UNDERSCORING THE MESSAGE
The heart of an enigmatic American icon, explored with fragile harp and wailing theremin. The gutsy adventures of a black cop who goes undercover in the KKK. And a quirky journey into a near-future Japan with taiko drums twisting around other instruments. If some of this year’s best film scores have anything in common, it’s that they take surprising routes into humans — and creatures — who are unknown or unseen.
Terence Blanchard “BlacKkKlansman”
“BlacKkKlansman” is the 23rd project Terence Blanchard has scored for director Spike Lee, his first to earn an Oscar nomination — and, in many ways, the culmination of their prolific collaboration.
“We just have a great thing,” Lee said. “You know, simpatico.”
The film is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first black police officer in Colorado Springs who, in the late 1970s, went undercover inside the Ku Klux Klan by pretending to be a white man over the phone. It’s a rollicking caper with many laughs and some delicious comeuppance — but always with a sizzling undercurrent of all-too-real racism.
Blanchard, 56, wrote a score that weds nostalgic, symphonic Americana with the groove of his R&B/jazz band, the E-Collective.
“Boy, I relate to the moment where [Stallworth’s] telling his captain, ‘Well, I speak the Queen’s English, but I also speak jive,’ ” said Blanchard, a jazz trumpeter from New Orleans. “So you have the sophistication of the orchestra, right, that swells and becomes very voluminous at some points and then just kind of hovers and gives you tonal color for some of the brighter moments. But then in the midst of all of that is guitar, and there’s a groove underneath.”
The electric guitar, which wails Ron’s theme over the orchestra, was inspired by another patriot like Stallworth.
“I started to think about Jimi Hendrix playing the national anthem,” Blanchard said. It represented to me the notion that women and people of color have been screaming for decades: ‘We’re Americans too, who should be afforded the same rights as anybody else.’ ”
The score is almost like a narrator in the film, said Lee, who always shares a new script with Blanchard before almost anyone else. It’s also, he said, the film’s soul.
Alexandre Desplat “Isle of Dogs”
French composer Alexandre Desplat has been director Wes Anderson’s partner in crime since 2009’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
“Isle of Dogs” is a stop-motion marvel about a Japanese boy who goes searching for his beloved dog, sent like the rest of the country’s canines to a remote, trash-heap island. The handcrafted, minutely detailed world of a near-future Japan clearly called for an appropriately native sound.
The question was: “How do we use Japanese drums but try to mix them with another bunch of instruments and sounds?” Desplat said. “I came up with this jazz walking bass, a bunch of saxophones — instead of any other woodwinds or brass — male voices, some recorders. And it created a very, very strange sound that belongs to only Wes Anderson’s world.”
Taiko drums (which are represented in onscreen animation) provide a syncopated heartbeat, a persistent thumping and clacking that propels the story of the journeying dogs — embellished with low, menacing sax growls, off-kilter recorder notes and shimmering celesta.
“When I saw the images, I was dazzled how incredible the detail, the beauty of every shot. And the music tries to play with that detail, and at the same time the reference to some Japanese drumming — but completely twisted by the rest of the instruments,” Desplat said.
Justin Hurwitz “First Man”
Who was Neil Armstrong? Other than his seminal achievement — the first human to step foot on the moon — most people know little about the astronaut from Ohio. “First Man,” directed by Damien Chazelle, attempts to penetrate his stoic silence and find the heartbeat within.
Composer Justin Hurwitz found it using two underused instruments: solo harp and theremin.
“Even though he’s steely on the outside, he has a real vulnerability on the inside that we wanted to get at with the harp,” said Hurwitz, who wrote a delicate theme for Armstrong’s young daughter, Karen. In the film, her death becomes the Rosebud in his incredible life.
“The theremin is inherently electronic and technological,” he said, “but it has a really human quality to it. It almost sounded, depending on how you play it, like wailing or crying. It evoked this sort of cosmic pain.”
Hurwitz wrote his major themes, and even scored critical scenes, before Chazelle ever shot the film. Star Ryan Gosling then listened to the music on set to get into Armstrong’s emotional space.
His theme for Armstrong’s skybound ambitions, first performed with dancelike castanets during a Houston training montage, finally joins with Karen’s theme in the heart-pounding moon landing sequence — the climactic fusion of the heartbroken astronaut’s career and family lives.