Richard HOROWITZ
Any Given Sunday
OST
PROMO RH CD 01
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In close succession we are offered Hans Zimmer's electronics for
Gladiator, and Richard Horowitz electronics for American football
movie Any Given Sunday, intended by the director Oliver Stone to 'reflect
the ancient soul of the film', 'the mythological souls of his modern gladiators.'
Oliver Stone is one of those rare directors who pushes the form of commercial
cinema to the limit, and his use of music has ranged from era-defining pop,
to outstanding scores from John Williams for Born on the Fourth of July,
JFK and Nixon. Stone decided to try something very different with
Any Given Sunday. The 'score' if such it can be called, is a vast
patchwork of rap - two albums, one with swearing, one without, have already
been issued - and work by a wide range of other composers, Richard Horowitz
just being one of nine. There are copious notes by Horowitz included with
this disc, which necessarily concentrate almost exclusively on his part in
scoring the film, though an excellent article by Jeff Bond in Film Score
Monthly (Vol 5, No. 2) puts the whole complex process in context. Horowitz
notes are exuberant, deeply personal, arguably pretentious, and include a
letter to Stone which it is simply astonishing.
A huge amount of work and intellectual effort has been put into conceptualising
this score. This is meant to be considered art, shame then that a director
who understands so well how music can work to enhance the emotional power
of film, that Stone should be satisfied with this end result. Clearly this
is the same Richard Horowitz whose music worked well as extra material in
The Sheltering Sky and 1492: Conquest of Paradise, though here
while still often derived from ethnic rhythmic devices, the scoring is largely
synthesised. The sad fact is that it all boils down to 'dance music'. Only
the opening 'Final TD' - presumably from near the end of the film, has any
sense of mythological destiny - and that in a very modern, digitised idiom.
For 40 tracks, loop follows loop. There are atmospheric patches. And loop
follows loop - a relentlessly turgid machine with no clear end in view -
as the composer's notes essentially point out. He improvised/wrote hours
of this stuff, and Stone mixed and matched as his team of editors edited
and edited and re-edited his million and a half feet of film, attempting
to find a film out of the chaos of what appears to have been a project close
to being out of control. The resultant CD is the sort of thing anyone familiar
with MIDI can assemble with a decent synthesiser, some 'world music' samples,
a digital reverb unit and a sequencer. There are no worthwhile themes, only
loops, riffs and beats. At normal volume it is all but unlistenable. A aggressive
cacophony that may well be appropriate to the undeclared war that is American
football. Even so, it is without a doubt the worst film related release I've
heard so far this year.
Reviewer
Gary S. Dalkin
+
