Pulp 1930, Red Heat, and Prokofiev

Worked on soundtrack with Jack last night- it was very productive. Initally when he played what we had I started to panic- what happened to all the work we did already?! He assured me it was all saved- all except for that day’s progress, which he had lost due to a configuration problem. Due to the crash, some of the instruments were set incorrectly as well- for example, a phrase which had previously used horns now used “Funky Bass Magic”, which made everything sound really screwed up.

One thing that is odd for me working for Jack is our age difference- I would estimate he’s in his 40s, and I’m in my 20’s- so cultural references I make frequently fly by him. Since I have very little training in musical composition, I have to sort of wave my hands when I describe the sound I want, or bring in an actual recording of something that sounds similar.

Example: I want to try one part sounding like Mr. Burns’s theme (from The Simpsons), for example, when he describes blocking out the sun, or routing all the beer trucks around Springfield… It’s not even a melody, just two chords, but it’s used pretty often. However, since Jack doesn’t really WATCH “The Simpsons” this becomes a problem.

The newest problem: the patriotic music for the soviets. Jack hasn’t heard the Soviet National Anthem, and it’s not really as over-the-top as I’d like. So I remembered the music that played over the credits in the movie “Red Heat” (yes that Jim Belushi movie where Arnold Schwartzeneggar, the canonical Teuton, is playing a Russian cop. Absurd!). However, if you surf a little bit you will find that piece is not written by the soundtrack’s author (James Horner- he wrote the score for “Titanic”) at all- it’s actually an arrangement of Prokofiev’s “Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution,” one of that composer’s more obscure works. There is apparently some controversy about this cantata, since Prokofiev was not a Stalin fan and made this work somewhat satirical, and so it was never performed in the composer’s lifetime, only recently being recorded and then released on CD.

Neither work is well-known enough to be on the file-sharing networks. Not that I would ever dream of doing that, since even listening to music you haven’t paid for is illegal.

Back to the point: Do I buy the soundtrack to this god-awful movie? Or do I buy the Prokofiev CD, assuming I can even find it? The “real” cantata may not sound the same, since by definition it’s a different arrangement than the “Red Heat” version. I’ll probably just rent the movie and bring it to Jack since I don’t really want to hear this thing over and over.