Electric Light-Cycle Orchestras

To considerable Internet excitement, cues from Daft Punk's soundtrack to the forthcoming Tron: Legacy were finally unveiled last week for public inspection. [UPDATE: fake leaks?] Out of context, they didn’t necessarily add up to much: it's not quite the Hans Zimmer Inception drone that has had people geeking out for weeks, but the rising minimalistic motifs—cut off and restarted just as they’re reaching maximal tension, perpetually delaying payoff—confirmed the musical future is way simpler than it was nearly 30 years ago. The cues don’t really "work" without context, although if you turn them up loud enough, even the simple act of making coffee can seem immortally heroic. Despite their vague reserve, they’re totally melodic, a regression from Wendy Carlos' analog-cum-digital score in 1982's Tron.

The original film's a blast for the nostalgically inclined, but the Jungian symbolism's a bore, the visuals wonky (colors were rotoscoped after-the-fact) and the whole thing's more a time capsule than watchable entertainment. The music is fantastic, however, arguably the culmination of Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos' most intensely productive period. From 1968-82, she basically invented one version of how the future might sound, traveling 400 years through one instrument. 1968's Switched-On Bach translated (yes!) Bach to the Moog synthesizer and quickly went platinum. For the next 15 years, Carlos would arguably be the highest-profile Moog exponent (not exactly a high-competition position), elevating its status further in public consciousness more than her mentor Vladimir Ussachevsky.

Electronics in film scores were nothing new: the theremin had popped up as early as 1945's Spellbound, and 1956's Forbidden Planet generally gets credit for having the first all-electronic score, an eerie sequence of disorienting, primitive noises (labeled "electronic tonalities" as a sneaky way to avoid paying music guild fees). But in that 15-year-run, Carlos pushed further by simultaneously running forwards and backwards through time. Her Bach work, while iconic, is now mostly a curio for many listeners, which isn't fair. For anyone wanting to hear polyphony rendered with each part clear and sonically distinct, it surely delivers, even if it initially sounds like a set of standards reworked by novelty synths. (The problem is that not enough people really care about Bach to begin with, much less rendered as a chilly technical exercise.)

Her work on A Clockwork Orange—even when using the exact same methodologies as in her solely recorded work—genuinely is iconic, as were her similar classical tweakings for The Shining. The music's no different from the records that catapulted her to fame, but context is everything. The rare exception is Tron: the music's ahead of the movie, and it’s probably her most complex work. The '80s were drowning in synths (thanks, Tangerine Dream), but Carlos doesn't use them for pure (and hence quickly dated) ambiance, or simply use the shock of new sounds to recast well-known classics. Some is chromatic formalism—check out the scherzo, which bends an unusual melodic line into a recognizable fugue—and some is complex in more unexpected ways, but it's all of a piece. Specifically, it sounds like 1982 in the best possible way, which is to say it's complicated and often non-melodic in ways you don't hear much in movies anymore. It could be classical music for academics, the tail end of a time when movie scores didn't have to have tunes.

Tron: Legacy proposes to be a total blast, in part because the technology's finally here to render the fictional world inside a computer viscerally rather than conceptually. The trailers conjure up a gigantic rave, and the soundtrack fits. Still, in purely technical terms, the visuals have become more complicated while the music less so. Complete original scores are a dying breed in many respects, but those that are comfortable with dissonance and offer a lack of respect for melody are the rarest of all.

Not to discount her classically-inspired work, but Tron may well be the best thing Wendy Carlos ever did; its complexities, paradoxically, date it. That's true of pretty much all electronic innovations: the further ahead the technology, the quicker it'll be outpaced and firmly timestamp itself, at least until sounds become retro and genuinely futuristic again. In weird ways, the unreplicable Bach oddities A Clockwork Orange linked to images forever are now, once again, ahead of their time. Daft Punk's score will undoubtedly be energetic fun, and the movie will strobe itself onto more retinas than the original could ever have dreamed of. Visuals have expanded, but sound's contracted.

Posted by ahillis at August 4, 2010 8:02 AM