50 - Survival

Composer: Dominic Glynn
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.

44 - The Happiness Patrol

Composer: Dominic Glynn
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
Dominic Glynn returns to provide his annual score (sadly, one a year from Glynn is all we'll get in these final years of the '80s). Musically, this is an unusual story for DW, and Glynn appears to relish the challenge - he recalls on the DVD commentary how delighted he was to be asked to score a DW story in which music played such an integral part.
Two key cultural influences are at work within this story: the blues and film noir, although the director was prevented from making very much of the latter. Glynn nods towards the film noir element with several minor key piano phrases, but musically he's able to make far more out of the blues angle, and this score is liberally seasoned with melancholic harmonica. The harmonica was played by guest musician Adam Burney, who did his best to provide something in line with Glynn's requirements that would nevertheless match up with the visible breathing and hand movements of actor Richard D Sharp in those scenes where Burney was required to dub diegetic material.

Musical notes

• As part of the incidental music, the harmonica is heard almost immediately in Part One, wailing and snarling as Silas P moves to entrap a miserable woman on the streets of Terra Alpha. The first bit of diegetic harmonica turns up about halfway through the episode, when Earl Sigma is first seen strolling down an otherwise empty street. It's at this point that the score's main harmonica theme is introduced, a relatively straightforward upward and then downward sequence of notes. Variations on this are heard through the rest of the story, including several provided by Glynn's synths - there's a particularly lovely flute version in Part One when Susan Q helps Ace to escape from the Happiness Patrol's headquarters. A full orchestral swell backs up the harmonica in the final cues of Part Three.
• As with Dragonfire, Glynn produces no fewer than three pieces of muzak to give some variety to the sounds of Radio Terra Alpha. The most prominent (and horribly earwormy) of these is a hyperactive xylophone tune over airy synth chords with muted trumpet accents. It's playing in the Forum Square when the TARDIS arrives in Part One, and pops up frequently thereafter - Earl Sigma even mimics it on the harmonica when he's surprised by the Happiness Patrol. A sort of synth calypso tune is very briefly heard just before the TARDIS' arrival, and is heard at greater length in the Waiting Zone in Part Three. The third piece, which plays in the Waiting Zone while the Doctor and Ace are there in Part One, is a slow, cowboy-esque tune in synth violins and a kind of whistling sound. It's strangely mournful; you can practically hear the howling of small dogs in it - however did it get past Terra Alpha's censors?
• Time for the obligatory mention of a DW theme reference - there's a burst of the theme tune's bassline in Part One as the Doctor and Ace are escorted into the Waiting Zone. 
• The Kandy Man has a special theme of his own, a fairgroundy oom-pa-pa in an eerie high-pitched glassy synth voice. It's first heard before he appears, in the scene in which Helen A and Gilbert M discuss what he's cooking up for that night's public execution. Glynn serves up a particularly grandiose version with trumpets and violins for the scene in which the Kandy Man first appears in his Kandy Kitchen, arranging the execution in Part One, and again in Part Three when he's killed in the pipes with his own fondant.
• One odd element of the soundtrack: for the scenes of the factory Drones marching through the streets in Parts Two and Three, there's a literal humming drone. At one point, this humming seems to take on a variant melody of the main harmonica theme.

Vox pop
This is a real high point for Dominic Glynn, and while I'd be hard pressed to say that it's the best of the Sylvester McCoy era scores (although that's a measure of the general high quality of this era's music, not a slight against Glynn), it's as good an example as any we've had of the incidental music working in partnership with the story. More than this, it's a rare instance of the music taking up the slack from other areas of the story's production that were compromised by time and budgetary constraints. With his perky, saccharine muzak, Glynn helps to build the world of Terra Alpha; with his sinister piano cues, he nails the director's vision of a DW film noir; with Adam Burney's harmonica, he provides the heart of the story. That this score is so enjoyable in isolation is just the icing on the Kandy cake.

Availability

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

42 - Dragonfire

Composer: Dominic Glynn
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
At last, some musical variety! The late replacement of the score for Paradise Towers leaves this as the only story in Season 24 not scored by Keff McCulloch. Dominic Glynn's fondness hitherto for tinkly and chimey sounds (as heard during Season 23) makes him an obvious choice to compose the music for a story set on an ice planet. (Dick Mills assists with a lovely background atmosphere for the "Singing Caves", which was included on the Doctor Who - 30 Years at the Radiophonic Workshop sound effects release.) To the anticipated crystalline noises, Glynn adds a range of sounds that suggest howling Antarctic winds - there's plenty of synth flute and airy gliding sounds throughout, and some lower croaky synths that tend to show up in particularly eerie or villainous moments.

Musical notes

• The chief villain, Kane, gets his own signature sound: a highly melodramatic pipe organ. There's a main five-note theme - four notes and a sting, really - that's first heard early in Part One when a mercenary stumbles into Kane's icy lair. (It's immediately followed by some of those low, croaky sounds when Kane plunges his hand into liquid nitrogen to retrieve the mercenary's dropped gun.) Variations on this theme, or other more grandiose organ phrases, are heard in scenes of Kane killing people, retiring to his Absolute Zero sarcophagus, or gloating in triumph. There's a reprise that builds into a discordant pile-up in his death scene in Part Three.
• The pipe organ is strongly suggestive of cinematic horror. The obvious association is with the 1925 and 1962 adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, although Kane is more often likened to Dracula - lean, pale, very long-lived, appears to sleep in a coffin, doesn't like sunlight. (For some reason, the Internet seems to associate Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor - remember it from Attack of the Cybermen? - with Dracula, although there's no cinematic precedent for this at all.) It's worth noting that Dragonfire's script is laden with references to film theorists, historians and characters - it's entirely appropriate for Glynn to join in with some cinematic gestures of his own.
• A wistful theme in high synth strings and flute is played over model shots of the planet Svartos and of Glitz's ship leaving it. It's a charming piece that helps to sell the model shots to the viewer. Another melancholic flute cue is used in scenes of Kane's unhappy minions plotting against him.
• Other cues echo the melodrama of Kane's organ theme. Your humble blogger could mention the earnest "action movie" bass guitar and cabasa stuff heard in one scene of Kane's staff "bug hunting" in Part Three, or the metallic thumping steps used throughout for the zombie mercenaries, but the real stand-out is the piece that plays when the dragon appears at the end of Part One. It sounds a bit like the sort of staccato histrionics you'd hear being played on the violin in a Hitchcock film, except that it sounds as if it's being banged out on an antique upright piano. 
• Glynn proves to be the master of muzak in the Sylvester McCoy era, and here provides three distinct pieces of diegetic music for the scenes in the Iceworld cantina in Part One. All of them feature the icy, tinkly sound of the glockenspiel: the first piece includes high, airy synths and the flute; the second loses the flute and sticks to the glock and synths; the third takes a strange detour through the warmer musical territory of the trumpet and guitar. The second of these three tunes is only briefly heard in Part One, but makes a return appearance in Part Three in the scene of zombie mercenaries storming through the Iceworld complex and driving the customers out of the cantina.
• The most appropriate instrument of all, the crystallophone, is finally heard near the end of Part Three when Mel announces her departure. The crystallophone, or glass harmonica, sounds like a set of wine glasses being played with a wet finger, and produces sound through crystalline resonance in much the same way - it's rather like a huge, rotating, conical wine glass on its side. What we have here is probably a synth imitation, mind you. The cue opens with a DW theme reference, a little "oo-wee-oo", before - like Mel herself - heading off in another direction.

Vox pop
This is a very theatrical score, which makes it a fair match for the theatricality of the TV episodes it was composed for. In isolation, it has its moments, charming and trying by turns. It is, of course, another solid piece of work from Dominic Glynn, but I wouldn't say it's Glynn's best DW score, or the best of this season. The in-your-face organ music is amusing at first, but outstays its welcome soon enough. The good news, and the important thing, is that it's never less than interesting.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• An abridged version of this 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 The Ultimate Foe.

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.

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.