American Beauty

Internet debates about the most influential soundtracks invariably mention John Williams, then go a bit further and get to Miklos Rozsa, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and invariably you end up back at Max Steiner's King Kong which probably did more than any other early score to put the concept of a properly composed film score onto the cinema going map. Recently, Hans Zimmer might be sited, but in fairness, almost all of his imitators work with/for him at Media Ventures and it's essentially just a house style. My pick for most influential score of the last five years, if not longer, is almost certainly Thomas Newman's American Beauty. His quirky and perky marimbas and percussion is seemingly omnipresent in advertising, other film scores and the score itself was sampled, quite successfully I might add, for a popular dance remix, American Dream.

Sam Mendes' film won a slew of Oscars, but Newman was unfortunately passed over for the original score, although he was nominated. Whether American Beauty is his best score or not is open to debate (I'd suggest that it's close, but not quite), he is definitely a composer who deserves an Oscar if only because he's one of the most creative, original and now imitated film composers around. The score certainly worked in the film. The film was the sort where the acting and script were the most important ingredients, but Newman's score worked supremely well at instilling an almost inane perkiness with his minimalist marimba and percussion. A musical suggestion of the inane, repetitive and superficial pleasantry of modern life perhaps.

The darker side of the film is of course reflected in the score, the titular track midway through the album developing a sombre piano idea against a pad of synths and slightly distorted acoustic instruments. The euphamistically titled Choking the Bishop played on detuned Mandolin is a creepy distortion of the main marimba theme. Having called it a main theme, none of the ideas play the same twice, it is in essence a variations on an idea score, but most of the cues have a fairly minimalist structure and repeat a simple (or not so simple) phrase with variations mainly happening in the background.

It would probably fair to call America Beauty Newman's most successful experimental score. His odd combinations of curious instruments don't always work, but here he pretty well perfected the formula and applied to the film impressively. That doesn't mean it always makes for easy listening, but as an example of modern, non romantic symphony orchestra scoring, it's ahead of the field.