Home
*  *  *
 AIM Radio
Program 17 -
Armenian/Jazz Fusion
with Musaner
Playlist and
Artist Info here
*  *  *
 Music Mart
Guest Recordings
New & Noteworthy
More
*  *  *
Standouts
Recommendations
Interviews & More
Adventures in Film
ComposerRoundtable
Spotlight Artists
Sign of the Times
*  *  *

ADVENTURES IN FILM

Sci-Fi Classic 'Forbidden Planet'

Forbidden Planet (1956), an influential science fiction classic, was the first commercial film to feature an all-electronic score. Only don't call it a 'score' because the credits read Electronic Tonalities, instead. This is because MGM acceded to a Musicians Union demand not to use the term 'score' on account of the fact that there were no performances by live musicians. Just sounds emanating from vacuum tube circuits manipulated with a tape recorder.

The Union would not let co-creators Bebe and Louis Barron become members, so Forbidden Planet was the last work these electronic music pioneers did for Hollywood. They went on to collaborate with noted composer John Cage, theater producers, and independent filmmakers in the Barrons' own electronic music studio, one of very few oases of support for electronic music in America at the time. In 1984, Bebe helped found the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). She later became its first secretary and served on its board of directors.

In the film, an earth crew is sent to visit a space colony that can only be reached at the speed of light. What happens there makes for an absorbing psychodrama and morality play about humankind's animal instincts. Vice, jealousy, possessiveness, murderous impulses, revenge, "human greed and folly" are all in play. The imagined look-and-feel of the future might seem dated today (remember flying saucers?), but the commentary on human nature will remain relevant forever. Civilization is a thin veneer, indeed. We are not as 'advanced' as we think. Science fiction writers nodded in Forbidden Planet's direction for the next two decades. It is perhaps not coincidental that a doctor was a main character and confidante of the ship's commander in the film and in the first Star Trek TV series ten years later.

The Barrons' circuitry generated different pitches and timbres. The sounds have long since passed into our general aural experience but were revolutionary at the time. These were sounds that no one had ever heard before and one indication of the composers' success is that the sounds now evoke emotional responses and peg identifiable objects in today's collective psyche.

People still make 'circuit music' today. At a circuits festival, I saw one performer, with an assortment of gizmos and electronic flotsam spread before him, using a Slinky as an oscillator to vary pitch.

In one scene in Forbidden Planet, the characters listen to the recorded music of an ancient but superior civilization. Aside from this, don't expect 'music' from the film but approach the soundtrack as a soundscape and prepare to delight in the rich and variegated sounds that await you.

            HD                        Soundtrack
 

Robbie the Robot Clock


Movie Poster - Others Available

© 2008 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved - This material may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten, redistributed, resold, or manipulated in any form.