16 - Snakedance

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Fiona Cumming

What's the score?
Peter Howell returns to provide music for the sequel to Kinda, which he worked on the previous year. There's a heavy reliance on atmospheres and diegetic music; in other parts of the score, Howell lets himself be guided by the narrative in his choice of sound. The score overall is unusually experimental, a departure from Howell's normal melodic style. Deep scraping synths and dry serpentine rattles are the order of the day.

Musical notes

• There are two prominent atmospheres in Snakedance; the first of them is the ambient sound of Dojjen's mountaintop retreat. It consists of wind and a sort of dry crystalline sound. It might initially be mistaken for the ambient sound used in the wind chime glade scenes in Kinda, but it isn't - in fact...
• Atmosphere number two is the glade sound. Curiously, it's heard in scenes in the lounge area of the Manussan palace. Is there any significance in the decision to musically connect the dreaming glade of the Kinda with the home of Manussa's bored royal family? The palace isn't the place in which the Mara enters the story this time, nor is it said to serve a particular function as the glade does. It's a bit of a stretch, but we might argue that the atmosphere stands for a kind of soporific quality in both environments that makes Tegan and Lon vulnerable or receptive to the Mara - Tegan by putting her to sleep, and Lon by frustrating him with idleness.
• The other major element of the incidental score is the music played by the band in the marketplace; several different tunes are heard during the course of the story. Although they're not named as such on screen, ancillary material (notably the track listing for Doctor Who - The Music) describes the players as a Janissary band. Time for a quick history lesson: the yeniçeri (or "New Soldiers") were a branch of the Ottoman Empire's armed forces, originally comprised of press-ganged prisoners of war, then of the conscripted children of conquered nations. They became the world's first salaried, uniformed, standing army, gaining in prestige and political power to the point that ambitious freeborn Turks started to enlist their sons in the Janissaries. They were also notable for their marching bands, which consisted of shrill shawms and horns, booming kettledrums and clashing cymbals - essentially the combination of sounds Howell uses in the market scenes. The way it was told to me by a wise percussionist Dojjen, the hammering and crashing of the Janissary band was used as a form of psychological warfare, which would make the choice of this musical style particularly appropriate for this story.
• One other piece of (presumably) diegetic music features during the dinner party in Part Two, while Ambril is boring Tanha with his display of antiquities. It's a lovely off-kilter slow waltz in plucked and bowed string sounds.
• Other cues are clearly influenced by what's happening on screen. Scenes of the various Mind's Eye crystals glowing with psychic energy are accompanied by an appropriately crystalline sound, something like a sustained note on a glass harmonica. Clashing swords are heard in the Part Three cliffhanger, when the Doctor and friends are menaced by armed guards. The standout cues, however, are those that play during Tegan's nightmare in Part One and when the Mara finally manifests through her in Part Four - a blend of distorted screams and roars with a scattering of weird vocal samples. It's freaky stuff.

Vox pop
This score's a real tour de force for Peter Howell, thoroughly exploring the ways in which incidental music can supplement a story. Although there are some beautiful bits in it, there's no way it could ever be described as "easy listening" (uneasy, certainly), but it's a superb soundtrack to the TV episodes.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Doctor Who - The Music included one track from this story: "Janissary Band". It's specifically the music that the band play in Part Four during their procession to the Mara's cave.

15 - Arc of Infinity

Composer: Roger Limb
Director: Ron Jones

What's the score?
Here Roger Limb bridges the gap between Seasons 19 and 20, just as Paddy Kingsland did for Seasons 18 and 19. In a similar way, this provides a kind of musical continuity (probably unintended) across the show's off-air months. In other words, the score for Arc of Infinity isn't a radical departure from Limb's other DW work to date. This time he gives full vent to his unmelodic muse, with raucous mid-range trumpet sounds throughout on a base of higher-range noodlings.

Musical notes

• This story features sinister goings-on in Amsterdam. Limb sets the scene by playing a snatch of "Tulips From Amsterdam" in the style of a calliope before shifting straight into some sinister synth business.
• There's a pleasant treble fanfare when Tegan shows up in Part Two. It's an oasis in a cacophonous desert, which (intentionally or not) gives a welcome air to her reappearance after her apparent departure in Time-Flight. As previously noted, Tegan doesn't actually have a theme - this is another one to add to the list of candidates that didn't make it.
• The Roger Limb Four Note Structure of Villainy is all over this score, although the arrangement of the notes changes during the story. It's three notes up and one down in Part One, in which the villain's identity is a mystery - we might perhaps read a questioning tone into this phrase. Later, it changes to a stepped sequence that's closer to earlier instances of the Four Notes - it's actually the inverse of George Cranleigh's tragic Four Notes in Black Orchid. By the time Omega is running around Amsterdam in Part Four, the phrase has entered fully tragic territory, as has the villain himself.
• When we see the zombie Colin Frazer in Part One, there's a sound as if Limb has leant his whole arm across the keyboard. It could perhaps be described as an electronic vomiting sound. This one moment sums up this score for me.

Vox pop
Once again, there's not much to say about Limb's score, because there aren't many notable features to it. (Is it just down to Limb's creative choices, or is it because for a third time he's being given notes by director Ron Jones?) It's less varied even than the score for Time-Flight, and it's a lot more confrontational - one might wonder whether Limb was in a particularly bad mood that week. Sometimes it's nearly tuneful, sometimes it sounds like someone screaming into a kazoo. Quite a lot of the time it's just a wall of noise. It could be argued (cruelly, perhaps) that it's a fitting soundtrack for Arc of Infinity, but in isolation it's appalling.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Three tracks on Doctor Who - The Music were taken from this story, all augmented by Dick Mills' sound effects. "Omega Field Force" (sic, presumably meant to read "Omega Force Field") is a combination of two cues from Part One that play as Omega invades the TARDIS and attempts to bond with the Doctor. "Ergon Threat" is the cue immediately following that, during the scene of the Ergon firing at the young backpackers. "The Termination of the Doctor" is the penultimate cue from Part Two, leading into the Doctor's apparent (and very noisy) execution.

14 - Time-Flight

Composer: Roger Limb
Director: Ron Jones

What's the score?
Roger Limb takes his familiar sound palette and changes the pitch up. Droning and buzzing synths are in evidence again, along with some trumpet-like sounds, but most of the score is taken up with extremely high-pitched jangling and echoey sounds, generally to accompany scenes of the ethereal Xeraphin or Kalid's supernatural shenanigans.

Musical notes

• Part One contains an astonishingly long gap between cues, more than eight minutes between the disappearance of Concorde #1, Golf Victor Foxtrot, and the flight crew preparing to board Concorde #2, Golf Alpha Charlie. Incidental silences of this length are almost unheard of (so to speak) in the electronic 80s; this is almost certainly the longest example, with Peter Howell's score for Part One of Planet of Fire providing a distant second place with a six minute silence.
• Presumably copyright restrictions prevented any use or spoofing of British Airways' marketing jingle, "We'll Take More Care of You", during the story. Limb provides a distant cousin to the tune in Part One - a triumphal mid-range synth fanfare - when Golf Alpha Charlie apparently lands safely back at Heathrow.
• The only other notably tuneful bit of the score - a march that starts in an earnest minor key but soon turns jolly - plays in Part Four when the flight crew are making repairs to Golf Alpha Charlie's landing gear. According to the production notes on the DVD, it was during the shooting of this scene that the real "We'll Take More Care of You" was played on the studio floor, to the amusement of all.
• There's a really good bit about halfway through when Captain Stapley is caught listening to "Better the Devil You Know" by Kylie Minogue on his headphones. Oh no, wait, that's the parody version. I wish, I wish I was watching the parody version instead of the real one.

Vox pop
There's an interesting question to be pondered here: Does my opinion of a story affect my opinion of its soundtrack, or vice versa? Time-Flight is a story that I actually find it draining to watch - were it but for this project, I wouldn't have pushed my way through to the last episode again, and I could have spared myself the physical sensation of having wall cavity insulation pumped into my skull. It's a solid dud. I'm reasonably sure that the combined efforts of Bernard Herrmann, Wendy Carlos and the sainted Delia Derbyshire couldn't have made it look good. Would Time-Flight have made a great composer sound bad? Could a better story have made Roger Limb's score sound better?
In fairness, there's more going on in Limb's score for Time-Flight than I've given him credit for above. It's probably on a par with Four to Doomsday's score in terms of content - the thing is, it's much less varied and less appealing in terms of timbre, and it's hard to pull out notable features from all that shrilling. As much as my opinion of the story itself might have reflected onto the music, I don't think Limb does himself any favours here. There are points of interest around the score, as noted above, but none within the score itself.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the full isolated score, but the DVD photo gallery features eight minutes of Roger Limb's music.

13 - Earthshock

Composer: Malcolm Clarke
Director: Peter Grimwade

What's the score?
A decade after he last worked on DW, Malcolm Clarke returns to the show. His previous score, for 1972's The Sea Devils, was a wild experiment in sonic textures; his score for Earthshock retains some of that textural playfulness, with echoing sepulchral tones during scenes in the caves, cold electronic washes in the space freighter, and an assortment of mechanical system noises depicted in the incidental music. The Cybermen themselves are represented throughout by exaggerated footfalls, particularly when marching, and by the sound of metal girders being struck.
Rather than express himself at length, Clarke peppers the soundtrack with short cues - a common approach the previous year, an oddity in 1982, but very much a trademark of stories directed by Peter Grimwade. The average cue count per episode is nearly double that of any other story in this season.

Musical notes

• The Adric theme composed by Paddy Kingsland makes a couple of reappearances during this story. It first pops up in Part One as Adric talks about going home, in more or less its original form. A sadder version debuts in the middle of Part Four when the Doctor and Adric part company, and plays again at the end as a little requiem.
• In a change from our regular "oo-wee-oo", Clarke uses a more substantial quote from the theme tune in his score. It's first heard in Part One when the troopers spot the Doctor's alien pulse on their scanner. A different version plays in Part Two when the Cyberleader recognises the image of the TARDIS. (There's also a quick "oo-wee-oo" later in Part Two as the Doctor explores the freighter's cargo hold.) There's a partial quote in Part Four when the freighter travels back in time to collide with prehistoric Earth, which seems to serve much the same function as the theme quote at the end of The Visitation, as a wry acknowledgement of the Doctor's part in historical events.
• Over the discussion of dinosaur bones in Part One, Clarke plays a cheeky quote from the "Fossils" section of Saint-Saëns' "Carnival of the Animals". It's echoed a moment later when we see Adric watching the others talk about fossils on the TARDIS scanner - between this and the theme tune quotes in Parts One and Two, there's a bit of a motif in this story of us watching characters watching the Doctor on a screen, which Clarke seems to have picked up on.
• The star of the score is the Cybermen's marching theme. It features prominently in Parts Three and Four, building on elements laid out over earlier scenes of the Cyberleader in Parts One and Two. It's prefigured in scenes of the androids in Part One - the descending three-note phrase can be clearly heard in the cue that plays between Adric's scene in the TARDIS and the rockfall in the caves.
• The end credits of Part Four roll in silence, to mark the death of a major character. Producer John Nathan-Turner famously borrowed this gimmick from Coronation Street, which had sent off a popular character with silent credits in 1964 and repeated the trick several times since.

Vox pop
In one of the musically least remarkable seasons, Clarke's experimentalism comes as a breath of fresh air - there could hardly be a better time to welcome him back to DW. His use of metallic sounds for the Cybermen is inspired, and this together with his clinical use of sound in the freighter scenes and Dick Mills' heavy breathing sound effects really brings the monsters to life. The whole score is a fine demonstration of how the incidental music can be made to help tell the story. Listened to in isolation, it's unlikely to be to everyone's taste (although certainly to your humble blogger's), but it's a tailor-made fit for Earthshock.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Three tracks represented this story on Doctor Who - The Music. "Subterranean Caves" was a collection of cues from Part One (of Scott's troopers entering the caves, a rockfall and the Cybermen's androids following the troopers) joined together by Dick Mills' sound effects. "Requiem" was a short cue from Part One that played after Scott's troopers were killed by androids. "March of the Cybermen" was a five-minute composite of several cues from the end of Part Three and the final cue from Part One.