In week 1 I was tasked to select a piece of music from a film, analyse the piece and then bring it to the class in week 2. For this I chose Memories Of Green by Vangelis, used for the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner.
Vangelis has scored numerous films including Chariots Of Fire for which he won an the Academy Award for Best Original Music Score although the piece I have chosen was not originally made for the film. It first appeared on Vangelis' own album See You Later in 1980 which surprised me because of how perfectly it fits within the tone, mood and context of the film.
Blade Runner takes place in a dystopian future where the lines between man and machine are becoming more and more blurred which I think is something heavily represented in the instrumentation. A main aspect of the piece is a piano composition which really speaks to the emotional narrative of the film but the simple fact that it is a composition on a piano does also. The piano has a very human feel to it especially in the way the bass notes resonate, this juxtaposed with the mechanical bleeping on the track really shows the narrative musically. Harrison Ford's character plays an agent tasked to seek out robots who are almost indistinguishable from humans, called replicants and one question posed throughout the film is whether or not Ford himself is a replicant. This confusion and is shown through the synthesised sirens in the piece which remind the audience of the protagonist's status, the tone of the film and the guessing games going on in the background all the time. There are also rain-like sounds in the piece which go along side the ever present rain in the future Los Angeles setting along a lot of panning synth noises creating images of futurist vehicles passing through a metropolis.
This piece does brilliantly to keep the audience within the world of the film and beautifully represent the intricacies and second guessing that goes on throughout the story.
