STEVEN PRICE

The 1st of October the score to GRAVITY will be released from Watertower Music. You can see the cover and tracklisting and listen to clips over at their official website:

http://www.watertower-music.com/release … h=WTM39478

Seems to be a largely electronic score with lots of soundscaping, but also some organic elements like a female vocal, piano and violin/cello.

I was kinda hoping that Gravity would have no score whatsoever.

-Erik-

My review of GRAVITY, for anyone who is interested:

http://moviemusicuk.us/2013/10/08/gravity-steven-price/

Jon

A thoughtful review Jon.

Are we going to get rid of "the guy from attack the block" in this thread's title anytime soon?

Overrated!

Really? It's also one of my favourites this year. Quite spectacular music.

The rest is sound design. Effective or not, it's not the matter; But this further marks an era when sound design is nowadays considered music. Would a distinct motif, not a grand and distracting theme or anything unfitting like that, but a musically meaningful motif (even one note) harm anyone? Look at what Martinez did with the vastly superior score for Solaris.

Hmm, didn't you notice that the idea behind the synth motif at the beginning of Gravity and throughout the whole Debris is not too far from the idea behind Why So Serious?

3 or 4 times, not a thousand? Personally I feel that there's so much derivative, easily digestible, uncreative stuff out there that having to listen to something a few times to figure it out is a refreshing and pleasant experience. But I have not heard this particular score so I don't know that its not as bad as you say.

It is music... it's creative music for sure... but I don't think it does anything much different than any other standard suspense score. And the finale music is so overly simple and plain musically that I don't understand how something like this gets such rave reviews.

-Erik-

Yeah, I think Alan's nailed it. I think what Price did well was transitioning from the difficult sound design to the more traditional stuff at the end. You can really hear the two sides of the equation battling it out in "Tiengong" and "Shenzou," and then the more humanistic/emotional side eventually wins out in "Gravity." Taken on its own that cue is nothing special (though quite stirring and enjoyable, in an almost Two Steps From Hell kind of way), but it feels like a relief, which considering the film seems like a an appropriate emotional response to go for in that situation!

I'm not sure I'd write a rave review of this particular score either but I find myself "understanding" it much better than I usually do challenging/sound-design scores.

Indeed.

I'm not sure comparing it to SOLARIS is a great idea either. That's basically comparing a supernatural/romantic drama to an action film, despite the fact that both have sci-fi trappings. CAPTAIN PHILLIPS is a better comparison, really, for this film's primary genre. While the opposition in that film is all tribal polyrhythms and exotic electric cello motifs, in this one it's a pile of musical debris, scattered to all channels, lacking the musical equivalent of a horizon line. In those moments where characters gain clarity of goal, the music focuses in very clearly to a particular train of thought.

Like a lot of great sci-fi scores... Artemiev's SOLARIS, Vangelis' BLADE RUNNER, Goldsmith's ALIEN, Goldsmith's LOGAN'S RUN, the infamous FANTASTIC VOYAGE score, even the use of Ligeti in 2001 ... it's almost borderline sound design at times. That's a consistent strategy that runs through sci-fi scoring as a way to represent the 'otherness' or the 'infinite' of what else might be out there. (Even Herrmann's theremin, before it was a trope, was an experimental idea that had never been tried before.) So I'm not sure the 'sound design' thing is much of a criticism. So much of music is designed sound anyway.

I think like Southall half my appreciation goes to the fact that it's a score that actually contributes to narrative shape. There don't seem to be so many of those these days.

Low growls, brass bursts, pounding electronics, screeching, dissonent strings, etc. Meh! At times I thought I was hearing an early 80's Horner urban thriller score... without the drum loops and steel drums. It also has a heavy Zimmer/MV influence. Nothing new to see here... move along, move along.

-Erik-