A Musical Oddity

Woo hoo - The Doctor Who Season 4 Specials music is out tomorrow! More music by Mr Murray Gold.

I've got a confession to make. I find Murray Gold's music wrong.

Completely and utterly wrong.

It's not his fault.

Let me explain. The soundtracks for the television show have been fantastic. I've enjoyed every CD, with 3 or 4 tracks per CD standing out and ending up on my oft-repeated playlists. So what's wrong with it?

They never seemed to end up in the right place in the TV show? The music itself never seemed to represent the scene that played behind it. Nowhere was this more evident than the first time we heard the track Gallifrey. It really does evoke the idea of the Doctor's homeworld. But it didn't play over a nice panning shot of the planet when it first showed up.

And that's when I started noticing the same for a lot of the other tracks. They were good tracks, orchestral, choral, dramatic and so very often used in the wrong place in the episode.

It's not just Doctor Who though - there's plenty of musical themes which don't belong with the scene they've been placed with. Saving the World, the continent lifting them from Superman Returns sounds more like a "hero beaten down, then gets back up to fight" moment (which technically I suppose that scene was, but I'm thinking more about a physical action.... yes, lifting a continent is pretty physical, but I mean a conflict and why the heck do people complain that Superman isn't "Super" in that movie, he was lifting a fecking continent into space, it just makes me mad when... okay,I've gotten so far sidetracked now, I'm going to jump back to the (sort of) point).

When I first heard the theme from Glory or The John Dunbar theme (from Dances with Wolves), I'd never even seen the movies. And so, I'd placed an idea of what was going on into the theme before I'd seen either movie. It never quite clicked when I saw the actual movie.

So I hear music and sometimes it fits into the movie perfectly and I can't replace the scene that occured in my head (The Battle For Peace from Star Trek VI is one such track that I can't imagine anything else other than the Enterprise battling the cloaked Bird of Prey), whereas when Star Trek III's Stealing the Enterprise or Star Trek II's Run From Reliant, whilst always being "Chase" or "Escape" music, mean so much to me when I have stories in my head.

I love music which does this. And when I see it in what I class as the "wrong place", it just grates. (Imagine hearing the theme for Eastenders over the title sequence to Mission Impossible, that what it does).

Now I've gotten past this quite easily. And most times, the music fits the film or programme perfectly. I'm sure there will be a track or two tomorrow which the next time I watch an episode of Doctor Who will set my teeth on edge because it's not the same as the picture in my head, but that's well worth it for the new motifs I'll hear.

Music is a fantastic medium. I could be watching the next mega blockbuster movie, with more creative ideas in it than the last clever movie (was it really The Matrix? Seriously, if you forget the overstuffed sequels, that was such a brilliantly clever movie) but it'll all fall apart for me if the soundtrack has been written by an unimaginative simpleton (or someone using the same track as their last movie.... Danny Elfman, I'm sorry, but do you know how many tracks of yours I've got called The Final Battle? And at least half of them sound the same).

Movies need music. Life needs music.

Find yourself a musical track that you relate to something, whether it be church, a musical, movie or anything else (heck, the ice cream van carries a nice jingle) and try to imagine something else to it. Don't go too far from the source (at least to start with) and see where your own creativity takes you.