim tendencies of Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot—complete with a joyless, orchestral score by Hans Zimmer—Danny Elfman shows that a superhero movie is at its best when it’s a thrilling, snappy spectacle. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Danny Elfman, “The Batman Theme”
The Pink Panther (1963)
Spry, swinging, and just a shade louche, “The Pink Panther Theme” perfectly sums up the kind of detective movie that jokes, “Take your filthy hands off my asp.” Its horns squeal like a Fiat burning rubber; the iconic, ascending saxophone lead, originally slurred out by the great Plas Johnson, winks and twists like mod headscarves floating through air. Henry Mancini, one of the greatest film composers of the 20th century, brought irrepressible joys to his score, lighting Peter Sellers’ slapstick Inspector Clouseau with another layer of wry mischief; the light, refined lounge pop of “Champagne and Quail” befits his upper-crust world, while the brassy “The Tiber Twist” has a noir underbelly to pair with all that hip-shaking. Mancini already had some silver-screen classics under his belt by The Pink Panther—including “Moon River” and “Theme From Hatari!”—but this captures him entranced by the glamorous lives onscreen and celebrating what makes them effusively, wonderfully alive. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Henry Mancini, “The Pink Panther Theme”
Les Stances à Sophie (1971)
In 1969, the Art Ensemble of Chicago relocated to Paris, where they hypnotized the film director Moshé Mizrahi in concert. Struck by “the way they attacked music, like they could do anything they wanted,” he asked them to score his adaptation of Les Stances à Sophie by the French feminist novelist Christiane Rochefort. The result is often jarringly at odds with the film’s visuals, pulling attention from screen to speaker and stealing scenes, but their riotous work succeeds in capturing the push-pull dynamics and clashing philosophies of the central couple, a sexually liberated woman and her more uptight husband. The recording features Fontella Bass (singer of the R&B hit “Rescue Me”) on the memorable “Thème De Yoyo,” which melds her infectious vocals, explosive Can-like drums, silky bass-led funk, and detonating brass. The score blazes with such vitality and momentum that the music’s legacy eclipses the largely forgotten film. –Daniel Dylan Wray
Listen: The Art Ensemble of Chicago, “Thème De Yoyo”
Jackie (2018)
In not much time, Mica Levi has made a name for herself as a master of cacophonous anxiety. After scoring the eerie extraterrestrial film Under the Skin, she brought that disquiet to Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as the grieving First Lady in the days after JFK’s assassination. Levi elevates the film out of conventional biopic territory with its dreamlike, frightening ambience; her strings sound ominously off, as if someone has accidentally landed on the wrong note, and the entire score doubles down on that pebble-in-the-shoe feeling. The musical Camelot plays a big role in the film, most notably in the scene where the newly widowed Jackie drinks wine alone in the White House. But overall, Levi’s creeping strings provide the minor-key backbone for this snapshot of a woman in mourning as the world watches her. –Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Listen: Mica Levi, “Burial”
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Director Godfrey Reggio has never wanted to say what Koyaanisqatsi is about, to pinpoint the message behind his precisely edited slipstream of time-lapse beauty and stunning slow-motion. Juxtaposing the ancient majesty of nature with the mechanized might of human endeavor, Koyaanisqatsi is either an environmentalist’s nightmare or an industrialist’s ode to invention and conquest, depending on how you see the world. Philip Glass’ overwhelming score, which runs largely uninterrupted for the length of the film, is a similar litmus test: During “The Grid,” do you connect with the perfectly controlled voices or the pulsing synthesizers? Is “Slo Mo People” the sound of existential satisfaction or anguish, “Prophecies” a clarion call to action or a dream for the future? Ultimately, is Koyaanisqatsi a celebration of what we have done or a lamentation of what we will do? A microcosm of a million moving parts, Glass’ score makes everything feel important and urgent, with enormous dynamic sweeps and interwoven melodies that seem to multiply and surround you, giving you no choice but to at least consider the questions he and Reggio raise. Koyaanisqatsi marked the start of Glass’ career as a major film composer, but it also helped redefine how tightly bound film and sound can be, and how much they can say together. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen: Philip Glass, “Prophecies”
Suspiria (1977)
Italian prog-rock band Goblin’s score for Dario Argento’s Suspiria is routinely exalted by horror connoisseurs and electronic music producers alike. Suspiria nostalgia reached an all-time high in 2018 when founding Goblin member Claudio Simonetti led a tour performing the score to screenings of the film; also, none other than Thom Yorke filled Goblin’s shoes onscreen, providing music for a chilly, cerebral Suspiria remake by Luca Guadagnino. But what an unlikely candidate for hushed reverence: The original picture is gloriously over-the-top and irreverent, with its intentionally cartoonish color scheme, stiffly dubbed dialogue, and lurid occult violence.
Goblin’s score heaps on the gaudy extravagance and visceral thrills. From The Exorcist-like bells to Halloween-presaging synths, funked-out guitar to prim harpsichord, trippy tabla to creepy screams, all is fair game so long as it’s suitably wild. These days, synthesizers and cinema are no longer strange bedfellows, and “cult classics” have graduated to become simply “classics,” but Goblin’s work on Suspiria still sounds wonderfully deranged. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Goblin, “Suspiria”
Blue Velvet (1986)
“You fucking get that thing, man. There are 27 zillion songs in the world. I don’t want one of them. I want this song,” David Lynch told producer Fred Caruso. He was talking about This Mortal Coil’s ethereal masterpiece “Song to the Siren,” which he envisioned as the backdrop for a crucial scene in his film Blue Velvet, a surreal mystery bound up in straitjacketed camp—a kind of claustrophobic Norman Rockwell nightmare.
Lynch didn’t get the song. Instead, the director tasked Angelo Badalamenti, a young composer he had hired as Isabella Rossellini’s vocal coach, with creating a replacement. It “should be a song that floats on the sea of time,” Lynch told him. And that’s exactly what Badalamenti came up with in “Mysteries of Love,” in which a then-unknown singer named Julee Cruise coos coolly over beatific synth pads. (The title and lyrics were Lynch’s.) Badalamenti’s score for the film—the first of many he would compose for Lynch—proves perfectly suited to the director’s sneaky visual style, encompassing lounge jazz, sinister atmospheres, and winking twists on cinematic convention. The “Main Title” theme, repeated frequently, slices back and forth, pawing at the spongy ground: Like the film’s narrative itself, it progresses haltingly, two steps forward, one step back, unleashing unimaginable darkness as it burrows deep into the subconscious. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Angelo Badalamenti, “Main Title”
Jaws (1975)
Steven Spielberg’s thriller opens with the destruction of innocence. A young couple run off to the ocean to skinny dip; while the woman waits for her beau, who is engaged in a drunken battle with his trousers, she splashes around in the moonlight. Then, it begins. Dun nun…dun nun…. The girl is a goner. With just two repeating notes, played with increasing urgency by a 19-piece string and horn section, composer John Williams traumatized beachgoers forever and gave cinema’s newest nightmare an unforgettable theme. Never again has a tuba been used for such evil.
Despite its primal horror, the Jaws theme would not be as effective were it not for the less-ominous orchestrations in the film’s first half, like the swashbuckling “Promenade (Tourists on the Menu)” and the cheerful “Out to Sea.” The idyllic New England summer these moments establish make the devastation of the shark all the more cruel. By the time the film’s crew of Captain Ahabs set sail to kill their aquatic demon once and for all, the score pummels relentlessly, emerging from the sea to wreak havoc. Like Psycho before it, Jaws showed music’s ability to convey terror, chilling viewers to their cores. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: John Williams, “Main Title (Theme From Jaws)”
The Tale of Genji (1987)
The Tale of Genji, written in the 11th century by a noblewoman named Shikibu Murasaki, has been called the world’s first novel. Detailing courtly love in Heian society, the sprawling, seductive book was partially adapted into the 1987 anime film from Gisaburō Sugii. The film may only cover the first few chapters, but the soundtrack from Haruomi Hosono imparts a singular charge.
Hosono is a legend in 20th century Japanese music, from his tenure in Yellow Magic Orchestra to his own wide-ranging solo work—but even amid his decades of music, the score for Genji stands apart. His telltale electronics hover in the background as he accentuates koto, drums, and bamboo flute, mixing Japanese court music with ambient into a mix that defies characterization. –Andy Beta
Listen: Haruomi Hosono, “月読 (Tsukiyomi)”
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Ennio Morricone has created more than 500 film scores, including works for some of the greatest westerns of all time. But perhaps none are as gorgeous and emotionally resonant as Once Upon a Time in America. Before James Woods became a pro-MAGA Twitter ideologue and Robert De Niro a guy willing to take a fat paycheck for Dirty Grandpa, the two starred together in Sergio Leone’s astonishing crime epic chronicling a lifetime of friendship and betrayal among Jewish mobsters. Morricone’s score—especially its sweeping centerpiece, “Deborah’s Theme”—contributes greatly to the film’s tone of wistfulness and loss. (Seriously, try playing “Deborah’s Theme” as accompaniment to any mundane activity—folding laundry, eating Doritos—and your life will suddenly feel like a profound meditation on squandered glory.) In addition to the main orchestral theme, the score boasts some rousing speakeasy jazz (much of the film takes place during Prohibition) and an ominous pan flute refrain performed by Gheorghe Zamfir, the same flute master from the Karate Kid soundtrack. –Zach Schonfeld
Listen: Ennio Morricone, “Deborah’s Theme”
Walkabout (1971)
In Nicolas Roeg’s film, two British children stranded in the outback are rescued and guided back to “civilization” by an indigenous Australian boy—scare quotes around the C-word, for Walkabout is a rhapsodic elegy for nature and our lost innocence. Because there’s only sporadic dialogue (Roeg described the script as “a 14-page prose poem”) and the six-year-old brother and his teenage sister have been brought up in typically post-imperial stiff-upper-lip fashion, nearly all the emotional eloquence in the movie is supplied by the score. Waltjingu Bandilil’s eerie didgeridoo and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s disorienting tape-piece Hymnen conjure the unknowable majesty of the arid landscape and its scorching extremes of weather. But it’s veteran film composer John Barry who establishes the prevailing mood with his piercingly poignant orchestrations. A stirring choral theme redolent of a school song, “The Children” evokes the simple-hearted hope and accepting obedience with which kids face the world. The horn fanfares of “The Journey” conjure a storybook-adventure air, mirroring the way that the youngest child in particular processes his predicament. Above all, there’s the gently devastating, recurring main theme, a patient pulse of harpsichord over which wistful woodwinds pipe and tender violins soar and swoop. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: John Barry, “The Children”
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
At one point in the lively 1959 legal drama Anatomy of a Murder, a small-town woman caught up in a homicide case questions her lawyer’s taste in records. “Aren’t lawyers supposed to like music?” responds the weary attorney, played by James Stewart. She shoots back: “Well, not that kind of music!” She’s talking about jazz, which was just beginning to be used in movies at the time, and Duke Ellington’s work on Anatomy of a Murder marked the first time a black composer wrote a full-length score for a major film. In an interview, the legendary bandleader made his intentions clear. “I’m not playing semi-classical stuff or symphonic music,” he said. “It’s strictly Duke Ellington music.”
So it is. In the late ’50s, Ellington was enjoying a career renaissance, and his score features the sort of swinging, big-band tunes he made his name on decades prior. But most effective are the more somber compositions that add depth to Anatomy’s explicit-for-the-time story, which revolves around an ethically murky case of rape, jealousy, murder, and the vagaries of the law. The film is famously ambiguous, smudging the line between hero and villain, and Ellington and his orchestra’s improvisations work best when they achingly tug at that sense of reasonable doubt. –Ryan Dombal
Ceddo (1977)
In the late ’70s, the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango was already legendary on dancefloors for his disco-defining 1972 hit “Soul Makossa,” which would go on to form the basis of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” But in 1977, Dibango reached across borders and genres to score the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s film Ceddo. Sembène’s unflinching historical films often looked at atrocities from Senegal’s history and, like past works of his, Ceddo was banned in his country. No doubt the film’s grim portrayal of Islam and Christianity in past centuries had something to do with it, showing how these religions feasted on the slave trade, turning human beings into commodities. Buoying such grim imagery is Dibango’s music: His sax and vibraphone mingle with piano, guitar, and drums to create a highlight of ’70s African cinema, revealing Dibango to be a diverse and deeply funky composer. –Andy Beta
Listen: Manu Dibango, “Ceddo”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn portrays a “very lovely, very frightened girl” who escapes to New York to reinvent herself. While Hepburn’s performance of Holly Golightly is enchanting, it is arguably Henry Mancini’s score that most effectively conjures the romance, loneliness, and mystique of the city. Mancini captures all sides of New York, from champagne-soaked parties soundtracked by peacocking big bands to the sultry allure of its seedy underworld.
The heart of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is indisputably “Moon River,” which captures Holly’s longing for love and adventure. Though instrumental and choral renditions of the song bookend the film, the most enduring version is sung by the untrained Hepburn on her character’s fire escape, hair in a wrap and guitar in hand. Featuring lyrics penned by Hollywood songwriter Johnny Mercer, Hepburn’s performance of “Moon River” aches with a genuine wistfulness that transcends the film itself. –Quinn Moreland
Listen: Henry Mancini and His Orchestra, “Moon River”
La Planète Sauvage (1973)
Whether you perceive La Planète Sauvage’s strange allegory of giant, blue-skinned Draags and their enslaved, human-sized pet Oms on the planet of Ygam as imparting a lesson in racism, human rights, or animal rights, this early-’70s animated flick continues to mystify first-graders and grad-school vapers alike. But the film’s real genius was in tapping Serge Gainsbourg’s arranger/composer Alain Goraguer for the soundtrack, before he pivoted away from child-friendly fare into scoring French porn. Full of flummoxing wah-wah guitar, ethereal choirs, breathy horns, psychedelic Mellotron, and crisp breakbeats, this score has inspired beat-heads like J Dilla, DJ Shadow, Madlib, and Flying Lotus while also powering tracks for Mac Miller, Big Pun, and Capone-N-Noreaga. Surreal, forlorn, and funky in equal measure, La Planète Sauvage continues to draw generations of producers and rappers into its gravitational field. –Andy Beta
Listen: Alain Goraguer, “Le Bracelet”
Sicario (2015)
The Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything made the Oscars take notice of Jóhann Jóhannsson as a blockbuster composer, but it was the late experimental musician’s score for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario, released the following year, that proved he could smuggle truly unsettling sounds into Hollywood. Sicario is one of those FBI drug-bust thrillers in which the tension maintains a steady simmer; you can’t always tell when the action is about to go down because the heroes spend so much time riding around in SUVs. Jóhannsson’s score is particularly good in these moments: With its pounding timpani crescendos, venomous string strikes, and deft use of atmospheric dynamics that zoom in and out, the music is a clear sign of not just the danger that looms but the pure evil embodied by the film’s drug-lord villains. The effect is well captured by “Convoy,” a composition that hums along anxiously before swarming up at once and surrounding each side in a different kind of instrumental chaos. When the chase finally dies down, the mood is eerily still: They’ll be back. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Jóhann Jóhannsson, “Convoy”
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)
The Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, a member of the electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra, would go on to win an Oscar for his work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, but his first toe-dip into cinema was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Japanese director Nagisa Ôshima’s English-language feature starred David Bowie as a handsome British major in a prisoner-of-war camp, and costarred Sakamoto himself as a guard. Sakamoto’s famous piano ballad starts with notes as pure and gentle as raindrops, a friendly reprieve from the World War II backdrop and an antidote for his initially militant character (who, not surprisingly, eventually becomes enamored with Bowie’s Jack Celliers). Even when the song escalates into a battle anthem, the humanistic melody still shines through. –Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Listen: Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989)
Peter Greenaway’s elegantly awful masterpiece is the best version of “The Aristocrats” ever told. In a series of seemingly endless camera movements that glide across a feast of violence, nudity, piss, shit, garish colors, and amazing Jean-Paul Gaultier costumes, it chronicles the abuse and humiliation to which a gluttonous, nouveau-riche London gangster played by Michael Gambon subjects everyone in his orbit… until the worm, as it were, finally turns.
The score by British minimalist and frequent Greenaway collaborator Michael Nyman matches the director's commitment to both restrictive formalism and anything-goes maximalist zeal. The genteel funeral march of “Memorial,” for example, evolves into a ludicrous saxophone grind. In “Miserere,” a boy soprano sings at the upper limit of his listeners’ comfort zone. Yet right in the middle of it all, there’s “Fish Beach,” a backbreaker of a love theme for the adulterous characters played by Helen Mirren and Alan Howard. Here, the lurid flourishes drop away entirely, leaving behind only the repeated sound of something beautiful and doomed. –Sean T. Collins
Listen: Michael Nyman, “Memorial”
Vertigo (1958)
Alfred Hitchcock’s musical collaborator, Bernard Herrmann, was responsible for some of the most recognizable scores in cinematic history. Some of his best work can be found on Hitchcock’s obsessive thriller Vertigo, about a man who loses the woman he loves (an enigmatic, platinum-blonde Kim Novak) only to find her plain doppelgänger (Novak again, this time brunette), whom he grooms to look exactly like his deceased lover. Herrmann’s string-driven, atmospheric accompaniment not only imitates its San Francisco setting—two notes mimicking the sound of fog horns by the Golden Gate Bridge—but it also gracefully, desperately moves through the entire spectrum of emotions, from aching and romantic to urgent and dangerous and tragic. And like the fog that blankets the film, the score shrouds the story with an even thicker air of mystery. –Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Le Mépris (1963)
Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris (“Contempt”) approaches a frightening question—How does the “delicious complicity” of a marriage die?—with music so gorgeous, it seduces even as it shatters. Amid the stately cliffs of Capri, a screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) struggles to adapt Homer, abandoning his own wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot)—the Penelope to his Odysseus—in the process. French New Wave maestro Georges Delerue meets their stormy passions with a symphonic grandeur that befits the backdrop of their war.
Delerue’s score is an unusually choppy one, with over two dozen tracks of just a few minutes apiece; this was the work of the impressively cranky Godard, who submitted Delerue’s original, lengthy arrangements to a hacksaw. Motifs recycle throughout Le Mépris, hazy as memories. Delerue’s overture returns often, never losing its adrenalized fear and desire, and “Camille,” Delerue’s most iconic film theme, is an exquisite ghost throughout, almost intolerable in its fragile hope. It sounds like the most beautiful place you’ve yet to visit. –Stacey Anderson
Listen: Georges Delerue, “Camille”
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
George Lucas’ Star Wars was an absolute blast—and still is, anytime you’re flipping through channels and catch the Death Star attack run. For the sequel, Lucas and company went a bit deeper, got a bit darker, and added more mystical light and romantic heat. So did Lucas’ go-to composer.
Between Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, and, of course, that first Star Wars, John Williams was already responsible for some of the most recognizable film music ever recorded, combining a pop musician’s ear for hooks with a sense of scale commensurate with galaxies far, far away. In Empire, he expanded the sonic template he established for the original film, creating his richest and most varied set of compositions yet. Foremost among these is “The Imperial March,” the brassily sinister martial theme associated with Darth Vader. “Yoda’s Theme” is its opposite—soft and sweet, its melody seems to slowly levitate. A swoon in musical form, “Han Solo and the Princess” is an intensely romantic theme for that literally tortured love affair. Empire is the definitive Star Wars score, featuring songs so intrinsic to Lucas’ fictional universe, it’s hard to believe they weren’t there from the start. –Sean T. Collins
Listen: John Williams, “The Imperial March”
Annihilation (2018)
It’s one thing when a score is tasked with carrying the emotion of a small scene, nudging the audience toward the desired effect of the director. But when a score is asked to carry a wordless, 10-minute pas de deux between a film’s protagonist and her translucent extraterrestrial clone that serves as the jaw-dropping climax of a surreal sci-fi film, it’s Annihilation. Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score lives in the belly of Alex Garland’s movie, coiling and mutating as the expedition treks deeper into the alien Shimmer. They make use of an otherworldly instrument called a waterphone and ground the film’s humanity within a recurring two-note acoustic guitar riff (alongside repeated flashbacks that feature Crosby, Stills & Nash’s angelic “Helplessly Hoping”). As the characters start to unravel and transform, the music undergoes its own mitosis, splitting and blooming until that climactic scene in the lighthouse, when those fog-horn synths develop an entirely new musical language. –Jeremy D. Larson
The Hired Hand (1971)
Bruce Langhorne made his name as a guitarist for hire, most famously on Bringing It All Back Home, Bob Dylan’s first electric album. (Legend has it that Langhorne also provided the inspiration for “Mr. Tambourine Man.”) But as important as his contributions were to that revolutionary folk-rock record, the guitarist’s true legacy is his score for Peter Fonda’s pastoral anti-western The Hired Hand. Langhorne overdubbed banjo, Farfisa organ, Appalachian dulcimer, and fiddle to create a sui generis slice of cosmic Americana. The film’s dazzling opening sequence—a slo-mo, impressionistic montage—is a hypnotic marriage of sight and sound, earthy and psychedelic all at once. “Ending,” meanwhile, is as lonesome as a frontier sunset. The Hired Hand wasn’t released as an album until the 2000s, but since then, it’s earned a devoted underground following. In 2017, Scissor Tail Records released The Hired Hands, a double-disc tribute featuring Lee Ranaldo, Steve Gunn, and other disciples who have fallen under the spell of Langhorne’s singular score. –Tyler Wilcox
Listen: Bruce Langhorne, “Ending”
Akira (1988)
Akira is beloved for its irreverent, cyberpunk spirit, but there’s a keen sense of dread to its hyper-stylized world. Neo-Tokyo isn’t at all new; it’s salvaged, scrapped from ruins. That collision of modernity and near-extinction gives the film a tense, hallucinogenic quality, and sets the tone for the score’s extreme dynamism.
Experimental Japanese collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi fills every crevice of the score with sounds familiar and strange, blending choral chants, Balinese percussion, and organs into extravagant compositions that swell into polyrhythmic head rushes and contract into blistering silence. Composed and recorded before the film was animated, the score structures the story and amplifies the excesses of the animation. There’s a constant contrast between the film’s rich detail—it was the most costly animated movie in Japan’s history at the time—and its delirious imagery, and the score embraces that friction. Evoking the thrills of Akira right alongside its horrors, Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s decadence inspires awe but never comfort. –Stephen Kearse
Listen: Geinoh Yamashirogumi, “Kaneda”
Casino Royale (1967)
How do you take your Bond? Do you prefer him a stern, cold, remorseless killer? Or do you want him to be rakish, campy, and too busy leering at everything in a skirt to concern himself with geopolitical gamesmanship? Wherever you land on the spectrum, you have the original Casino Royale to thank for the choice. The 1967 film was a happy mishegoss of competing superstar egos and screenwriters, a disaster that burned through $12 million (an absurd sum at the time) and featured not one, not two, but seven different James Bonds. An incomplete list of writers it took to yield the howlingly incoherent screenplay: Terry Southern, Joseph Heller (yes, that one), Billy Wilder (yes, that one), and, um, Woody Allen. As for the stars parading through it, all of whom chewed the overripe scenery: Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, John Huston, Peter O’Toole, and, yes, Woody Allen again.
Who else to compose the music for such a booze-soaked, 10-ton cheesecake but Burt Bacharach and Herb Alpert? The score was as extravagant as the movie: Audiophile legend has it that the recording sessions featured such a fancy grade of tape, the engineers buried the needle in the red, producing such a dynamically hot and wide-ranging recording that it was used as a test record for high-performance stereos for years. The vinyl became a vanishingly rare cult object—“I don’t even have a copy,” Bacharach admitted once—and the music on it became a touchstone for a certain kind of knowing bachelor-pad cheese. –Jayson Greene
Rocky (1976)
“Here was a movie that is about a loser,” arranger and composer Bill Conti remembered of the first Rocky film. “I’ve read the script; I know how it ends. He loses. But in the tenth reel, he gets to train for a big fight, and we want to manipulate the audience to think that he can win.” So Conti took the film’s piano theme, which he wrote first—a loping and doleful little motif that tails Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky as he kicks dejectedly around Philadelphia, a loser’s theme—and turned it into a battle hymn. Horns, harps, a drum kit, strings, electric guitar, background singers, an entire goddamn orchestra: All of it lights into you. Suddenly, the sight of a lumpy guy in baggy sweats running up the steps of a Philadelphia museum turns into the ascension of a Greek god. You believe, for a moment, that the pug-ugly bastard can—and must—win.
The music is so invincible that it has survived a series of sequels that run the gamut from simply “not-as-good” all the way to “hoo, boy.” And when Ryan Coogler rebooted the franchise with 2015’s Creed, nothing stirred the blood as much as hints of that old Conti score poking its way through the training montage. It is victory music for born losers, and there are no losers when it is playing. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Bill Conti, “Going the Distance”
Phantom Thread (2017)
Phantom Thread is a film about the limits of perfection. The pursuit of beauty is solitary and futile; love brings bitterness and disappointment. Jonny Greenwood’s score is a self-conscious composition to match. There are countless moments of aesthetic bliss that threaten to overwhelm, but never do: The adagio “For the Hungry Boy” is rich and dramatic; “Sandalwood I” is textured and lively; “Barbara Rose” has harp and other strings plucked harriedly. It is ambiguous how good any of this should really feel. You cannot live a charmed life forever, the music suggests.
The main theme, “House of Woodcock,” is the best example of fleeting satisfaction, as its florid motif vanishes just as soon as it peaks. Its piano is particularly reminiscent of the main theme to Lolita, another movie about a pitifully insecure man, with a soundtrack that served as inspiration for Greenwood. The Phantom Thread score captures the hope that’s always out of reach, the desire for something more, and the acknowledgment that as you settle back down to reality, you realize that what’s around you is not to be taken for granted. –Matthew Strauss
Listen: Jonny Greenwood, “House of Woodcock”
Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)
Matching the scope and ambition of a film as bold as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God was no small task, yet the prog-krautrock band Popol Vuh’s score remains as impactful as Herzog’s images. Rather than attempt to bolster the audacious production and narrative with bombastic strings or dramatic arrangements, the score is restrained. The opening scene, dense with mist and dramatic mountains, is matched in texture by the main theme, which is as immersing and omnipresent as the thick vapor that envelops the landscape. The score is rich in dreamy, droning Moog synthesizer, but the choral sounds come from a custom-made, Mellotron-like instrument called a “choir organ.” These two machines collide and interlock to create hypnotic and quietly beautiful arrangements that let you to sink into the voyage onscreen. Several pieces of music reappear throughout, a creative editing process that adds to the feeling of a never-ending journey unfolding. –Daniel Dylan Wray
Listen: Popol Vuh, “Lacrimae Di Rei”
Drive (2011)
When director Nicolas Winding Refn was making Drive, he had Kraftwerk on his iPod: There was something about the idea of electronic music, he said, that suited “the mythology of the gunslinger with a car.” The songs that found their way to the movie’s soundtrack bear that out: Slick, ’80s-fueled synth-pop chuggers from Kavinsky and the Chromatics help establish the film’s knowing sense of style, cognizant of its antecedents but not the least bit retro. Cliff Martinez’s original score is also rooted in the electronic music of the ’70s and ’80s; its clean-lined synths and cycling arpeggios are part of a lineage running through acts like Kraftwerk, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream.
Unlike the neon gloss of Kavinsky and the Chromatics, though, Martinez’s score is darker and more ominous. Throbbing metallic pulses play up the film’s heart-in-mouth action sequences, while desolate ambient passages mirror its amoral character sketches. Not long after Drive’s release, Martinez turned up remixing Plastikman, the most famous alias of the Midwestern techno producer Richie Hawtin. The pairing made sense: Just as Plastikman helped popularize the idea of ambient techno, Martinez’s Drive score introduced the idea of ambient electronic music to a public who might never have otherwise opted to listen to the buzz and burble of minimalist synthesizer recordings. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Cliff Martinez, “I Drive”
Solaris (1972)
Director Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie is far less explicit a narrative than its source, the brilliant sci-fi novel by Stanisław Lem. Solaris is a remote planet that human explorers have circled for centuries, hoping in vain to make contact with the evidently sentient but inscrutable ocean that covers its surface. Suddenly, people from the deep recesses of each astronaut’s memory materialize, flesh-and-blood ghosts that the crew call “guests” and that appear to be the planet’s attempts to communicate.
The story behind the score is almost as fantastical. Entrusted not just with scoring the movie but creating “an overall conceptual idea for all the sound used,” Eduard Artemiev turned to a Soviet synthesizer called the ANS that generates sound by a unique photo-electronic method: Composers “draw” soundwaves which are turned into audio vibrations via a sophisticated system of rotating glass discs and light beams. The ANS supplied a panoply of microtonal intervals and dense polyphonic chords unachievable on other synths at that time. This palette of subtle shades and shimmering drones enabled Artemiev to depict the unsettled atmosphere on the space station, where the guests are driving their hosts out of their wits. But the queasy sound-vapors also suggest thought-waves from Solaris itself penetrating the minds of the astronauts, blindly striving to understand consciousness unfathomably different from its own vast self. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Eduard Artemiev, “Main Title”
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
Paul Schrader’s biopic Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a Japanese-language portrait of Yukio Mishima, the postwar writer and right-wing nationalist who captivated his nation before meeting a grisly demise, one that continues to bewilder historians to this day. Philip Glass’ score is not so much preoccupied with Mishima’s extremist ideals as it is with dramatizing the man himself, and the fact that Glass chose to adhere exclusively to Western tonalities only drives home the film’s operatic nature. The minimalist’s signature repetitive style allows him to use other elements, such as dynamics and instrumentation, to illustrate Mishima’s life. “Osamu’s Theme (KYOKO’S HOUSE)” sees the primary string motif played on a jangly electric guitar, reflecting the more flamboyant early nature of his character, while the distinctly militaristic bent of “November 25: ICHIGAYA” drives home the somber nature of Mishima’s final day on Earth.
While Mishima bombed at the box office—being banned in Japan certainly didn’t help—themes from the score live on, licensed for numerous documentaries and even featuring prominently in The Truman Show. It remains an important work for Glass, who described it as a turning point in the development of his film-scoring technique. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Philip Glass, “Osamu’s Theme (KYOKO’S HOUSE)”
Eraserhead (1977)
The sounds featured in David Lynch’s debut film could easily be placed in both the score and soundtrack category, and yet they remain so unusual that they arguably don’t belong in either. Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet create a soundscape that plunges you deep inside the film, where you feel every floorboard creak, gust of wind, rumbling smoke stack, churning radiator, and electrical hiss. Eraserhead is the amplification of background noise as its own art, where Lynch and Splet force your attention on sounds that would otherwise be ignored or deemed ugly and grating. The organ music of Fats Waller bleeds into dense atmospheres and clips of crying babies like a ghost from another realm, creating a confusing sonic voyage. Both “ambient” and “industrial” would become more frequently used music terms in the years after Eraserhead’s release and, over 40 years on, its score remains a template of experimentation, where the two genres coexist in harmonious discordance. –Daniel Dylan Wray
Dead Man (1995)
For the past 50 years, Neil Young’s primary electric guitar has been the customized 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop he calls “Old Black.” Fans know the guitar’s majestically overdriven tone from classic albums like Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps, and Ragged Glory. But Old Black is featured in its purest form on the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s hallucinatory western Dead Man. Young’s low, ominous notes are inseparable from Robby Müller’s striking black-and-white cinematography, lending an elemental pull to the increasingly strange odyssey of William Blake (Johnny Depp) and Nobody (Gary Farmer), Blake’s sardonic Native American guide. Young improvised most of the score, conjuring up dreamy memories of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti westerns and the harsh twang of the “Rawhide” TV show. It’s both an authentic evocation of the American West and an ironic commentary, just like Jarmusch’s film. –Tyler Wilcox
Listen: Neil Young, “Dead Man Theme”
The Third Man (1949)
When The Third Man hit theaters in 1949, Anton Karas’ zither score was nothing short of radical. In an era dominated by swelling, orchestral film music, here was this strange instrument (sort of like an overgrown pedal steel guitar) making this odd sound (somehow circus-like and mournful at once) being played by an unknown Austrian used to performing at the houses of Viennese wine growers (where he would be compensated with a glass of white and some sausage). In modern terms, it would be like Christopher Nolan enlisting a busking kazoo player from the London Underground.
But director Carol Reed’s unlikely gamble paid off in more ways than one. Karas’ zither instantly sets The Third Man apart from its noir ilk, the instrument’s mischievous twang complementing the movie’s skewed, tragicomic tone. The score was such a hit with audiences that a single featuring its plucky main theme was rushed to market. It quickly sold more than half a million copies in England, a then-unprecedented achievement, and went on to become the third most popular record in America in 1950 (with a cover of the tune nabbing the No. 4 spot as well). Though dismissed as a mere fad at the time, the music of The Third Man has endured ever since: The Beatles and the Band recorded their own versions of the theme, and the Lonely Island sampled it on a 2002 song about wanting to fuck a stork. Even now, it remains one of the most unmistakable film scores ever made. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Anton Karas, “Third Man Theme”
Taxi Driver (1976)
Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver depicts a seedy, sick New York through the eyes of Travis Bickle, a man on a mission to wash away the scum he sees staining the streets. Bernard Herrmann’s score—his last ever—taps into the filthy underbelly that Bickle prowls at night in his taxicab. The arrangements are at once dramatic, malevolent, eerie, and romantic, capturing a spirit of the unknown that matches Bickle’s endless cruising. Tom Scott’s profoundly beautiful saxophone solo in the film’s main theme embodies the potential of a city (and person) in conflict with itself. The music is the sound of the metropolis, as projected by Bickle. It ricochets between hope and beauty, desire and despair, romance and violence, all with a tangible atmosphere as thick as the engulfing steam emitting from the vents of the streets. –Daniel Dylan Wray
Listen: Bernard Herrmann, “Theme From Taxi Driver”
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
Pigeons taking flight are a recurring image in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. They ascend at will, leaving the ground as well as Ghost Dog, a reticent hitman and pigeon-keeper, behind. The birds are one of his few connections to the world beyond contract killings. There is no envy in his eyes as he watches his pigeons lift off, but there is longing, and RZA’s spare score fills the distance between Ghost Dog’s melancholic gaze and the freedom he can’t attain.
Skeletal and swaying, RZA’s compositions are hypnotic dirges. Chimes, bells, and guitar plucks drift over brusque kick drums like spirits over water; dulled gongs and chords echo into chasms of rumbling bass. As Ghost Dog stoically carries out his masterful hits, the score voices his inner peace. His life is a loop but it is not a bore. The soundtrack to the film is more lively than the score, and features voiceovers from the film and crowd-pleasing Wu-Tang team-ups, but it trades character for action. There can be freedom within constraints, and in his minimal compositions, RZA finds it for Ghost Dog and for himself. –Stephen Kearse
Listen: RZA, “Samurai Showdown”
The Social Network (2010)
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ first full-length film score is a masterpiece of gloomy, menacing atmospheres, full of long guitar drones and glitchy, digital textures that capture the turbulent birth of Facebook and its irrevocable shaping of modern society. Drum machines and sequencers set a precise pace on some tracks, while a lonely piano strikes the emotional counterbalance elsewhere, offering peals of both hope and sorrow.
Reznor has said director David Fincher requested a “synthetic landscape” à la Blade Runner, and that influence is apparent. Like Vangelis’ masterwork, The Social Network’s score is a shadowy character that lurks in the backdrop of the film’s most arresting scenes, lending tension to the tedium of start-ups and stockholders. “When we were creating these ideas... we thought, ‘This could be the sound of an asteroid hitting the Earth at the end of humanity,’” Reznor said of the score in 2011. He had no idea how right he was. –Noah Yoo
Listen: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “In Motion”
Halloween (1978)
John Carpenter, the Renaissance man of horror, didn’t just help pioneer the slasher film genre with Halloween, he also created one of its most iconic scores. Bernard Herrmann’s climactic, stabbing strings for Psycho may have set the tone for scary film composition, but Carpenter’s music chases the listener with the sense of a never-ending nightmare—fitting for its seemingly invincible, purely evil villain, Michael Myers, who’s still stalking and murdering today. It’s the kind of score that confirms that you’re not just being paranoid—there really is someone lurking behind you in the shadows. This creeping dread can be found throughout the film, but it’s in the frequently-sampled main theme that fear is most potent, and then it’s multiplied as the sparse melody becomes layered with more piercing synths. Grab a kitchen knife and run. –Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Listen: John Carpenter, “Halloween Theme - Main Title”
Shaft (1971)
Few films are as inextricably linked to their music as Gordon Parks’ Shaft is to Isaac Hayes’ compositions. “Theme From Shaft” is so woven into the fabric of pop culture that it might invite more parody than reverence now, but nearly 50 years ago, it revolutionized how music could be used in film. Before Shaft, soundtracks were collections of popular songs, while scores were designed to accompany action and dial up drama. Hayes’ take on Shaft blended the two approaches, creating an experience that worked in theaters and also on radio and record players—and in the process, topped the charts.
Though Shaft was Hayes’ first film score, he was uniquely equipped for the task. A multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, vocalist, and songwriter, he was one of the architects of the funk and R&B sound of Stax Records, and knew how to create something massive from the ground up. When tasked with dramatizing Shaft’s scenes, he enlisted his home team—the Bar-Kays, the Isaac Hayes Movement, and the Memphis Strings & Horns—and drew from a palette of styles that told the story of where black music was and where it was going. Jazz, R&B, rock, blues, funk, and nascent disco are all present and vital. The album would cement Hayes as a star and earn him an Oscar for Best Original Song—the first for an African-American composer. The greatest testament to its impact remains the theme, still purring in our heads today. –Timmhotep Aku
Listen: Isaac Hayes, “Theme From Shaft”
Psycho (1960)
“He only finishes a picture 60 percent,” Bernard Herrmann said of Alfred Hitchcock. “I have to finish it for him.” The composer worked with Hitchcock on a number of films, and though he may have written a richer score in Vertigo, nothing else remains as iconic as Psycho. You could argue that Herrmann didn’t “finish” Psycho; he made it. Hitchcock must have thought so, too, because he doubled Herrmann’s fee.
Accordingly, people say that Psycho invented slasher movies, but really Herrmann did, and he did it with a single string cue. Nothing in the famous shower scene—not the pulling back of the curtain, not the shot of the killer’s knife poised high, and not Janet Leigh’s scream as the knife digs repeatedly into her flesh—cuts as deep as those violin shrieks. Slasher movies, and the gruesome way they play on your nerves, gushed forth from this inciting wound; think of the string screeches as Jason emerging from Camp Crystal Lake at the end of Friday the 13th, or the stabbing lurches of the Jaws theme. They are little pieces of the DNA left in Psycho’s blood trail. –Jayson Greene
Listen: Bernard Herrmann, “Theme From Psycho”
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958)
Miles Davis recorded the score to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released as Elevator to the Gallows in the U.S.) in 1957. Its open-ended modalities point forward to the jazz giant’s groundbreaking 1959 LP Kind of Blue, and even to the ghostly proto-ambient atmospherics of In a Silent Way, released just over a decade later. Malle’s film is a noir thriller, with pitch-black subject matter—adultery, murder, claustrophobia. The bleak, lonely sound of Davis’ muted trumpet matches the stark black-and-white imagery perfectly, and the short, near-fragmentary nature of the compositions allow Davis to break out of the hard bop confines of the 1950s. Taped with a pickup band of Parisian jazzers and the ace drummer Kenny Clarke, Miles’ mostly improvised score provides a sense of almost unbearable tension, whether the musicians are lingering on a doomy, morphine-drip bassline or racing along to the skitter of Clarke’s deft high-hat work. Adding music to film brought out some of Davis’ most inspired and adventurous playing. –Tyler Wilcox
Listen: Miles Davis, “Générique”
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Wendy Carlos’ score for A Clockwork Orange was designed to disorient. Stanley Kubrick’s film takes place in a dystopian future, and its main character, the sociopathic youth Alex, is obsessed with the music of Beethoven—the sound of the distant past. Carlos was the perfect composer to articulate this temporal instability; in her massively popular and groundbreaking 1968 album Switched-On Bach, she showed how ancient music could be updated with forward-looking electronics. Armed with a battery of synths and the assistance of her regular producer and collaborator Rachel Elkind, Carlos crafted a dense and tonally slippery world that reinforced the essential horror of the film, sometimes by offering creepily cheerful counterpoint. Great art, the film suggests, is just as easily embraced by monsters, and this uneasy irony comes through in both Carlos’ electronic re-imagining of classical themes (“The William Tell Overture,” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9) and in original compositions, like the slowly unfolding and brilliant opener “Timesteps.” Hearing it now, almost 50 years after its release, amplifies the record’s confusion in the best possible way. It remains an inscrutable and rewarding puzzle. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Wendy Carlos, “Timesteps”
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
The flickering two-note coyote bay. The vaulting trumpet fanfare. The click-clack rhythm of horses, wagon wheels, and, later, gargantuan steam engines: Ennio Morricone’s theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a musical metonym for the American West, a cultural artifact as tied to that mythology as the Red Rocks of Sedona and John Wayne. In fact, half a century later, it’s difficult to imagine high noon without Morricone’s signature melody.
Sergio Leone intended his film to be a studied yet hyperbolic send-up of western films, in which a triangle of outlaws outrunning the Civil War (as heard in the immortal lament “The Story of a Soldier”) search for treasure, culminating in a wonderfully absurd graveyard confrontation. Morricone responded by synthesizing the genre’s storytelling tropes—insistent motion, arid twang, outsiders’ impressions of Native American music—into dense sonic pieces that pull at tension until it snaps and amplify drama until it overflows. They’ve never been outdrawn. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen: Ennio Morricone, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Main Title) (II Buono, II Brutto, II Cattivo)”
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
In her filmmaking breakthrough, Sofia Coppola turned Jeffrey Eugenides’ dark, dirty novel The Virgin Suicides into a love story of sorts—between teenagers Lux (Kirsten Dunst) and Tripp (Josh Hartnett), and also between five beautiful, doomed sisters and their haunted admirers. Coppola met her tonal match in the French electropop duo Air, who agreed to write a score as long as they could approach it like an album. The result proved just as bold and cosmic as Air’s classic debut, 1998’s Moon Safari, but with a stronger air of mystery, vis-à-vis ’70s prog influences, insistent synths, and cryptic lines of film dialogue. The Lisbon girls are like a surreal daydream when set to “Playground Love,” featuring an intoxicating sax solo and a drowsy, sexy performance by Phoenix’s Thomas Mars. When that same melody recurs by piano on “Highschool Lover,” its coolness has turned wistful and heavy, consumed by lingering questions the boys are afraid to ask. –Jillian Mapes
Listen: Air, “Cemetery Party”
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Starting with a title that promises violence as directly and ominously as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—another cinematic nightmare about unsustainable consumption in the American West—writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson treats his adaptation of muckraker Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! as a tale of demonic possession. The demon in question, though, happens to be money. So if Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s original music for There Will Be Blood sounds like the score for a horror movie, that’s because it is.
Leadoff track “Open Spaces” is the tell here. Despite long string phrases that evoke the wide landscapes crossed by the misanthropic oil magnate Daniel Plainview, the mood is not openness but dread. “Future Markets” and “Proven Lands” clatter and pulse with infernal-engine energy. “Henry Plainview” hums like flies on a pig’s head. Strongest of all, the title track is a two-minute masterpiece of jump scares and screeching cacophony in the lineage of Psycho and The Shining. Greenwood creates a soundtrack for a haunted hotel where the elevator doors gush crude, and the killer’s ax is embedded in the earth itself. –Sean T. Collins
Listen: Jonny Greenwood, “There Will Be Blood”
Under the Skin (2014)
Though Mica Levi cites her childhood love of Disney films as an inspiration for her first film score, Under the Skin contains nothing approaching conventional songcraft or leading cues, dwelling instead in unsettling shards of gray. She has also likened the effect of her incessant, microtonal viola-playing to a beehive—though it is more malevolent than that, evoking the way Japanese honeybees swarm around an intruding giant hornet and cook it to death.
From this menacing shudder emerges leering shrillness and disembowelling slurps, flooding sensations that simulate organs swelling with blood. That sense of simulation is key: Director Jonathan Glazer’s extraterrestrial protagonist is disguised as a human woman unsettled by their emotions, a confusion Levi captures by making her sexiness uncanny. (Fitting, also, that the score was partially inspired by strip club music.) Jonny Greenwood’s work for There Will Be Blood inspired a run of dissonant scores: Under the Skin represents its apex. –Laura Snapes
Listen: Mica Levi, “Creation”
Blade Runner (1982)
It’s shocking to consider that Blade Runner did not get nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, or any other major Oscars. Equally bewildering is the fact that Vangelis won Best Original Score for 1981’s conventionally pretty Chariots of Fire, but wasn’t even honorably mentioned for his far richer contributions to Blade Runner. Vangelis composed the score live, improvising as scenes from the film unfurled onscreen in his London recording studio. “Everything was composed with the images,” he said in 2007, adding that “the reason I wrote the score is that I was very impressed with this film.” There is a palpable sense of awe trembling through his every keystroke, as well as a subliminal sense of competition—a drive to not only match the majesty before his eyes, but maybe even surpass it.
Before Blade Runner, electronic soundtracks for science fiction movies painted the future as cold, sterile, emotionless, as hostile to humanity as Saturn’s liquid hydrogen surface and diamond rainstorms. Vangelis broke with these accumulated clichés, draping Blade Runner’s scenery with droopy pitch-bent synth tones of unexpected warmth and wetness. From the colossal, thudding pillars of percussion that open the film, through the mystic yearn of “Rachel’s Song” to the climactic twinkles of “Tears in Rain,” everything is drenched in reverb—an effect as atmospheric and seductive as director Ridley Scott’s over-reliance on shadow and drizzle.
It’s impossible to imagine this film without its music, so intertwined are the sounds and the visuals. Although the movie takes place in a 21st-century Los Angeles teeming with flying cars and huge, animated billboards advertising a fresh start in the off-world colonies, the music is steeped in aching nostalgia as much as disorienting futurity. And that’s just right for a film that, for all its stunning special effects and storyline about androids gone AWOL, is rooted in the archetypes of 1940s film noir and hardboiled detective fiction: Deckard as the cop with the tough exterior and the big soft spot, Rachel equal parts vamp and broken-winged angel. Ghosts of older styles haunt the edges of the score, from jazz and blues to the crooned 1920s pastiche of “One More Kiss, Dear.”
There are also pungent aromas of ersatz exoticism, like the keening quasi-Arabic wails in “Tales of the Future” and the vaguely Eastern cavalcade rhythm of “Animoid Row.” We don’t know quite where or when we are with Vangelis’ score, which mingles ancient and modern, East and West—perfectly matching this futuristic West Coast that resembles a Pacific Rim hybrid of Shanghai and Santiago. It’s a tomorrow’s world more vividly imagined than filmgoers had ever before encountered, and Vangelis filled every corner of this space with life as strange and lonely as our own. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Vangelis, “Tears in Rain”
Contributors: Timmhotep Aku, Stacey Anderson, Andy Beta, Sean T. Collins, Grayson Haver Currin, Ryan Dombal, Jayson Greene, Marc Hogan, Stephen Kearse, Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, Jeremy D. Larson, Jillian Mapes, Quinn Moreland, Simon Reynolds, Mark Richardson, Zach Schonfeld, Philip Sherburne, Laura Snapes, Matthew Strauss, Tyler Wilcox, Daniel Dylan Wray, Noah Yoo
