Tubular Bells
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| - | A '''horror film score''' is [[music]] used and often specially written for [[films]] in the [[horror films|horror]] [[genre]]. | ||
| - | ==History== | + | '''''Tubular Bells''''' is the debut [[vinyl record|record album]] of English musician [[Mike Oldfield]], recorded when he was 19 and released in [[1973 in music|1973]]. It was the first album released by [[Virgin Records]] and an early cornerstone of the company's success. [[Vivian Stanshall]] provided the voice of the "Master of Ceremonies" who reads off the list of instruments at the end of the first movement. The opening piano solo was used as a soundtrack to the enormously successful [[William Friedkin]] film [[The Exorcist (film)|''The Exorcist'']] (released the same year) and gained considerable airplay because of this. |
| - | ===Beginning of the Sound Era===<!-- Hidden Comment --> | + | |
| - | While the breakthrough Universal horror films of 1931, [[Dracula]] and [[Frankenstein]] used little or no music apart from for title sequences, [[Franz Waxman]]'s score for ''[[Bride of Frankenstein]]'' is often cited as one of the first modern film scores. In particular, the long and elaborate piece that accompanies the Bride's creation is a triumph of orchestral film scoring, enhancing greatly the excitement, eeriness and wit of the film. | ||
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| - | The late 1930s and 1940s saw unknown and often uncredited composers such as [[Hans J. Salter]] and [[Frank Skinner (composer)|Frank Skinner]] setting the tone for later horror music. Often the music was darkly and lushly romantic, but heavily influenced by [[impressionist music|impressionism]], [[atonal music|atonality]] and [[serialism]]. A chief example is ''[[The Wolf Man (1941 film)|The Wolf Man]]'' (1940), to which Salter and Skinner both contributed. | ||
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| - | ===Hammer Horror (1950s-'70s)=== | ||
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| - | The [[United Kingdom|British]] [[Hammer horror]]s of the 1950s, '60s and '70s owed their musical feel to composer [[James Bernard (composer)|James Bernard]], whose pacey, often frenetic, jarring scores to films such as ''[[Dracula (1958 film)|Dracula]]'' (1958), ''[[The Plague of the Zombies]]'' (1966) and ''The Devil Rides Out'' (1968) are among his best-known. Bernard was fond of using the score to play along with the title of the film—his three-note signature for Dracula can be sung, and by prefiguring it with another four notes, Bernard could underscore the main title of Taste the Blood of Dracula. | ||
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| - | In fact, Hammer employed a number of other composers, including [[Franz Reizenstein]] (''[[The Mummy (1959 movie)|The Mummy]]'', 1959), [[Malcolm Williamson]] (''The Brides of Dracula'', 1960) and [[Tristram Cary]] (''[[Quatermass and the Pit (film)|Quatermass and the Pit]]'', 1967, and ''Blood from the Mummy's Tomb'', 1971). Despite the obvious atonal influence on the earlier Universal film scores, [[Benjamin Frankel]]'s 1960 score for ''The Curse of the Werewolf'' (1960) is believed by some to contain the first film theme to be based entirely on [[Arnold Schoenberg]]'s [[serialism|Twelve-Tone scale]]. | ||
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| - | ===1960s onwards=== | ||
| - | On the other side of the Atlantic, it was perhaps [[Bernard Herrmann]]'s string score for [[Alfred Hitchcock|Hitchcock's]] ''[[Psycho (1960 film)|Psycho]]'' that changed the sound of horror music. The stabbing rhythms of the famous shower scene have been imitated many times since. | ||
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| - | The 1970s saw a new wave of [[slasher film]]s, which tended to have more contemporary-sounding scores, often using electronic instruments. Horror director [[John Carpenter]] was well known for scoring his own films, such as ''[[Halloween (1978 film)|Halloween]]'' (1978). For [[The Exorcist (film)|The Exorcist]], [[William Friedkin]] rejected a score by [[Lalo Schiffrin]] and used the [[temp track]] featuring assorted pieces of music including part of [[Mike Oldfield]]'s [[Tubular Bells]]. | ||
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Tubular Bells is the debut record album of English musician Mike Oldfield, recorded when he was 19 and released in 1973. It was the first album released by Virgin Records and an early cornerstone of the company's success. Vivian Stanshall provided the voice of the "Master of Ceremonies" who reads off the list of instruments at the end of the first movement. The opening piano solo was used as a soundtrack to the enormously successful William Friedkin film The Exorcist (released the same year) and gained considerable airplay because of this.
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Tubular Bells" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
