Composed and Produced by:

Iva Davies, Christopher Gordon, and Richard Tognetti

Release Date: November 11th, 2003

              Decca Records
 

     While Master and Commander may seem to be an answer to Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, the two films couldn't be farther apart structurally. Pirates is a fun adventure film that has loads of entertainment value while possessing little in much historical accuracy. Master and Commander is just the opposite with the plodding day-to-day depictions of life onboard a sailing vessel from that period being the primary complaint leveled at the film. Just as different are scores between the films. The Media Ventures catastrophe could have greatly benefited had the guiding hand on the project been Zimmer or Gregson-Williams instead of Klaus Badelt, while the door swings in the completely opposite direction stylistically for this score, which relies on the talents of Iva Davies, Christopher Gordon, and Richard Tognetti.

     Of the three composers, Christopher Gordon is the only name I recognized, and anyone familiar with his work would undoubtedly be expecting some good things from this score. However, it is immediately apparent with the first track that this isn't the swashbuckling piece of epic cinema music that might be expected. The beautiful melodies that made Gordon's score to On the Beach are completely absent, leaving only the haunting string work that, while beautiful, isn't enough to bolster the generally pointless direction of the music. With no grandiose themes or motifs (actually no themes or motifs that I could detect) to carry the score, it tends to drive around with a lot of atmospheric music and driving percussion. It's telling that the additional music from classical sources (the most notable example being Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis) offer more life and notoriety than the actual score cues.

     In addition to the classical pieces, there are several arrangements of folk music, more than likely used as source in the film, culminating in the Folk Medley on track eleven. While interesting to run through at least once, their appearance in the score soon grows tiresome as they tend to stand pretty far apart from the rest of the material. They offer some much needed lightness to an otherwise dark tone that is going on around them, but at the same time presenting so much contrast that they quickly wear out their welcome. Oddly enough, the album ends with a creepy line of dialogue (the only dialogue that appears on the album at all) which springs up from nowhere and seems to leave the music hanging just before the climax of the score.