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BASIL POLEDOURIS
Conan The Barbarian - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Place Of Origin: Los Angeles, CA, USA
Release Year: 1992
Ripping Source: CD
Label: Varese Sarabande
Catalog Number: VSD-5390
Ripped With: EAC (Secure And Test) with LOG and CUE
Format: FLAC
Scans: Yes
Tracklisting:
1 Anvil Of Crom 2:34
2 Riddle Of Steel / Riders Of Doom 5:36
3 Gift Of Fury 3:50
4 Wheel Of Pain 4:09
5 Atlantean Sword 3:50
6 Theology / Civilization 3:13
7 Wifeing (Theme Of Love From “Conan The Barbarian”) 2:10
8 The Leaving / The Search 5:59
9 Mountain Of Power Procession 3:21
10 The Tree Of Woe 3:31
11 Recovery 2:11
12 The Kitchen / The Orgy 6:30
13 Funeral Pyre 4:29
14 Battle Of The Mounds 4:52
15 Death Of Rexor 5:34
16 Orphans Of Doom / The Awakening 5:31
There is no rock involved in this music, but this soundtrack is very metal. If you enjoyed my Crom upload, you should enjoy this just as well.
Quote:
The musical score for Conan the Barbarian was composed and conducted by Basil Poledouris, and it was performed by members of The Orchestra and Chorus of Santa Cecilia & The Radio Symphony Of Rome.
Milius recruited his friend, Basil Poledouris, to produce the score for Conan; they had a successful collaboration on Big Wednesday. The film industry's usual practice was to contract a composer to start work after the main scenes had been filmed, but Milius hired Poledouris before principal photography had started; the composer was given the opportunity to compose the film's music based on the initial storyboards and to modify it throughout filming before recording the score near the end of production. Poledouris made extensive use of Musync—a music and tempo editing hardware and software system invented by Robert Randles (subsequently nominated for an Oscar for Scientific Achievement), to modify the tempo of his compositions and synchronize them with the action in the film. The system helped make his job easier and faster; it could automatically adjust tempos when the user changed the positioning of beats. In the montage where Conan grows up, for example, Poledouris had Randles prepare, over the phone, a long accelerando that landed on precise moments in the picture along the way. Poledouris would, otherwise, have had to conduct the orchestra and adjust his compositions on the fly. Conan is the first film to list Musync in its credits.
Milius and Poledouris exchanged ideas throughout production, working out themes and 'emotional tones' for each scene. According to Poledouris, Milius envisioned Conan as an opera with little or no dialog; Poledouris composed enough musical pieces for most (approximately two hours) of the film. This was his first large-scale orchestral score, and a characteristic of his work here was that he frequently slowed down the tempo of the last two bars (segments of beats) before switching to the next piece of music. Poledouris said the score uses a lot of fifths as its most primitive interval; thirds and sixths are introduced as the story progresses. The composer visited the film sets several times during filming to see the imagery his music would accompany. After principal photography was completed, Milius sent him two copies of the edited film: one without music, and the other with its scenes set to works by Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev, to illustrate the emotional overtones he wanted.
Poledouris said he started working on the score by developing the melodic line—a pattern of musical ideas supported by rhythms. The first draft was a poem sung to the strumming of a guitar, composed as if Poledouris was a bard for the barbarian. This draft became the 'Riddle of Steel', a composition played with 'massive brass, strings, and percussion', which also serves as Conan's personal theme. The music is first played when Conan's father explains the riddle to him. Laurence E. MacDonald, Professor of Music at Mott Community College, said the theme stirs up the appropriate emotions when it is repeated during Conan's vow to avenge his parents. The film's main musical theme, the 'Anvil of Crom', which opens the film with 'the brassy sound of twenty-four French horns in a dramatic intonation of the melody, while pounding drums add an incessantly driven rhythmic propulsion' is played again in several later scenes.
Poledouris completed the music that accompanies the attack on Conan's village at the beginning of the film in October 1981. Milius initially wanted a chorus based on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana to herald the appearance of Doom and his warriors in this sequence. After learning that Excalibur (1981) had used Orff's work, he changed his mind and asked his composer for an original creation. Poledouris' theme for Doom consists of 'energetic choral passages', chanted by the villain's followers to salute their leader and their actions in his name. The lyrics were composed in English and roughly translated into Latin; Poledouris was 'more concerned about the way the Latin words sounded than with the sense they actually made. 'He set these words to a melody adapted from the 13th-century Gregorian hymn, Dies Irae, which was chosen to 'communicate the tragic aspects of the cruelty wrought by Thulsa Doom.'
The film's music mostly conveys a sense of power, energy, and brutality, yet there are tender moments. The sounds of oboes and string instruments accompany Conan and Valeria's intimate scenes, imbuing them with a sense of lush romance and an emotional intensity. According to MacDonald, Poledouris deviated from the practice of scoring love scenes with tunes reminiscent of Romantic period pieces; instead, Poledouris made Conan and Valeria's melancholic love theme unique through his use of 'minor-key harmony'. David Morgan, a film journalist, heard Eastern influences in the 'lilting romantic melodies'. Page Cook, audio critic for Films in Review, describes Conan the Barbarian??'?s score as 'a large canvas daubed with a colorful yet highly sensitive brush. There is innate intelligence behind Poledouris's scheme, and the pinnacles reached are often eloquent with haunting intensity.'
From late November 1981, Poledouris spent three weeks recording his score in Rome. He engaged a 90-instrument orchestra and a 24-member choir from Santa Cecilia, and conducted them personally. The pieces of music were orchestrated by Greig McRitchie, Poledouris's frequent collaborator. The chorus and orchestra were recorded separately. The 24 tracks of sound effects, music, and dialog were downmixed into a single-channel, making Conan the Barbarian the last film released by a major studio with a mono soundtrack. According to Poledouris, Raffaella De Laurentiis balked at the cost ($30,000) of a stereo soundtrack and was worried over the paucity of theaters equipped with stereo sound systems. - Wikipedia |
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