[Nicolai P. Zwar]

It’s an interesting question actually… “Scores Which You Simply Cannot Fathom.”
There are film scores I don’t dislike, that would be too easy. Disliking something is a clean, declarative act. You hear it, you wince, you move on. “Not fathoming”, though, is a different beast. It’s that strange limbo where you sit there thinking: “I don’t get this… but maybe someone smarter than me does?” It’s the musical equivalent of staring at a modern art installation and wondering whether the joke is on you, or on the curator, or on the entire concept of walls.

And to be fair, there are scores I once dismissed that I now like, sometimes even love. Tastes evolve, ears mature, and occasionally you realize that the thing you thought was noise was actually a composer being twenty years ahead of you. Interestingly enough, I never had much of an issue with some of the composers people grapple with… like Leonard Rosenman or Alex North. I thought they were wonderfully original and uncompromising voices. They were exciting from the start. They still are. They are among my all time favorite film composers.

But then there are those moments, those baffling “what the hell were they thinking” moments. Not because the music is bold or experimental, but because it seems to have wandered in from a completely different movie, possibly a different planet.

Take John Barry’s “Laser” cue in The Black Hole. Climactic action, tension rising, robots fighting, the whole thing teetering on the edge of cosmic doom… and suddenly the score decides it wants to be somewhere else entirely. The music isn’t bad per se, and most certainly fitting for a British Coronation Ceremony or something, but not for people and robots fighting it out in outer space! I cannot fathom why they did that. The music calls attention to itself in every way you don’t want music to do in a scene like that. It’s like someone interrupting a heavyweight championship boxing match to read poetry. No matter how nice the poem… it just doesn’t fit!

Or the Hanson symphony excerpt tracked onto the end of Alien. To this day, I remember sitting in the theater thinking, “What is that doing here?’ And I didn’t know the Hanson piece at the time, but I felt it didn’t belong. It felt like the music editor had discovered a lovely bit of symphonic calm and thought, “Well, the movie needs to end somehow, why not with this? Isn’t this soothing? Isn’t this pretty?” Many people didn’t mind, some even liked it. I remain unconvinced. My initial rejection hasn’t really changed, I’m just more used to it now.

However, unconventional choices can absolutely work. Vangelis scoring THE BOUNTY with electronics? Hell yeah, inspired. A historical drama with synths? Why not. It’s a reminder that “unexpected” is not the same as “misjudged”, and that sometimes the least obvious approach is the one that lands with the most grace.

So yes, there are scores I cannot fathom. Or at least tracks and cues. Not because they’re bad, necessarily (though they may be), but because they are “misplaced”, because they don’t work. They make me wonder what the creative mind thought that was a good idea. In many cases I doubt the people in charge know or understand much about music. Of course, not everything needs to be “understood”. But it should, at the very least, make sense in the movie it’s in.