[Nick Zwar]

One of my all time favorite film scores is LOGAN’S RUN by Jerry Goldsmith, which includes a lot of then cutting edge synthesizers, though I would not call it a synth score. It’s just exemplary of how synths can be used and incorporated into a classic orchestral structure.

The opening already sets the tone for the score, a mirror to Strauss’s optimistic “sunrise” Zarathustra, yet the effect is the opposite: the music sounds like dystopic oppression. The camera zooms in on “The City” a giant dome, and as soon as we’re inside, bang, the score turns fully electronic. Ice-cold. Surgical. Stockhausen comes to mind — or Varese’s “Poeme Electronique”, there is no warmth in the music. And Goldsmith was doing this in 1976, and I’ve heard avant-garde pieces from later in the 70s and 80s that sound like they’re chasing this shadow.

So the music is sterile, cold, but, and that’s typical for many of classic Goldsmith scores, especially his science fiction scores, there are a lot of “ideas” and concepts in the music, and the architecture is genius. The first acoustic instruments enter when Jessica is first encountered and mentions the “Sanctuary”, a mythical place outside of the dome. At first, these instruments stay in the back, the electronics still dominate, but the more Logan and Jessica try to flee the city, the closer they get to “Sanctuary”, the more acoustic instruments creep in, like vegetation through concrete (an idea that is visually mirrored later when they come find the old man in the overgrown ruins of Washington DC). The music slowly adds more and more orchestral instruments, first just maybe some percussive hammered piano notes. Then strings. Then more. The further from the dome, the more “human” the sound becomes. There’s the great section, which has its own musical voice: the enigmatic freezer robot Box (who, like today’s A.I., sounds sentient, but may just be a program on a loop that actually needs a re-boot), who belongs neither to the inside nor the outside.

The music reflects the difference between breathing recycled air and gulping wind. Until the full orchestra comes to shine with “The Sun”. Great cue. And it explodes after all the oppression… twice. And that’s another interesting thing. When Jessica and Logan’s first see the outside world, the music is glorious, like a celebration of life and outdoors, when the pursuing Francis reaches the same spot, the music — still fully orchestral — now sounds like a threat… which of course the encounter with the outside is for Francis and his worldview. When Francis sees the same sun that same full orchestra that embraced Logan and Jessica now turns predatory, threatening.

The score is dense with these moments. The music stays now acoustic except for one final confrontation cue, when Logan goes back inside the dome to confront the computer. And that’s another harrowing piece of electronica. It’s a remarkably well constructed film score, composed through like any classical symphonic work, containing both wonderful melodic passages and alien atonality, warm, gentle music and ice cold sterile music hostile to genuine feeling. Masterpiece. But is it a “synth score”? I would say not really… it’s a score that uses synths, among other things.