An essay on the use of music Part I: The ALIEN Franchise

How wonderful and important is the audible language of emotion? To many authors, including myself, indescribably and vitally. Often times, the reason I end up loving a motion picture or TV show or even a song itself is the music. Oftentimes, it's the melody I love first, and the lyrics second. Sometimes I love the melody while I detest the lyrics. Here are some examples that have recently come to mind: I LOVE the ALIEN movie franchise. Why? Mainly because Ripley is a badass and I have a girl crush on Sigourney Weaver. I'm talking, I wish I could BE her, almost 6 feet tall, willowy, graceful, feminine, and yet when it's time to be a bad motherfucker, she does it better than even (gasp!) Sarah Connah! But let's get back to music. The musical score from the very first Alien film (Ridley Scott, 1979) is so beautiful, so wondrous, and yet so menacing at times, that it pours the emotion and tension into scenes that would have lacked without this music, no matter how scary or gory they are. Jerry Goldsmith's score is brilliant, a rainbow of different sensations. While I loved the music of Aliens by James Cameron (1986), I have to admit that James Horner's stuff was a little too upbeat, or reminiscent of "Wrath of Khan", which Horner scored 2 years earlier. The one exception is "The Queen"...a sinister piece consisting of a continuous "droning" and "buzzing" that increases in volume and severity as Ripley and her little friend Newt encounter the fearsome matriarch of the savage xenomorph family inhabiting LV426. As many fans, I didn't care for Alien 3 or Alien Resurrection as much as I did for the first 2 films, although I admit to liking them for each of their positive contributions. Alien 3 had beautiful, haunting, Catholic-esque choral arrangements by Elliot Goldenthal, and Alien 4 (Rez) had an amazing, evocative, and rather sensual score from John Frizzell, and I actually found myself liking Frizzell's stuff better than Horner's or Goldenthal's. Here is a fun slideshow I made with stills and promo shots/posters from the franchise...its main purpose is just to share how each movie's music affected me, and how it's easy to connect Prometheus and its upcoming sequels to the existing Alien films as well as the newest Alien film that was just announced within the past week or so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQNXR...

I am going to try to post another 2 blogs today about music and how I chose certain pieces for my Crush and Bright dream playlists :)