32 - The Two Doctors

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Peter Moffatt

What's the score?
The last televised DW score from Peter Howell. The Two Doctors, equivalent in length to a 1970s six-parter, is the longest single story-unit (this blog counts The Trial of a Time Lord as four of those) of the 1980s, yet the incidental score is no longer than that of the average four-parter, clocking in at only a little over 45 minutes. This season alone, it's outweighed by the scores for Attack of the Cybermen and Revelation of the Daleks, both of which boast close to an hour of music.

Musical notes

• This score is dominated by melodic flurries of Spanish guitar. Session musician Les Thatcher plays on several cues, as indicated on the BBC's Programme-as-Completed documentation. The acoustic melodies are obviously appropriate to the story's setting in Seville, a nice counterpoint to the synthesized elements of Howell's score, and just all-round pleasant to listen to. Notable highlights include the mournful tune that plays for the Dona Arana (complete with freakish "Eeeeee!" sound as Shockeye kills her); the melancholic theme that introduces the clownish Oscar in Part One and plays again over his death in Part Three; and my personal favourite, the piece heard in Part Three while everyone's stalking everyone else through the streets of Seville, with its little synthetic Latin 3-2 horn phrase on top.
• The second most significant character theme in this score is the untuneful and slightly fey whistling motif that stands for the Androgums. It generally plays during Shockeye's most triumphant moments - elsewhere, he's represented by brooding synth sounds with metallic, somewhat knife-like accents. The Androgum whistle also plays in Part Three when Chessene reverts to type.
• And the number one most significant character theme belongs to the Sontarans, a rousing march with tattoos of increasingly loud snare drum as its most prominent feature. A high plucked string melody plays over the top of the leading part of the theme - it has a bit of a Spanish flavour about it, even before the Sontarans set foot in Spain. Fast and slow variants of the theme crop up throughout the story, while the snare tattoo on its own quietly intrudes into the scenes in Part One in which the Sixth Doctor investigates the ruined space station Camera. 
• As usual, Howell's score includes some more abstract atmospheric moments. The scene in Part One of the Sixth Doctor and Peri fishing on an alien world is accompanied by a sustained alto ethereal sound that sounds a little bit as though someone's left the tap running in a metal sink. Later in the same episode, we hear an assortment of creaking sounds as the Doctor explores space station Camera, suggesting the raddled edifice could give way at any minute.
• There are several DW theme tune moments for our perusal this week. There's an "oo-wee-oo" into descending notes as the Sixth Doctor collapses in Part One, two "oo-wee-oos" with snare drum tattoo early in Part Three when the Sontarans force the Doctor to prime their bootleg time machine, and a pair of high and low "oo-wee-oos" in Part Three when the two Doctors finally meet. Like the bassline heartbeats in Howell's score for The Five Doctors, this last moment seems to gesture back (in broad principle, if not in specific pitches) to the difference in pitch between Howell's contemporary arrangement of the theme tune and the Delia Derbyshire arrangement that was in use during Patrick Troughton's tenure. There's also a flash of the bassline rhythm in Part One when the Sixth Doctor starts to hack into Dastari's computer.
• And then, when the Sixth Doctor and Jamie escape from the Sontarans in Part Three, the drums suddenly go haywire. Somehow, in 1985, Peter Howell has anticipated the advent of drum 'n' bass.

Vox pop
And there goes Peter Howell. Nobody's going to be surprised to hear that Howell is my favourite Radiophonic Workshop composer - he just seems to have struck the right balance between accessibility and experimentation in each story, and I can't think of a single dud score he composed. His association with DW doesn't end here - the Beeb brought him back to provide the music for their original Jon Pertwee radio DW stories in the '90s, which again should surprise no one. But this is where he leaves our story.

Availability

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

26 - Planet of Fire

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Fiona Cumming

What's the score?
The clue's in the title - most of Planet of Fire is set on a dry, volcanic world. Along with his regular synths, Peter Howell accordingly brings some sounds appropriate to the setting. Several of the percussive elements in this score have a tinkly quality to them, like shards of pottery being knocked together, while many scenes feature airy, breathy musical cues that sound as if they're being wafted out through volcanic vents.

Musical notes

• Part One is very sparsely scored. It boasts less than six minutes of music, probably the least Howell has ever recorded for an episode of DW, with several large gaps between cues, one of them a full six minutes long. The reason for this is that Howell's music is saved for the alien elements in the story - the planet of Sarn, and the Trion beacon that Howard's diving team find. Scenes set in Lanzarote warrant no incidental music, except when the beacon is held in close-up.
• The signature sound for the beacon is a downward pitched whir. It seems to be a signifier for the "Misos triangle" emblem on the top of the beacon rather than for the beacon itself - there's a glitchy whirring cue in Part One when Turlough discovers the beacon and reveals a matching triangle branded into his upper arm.
• Kamelion's signature is a plucked string sound arranged in fast phrases. (It's tempting to suggest a reference in the synth strings to Kamelion's previous appearance, when he played a lute, except that the sound here doesn't bear much relation to the lute.) It also forms the steady beat under the cue at the end of Part One when Kamelion takes on the appearance of the Master. 
• There are several Master-related cues scattered through the story that consist of a high-pitched whine overlaid with uneasy treble synths. Howell seems to have enormous fun falsetto-ing this motif at the end of Part Three when the tiny Master is revealed. 
• This story sees further uses of the "repeated simple element" tension-building method commented on under The Awakening, although nothing quite so drawn out as the minute-long examples heard in that story. The cue that plays over the Part Two cliffhanger and Part Three reprise is a fine example, a series of alternating dramatic notes and pneumatic "phung!" noises as the Kamelion-Master demands that the Doctor and his friends be sacrificed in the Cave of Fire. Howell plays a rather interesting game with the reprised cue in Part Three: as the scene shifts from the action inside the great hall to Turlough and Malkon lurking outside, Howell drops the volume on the music, as if it were actually playing inside the great hall. There's no suggestion that it's a diegetic piece of music, yet it behaves like one in order to reinforce the visual separation of the interior (loud) and exterior (quiet) scenes while at the same time joining both in a continuous sequence.

Vox pop
By now, readers should have a pretty good idea of how I'm likely to react to a score by Peter Howell. This is another good one, and one that again does a fine job of adding narrative value to the story - in a sophisticated way in the Part Three reprise cue mentioned above, and in a more obvious way in the appropriate choice of sounds to reinforce the volcanic setting.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option. The DVD also includes a re-edited special edition of the story from which, inexplicably, all the music has been removed.
• Doctor Who - The Music II included a suite of music from this story.

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.

21 - The Five Doctors

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Peter Moffatt (1995 edition overseen by Paul Vanezis)

What's the score?
And so the gap between Seasons 20 and 21 is broken by the appearance of a special feature-length story to celebrate DW's 20th anniversary. With hindsight Peter Howell, responsible for the contemporary arrangement of the theme tune, seems an obvious choice to compose the incidental music.
Twelve years later, Howell was asked to compose for the story again! 1995 saw the release on VHS of a new special edition of The Five Doctors (and for the sake of convenience, let's hereafter refer to the 1983 version of the story as the Original Edition and the 1995 version as the Special Edition). Several scenes were extended, added in from the cutting room floor or moved around for aesthetic reasons, and this necessitated a rescore. Howell agreed to adapt the original musical cues as necessary and to provide new cues for some of the new scenes. (He also took the opportunity to retouch details such as Rassilon's harp - with the benefit of more advanced synthesizers, it sounds a lot more harp-like in the Special Edition than it did in the Original Edition.) So you're getting two scores for the price of one this week, you lucky readers.
Howell's score is somewhat sparser than the average for 90 minutes of DW - less than 30 minutes in total (around 35 minutes for the longer Special Edition). A typical four-part DW story made in the '80s, running to a little over 90 minutes, will contain between 45 and 60 minutes of music. But then this isn't a four-part story, it is in effect a one-parter, and 30 minutes of music might actually have seemed generous for a single piece of television at the time.

Musical notes

• In the Original Edition, the opening theme continues as if, uniquely during the period 1981-86, it's going to launch into the middle eight (the "mouse chorus" section); instead it diverts directly into the opening cue over a scene inside the TARDIS. In the Special Edition, this scene was replaced with some establishing shots of the Tower of Rassilon, and the musical transition was lost.
• In fact, as Special Edition producer Paul Vanezis notes, the opening theme presented a rather special problem, since Vanezis wanted stereo title music and the only stereo mix Howell had to hand was "the radio version" (presumably the version included on the Doctor Who - The Music album, which had recently been used on the 1993 radio play The Paradise of Death). Missing from this mix was the washing sound that had heralded the appearance of the DW logo on screen - presumably not considered necessary without the accompanying visuals, but required for The Five Doctors. For the Special Edition, Howell added in an extra specially thunderous logo sound. It sounds almost as if he's trying to outdo the sound he added to the theme tune for Colin Baker's run - but let's not get ahead of ourselves...
• The cue that introduces the tranquil Eye of Orion is broadly similar in both editions, but in the Original Edition it included what sounded remarkably like a cheeky lift from Dudley Simpson's Blake's 7 theme tune. (A crafty way of acknowledging Simpson's enormous contribution to DW in earlier years?) Someone must have mentioned it to Howell, because in the Special Edition the cue has been rewritten without it.
• A persistent ticking sound appears in cues that play over scenes in the Timescoop control room, and later when the assembled Doctors are resisting the villainous Borusa's attempt at mind control. Your humble blogger can't decide whether it's brilliant or a bit over-literal to represent the President of the Time Lords with the sound of clockwork. 
• One of the new cues in the Special Edition is a stately harp-based piece for the establishing interior shot of the Capitol. Given the importance of Rassilon's harp later in the story, the choice of the harp here is a canny one, a nice set-up for the eventual revelation. It should be pointed out, though, that this cue doesn't bear any resemblance to the actual tune the Doctor will later pluck out on the instrument in question. 
• The first multiple Doctor scene, when the First Doctor finds and enters the Fifth Doctor's TARDIS, is accompanied by a twanging sound reminiscent of the bass line from the original arrangement of the DW theme tune. It starts out fast and on a relatively high note (the Fifth Doctor out cold on the floor), then switches to a lower note and a slower speed (the First Doctor arrives on the scene); the notes don't match up, but it could be a reference to the difference in pitch and speed between the 1981 and 1963 arrangements of the theme tune. This isn't the only theme tune reference in the score - needless to say there's an "oo-wee-oo" or two to be found, with a prominent example early on when the Third Doctor thinks he's outrun the Timescoop.
• The cues used for the Cybermen vary depending on which Doctor is appearing in their scene. When the Second Doctor and the Brigadier run across one, we get a rasping, oscillating sound very much like something Brian Hodgson might have put together in the '60s. Elsewhere, when the Cybermen confront the Fifth Doctor, Howell employs a metallic march in clear tribute to Malcolm Clarke. The only cue that connects the Cybermen to the First Doctor is the stepped bass build-up that plays as they march into a death trap inside the Tower - is it too fanciful to look for echoes of Martin Slavin's "Space Adventure" in there? (There's no precedent for the Third Doctor, who never had a Cyberman story to call his own, so we default to the '80s style with him. It may be worth noting that Howell contributed electronic music to the only '70s Cyberman story, so I guess he gets the final say in the matter.)
• The cue that plays as the Second Doctor and the Brigadier find the cave entrance to the Tower has been changed for the Special Edition: it now includes a whistling reprise of the "Above, Between, Below" nursery rhyme the Doctor sang earlier when he was telling the Brigadier about the various ways to enter the Tower.
• Fans have long joked about the Master's musical staircase: after the First Doctor and Tegan have left the chessboard room and entered the main body of the Tower, the Master is seen sneaking down a staircase behind them, and the incidental music in the TV soundtrack appears to punctuate his steps. (This effect may not have been Howell's intention, but if it were, it would be in a long and noble tradition of musical staircases stretching back to Max Steiner's music for King Kong.) But if we're talking amusing collisions of visuals and music, I prefer President Borusa's harmonica: after Borusa has told the rest of the High Council that he wants to be left alone, he puts his hands together and huffs into them, and in the Special Edition this coincides nicely with a blast from Rassilon's horn.
• The Five Doctors famously ends with the original Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the theme tune, the pitch and speed altered to bring it into line with Howell's arrangement, which takes over around the transition into the "mouse chorus".
• Fun fact: Peter Howell has said in interview that the Horn of Rassilon was a treated library sample of the Queen Mary cruise liner's horn.

Vox pop
Peter Howell has been getting experimental lately, but this of all stories demands a conventional score with one eye on the past, and Howell duly obliges. There's still opportunity enough for him to flex his musical muscles, and the result is a score that can hardly fail to please. And like the best birthday presents, it can be enjoyed time and again after the celebratory event itself.

Availability

• The BBC DVD special edition includes the full isolated scores for both versions of the story.
• Doctor Who - The Music II included a suite of music from this story.

20 - The King's Demons

Composer: Jonathan Gibbs (with lute compositions in Part One by Peter Howell)
Director: Tony Virgo

What's the score?
There's a tangled story behind this score, but the DVD production subtitles are there to talk us through it. Peter Howell was initially assigned to work on The King's Demons, and he began by writing the pieces to be played on set - or rather, to be recorded beforehand by lutenist Jakob Lindberg, and then mimed to by the actors. These included the music played in the opening scene of Part One by a minstrel (actually Lindberg himself - he isn't exactly credited for his cameo, but he does get a crew credit alongside Fight Arranger John Waller), and the King's song performed by the false King John.
Howell then had to back out of scoring The King's Demons in order to focus on other commitments, and the assignment was handed on to BBC Radiophonic Workshop newcomer Jonathan Gibbs. Gibbs thus ended up composing all the incidental music for the story, but he did take some inspiration from Howell's song, and Lindberg was brought back into the studio to provide some more lute sounds. A drummer, Tim Barry, was also called in to perform on the soundtrack - this time next year the Radiophonic Workshop will have a synthesizer that can do snare drum rolls, but at this point they have to employ a session musician.

Musical notes

• As noted, the lute music that opens Part One is not part of the incidental music (and thus not included in the isolated score on the DVD). The first incidental cue in the story plays over the start of the joust scene, and comes across as an ostentatious piece of scene-setting. Synthesized recorders, shawms and horns are added to the lute and drums - look how gosh-darned medieval we are, the music seems to say. In fact the feel of the composition is more Renaissance than 13th century, and the snare drum is anachronistic, but there's an air of heritage park historical re-enactment about the story, so it's not as out of place as it might be. And given the later revelation of the King and his champion as fakes, we might even argue that this subtle wrongness in the music is entirely appropriate.
• The King's song is also not part of the incidental score, having been played during the filming of the banquet scene in Part One, with the false King John singing and "playing" along. (Perhaps I should have put "singing" in inverted commas as well...) Gibbs doesn't make use of the lute composition that opened Part One in his score, but he does use the King's song as a motif in the immediate next cue as Sir Gilles threatens Sir Geoffrey Lacy. There's also a tinny high-pitched reprise at the moment that Kamelion is revealed in Part Two (one for the dogs and small children there).
• The use of synthesizers notwithstanding, Gibbs stays in character until the end of Part One, when the revelation of the Master thoroughly breaks the medieval atmosphere. All-out electronic sounds and weird oscillations burst free in this cue. The scenes in Part Two that feature Kamelion in his robotic form also feature some notably "alien" musical cues, in contrast with the conventional melodies that precede them.
• The downbeat cue that plays as the Master reappears in the castle dungeon in Part Two sounds mysteriously like part of the Oompa-Loompa song from the Gene Wilder film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Vox pop
A promising DW debut for Jonathan Gibbs. The story allows him to play with historical and futuristic musical forms side by side, and he proves to be comfortable with both. A solid and pleasant score to round off the season.

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.

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.

10 - Kinda

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Peter Grimwade

What's the score?
Peter Howell's only contribution to this season. The overall range and timbre of the sounds used here are pretty similar to those used in Warriors' Gate, with the experimentalism carried a bit further - the Mara is represented by weird shriekings and howlings rather than melodic cues. There's also some use of ambient atmospheres in this score - possibly from Howell rather than Dick Mills, since Mills' "time wind" atmosphere from Warriors' Gate was included and credited on the 30 Years at the Radiophonic Workshop sound effects CD, whereas the background noise of the wind chime glade from this story doesn't appear on the album. Hold onto the glade sound, it'll be making a return appearance...

Musical notes

• A couple of recurring themes stand for the Kinda in this story. The main one, which plays over various group scenes as well as over the final scene after peace has been restored, is a slow, pensive-sounding piece. Keen listeners may notice some structural similarity to that eerie cue from Part Four of Warriors' Gate. The other theme is airier and slightly more mysterious - it plays over the images of the Kinda that appear during the Doctor's hallucination in Part Three.
• The Kinda's wind chimes play an interesting part in the incidental score. They start out as a diegetic sound in Part One when the Doctor, Adric and Tegan first find them - Howell is careful to respond to the verbal/visual cues of the Doctor striking "a perfect fifth" and playing the opening notes of "Three Blind Mice". However, they seem to become part of the non-diegetic music when we get to the scenes inside Tegan's mind. It's debatable whether the chimes heard during the scene in which the Kinda tribespeople tend to the sleeping Tegan are meant to be diegetic or not.
• The mental contact between the Kinda is signalled by a breathy shimmering sound. An extended version of the sound is heard near the start of Part Four when Panna's mind merges with Karuna's. A washed-out version forms a continuous background in the scene in which the Mara telepathically directs the Kinda to help it attack the Dome.
• When Sanders opens the Box of Jhana in Part Two, there's a build-up of rising synth sounds culminating in a falling, trilling sound that could be described as, um, ecstatic. The Part Two cliffhanger relies on an element of uncertainty and possible menace about the Box, but it's hard to take that seriously when we've already heard this noise. Conversely, the cue that plays in Part Four when Hindle opens the Box and is mentally healed is strangely sinister.
• Sanders' return to the Dome in Part Two, having been mentally regressed to childhood, is announced with a cheeky snatch of "Girls and Boys Come Out to Play".
• A slightly weird moment: at the very start of Part Three, and without any obvious reference to the opening shot of the episode, the theme tune fades directly into the Box of Jhana sound. (The Doctor actually opens the Box a couple of minutes later.) It's as if Howell is suggesting that DW itself is our Box of Jhana, and we the viewers are about to be granted a revelatory vision. Sure enough, this is the episode in which we see what the characters see when the Box is opened. Still, part of me wishes this could happen at the start of every episode of DW.

Vox pop
Much as I like this score, I don't feel it's a huge departure from Peter Howell's work in the previous season. The Mara scenes are strange and unsettling, but the more melodic material, lovely as it is, feels quite familiar. Next season will see Howell's work on DW undergo a radical change; this is just a small step towards that change.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Doctor Who - The Music included one track from this story, a one-minute cue called "TSS Machine Attacked". It's the cue from Part Four that plays when the Trickster makes Adric lose control of the TSS.

5 - Warriors' Gate

Composer: Peter Howell
Composer: Paul Joyce

What's the score?
As the Doctor returns from E-Space through the pocket universe of the Gateway, so we return from Paddy Kingsland to Peter Howell. His score is generally melodic, but inclined towards the weird. String sounds and breathy atmospheres take centre stage here.

Musical notes

• Once again, Howell is presented with a long tracking shot at the start of Part One that could be taken as an invitation to the composer. This time, however, he stays silent while the camera pans slowly around the slavers' cargo hold full of comatose Tharils, only fading in as we approach the action on the ship's bridge.
• The signature sound for the Tharils is something like a dulcimer or a zither, sometimes jangling and sometimes echoing. (It could be a cimbalom, or at least the synth equivalent.) It's the kind of thing you might hear in a Cold War spy film; it might be meant to suggest antiquity, exoticism or mystery, all of which would be appropriate to this story. It's also heard in Part Two when Romana is strapped into the slavers' navigator chair as a surrogate Tharil.
• A shimmering synth sound is heard when Tharils walk through the Gateway mirror. It's a bit like a Flexatone pitched down several octaves, or like those plastic "booming" tubes you sometimes see in dollar shops.
• The Gundan robots have an off-kilter marching theme, solid on the beat and with a servo-like whine in between. A halting, jerking version plays when the decrepit Gundan comes to life in Part Two; a faster, more confident version plays over the Part Three cliffhanger when the newly minted Gundans storm the Tharils' banqueting hall.
• This week's "oo-wee-oo" sound comes near the start of Part Three, when the Doctor discovers that his hand has been healed after passing through the mirror.
• Scenes in the Tharils' gardens are accompanied by whimsical noodlings on the synth. Is there just a hint of the leading phrase from Debussy's "Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune" in there?
• Part Three features what I think is the first bit of diegetic music (i.e. music that we're supposed to believe the characters can hear - remember that word!) in 80s DW: the Tharil banqueting music. It's a stately piece in the medieval style, combining ethereal pipe sounds with the sort of pulsing rhythm you'd get from a hurdy-gurdy. Antiquity is clearly the intended effect here.
• Abrupt jumps between time zones in the hall are signalled by a sort of backwards washing sound. Howell fades this down fairly quickly in the Part Four reprise, but keeps it going into the credits at the end of Part Three.
• This week's pop pick: the eerie cue that plays while Lazlo wakes the other Tharils in the cargo hold in Part Four. It's a lovely minor key tune in a high-pitched synth over a refrain using low string sounds.

Vox pop
Another great score from Peter Howell, with a more experimental edge than his previous two. It's interesting to hear him trying out unconventional material in a mostly melodic score - not just the washing and shimmering effects, but some striking stuttering sounds too in the derelict hall in Part One. The roots of Howell's next two scores - for the two Mara stories - can be found here. This is one I come back to again and again.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• Doctor Who - The Music included a minute-and-a-half track titled "Banqueting Music", which combined material from the Tharil banqueting scenes in Part Three with Dick Mills' "time winds" sound.

2 - Meglos

Composer: Paddy Kingsland (Part One), Peter Howell (Parts Two to Four)
Director: Terence Dudley

What's the score?
As Paddy Kingsland explains in the DVD commentary, Peter Howell was assigned this story to score but fell ill; Kingsland stepped in to score Part One while Howell recuperated, using notes that Howell had made in discussion with the director.
It would be wrong to say that we hear Kingsland giving an impression of Howell in Part One, or Howell of Kingsland in Part Two. Part One is unmistakably Kingsland's handiwork, elements of which recur in later episodes, either wholesale or modified to fit Howell's style. The music is bouncier than in the previous story, even jittery in places. But it doesn't take long for Howell's own voice to make itself heard - quite literally, in fact.

Musical notes

• In scenes that feature Deon ceremonies, the chanting of the Deons becomes a part of the incidental score thanks to the electronic magic of the vocoder. This device takes vocal input, processes the sound through a number of electronic channels and returns it as a buzzy, robotic sound that can be played on a keyboard. There's some irony here given the Deons' opposition to the science-fundamentalist Savants. In most cases the chanting is performed by Peter Howell himself, but for a couple of musical cues the studio dialogue provides the input. I think this might be the only time in DW's incidental musical history that the vocoder is used in this way - although Howell's arrangement of the theme tune also includes some vocoder elements, as can be seen in the "Synthesizing Starfields" extra on the Leisure Hive DVD.
• The vocoder was designed as a military tool for scrambling communications during World War Two, laid the groundwork for the technology that made mobile phone communications possible, and became the hot musical toy of the 1970s for artists like Kraftwerk and Wendy Carlos. How to Wreck a Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins offers plenty of further information about the vocoder for interested readers. Speaking of Wendy Carlos, the cue that introduces Lexa, the Deon high priestess, in Parts One and Two sounds rather like the opening theme from A Clockwork Orange. Or perhaps I should say, they both sound like the march from Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary". There's no obvious relevance to the funereal aspect of the piece, but it's possible the cue was intended to liken Lexa to Mary II, another capable and devout political leader.
• Meglos is represented by the rattling sound of the vibraslap. In scenes where he's impersonating the Doctor, the vibraslap plays a subtle part in the music, reflecting his subterfuge; when the cactus breaks through, the sound is louder and electronically enhanced to give it a more prickly quality. If you could hear a cactus shouting (other than when it's being played by Tom Baker), I imagine this is what it might sound like. Readers at home who own the Doctor Who - The Music album or any of its reissues can hear the enhanced noise right at the start of the "Meglos" track. Oh listen, there's a quote from the DW theme tune at the end of that cue.
• The "reset" sound for the chronic hysteresis in Parts One and Two is a peculiar "twinkle" that wouldn't sound out of place on the end of a pantomime fairy godmother's wand. Perhaps it was meant to point up the magical nature of this bit of pseudo-science? Again, an interesting choice for a science-vs-faith story.
• On the DVD commentary, Howell recalls a prank he played on producer John Nathan-Turner during a screening of Part Three. For the scene in which Meglos takes Caris by the hands and leads her off into the shadows of the bunker, Howell replaced the transmitted cue with the sound of a tango; Nathan-Turner didn't notice.
• Meglos' lighthouse/elevator/weapon thing gets its own signature sound once it's fired up in Part Four. It might best be described as "like that seagull noise at the start of the Bergerac theme".
• Famously, the closing theme music at the end of Part Four was played at a lower pitch than normal - closer to the Derbyshire arrangement's key of E minor - albeit at the correct speed, and to this day nobody knows why.

Vox pop
This score could easily have ended up sounding like a retread of the previous one - there are several cues in the latter half that would fit comfortably into the Leisure Hive score - but the use of the vocoder and the vibraslap keep it fresh. The inclusion of Paddy Kingsland's peppy style in the mix also helps. Perhaps the Radiophonic composers should have collaborated more often? Not one that I listen to regularly, but entertaining.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• The entire score was released on the Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Volume 4 CD in 2002, alongside Paddy Kingsland's score for Full Circle. A selection of Dick Mills' sound effects from both stories were included in Volume 3 the same year.
• Doctor Who - The Music included a single musical cue from Meglos, lasting about a minute and a half - it's the one from Part Two, when Meglos is hiding from the Tigellan guards inside the bunker.

1 - The Leisure Hive

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Lovett Bickford

What's the score?
The incidental music for The Leisure Hive, the first story of the Nathan-Turner era of DW, was composed by Peter Howell, who had also provided the new arrangement of the DW theme tune. This gave the new-style score and new theme a consistent musical texture, a canny move that would be repeated with the introduction of the Dominic Glynn arrangement of the theme tune for The Trial of a Time Lord and the Keff McCulloch arrangement for Time and the Rani.
As Howell and director Lovett Bickford explain in interview on the Leisure Hive DVD, Bickford included several lengthy transitions and scene-setting shots for Howell to provide "epic" music for. It's suggested that this was down to Bickford's filmic vision as a director; scurrilous bloggers like myself might wonder if it was also a creative way of filling out a short-running script. The epic music is very welcome in any case.

Musical notes

• As this is the first story to feature the Howell arrangement of the theme tune, let's talk about it. It's a very dynamic arrangement, sure to excite the viewer's anticipation of the episode that lies ahead. An echoing treble line, not all that dissimilar from the sound of the original theme arrangement, is driven along by a growling bass line - the rock 'n' roll years of DW have arrived. Parts, notably those that were created using a vocoder, have almost the quality of an electric guitar about them. The formation of the DOCTOR WHO logo is heralded by a very quiet washing sound - that'll change in 1985. The closing theme includes the middle eight section of the tune, which I like to think of as the "mouse chorus" - a high pitched vibrato synth sound. It tails off almost disappointedly as the singing mice are ushered out of the room and the main body of the theme returns. Rather than fade out, the closing theme ends with a rushing sound and goes out with a bang.
• Delia Derbyshire's theme arrangement was in the key of E minor, but the new arrangement is in the key of F sharp minor. As Howell recalls on the DVD commentary for the next story, Meglos, the practical consideration of the keyboard layout of his synthesizer led him to use the key of F; he then felt it was running too slowly, and sped it up to leave the final version another semitone higher.
• Part One famously opens with a long tracking shot along Brighton beach on a grey day, and Howell matches this with a wistful, desolate opening cue. It's probably best if we pass quickly over the little refrain of "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" that announces the Doctor's appearance. There's a hint of seagulls in the mournful cue that plays after K9's explosive attempt at bathing.
• The military-sounding cues in Parts One and Four show signs of classical influence. Mena's shuttle, returning to Argolis from Earth, is heralded by a cue with some similarities to Ravel's "Boléro", while the cues that play in Part Four while Pangol is creating an army of tachyonic copies of himself owe something to this and something to "Mars, the Bringer of War" from Holst's "The Planets" suite. Both pieces - with their associations of the romance of the industrial age and mechanised warfare respectively - are appropriate referents for the Argolin, whose fate depends on a machine.
• Howell plays along very nicely with the Part One cliffhanger and Part Two reveal, in which the Doctor appears to be dismembered by the Tachyon Recreation Generator. He sets this up with a sort of horrified synthesizer yelp and an urgent, downbeat cue during the earlier scene in Part One in which a tourist really is killed in the TRG; he then repeats this at the start of Part Two, after we've seen the Doctor's image suffer the same fate. When it becomes clear that the Doctor's unharmed, the urgent-sounding cue evaporates into an audible sigh of relief.
• The TRG has a little motif of its own, a repeated four-beat bass phrase that pops up at various points during the story. There's a panicky version of it when the TRG seems to be about to dismember the Doctor.
• I'm very fond of the cue leading up to the end of Part Two, in which Hardin's time experiment fails and the Doctor is aged 500 years. It conveys that something's gone wrong in an understated, melodic way, before subsiding into an angsty, wavering treble sound as the elderly Doctor is revealed. It's as if the music is as stumped as the characters as to what's happened and is taking a while to react. Then, once everybody's settled down at the start of Part Three, there's another nice melodic cue with a couple of minor key "tumbling" phrases to underline the downward spiral of the situation of Argolis.
• There's an unexpected burst of sequenced sound in Part Three that would have made Tangerine Dream proud. It comes just after Romana's removed a component from the TRG. For some reason, it plays over a shot of Pangol walking down a corridor.
• Once all the martial music in Part Four has died down and Mena and Pangol have re-emerged from the TRG, there's an odd upbeat fanfare that sounds almost like the flourish after an illusionist's trick. Which I suppose in a sense it is, but still. It's mood whiplash in musical form.
• There's a little taste of the bass line from the Howell arrangement of the theme tune in the cue early in Part Four when Mena collapses, and more confidently at the end of Part Four during the Doctor's "back to work" exit speech. Thus begins a long tradition of electronic composers working bits of the DW theme into their scores.

Vox pop
The director gave him the opportunity to show what the Radiophonic Workshop could do, and Peter Howell seized it with both hands. This score is lush, varied, and really feels like an all-out showcase for the new sound of DW. It sounds every bit as good on its own as it does over the episodes, and rewards repeated listening. I love it to bits.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• The entire score (without the episode breaks) was released on CD as Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Volume 3 in 2002, along with some of Dick Mills' sound effects from this story, Meglos and Full Circle.
• The 1983 album Doctor Who - The Music included a five-and-a-half minute suite of music from The Leisure Hive, topped off with the TARDIS dematerialisation sound and Dick Mills' atmospheric wind sound as used for Argolis exterior scenes.