Lately, I’ve been listening to the Legend movie soundtrack, especially as I work on my fiction. Which version, you may ask? The one I grew up with.
There’s nothing wrong with the Jerry Goldsmith score for the European version and director’s cut, but for my own purposes, I need the synths.
It was definitely a trend in the 1980s to have synthesizers heavily featured on many a movie soundtrack, but there’s something particularly appropriate to having synths accompanying Jack and Lili and Atreyu and Artax (or even Sarah and Hoggle). I went through a phase in my grungy teens and early twenties when I despised nearly all 80s music — synthesizers and drum machines especially — but I could never bring myself to despise these movies’ soundtracks. Call it nostalgia, perhaps, but I think it’s something more.
In a weirdly paradoxical way, synthesizers are the perfect fantasy instrument.
I will add a huge caveat here first: Synths probably wouldn’t work for every fantasy movie, especially one with a more naturalistic aesthetic. The Lord of the Rings films would definitely not be improved by a synthesizer. But nevertheless, the synthesizer works incredibly well for ethereal and otherworldly fantasy precisely because it is an unnatural-sounding instrument.
Fantasy is a genre that allows us to break the bounds of the ordinary — magic doesn’t play by the normal rules, of course — and synthesizers, too, inhabit a realm outside the traditional musical landscape. They sound strange, even alien, and while this seems a perfect fit for science fiction, it also works incredibly well for fantasy because fantasy — when it’s closer to pure fantasy and not something that’s more pseudo-historical — is strange and otherworldly, operating beyond the purely rational or mundane. It’s the same with magic. Magic is something beyond the normal. A mystery. Power that defies reality.
Synthesizers, in other words, make wizard music. And fairy music. Music of the Otherworld. Synthesizers bend and manipulate what we expect from an instrument and expand it beyond the edges of ordinary. That’s why David Bowie as the Goblin King in Labyrinth makes so much sense. He might be the Goblin King, but what he really is is a sorcerer, a rock and roll wizard. He manipulates time and space, and so his (and Trevor Jones’s) rock and synth music manipulates sound to create something strange and even discordant at times.
This melding of magic and futuristic aesthetics, of otherworldly and alien, blurs the line between genres: Is the synth a sci-fi instrument or a fantasy one? The answer is: both.
The 1980s — especially in movies, less so in literature — were still, at times, operating in those pre-genre days of fantasy (the Appendix N days, so to speak); genre codifications and conventions weren’t so solid then, and we could have sci-fi in our fantasy and fantasy in our sci-fi. No one really questioned it. The synthesizer soundtrack is like the musical distillation of this free-form expression of the genres: a piece of “futuristic” tech used to embody the aural landscape of a pre-modern fantasy world.
Which brings me back to Legend. The movie is an attempt to create a “legend” — a fairy tale that taps into primordial and mythic dimensions, that operates on a symbolic and unconscious level. Light, Darkness, Purity, Evil — all of these form the primordial soup from which the movie’s iconography and narrative arise. While Goldsmith’s more traditional soundtrack is excellent and work perfectly well with the film, the Tangerine Dream soundtrack is operating at another level. Whether you think the movie works or not (most would say “not,” though I’m not sure I agree), the synthesizer soundtrack brings with it something uncanny and startling, something that transports us to another world, another dimension. The world in Legend is both an echo of our own world but also a world born out of legends themselves, and it is this “outsideness,” this “beyondness” that is captured by the synthesizer music.
There’s a reason I’m listening to this soundtrack as I work on my fiction. Even divorced from the movie it was composed for, the music still conjures images of the fantastical, it still transports one to the Otherworld. It still creates that wonderfully strange and uncanny sensation that the best of fantasy taps into. Like a magic spell, the synthesizer music transforms my own imagination, allowing it to see worlds as yet undreamed. Or so I hope.