Music Composed by Howard Shore
Rating: **** 1/2

Howard Shore has continuing relationships with many directors, but none have lasted so long or yielded as many scores as his relationship with David Cronenberg. While not all of their collaborations have been stellar (I don’t think many would rank The Brood or Spider with Shore’s best work), at best Cronenberg has inspired some of the finest music in Shore’s canon (The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash). A History of Violence, Cronenberg’s harrowing portrait a well-loved man whose identity is thrown into question by a single act of violent defense, may be their best collaboration to date. True, Shore has been down this path before (Silence of the Lambs and Se7en are two of the most iconic examples of turbulent psychological scoring). Yet while his previous works in the genre have been brilliant, their bleakness has always felt so overwhelming that I very rarely feel the desire to return. A History of Violence feels much more emotionally accessible, perhaps owing to the fact that Shore mingles the ominous dread with more heart and humanity than he did in those earlier desolate scores. In many ways, History plays as a combination of the bleak anxiety of The Silence of the Lambs and the warmth of Lord of the Rings. Looking back, it seems that while that latter trilogy of scores was crucial in developing Shore’s current voice as a composer, it also served as a crash-course for listeners who never quite “got” Shore before. After 3 years and 12 hours of monumental music (music that quite a few film music geeks have memorized backwards and forwards), we’re fluent enough in his musical language that we can follow him into the dark territory that once seemed so unapproachable.

Howard Shore

History’s tracks are almost all one-word titles, as though to imply the stark animalistic instincts that the music keeps driving to unearth. “Motel” opens the score with quiet terror, as a sustained chord on the strings slowly expands, revealing new dissonant textures the louder it gets. It’s probably the last device you would expect for a representation of pure carnal violence, but it’s extremely effective and Shore repeatedly uses the device throughout the score (most notable in the surprisingly titled, “Violence”). But the tone changes to hesitatingly tender with “Tom.” Here, Shore introduces the theme for the title character, a more restrained cousin of his Hobbit/Shire theme from Lord of the Rings. Both share the same opening phrase and similar orchestration, but this theme seems to struggle more, as though it’s attempting to make a strong melodic statement but can’t quite stabilize itself long enough to do so. Of course, this is not a flaw in Shore’s writing, but rather a brilliant musical depiction of a man struggling to embody a persona of warmth and purity despite the violent undercurrents that constantly threaten that façade. As the score progresses, this struggle grows more and more pronounced. The next cue, “Cheerleader,” continues this trend in the guise of a gentle love theme derived from Tom’s theme. Though the melody seems beautiful and innocent, it balances atop a bed of shifting harmonies that hint at darker undercurrents. The harmonies are never blatantly ominous, but just uneasy enough in their constant motion to leave us feeling slightly apprehensive. This struggle is embodied in the orchestration itself, which casts the solo woodwind’s melody (usually the flute or the oboe) as the desperate attempt to maintain gentle nobility and the strings’ harmonies as the repressed undercurrents that can either support or destroy that ideal.

That ideal of tenderness quickly dissolves after a second run in with pure carnage in “Diner.” The aftermath, “Hero,” shows Tom’s theme giving its last gasp before bleak suspicions entirely engulf the melody. From this point on, suspicions dominate the score and give way to despair and decay as Tom’s relationship with his family (and with himself) quickly deteriorates. As Shore’s music is primarily concerned with capturing the subtle and complex emotional turmoil running beneath the surface, there are few outright violent bursts. Only once does the score really erupt with energy, in the pulse pounding “Run.” Here, with dizzying layers of counterpoint (contained almost entirely within the string section), Shore manages to capture a larger-than-life sense of terror without resorting to overt bombast. But apart from that exception, subtler and bleaker motifs consume the score and give voicing to the growing anxiety shared by both Tom and his family.

Gradually, a new theme emerges to represent these decaying relationships, in “The Staircase.” Many have compared this melody to the falling/rising theme to Zimmer’s theme from The Thin Red Line, but I find the similarity rather negligible. Yes, they both start with a similar falling/rising phrase, but Shore’s interpretation is much more bleak and restrained, and he ultimately takes the material in a much more complex direction (at any rate, the similarity is nowhere near as jarring as it was in John Williams’ Revenge of the Sith). More importantly, Shore’s piece is the perfect musical depiction of a relationship giving its dying gasp and it has a devastating effect on the scene it plays over. He uses the theme again in the closing, “The Return.” The scene plays without dialogue, but Shore draws more unspeakably raw emotion from those few despairing glances than any dialogue could possibly convey. The score could easily close here, but Shore surprisingly decides to allow Tom’s tender theme to have the last word in “Ending,” tentatively indicating that the family unit may prevail against the demons after all.

It may seem like gushing overstatement, but I do believe that Shore approaches films like this in a manner unlike anyone else who does or ever has attempted to score psychological dramas. Few would walk away from any of his scores humming a melody, but the scores are nevertheless almost entirely tonal. This is a far cry from the usual mix of ambient sound textures or dissonant mulling that all-too-frequently dominates music for “serious” films. While dissonance and atonality can be effective in conveying psychological turmoil, more often than not they’re used as a crutch, a method of unnerving the audience without actually saying anything significant. Shore proves that a rich harmonic soundscape can probe our complex and ever-shifting psychological demons far more effectively than an arbitrary handful of tone clusters or a droning synthesizer. I’m sure that somebody with a firmer background in music theory could do a more thorough job of discussing the harmonic relationships in this score, but you don’t need a PHD to feel the effect of those relationships – every moment of tender beauty feels ready to give way to crushing despair, while every moment of bleak despair still carries a faint glimmer of humanity. I won’t attempt to posit A History of Violence as the year’s most enjoyable score, but it’s hands down the year’s most thoughtful, probing, intelligent, and ultimately moving.

Music Composed, Orchestrated and Conducted by Howard Shore; Recorded by John Kurlander / Mixed by Peter Cobbin; Album Produced by Howard Shore; Availability: In print; Label (Catalogue): New Line Records, (NLR39051); Release Date: October 11, 2005

01. Motel (3′11)
02. Tom (1′31)
03. Cheerleader (1′58)
04. Diner (1′50)
05. Hero (2′42)
06. Run (2′25)
07. Violence (3′12)
08. Porch (4′17)
09. Alone (1′36)
10. The Staircase (2′44)
11. The Road (3′06)
12. Nice Gate (3′15)
13. The Return (4′39)
14. Ending (3′48)

Total Playing Time: 40′14