MOVIE MUSIC UK

MOVIE MUSIC UK CLASSICS

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

I so much want to like Alex North’s music. Every bone in my body tells me that, technically, he was one of the most gifted and creative composers every to work in Hollywood. Modern luminaries laud his work as being some of the most groundbreaking ever written for the Silver Screen. Jerry Goldsmith was a close friend and ardent admirer. As a 14 time Oscar nominee, the esteem in which he is held speaks for itself. But, with a few notable exceptions, I never have been able to actually sit and “enjoy” an Alex North score. He didn’t write that kind of music.

Africa, the score he wrote for a 1967 TV series, has long been held up as one of his forgotten masterpieces. A four-hour television event which would attempt to convey – as Ford Thaxton’s excellent liner notes describe – “the mind-reeling kaleidoscope of man’s existence from the primordial Then to the bewildering global Now”, Africa was a tough challenge in any composer’s book. The series attempted to capture on film every aspect of the Dark Continent, past and present. It’s people and their culture, its dazzlingly varied landscape, it’s wondrous assortment of wildlife, its traditions and its heritage. From the description above, one might expect to hear something lush and wondrous, overflowing with tribal rhythms, exotic dances, and colourful depictions of life and movement. Well, it does… but this is Alex North, remember, and nothing is to be taken for granted.

The one thing Alex North regularly did was challenge expectations. Instead of depicting Africa in the way composers such as Jerry Goldsmith and James Newton Howard have done in recent years, North’s musical landscape is a savage, primal, percussive assault on the senses, adding a level of feral intensity to the oddly-clustered orchestral tones that have littered so many of his more avant garde works. In many ways, Africa is reminiscent of the music he would compose for the 1981 fantasy film Dragonslayer – all off-kilter textures and scary themes that almost defy conventional description. Admirers of Jerry Goldsmith’s spectacularly unconventional score for The Planet of the Apes will also surely find similarities between the two works; such was Goldsmith’s admiration for North, it is almost certain he took inspiration from this score when he wrote his own percussion-heavy piece the following year.

This album of music from Africa is split into two halves, beginning with the 30-minute “Symphony for a New Continent”, which takes the thematic content of the underscore proper and re-establishes it as four distinct classical movements. Throughout the course of the symphony, North utilises dozens and dozens of wild percussion combinations – things that clang, clatter, and get bashed with mallets. Interwoven within these ancient rhythms are a series of atonal orchestral textures and instrumental passages, many of which play at odds with, and intentionally contradict, the whistles and drums over the top. But this is not to say the symphony is all abstraction. I mentioned earlier that I do enjoy listening to some North scores and occasionally, for a few brief moments, Africa revisits the tonal tendencies of scores like The Agony and the Ecstasy, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Last Butterfly. A playful passage for pizzicato strings and lighter percussion appears at around the three minute mark in the Second Movement; the Third Movement begins with a soothing duet for flutes and marimba, and goes through various permutations before exploding into a terrifically violent conclusion.

The album concludes with six cues of underscore from the series itself – all of it derived from material from the symphony (and vice versa), and which maintains the same style virtually throughout. The ‘Main Title Theme’ is a jerky march for brasses that pulse with short bursts of sonic energy; percussion that hammers incessantly around the theme; and a low, unheralded string theme that is barely audible underneath the carnage. ‘Man in Africa’ and ‘The Joyful Days’ both introduce slow, forlorn string passages that stand as some of the few traditionally tonal moments on the entire album, the latter also expanding upon the free-spirited tribal dances of the symphony, filled with maracas, flutes and fluttering trumpets and standing at odds with the more dour music that surrounds it. The gentle, hooting oboes and clarinets of ‘Kilimanjaro’ illustrate the mountain’s serene, mysterious beauty, but above all these, though, my favourite cue is the jaunty and good-natured ‘Victoria Falls/Progress’, which characterises one of Zambia’s most spectacular natural wonders with a buoyant string theme and light percussion accompaniment.

Two other things I must also mention. Firstly, anyone who has heard the Jerry Goldsmith re-recording of North’s rejected score for 2001 may be surprised to hear that film’s main theme in Africa. The rather amusing truth is that North’s sheet music for the main title from Africa was accidentally mid-filed in the box with the 2001 score, and was simply assumed to be a part of the latter work when the Varése Sarabande team came to make the recording. Secondly, it is also worth noting the beautiful cover artwork that adorns the front of the CD – a deeply moving and poetic depiction of a herd of elephants marching serenely across the savannah in front of a blazing sunset.

In summary, I would advise caution in anyone whose tolerance of musical oddity and abstraction is low to zero. There is little in the way of conventional themes or melodies in Africa and, despite its importance as a work of art, I cannot bring myself to recommend it to anyone other than ardent admirers of North’s work, or true film music scholars and historians. In my heart of hearts, I know that Africa is a good and worthy score, no matter how challenging it might be. Unfortunately, I also know that it’ll be a long time before I force myself to sit through the whole thing again.

Track Listing:

• SYMPHONY FOR A NEW CONTINENT
• First Movement (7:14)
• Second Movement (5:10)
• Third Movement (9:36)
• Fourth Movement (8:19)

• AFRICA
• Main Title Theme (Long Version) (2:54)
• Man in Africa (4:06)
• The Joyful Days (3:39)
• Victoria Falls/Progress (3:38)
• Kilimanjaro (3:15)
• Main Title Theme (Short Version) (2:09)

Running Time: 50 minutes 04 seconds

Prometheus PCR-509 (1967/2001)

Music composed by Alex North. Conducted by Alex North and Henry Brant. Performed by The Graunke Symphony Orchestra. Orchestrations by Henry Brant. Recorded and mixed by Val Balentin. Album digitally edited and mastered by James Nelson. Album produced by Ford A. Thaxton.