8 - Castrovalva

Composer: Paddy Kingsland
Director: Fiona Cumming

What's the score?
Owing to a late substitution of scripts, Castrovalva went into production nearly four months after The Visitation, the other story in this season scored by Paddy Kingsland. It's not clear to me which of the two stories Kingsland actually scored first: a 2010 interview for the Adventures in Time, Space and Music podcast suggests that he did them in broadcast order, while a 2003 interview for the DVD release of The Visitation suggests (more by implication than by anything Kingsland himself says) that he did them in production order.
Whatever the case, of the two, Castrovalva's score feels like more of a step forward. Although Kingsland's recognisable style provides some continuity here with Logopolis, The Visitation has more in common musically with Logopolis (and with other Kingsland scores) than Castrovalva does.

In keeping with Castrovalva's restful reputation, this score is quite relaxed and soothing - it's the calm after Logopolis' storm. Even the big dramatic moments are comparatively laid-back. Soft, simple synth tones and uncomplicated flute sounds are the order of the day. The electric guitar takes charge in moments of excitement; in between, it bides its time with quiet slides. Even the structure of the score is relaxed, with lengthy cues and long gaps between them. This is a marked contrast with what Peter Grimwade asked Kingsland to provide for Logopolis, and also with the other DW stories directed by Fiona Cumming.

Musical notes

• Before the opening credits roll, there's a cut-down reprise of the regeneration scene from Part Four of Logopolis. Kingsland modifies his cue from that scene to take account of the re-editing; he also peps up the regeneration itself and drops the "oo-wee-oo" from the end.
• The Master has a signature sound in Part One, a sort of bad-tempered electric outburst that plays over shots of his TARDIS hovering over the Pharos complex and of the interior of his TARDIS. The rhythm of the cue, but not the bad-tempered sound, is used again when the Master is unmasked in Part Four.
• The discovery of the Doctor's new cricketing clothes is greeted with a noble, pastoral march that one imagines the MCC would be proud to make use of.
• This week's "oo-wee-oo" moment arrives in Part Two, while Nyssa is trying to help the Doctor by unscrewing the Zero Room doors. It plays just as one of the doors falls across the Doctor and briefly brings him back to his senses.
• Our first sight of the Dwellings of Simplicity on Castrovalva in Part Two is greeted with a plain, gentle piping tune. This theme recurs during the rest of the story, with increasingly twisted variations as the topography of the Dwellings falls in on itself; the plain theme is heard once more at the end of Part Four as the Doctor returns to his own dwelling, the TARDIS.
• Shots of the Portreeve's tapestry are accompanied by a twinkly theme that's a subtle variation on part of the Dwellings theme.
• Although the guitar theme that plays while the Doctor and his friends try to escape from Castrovalva in Parts Three and Four has its merits, my favourite part of this score is the cue that's heard during the procession with the Zero Cabinet to the Portreeve's house in Part Four. It's probably a little excessive for the scene, but it does have a very nice quiet bass echo as the Doctor drags Shardovan off to one side.

Vox pop
The long, well developed cues make this a more coherent listening experience than most DW scores, and restful though it may be, it's not without incident. Lighter and more upbeat, it's a fine counterpart to Logopolis' gloomy score; importantly, it also offers plenty of support to the visuals of the story. On any given day I'd have to flip a coin to say whether this or Logopolis is my favourite Paddy Kingsland score.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.

7 - Logopolis

Composer: Paddy Kingsland
Director: Peter Grimwade

What's the score?
Paddy Kingsland plays out the Fourth Doctor in a story written by script editor Christopher H Bidmead; Kingsland would end up scoring all three of Bidmead's DW stories. The electric guitar is all over this one, alongside harpsichord and solemn synth tones. It's a sombre score for a sombre story.

Musical notes

• Tegan doesn't have a theme. There are a couple of strong contenders - the flighty cue that plays twice in Part One with Aunt Vanessa, the brittle music-box piece that plays twice in Part Two while Tegan explores the TARDIS - but none are taken up by any of the Radiophonic Workshop composers during the three years of Tegan's tenure as a regular character. Incidentally, this week's first "oo-wee-oo" moment comes at the end of the repeated cue in Part One, when we cut back from Tegan to the TARDIS. Our second "oo-wee-oo" comes later in Part One, when the Doctor first sees the Watcher.
• There's a little reprise from Full Circle when the Doctor stumbles across Romana's old room. It's the cue that played while Romana was sulking about being called back to Gallifrey, just before the TARDIS fell into E-Space.
• There's a peculiar bit of action music in Part Two when Adric falls over a bicycle in order to help the Doctor escape from a couple of police officers. It's got the same "wakka-wakka" guitar sound that you might hear on gritty cop shows like The Sweeney or The Professionals - Kingsland seems to be inviting us to laugh at these not-so-gritty cops.
• There's a theme for Logopolis that plays several times, with slight variations, throughout Parts Two and Three. It's a sombre, monastic piece, which makes it a good fit for the sombre, monastic Logopolitans. It's anticipated a couple of times in Part One when Logopolis is mentioned in conversation. A snare drum creeps in at the start of Part Three as the Logopolitans struggle with the effects of the Master's sabotage. The last variant plays near the end of Part Three with an unsettling key change in the middle, as Logopolis begins to die.
• Much of Part Four is taken up with a funky harpsichord/bass/woodwind chase theme, as various parties try to make their way across the grounds of the Pharos Project without being caught by the security guards. Like the escape theme in Part Two, it's got a bit of that cop show feel to it.
• In the moments before the Doctor's fall from the Pharos radio telescope, Kingsland builds up the tension in an ascending series of chords; there's what might best be described as an anguished cry over the fall itself. (Or perhaps it's that seagull from Bergerac again?)
• The final cue deserves a close listen. It follows the camera down with a descending scale of quiet chimes, landing on a low pulsing sound. The montage of former companions is accompanied by a pensive flute melody, followed by a brief pause for the Doctor's last line; there's then a more confident rising phrase in pipe and woodwind sounds as the Doctor regenerates. Naturally, there's one last "oo-wee-oo" to finish with. It's a gentle farewell to the Fourth Doctor and an optimistic welcome to the Fifth. In fact, it's the most sensitive musical send-off any Doctor has had, in your humble blogger's opinion. We won't hear its like again in a regeneration story - from here on out, the Doctors will be sent off in a blaze of sound and fury, to match the explosive visuals of future regenerations.

Vox pop
This score, and in particular the closing few minutes, is a thing of beauty. The one objection I might raise is that the chase music in Part Four gets awfully repetitive - an issue that will itself be repeated in subsequent Paddy Kingsland scores. But this really is a fine send-off for Tom Baker, and the icing on the cake is that Kingsland will be around to smooth the way for Peter Davison's first story too.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.

6 - The Keeper of Traken

Composer: Roger Limb
Director: John Black

What's the score?
Roger Limb's first score for DW - the first of many. In this season he's the odd man out, but over the next two seasons he contributes more than a third of the incidental music. From this point until the 20th anniversary, you're never more than two stories away from a Roger Limb score.
Some people regard this story as little more than a run-up to Tom Baker's big finale, and Limb's music seems to contribute to that impression. He tends to convey a general mood rather than emphasise or offer comment on particular moments, and he spends most of this story building up an air of anxiety, which is left hanging at the end of Part Four. He favours low buzzing synths coupled with high and mid range droning sounds.
It's also worth noting that, in stark contrast to the frequent short cues favoured elsewhere in this season in Howell's and Kingsland's scores, The Keeper of Traken features lengthier cues of a minute or two in duration with much longer silences in between. Presumably this was at the request of director John Black, but it may also reflect Limb's preference - his other DW scores tend towards longer cues. He's particularly cautious about intruding on moments of plot exposition, and on the latter parts of the story in general.

Musical notes

• Nyssa has a theme, but like Adric's, it isn't hers to begin with. It plays in full over the scene in Part One in which the young Kassia brings flowers to Melkur. The light sounds of harp and flute, conventionally considered to be feminine instruments, suggest youthful innocence, with a certain otherworldliness in the melody. A minor key variant is heard when Kassia visits Melkur after her wedding and hears him speak. Variants of the theme turn up in Part Two when Nyssa tends to Melkur, and at the end of Part Four when Nyssa leaves Tremas on his own in the council chamber.
• Another notable musical feature of Part One is the diegetic music heard after the wedding of Kassia and Tremas. It's a fast, jolly tune comprised of pipe, xylophone and tambourine sounds.
• Limb is a practitioner of the recap switcheroo, although given his compositional style it's not always easy to spot. In Part Four he extends and merges the last two cues from Part Three, and in doing so he strikingly alters the timbre and balance of the constituent parts. This leads to one of the stronger features of the composition being obscured: the three note phrase that practically defines the re-recorded cue included on the Doctor Who - The Music album is audible in the penultimate cue of Part Three, but is almost completely buried in Part Four.
• In interview, Limb cites Debussy as an influence on his work as an incidental music composer. I'm not familiar enough with Debussy's work to be able to spot any definite references in this score - perhaps there are DW-watching Debussy fans out there who can do better? In any case, Limb's atmospheric but very loosely structured score doesn't generally lend itself to this kind of analysis. It doesn't give commentators like myself very much at all to get hold of, in fact. But the style is an appropriate match for the art nouveau visual design of the story, since Debussy was composing at the height of the art nouveau vogue around the turn of the 20th century.

Vox pop
I prefer music with more form to it, so for me Roger Limb's score doesn't work so well in isolation. As an accompaniment to the TV episodes (which was, after all, its intended purpose), it's fine - as noted above, it's an appropriate choice for the story, and it's pretty enough. It also adds some welcome variety to a season that's otherwise musically dominated by Howell and Kingsland.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Doctor Who - The Music included three tracks from this story: "Nyssa's Theme", actually the cue that introduces Kassia in Part One; "Kassia's Wedding Music", also from Part One; and "The Threat of Melkur", a combination of Dick Mills' sound effects and the penultimate cue from Part Three.

5 - Warriors' Gate

Composer: Peter Howell
Composer: Paul Joyce

What's the score?
As the Doctor returns from E-Space through the pocket universe of the Gateway, so we return from Paddy Kingsland to Peter Howell. His score is generally melodic, but inclined towards the weird. String sounds and breathy atmospheres take centre stage here.

Musical notes

• Once again, Howell is presented with a long tracking shot at the start of Part One that could be taken as an invitation to the composer. This time, however, he stays silent while the camera pans slowly around the slavers' cargo hold full of comatose Tharils, only fading in as we approach the action on the ship's bridge.
• The signature sound for the Tharils is something like a dulcimer or a zither, sometimes jangling and sometimes echoing. (It could be a cimbalom, or at least the synth equivalent.) It's the kind of thing you might hear in a Cold War spy film; it might be meant to suggest antiquity, exoticism or mystery, all of which would be appropriate to this story. It's also heard in Part Two when Romana is strapped into the slavers' navigator chair as a surrogate Tharil.
• A shimmering synth sound is heard when Tharils walk through the Gateway mirror. It's a bit like a Flexatone pitched down several octaves, or like those plastic "booming" tubes you sometimes see in dollar shops.
• The Gundan robots have an off-kilter marching theme, solid on the beat and with a servo-like whine in between. A halting, jerking version plays when the decrepit Gundan comes to life in Part Two; a faster, more confident version plays over the Part Three cliffhanger when the newly minted Gundans storm the Tharils' banqueting hall.
• This week's "oo-wee-oo" sound comes near the start of Part Three, when the Doctor discovers that his hand has been healed after passing through the mirror.
• Scenes in the Tharils' gardens are accompanied by whimsical noodlings on the synth. Is there just a hint of the leading phrase from Debussy's "Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune" in there?
• Part Three features what I think is the first bit of diegetic music (i.e. music that we're supposed to believe the characters can hear - remember that word!) in 80s DW: the Tharil banqueting music. It's a stately piece in the medieval style, combining ethereal pipe sounds with the sort of pulsing rhythm you'd get from a hurdy-gurdy. Antiquity is clearly the intended effect here.
• Abrupt jumps between time zones in the hall are signalled by a sort of backwards washing sound. Howell fades this down fairly quickly in the Part Four reprise, but keeps it going into the credits at the end of Part Three.
• This week's pop pick: the eerie cue that plays while Lazlo wakes the other Tharils in the cargo hold in Part Four. It's a lovely minor key tune in a high-pitched synth over a refrain using low string sounds.

Vox pop
Another great score from Peter Howell, with a more experimental edge than his previous two. It's interesting to hear him trying out unconventional material in a mostly melodic score - not just the washing and shimmering effects, but some striking stuttering sounds too in the derelict hall in Part One. The roots of Howell's next two scores - for the two Mara stories - can be found here. This is one I come back to again and again.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Doctor Who - The Music included a minute-and-a-half track titled "Banqueting Music", which combined material from the Tharil banqueting scenes in Part Three with Dick Mills' "time winds" sound.