23 - The Awakening

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Michael Owen Morris

What's the score?
It's a historically themed story, so out come the synthesized harpsichord, fife, tenor and snare drums and a scattering of horn sounds. After the near miss with the previous year's The King's Demons, Peter Howell at last gets to score a story set in England's past. As with The Five Doctors, this isn't an occasion on which he can really indulge his experimental tendencies.

Musical notes

• Like Paddy Kingsland and Jonathan Gibbs before him, Howell draws a musical line between the earthly and the unearthly, with the sounds of historical instrumentation for the humans - those who've come from the past and those who re-enact it - and futuristic sounds for the alien Malus. The snare drum is generally used in rhythm for the Civil War re-enactors, and in rolling bursts to indicate the effects of the Malus' increasing influence, notably including the apparitions of ghostly soldiers. More innocent apparitions are accompanied by the harpsichord. Nimble fluting sounds are used in Tegan's big scenes. The Malus itself is generally heralded by sustained eerie notes, although weirder electronic whirring notes are heard in the build-up to Part One's cliffhanger.
• There's an odd rising sound that plays twice in Part Two, firstly when Turlough is locked up in a barn with Tegan's grandfather and then when Sir George says the Malus will alter the future of mankind. It's a plausible choice of noise for a scene in which the rise of the Malus is discussed, but its significance in the former scene is lost on your humble blogger.
• There are a couple of points in Part Two at which Howell maintains or builds the tension in a scene by repeating low-key musical elements for most of a minute. The scene of ghostly Roundhead soldiers closing in on the Doctor and his friends in the church is sustained by thumping and rolling drums, leading into a synth wail as they kill one of the re-enactors. Later, a repeated combination of growling and shrilling synth noises carries the final confrontation with Sir George into the moment when he topples into the Malus, accompanied by a horn and drum fanfare. It's a simple but effective technique. Howell did something similar in the climactic scenes of his previous three scores, but this is the point at which I think it's most noticeable. More of the same can be found later on in Planet of Fire. 
• The drum rhythm of the dramatic escape cue at the end of Part Two is remarkably similar to the bassline of the DW theme tune.

Vox pop
There's nothing ostensibly wrong with this score - on the contrary, it's very lovely, with its juxtaposition of period instrumental sounds and uncanny synth noises. But for me it's overshadowed by the incidental soundtrack for The King's Demons, which had all this plus a real lute! And it's Peter Howell's rotten luck that the two stories should fall so close together, which only invites comparisons between the two scores.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Doctor Who - The Music II included a suite of music from this story.