Later, “Delirious John” presents a deconstructed version of the main theme with a dream-like, slightly off-kilter aspect, before a final performance in the conclusive “The Amish Are Coming”. The famous main theme first appears in the opening cue, “Witness (Main Title)”. I suppose one could hypothesize that, in using a solely electronic palette to score a film set in the Amish community, Jarre may have been making a point about the encroachment of the modern world into older, simpler communities that eschew technology, but this is most likely a stretch.ĭespite all that, the score for Witness still contains a fair amount of melodic writing. This is what I mean when I say the music sounds thinly orchestrated, tinny, and weak: if you want a flute, use a flute, not a synth pretending to be a flute. However, in hearing the finished score, it begs the question why Jarre didn’t just use live instruments? One keyboard is clearly programmed to sound like a flute, another programmed to sound like chimes and high end metallic percussion, yet another programmed to give an as-close-as-possible approximation of brass, another programmed to mimic a piano. As such, the score does have a little more depth in its sound palette than one might expect: the fact that all the performers were in the room at the same time is a positive as it gives the recording an immediacy, negating the sterility that can sometimes come across in synth scores. ![]() To perform his musical ideas on Witness, Jarre employed a group of 10 synthesists – Michael Boddicker, Randy Kerber, Stewart Levin, Michel Mention, Chris Page, Pete Robinson, Clark Spangler, Nyle Steiner and Ian Underwood – and organized them like a band, with each person performing a different keyboard/sampler, while Jarre conducted them as if for a chamber ensemble. Too often the music came across like orchestral music badly rendered on an unsuitable keyboard, thinly orchestrated, tinny, and weak. To me, and with just a couple of notable exceptions, the majority of Jarre’s electronic music always sounded like the work of a composer trying to capitalize on the popularity of a fad, shoehorning his compositions into a sonic world that did not suit the way he wrote. Jarre, on the other hand, was an old-school orchestral symphonic composer with scores like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago under his belt. The difference, of course, is that Faltermeyer and Moroder and Fiedel were electronic specialists that was what they did, how they worked, how they saw music. ![]() As such, it’s understandable that film composers would want to tap into that then-progressive zeitgeist. Not only that, the popular music charts were full of electro-pop and synth-pop bands taking advantage of the growth of technology and the increasing sophistication of the samples that were available at the time. It’s not difficult to understand why Jarre embraced electronica so wholeheartedly in the 1980s composers like Vangelis, Harold Faltermeyer, Giorgio Moroder, Brad Fiedel and, to a lesser extent, Wendy Carlos, Jack Nitzsche and John Carpenter, had all enjoyed enormous success with their synth writing on a number of significant and popular films, while his son Jean-Michel was becoming equally successful in his own right as a pop and rock artist. Witness marked the second of four collaborations between Weir and Jarre, the others being The Year of Living Dangerously in 1982, The Mosquito Coast in 1986, and Dead Poets Society in 1989, and found Jarre deep in his divisive ‘synth phase’. The film was directed by Peter Weir, and was one of the major cinematic successes of 1985, receiving critical acclaim and eight Oscar nominations, including nods for Best Picture, Best Actor for Ford, and Best Score for the film’s composer, Maurice Jarre. Worse still, the murder suspects have discovered the whereabouts of the one eyewitness to their crime, and are coming after the young boy. ![]() To keep his witness safe, Book tries to maintain a low profile within the community, which shuns modern conveniences and technology, but unexpectedly begins to develop romantic feelings for Rachel, causing friction among the elders, who view Book as an interloper and outsider. The film stars Harrison Ford as John Book, an honest cop, who is forced to travel to rural Pennsylvania to protect a young Amish boy named Samuel, played by Lukas Haas, who unintentionally witnesses a murder while visiting the big city with his mother Rachel, played by Kelly McGillis. Witness is a thriller set in Pennsylvania’s Amish community.
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