Gladiator

More Music From The Motion Picture

Tracks

Decca Records (01/01/1970)

Booklet and Album Artwork Add Recording to my Collection

Liner Notes

This second album of tracks from „Gladiator“ features some of Lisa’s and my experiments, ideas and long-forgotten first attempts at finding a way into Maximus’ world.

The first track, „Duduk of the North“, was, with the „Gladiator Waltz“, really the first thing I came up with for the film. I never wanted the score to sound like a musical anthropology or archaeology – I was looking for ways of placing the music in its own imaginary ancient world and letting it echo into our times.

I had always wanted to write for the duduk, an ancient Armenian instrument with its beautifully lonely and wistful tone. And I had wanted to write for Djivan Gasparyan, the great duduk virtuoso, who plays with an ancient and noble poetry, each of his notes telling us a story from a time now foreign to us, from a time that feels mythic and raw and full of soul and dignity. Of course there was a slight problem with the whole idea, in so far that Djivan lives in Armenia which is nowhere near Los Angeles where I was writing the score, and everybody was very happy in pointing this out to me, plus the fact that he was probably unwilling to come here. He speaks no English so I couldn’t even ask him. But I’m stubborn, and I just kept on writing my notes – a bit of the „if you build it, he will come“ principle. And sure enough, one day I got a call from fellow composer Michael Brook saying that Djivan would be rehearsing in L.A. with him for a tour they were doing together. I had Djivan at our studio every moment he wasn’t rehearsing with Michael. He still didn’t speak any English, but he makes his own vodka back in Armenia, and you know – if you drink far enough down the bottle, a picture of his face is revealed on the verso of its label, and if you get that far you might as well finish, and suddenly it doesn’t seem to matter anymore that we can’t speak each other’s language.

The end of this track is my attempt at writing something Spanish (Maximus is referred to as „The Spaniard“, of course), but all that has survived from this is the chord-sequence and one tiny guitar phrase. It actually took me a long time to write this track, and it lived in the movie for quite a while before we chucked it out. But that is part of the process – you write something and all it ends up being is something that informs you about the direction you need to head in. Or not to head in. But I’m still fond of it, even though the end never got past the development stage of Spanish clichés.

Track 2 is about the tenth attempt by our friend Klaus Badelt to turn Lisa’s „Elysium“ tune and my „Earth“ tune into an uplifiting piece for the end of the movie. But we kept getting the mood wrong. It was either too happy and took you out of the movie, or it got too complicated and dark.

Track 3 was actually an alternative version for Maximus’ and Juba’s talk about family and afterlife. Lisa and Klaus wrote it, but it never got used. This is the wrong dialogue for this piece but it sounded nice on the CD.

Track 4 is all about urgency. I wrote it at the very last moment, all through the night, finishing just in time to catch the plane for London and the orchestra sessions. The lack of any kind of cohesive tune is really down to my lack of sleep and general exhaustion by this point. I wasn’t doing much better than Maximus’ horse is doing by the end of the scene.

Track 5 is one of three versions of the music I wrote for the desert journey. I just couldn’t make up my mind about size or pace. Sometimes you have to wait until you have the whole picture finished to make these choices. This one wasn’t it.

Track 6: The dialogue is actually from a scene a little later on the film. This track takes us from the training episode all the way into the first fight. I wanted to make Maximus’ loneliness and isolation apparent in the central tune. The fight is tribal, brutal and dirty and as far away from the orchestral pomp of the world of Rome as you can get. In the movie this cue is followed by Commodus’ entrance into Rome, and of course it is a Wagner-pastiche, just as Ridley has used the idea of „Triumpf of the Will“ as his way to comment on Commodu’s entrance. At first I played this scene serious and dark, and then it occured to me that the fun of the scene really lies with Commodu’s arrogance, with his childish posturing, his total disregard for the mob howling at him – just happy with this great toy called Rome that is now his to do with as he wants.

Track 7 starts off with my Commodus theme. I wanted it to have some measure of decadence and sexuality about it, but I wanted to evoke the loneliness of a lost little boy as well. One of the difficulties of the film was in how sympathetic we had made Commodus. I, for one, liked that ambiguity about him. The piece ends with one of Lisa’s wonderfully cold and spooky moments.

Track 8 is a one-take improvisation that Lisa and I did in my room. Klaus added some percussion later, but for a while this was the model for „Now We Are Free“, and it did work great at the end of the movie, but we couldn’t really ever find a way to make this tune work in the body of the film.

Track 9 & 10: This is part of the early sessions I did with Djivan and Heitor Pereira. The end is yet another variation on the „Earth“ theme.

Track 11: This piece was one of many improvisations that Jeff Rona did for our North African scenes.

Track 12: The Gladiator Waltz. This is my original synthesizer demo of the piece, in other words, before Bruce Fowler orchestrated it and we replaced the synth parts that were played by me with real players in the orchestra. I think it explains my process quite well.

This is sort of a diary of one idea being developed. I purposely kept the „diary“-nature of the piece; in other words, there are many attempts and failures at solving the problems I had with the theme itself (is it dark? heroic? forceful? dissonant enough? or too much? etc.). I went to England to meet with Ridley on the set of the opening battle. I was taken with the dichotomy of the brutality of the battle he was filming, and the elegance and architecural symmetry of the Roman designs; the marble busts in Marcus Aurelius’ tent, the sophistication of the whole Roman civilization. It occured to me that really most of what we think of as magnificent and cultured from the past has been based upon one culture destroying its predecessor; some dreadful artistic Darwinism. So I needed to find a musical analogy, something that represented the same symmetry and beauty as the Roman art and architecture. I started to think of Viennese waltzes, that most cheerful and on the surface most benign genre of music, with its perfectly symmetrical form; music from another era that we also think of as an aesthetic and a cultural highpoint. And of course it helps that it all becomes a little bit tongue in cheek – it was fun to take those waltzes and brutalize them.

Lots of people have commented that this piece reminds them of Holst’s „The Planets“, and of course I’m using the same language, the same vocabulary if not the same syntax. I was thinking more of Mussorgsky, of William Walton, of the primal force of Stravinsky. The guitar figure in the intro is really the whole idea – everything after that is a variation on that idea. Anyway, this is the track that Pietro Scalia and Ridley Scott cut most of the action scenes to. This really helped me in the long run, because not only could Ridley hear how it was working before the orchestra performed it, but it meant we could make all the changes over a long period of time and let the film and music develop together.

Track 13: The „Earth“ theme played by Lisa on her Yan Chin.

Track 14: This is one of the Morocco fights in the small coliseum. It uses the same motif as the Gladiator Waltz.

Track 15: This is another piece that Lisa and Klaus cooked up together. I remember lots of secrecy and locked doors from the two of them, keeping both Ridley and me out until they were happy with their pieces.

Track 16: This is sort of the opposite way of working for me from the Gladiator Waltz. I gave Klaus the very roughest of outlines, but when you work with people you trust, people whose talent you believe in, you get great surprises back.

Track 17: This comes from a session where Lisa was trying to learn my „Earth“ tune. Luckily something somewhere was set to record, because there was quite a magical take in there. Lisa added the harmony about 6 months later.

Hans Zimmer

When Hans called me and asked me if I wanted to see something from this „Gladiator“ movie by Ridley Scott that he was working on, I was immediately curious. After seeing the footage he sent me, I sat in silence for a long period of time, saturated by the sense of anticipation that becomes apparent when we are exposed to something deeply poetic.
I was soon after transported by air to Hans’ work place, Media Ventures, where he and I sat and improvised seven pieces of cathartic and somehow ancient music. I never wanted the experience to end. I had found a soul mate that finally was able to interpret the un-deciphered dialect that has for years hindered these pieces from being realized.
It is possible to communicate with your soul and the heart can tell a tale that will comfort our deepest pain. I will always treasure the intimacy we enjoyed during this time.

Lisa Gerrard