Director: Alan Wareing
What's the score?
Dominic Glynn's last score for DW, and the last story to be transmitted in the show's original run. Once again Glynn brings in a guest musician to beef up his score - in this case, it's David Hardington on the electric and acoustic guitars. The electric guitar gets the starring role, contributing a couple of prominent themes and a variety of feline yowls throughout the story. The acoustic guitar is reserved for the story's more contemplative moments.
Glynn uses an extremely wide variety of synth voices in this score, but the most notable is probably the piano - sinister piano steps feature prominently, helping to build up an atmosphere of menace. In a similar vein, several of the scenes of Cheetah People hunting or toying with human prey feature the sort of scratching violin sounds one might expect to find in one of Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock film scores.
Musical notes
- As with all his work for DW, Glynn's score for Survival is built around themes and distinctive sounds. The main theme for this score is a wistful, hungry sounding piece heard on various instruments throughout the story, most notably on the electric guitar. It's first hinted at in faint flute tones in the scene when Ange tells Ace that all her old friends have disappeared (to the planet of the Cheetah People, as we later discover), and it's picked up in a deeper woodwind voice after Ace herself has arrived on the Cheetah planet. Its last appearance in the story is a quiet reprise on the acoustic guitar in Part Three as Ace mourns over the body of Karra, the Cheetah Person that she befriends. There's a secondary theme for the electric guitar that has a bit of an Edge of Darkness about it.
- Season 26 hasn't offered much opportunity for diegetic muzak, but Glynn gets to provide the last example - a soft guitar and glockenspiel melody under high synths - in the scene in the corner shop in Part One.
- The cue that plays when the Doctor is spying on the domestic cats of Perivale (and John Nathan-Turner's dog...) in Part One is a cheeky one. It's a playful piece in bass guitar and piano with an up-and-down marimba hook and tambourine accents, and it's a rather accurate spoof of the sort of thing British viewers could expect to hear on any number of natural history programmes. Bass, marimba and tambourine are practically the signature sounds for BBC programmes about big cats mucking about in the Serengeti - applying them to small cats on a surburban street, with the Doctor cast in the role of natural historian, is an inspired move.
- The marimba crops up again in Parts Two and Three, providing the waltzing rhythm for a theme in high synth tones that seems to represent the pull of the Cheetah planet over its inhabitants. It's first heard when the Master describes the Cheetah People to the Doctor and his friends, and can be heard at various times in Part Three when Ace falls under the planet's influence. The theme makes its last appearance in the middle of the scene of the Doctor and the Master fighting on the planet of the Cheetah People, when the Cheetahs themselves vanish and the Doctor rejects the urge to become like them. Some cues embellish the theme with horn or electric guitar sounds, or replace the marimba with other synth voices.
- Our old friend the E-Mu Emulator II shakuhachi sample (remember it from Time and the Rani?) is back. It can be heard when Ace is transported to the planet of the Cheetah People in Part One, and it puts in a couple more appearances in Part Two.
- I'm quite fond of the heartbeat-like percussion and reversed breathing sounds that play early on in Part Three as Ace runs off with Karra. It's a very nicely judged cue.
- The very last incidental cue of 1980s DW is a little walkdown in flute tones based on the DW theme tune, with the melancholic acoustic guitar coming in halfway through. It plays over the Doctor's "Come on, Ace, we've got work to do" speech, and like that speech, it stands as a valediction to the classic series.
Vox pop
It's a great note to go out on. Overall, I think this is the strongest of Dominic Glynn's five DW scores, thanks to the tremendously varied sound palette and, of course, that electric guitar. Like all the best DW scores, it's the right fit for the TV episodes and lovely to listen to in isolation as well. In hindsight, it also strikes just the right note for the story that marked the end of an era - anxious, plaintive, but still promising more.
Next week we can look back at 1980s DW music as a whole, but for now, it's farewell to Dominic Glynn. "Solid" is a word I've used quite a bit in describing Glynn's DW scores - he's not prone to outbursts of sonic exuberance in the way that Keff McCulloch is, but the quality of his work is more consistently high. And his practice, here and with The Happiness Patrol, of bolstering his electronic score with the non-electronic sound of a session musician adds a lot of extra depth to these later scores, and hints at a fruitful direction DW's incidental music could have gone in if it had continued into the '90s. Somewhere in that lost decade, uncomposed, is the missing link between the synths of the '80s and Murray Gold's almost entirely symphonic compositions.
Availability
- The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
No comments:
Post a Comment