Notes in the Dark

The Pirates of the Caribbean movies do not have particularly distinguished music. In fact, in many ways the score is primitive. (And off the top of my head, I can’t remember who in Hans Zimmer’s shop is credited with the score.) Yet, the moment I noticed the music in the first Pirates movie, I knew it was one of the reasons the movie was going to be a hit. It’s unsophisticated, but really effective. There is a particular crescendo that gets used again and again, like they used to do in the old serials, or in old Star Trek episodes, and I think people just eat that up. (The second movie seems to use that crescendo more than the first, so it’s clear the producers “get it.”) It’s bad film music that is in fact very good — with zero artistic affectation.  The basic laws of musical manipulation have not changed over the decades. The real problem is not that Pirates has a score like this, or that movies don’t have scores like Ben-Hur any more, but that so much modern film music falls into the muddy middle between these pleasures. Nobody is aspiring to score like Miklos Rozsa (or rather, filmmaking has changed to the extent where Rozsa’s scores would be hardly possible), yet also no one is exactly hitting on the “sweet spot” of Pirates‘ damnably effective tropes.