38 - The Ultimate Foe (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Thirteen to Fourteen)

Composer: Dominic Glynn
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
Dominic Glynn returns to end Season 23 as he began it. Technically it's all one big story, so consistency is a virtue here. Expect more fast beats, chimes, crystallophonic sounds and pitchbending.

Musical notes

• The most remarkable feature of this score is an up-and-down-and-up-and-down stepping motif that bears an uncanny resemblance to the theme tune from The Twilight Zone. It's an appropriate choice for two episodes of weird escapades in the dreamlike fantasy environment inside the Matrix. Variations on it are heard when the Doctor is attacked by a pair of hands that try to pull his face into a barrel of water in Part Thirteen; when several hands drag him beneath the surface of the beach in the "waiting room" in the cliffhanger at the end of Part Thirteen; when he realises in Part Fourteen that the Valeyard intends to kill everyone in the courtroom from inside the Matrix; and when Mel is evacuating the courtroom as the final attack begins. There's also a hint of it at the end of the fast cue when the Doctor and Glitz are attacked with illusory nerve gas at the start of Part Fourteen. However, remarkable as it is, it may not be the first thing listeners notice...
• The most notable feature of the score is undoubtedly the fairground calliope music that Glynn uses for the reveal of the Valeyard's outlandish "Fantasy Factory" lair inside the Matrix. This is reprised whenever we get an establishing shot of the "Fantasy Factory" exterior and its gigantic illuminated sign.
• Two other phrases are repeated late in Part Fourteen. When the particle disseminator is revealed, there's a high wail and two-note fall-off repeated over a mid-range synth beat; this wailing phrase is repeated over a low staccato rhythm later in the episode when the Doctor escapes from the Matrix as the disseminator is switched on. The staccato rhythm gets its own slow, highly dramatic repeat right at the end of Part Fourteen when it's revealed that the Valeyard also escaped. 
• One last bit of repetition, linking the final episode of the season back to the first: as the Doctor re-enters the courtroom in the aftermath of the Valeyard's attack, there's a rueful (and extremely high-pitched!) glassy reprise of the Trial theme that opened Part One.
• Much of the rest of the score is given over to atmospherics with chimes and glassy notes to the fore. Of the more structured one-off cues, I have a soft spot for the bare, eerie synth notes that play as the Doctor is apparently condemned to death in a fake courtroom in the Matrix. But my personal favourite, although (or because?) it stands out so much from the rest of the score, is the despairing minor-key series of high, organ-like notes heard in Part Fourteen as the Master announces his intention to take over Gallifrey.

Vox pop
Listening to this season's incidental scores again, it's not hard to spot the winner. In just fourteen episodes, Dominic Glynn has emerged as the torch-bearer for the next musical era of DW. As with The Mysterious Planet, what we have here is a solid score with highlights, not too showy but with the robust confidence needed to carry the episodes along, and with that all-important quality of freshness. The incidental music of DW will be in safe hands, if we can just find a couple more composers like Glynn...

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story; five minutes of Glynn's music can be heard on the photo gallery.
• An abridged version of the score was made available for a brief time on the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) release Black Light: The Doctor Who Music of Dominic Glynn, alongside Glynn's music from The Mysterious Planet and Dragonfire.

37 - Terror of the Vervoids (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Nine to Twelve)

Composer: Malcolm Clarke
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
Here, then, is the Radiophonic Workshop's last stand. Malcolm Clarke is the last Workshop member to compose incidental music for DW on TV, although Dick Mills will continue to provide special sound for the rest of the classic series. The Terror of the Vervoids score isn't a radical departure from his previous work on DW - the cliffhanger cues are more restrained, and there's more of a tendency overall towards tunefulness with the most discordant moments reserved for the monsters, but it's recognisably Clarke.

Musical notes

• Clarke can generally be relied upon to deliver the appropriate signature sound for a monster, provided the monster is sufficiently distinctive. Presented with bipedal vegetables, he produces a sound that can best be described as "planty". It's a sort of strained, high-pitched, fibrous sound, like someone wincing through a grass reed, with some woody ticks and pocks added for emphasis. It isn't heard until Part Two, after the Vervoids have emerged from their pods, but it's heard over most of their scenes thereafter. A couple of frailer clicks and knocks punctuate the dying gasps of the Vervoids in the penultimate cue of Part Four.
• Other signature sounds include: ethereal washes for scenes of the Hyperion III floating through space; bassoon meanderings and persistent knocking sounds for anyone creeping around where they shouldn't be; and high fluting phrases for Mel, who gets plenty to do in this story and gets plenty of music to go with it. Clarke doesn't continue here his earlier use (in The Twin Dilemma and Attack of the Cybermen) of the harpsichord for the Doctor, who gets mid-range reed instrument sounds if he gets anything.
• In general, the music is saved for scenes of the Doctor's adventure on the Hyperion III, with very little spared for the courtroom scenes. The only notable courtroom cues, apart from the very last cue of Part Four, are the high, anxious phrases that play in Parts One and Three when the Doctor complains that the recorded evidence has been tampered with but is forced to withdraw the accusation. 
• The cue that plays when an anonymous infiltrator aboard the Hyperion III sends the Doctor a distress signal in Part One is a repeated series of rising notes in a rather plasticky mid-range synth voice. When we hear this cue again in the next scene, as the signal is picked up inside the TARDIS, it's muted, as though the incidental music is being diegetically relayed through the TARDIS console's speakers. Readers may recall that Clarke did something very similar in Part One of Earthshock; we might also call to mind Peter Howell's "inside the room, outside the room" game in Part Three of Planet of Fire.
• Clarke makes a bold guess at the sound of the aerobics music of the future - he seems to have taken his inspiration from the tinny tunes of the Japanese video games of the mid-80s. By an extraordinary coincidence, whichever of Mel or the Doctor was responsible for acquiring the horrible piece the Doctor exercises to inside the TARDIS in Part One seems to have shopped at the same place as whoever stocked the Hyperion III's gym.

Vox pop
This isn't a bad score, nor is it a stand-out - it's simply OK. Malcolm Clarke gives a fair account of himself, but this isn't the triumphant high note the BBC Radiophonic Workshop might have gone out on. It isn't even the magnificent return to form we might have expected from Clarke after the partial upswing of his Attack of the Cybermen score. It's ordinary, but for me the problem isn't so much its ordinariness as the absence of anything really fresh. The Workshop has provided incidental music for DW for six years at this point - leaving aside the question of relative costs, it would be reasonable for viewers (and the producer) to expect the show's musical repertoire to move with the times. (Notwithstanding Dudley Simpson's near-residency prior to 1980, or the approach taken with DW's incidental music since 2005...) Penned in by the shiny new work of freelance composers, this score only feels more dated.
On which petulant note, this blog says farewell to Malcolm Clarke. Some fans criticise his early DW scores for being too challenging to the casual TV viewer, but for me that's their strength - they've got something to say about the story they're attached to, they want to be heard, and they won't take no for an answer. He was at his best when indulging his experimental tastes, and I think he's best remembered that way.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story; the photo gallery features nearly six minutes of Clarke's music.

36 - Mindwarp (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Five to Eight)

Composer: Richard Hartley
Director: Ron Jones

What's the score?
It was originally intended that the incidental music duties for Season 23 should be split half-and-half between freelancers - represented exclusively by Dominic Glynn - and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Most accounts suggest that Malcolm Clarke was supposed to score Mindwarp and Liz Parker would have taken on Terror of the Vervoids; however, in the event, Parker was assigned elsewhere and Clarke was given Terror of the Vervoids. One version of events has it that the Radiophonic Workshop's various commissions had to be reassigned because of Jonathan Gibbs' sudden departure, but this seems unlikely as - according to Ray White, a Senior Engineer at the Workshop who worked closely with him - Gibbs didn't leave until November 1986, by which time Mindwarp had been transmitted. About Time vol 6 by Tat Wood states that Richard Hartley had been commissioned to score Mindwarp "well in advance", so it's possible that the reshuffle was simply down to the producer changing his mind. Suggestions that special sound creator Dick Mills was briefly proposed for the job are sometimes included in the "Gibbs departure" story, but may be entirely apocryphal.
This is the only DW story Richard Hartley worked on. He enjoyed a busy career composing for TV programmes at this time, and has gone on to greater success since, so presumably he simply wasn't asked or didn't feel the need to compose for DW again. Sadly, the isolated score for this story is missing, presumed lost: neither the BBC nor (to his knowledge) the composer kept a copy of the tapes. Consequently, the only way to hear Hartley's music is to watch the story as transmitted. (Sound clips used below have been taken from the soundtrack of the broadcast episodes.)

Musical notes

• A large part of this score - a very large part, in fact - is built on a five-note phrase in high synth strings first heard in Part Five when the planet Thoros Beta is displayed on the courtroom screen. It's heavily repeated and occasionally expanded on as a general musical background for scenes and to cover transitions.
• The other highly prominent feature of the score is the fanfare, again executed in synth strings, first heard when the Doctor and Peri watch the Mentors' procession through the cave tunnels in Part Five. It plays again with slight variations at several points during the story, not all of them obviously ceremonial. It's heard when two guards are seen carrying the Raak's corpse out of Crozier's lab in Part Five; when Sil is carried into the lab, surprising the Doctor and Peri; when Matrona Kani's serving women are seen processing to the Commerce Room in Part Six; when the delegate from Posikar is shown into the Commerce Room in Part Eight; and when the Doctor pretends to escort Yrcanos under guard into the detention centre.
• High bips are heard in the scenes in Parts Seven and Eight of Crozier operating on Kiv, and of Kiv waking up in Peri's body. Much is made in earlier episodes of the deadline Kiv has placed Crozier under, and these bips are suggestive of the seconds ticking away. Hospital dramas down the years have used a similar device to raise tension in operation scenes, and we shouldn't rule out the possibility that Hartley is appealing to this pop cultural association as well. 
• Other notable cues are hard to come by. There's a promising one in Part Five, a rapid beat under high strumming sounds as the Doctor and Peri venture into a cave in search of tidal energy machinery, just before they're attacked by the Raak. There are several sitar flourishes during the scene in Part Six in which Peri, disguised as a serving woman, enters the Commerce Room and is unmasked - this just sounds like "Generic Eastern" foolery in a scene in which the female cast members are regrettably dressed in "Generic Eastern" costume. Hartley provides a convincing romantic cue in Part Eight when Peri and Yrcanos have a bonding moment in the prison cell, playing delicate synth notes over a light drone and plucking occasionally at his guitar, but it's easily lost amid the gentle washing synths elsewhere in the story.

Vox pop
And that really is the problem with this score - Hartley just doesn't jump in and shout often enough, taking too much of a back seat too much of the time. Even dramatic moments like the end of Part Five or the escape through the processing zone in Part Six are underplayed to the point of being thrown away.

This is one of those very rare scores that I've actually become less fond of on repeated listening. It's pleasant enough - I certainly remembered it with fondness from that first encounter in 1986 - but there's so little to it, with only the repeated fanfare and five-note flourish elements standing out in an otherwise vague synth wash. This isn't to impune the talent or professionalism of Richard Hartley, but I get the sense that this really was just one more bit of work to him at a time when he had plenty to work on. It's not bad, it's just not especially remarkable.

Availability

• Nil.

35 - The Mysterious Planet (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts One to Four)

Composer: Dominic Glynn
Director: Nicholas Mallett

A brief note on episode numbering: While this blog will treat the four subsections of The Trial of a Time Lord as distinct story units - mainly because they were handled as distinct musical units - it would be contrary to talk about "The Ultimate Foe, Part Two" when the episode is named on screen as "The Trial of a Time Lord, Part Fourteen". Your humble blogger therefore proposes to use the popular story titles for convenience when referring to entire musical scores, but to refer to specific episodes within the season by their given number.

What's the score?
Welcome Dominic Glynn, first of the Big Three of late '80s DW music. Glynn provides two of the four incidental scores for this season, and will provide one in each of the remaining three seasons of DW's original run. His work is only a little more dance-inflected than that of the Radiophonic Workshop - in particular, his work this season is really quite close to what Workshop members Peter Howell and Liz Parker were doing the previous year.
There's quite a high proportion of music in the soundtrack to The Mysterious Planet, but a lot of it is background atmospherics. The new theme arrangement and Glynn's scores during this season feature quite a lot of pitchbending - although the means to distort pitch on a synthesizer had been around for several years by this time, and Glynn is far from the first DW composer to use the technique, he certainly seems keen on it. His score for The Mysterious Planet and his next couple also make extensive use of chimes and crystallophonic sounds.

Musical notes

• First things first: let's direct our ears to Glynn's new arrangement of the DW theme tune, which was used for this season only. It's a return to the theme's original key, shifting back down from Peter Howell's F sharp minor to Delia Derbyshire's E minor. More noticeably, it's full of twinkling and chittering sounds. (It's a little bit reminiscent of the "Delaware theme", created in 1972 by Brian Hodgson, Paddy Kingsland and Delia Derbyshire as a test, but ultimately rejected. Perhaps the world just wasn't ready for it yet.) The famous bassline is muted, stripped of resonance and reverb, pared back to just the bare notes. The crash opening of Howell's arrangement is replaced with an almost plaintive downward glide; the explosion at the end of the closing credits is retained, probably due to the use of the same visuals more than anything. Rather than the whooshing, hissing sound Howell used to segue the opening theme into the episode, Glynn lets the theme fade out with a series of high-pitched sighing synth noises. The overall feeling of the theme is subdued, even mournful - this is a theme that knows its parent programme is on trial.
• The first thing we see after the opening theme of Part One is a dizzying flypast of the Time Lords' space station, possibly the most expensive visual effect of the season and widely regarded as one of the finest of the entire classic series. Glynn's opening cue is no less impressive: beginning with the ominous tolling of a bell and a lone synth sigh on the initial approach, it launches into an almighty crashing funeral march as the camera licks its way across the station, fading into melodramatic organ music as the TARDIS is dragged into the antechamber of the courtroom. As Glynn confirms in interview on the DVD, the organ music and the tolling bell were intended to tie in with the scriptwriter's and modelmakers' concept of the space station as being like a cathedral. The bell also calls to mind the TARDIS' emergency signal, the cloister bell. This cue would later provide the basis for "The Trial Theme", a beefy piece of music given away free with Doctor Who Magazine in 1990 and included as an extra on the DVD release of this story.
• Glynn uses incidental cues to distinguish consistently between scenes of the Doctor's adventure and scenes in the courtroom - he's the only composer this season to do so. (Composer's choice or director's request?) It's a small thing but a praiseworthy one in a story that keeps cutting between narrative and meta-narrative, helping to prepare the viewer in a subtle way for each transition. A tinny downward jangle announces the shift from courtroom to adventure. Shifts back to the courtroom are heralded by a low chime and a harsh buzz - except in two instances. In the scenes in Part Three and Part Four when the words "the Matrix" are censored from the soundtrack in an effort to cover up the Time Lords' involvement in proceedings on Ravalox, Glynn holds fire and allows a dry cut back to the courtroom. The effect of this, having built up a comfortable expectation in the viewer that they'll hear a chime/buzz before a scene change of this nature, is to make these moments more likely to snag in the back of the viewer's mind. It may have been wishful thinking for the writers to hope that viewers would remember this bit of plot-significant mystery two months later when explanations would be provided, but at least the music is doing its part to help.
• There are three heavily repeated, highly rhythmic motifs in this story, and the most extreme of them is the theme for the L1 scout robot. The rhythm here is provided by a continuous high synth stabbing, with sinister bass chords overlaid. It's repeated a little too damn much for your humble blogger's liking.
• Significant motif number two is the march for the Tribe of the Free. A rapid one, four, one, four pattern of snare drum and horn synths is augmented here and there with stately fanfares. Queen Katryca gets a particularly grand one on her introduction in Part One.
• Number three is the train guards' march. Upwards pairs of high-pitched synth notes provide the main rhythm, while a bass string sound offers a more interesting second rhythm underneath. The squeaking high notes may be meant to suggest the wheels of the train grinding against metal rails.
• I'm very fond of the melodramatic pitchbending reedy chords that play as Peri rescues the Doctor from the inert L1 robot. The cue is far too bombastic for what's happening on screen, outlandishly so, but it sounds great. Shortly thereafter, Glynn plays an "oo-wee-oo" and a repeating phrase from his DW theme arrangement as the Doctor comes to and does his ripest impression of Jon Pertwee.

Vox pop
This is a thoroughly solid first outing for Dominic Glynn. I don't get the feeling that he's flicking all the switches and showing off what his keyboard can do in the way Peter Howell arguably did with The Leisure Hive (and Keff McCulloch will arguably do with Time and the Rani), but in a sense and for this particular story, that's not a bad thing. It almost feels as if he's always been here. That said, the opening cue really is a tour de force, and those glassy and chimey sounds really add something special to the score.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story, but does include a photo gallery featuring six and a half minutes of Glynn's music.
• An abridged version of the score was made available for a brief time on the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) release Black Light: The Doctor Who Music of Dominic Glynn, alongside Glynn's music from The Ultimate Foe and Dragonfire.