Basil Poledouris
Music is a huge part of my life. I was always interested in music, even at an early age but after watching Conan the Barbarian in the fifth grade, I decided that I had to learn how to play music.
I started playing the tenor saxophone in the sixth grade and by the end of high school, I played every instrument except the flute (because I couldn’t get my mouth to work that way).
Now while most people would deride my parents for letting me watch such a bloody film at such a young age, they would be wrong because, of course, they had no clue. As most children do, I watched this one while they were at work one summer day, and it changed my life. The blood, the nudity: bah. Nothing interesting there. What struck a deep chord with we was the music. Enter Basil Poledouris.
His scoring for this film is nothing short of epic in my estimation. I have listened to no single album more than this one, and I would estimate that I have heard it over five thousand times at least. I know the album so well, I could score the whole thing from memory.
Poledouris’ style is both grand and bold when it needs to be in the film, but his real genius is his subtlety and delicate sense of emotion that comes out in the softer pieces of the film such as “Riddle of Steel,” “Theology / Civilization,” “Wifeing (Love Theme),” “The Search,” and the best piece of the film, “Recovery.”
Ever since I found this soundtrack as a kid (on cassette tape), I began the long process of collecting his oeuvre on CD, which is hard work, since most soundtracks go out of print very quickly after the film’s release. And while I love the old guys like John Williams, Ennio Morricone, and Jerry Goldsmith, they just do not compare to Poledouris. Williams continues to garner every accolade the industry has for film composers, but I find his work to be monolithic. Like the rock band Boston, what Williams does, he does very, very well. But like them, he is a one trick pony, as it were. Every Boston song is the same Boston song. Likewise the second one hears a John Williams song, they know it is a John Williams song. He uses the same instruments in the same ways over and over. The only thing that changes is the theme.
Now take the Conan theme: a complex and varied set of similar melodies. Unlike Williams who has the standard tthree or four variations per film, Star Wars being the lone exception, Poledouris is able to vary his theme in this film no less than sixteen times, by my count. If you add in the other songs not available on the OST like “The Temple of Set,” then you get even more variations. I have a bootleg CD with every song from the film, including some that were not even used.
It has often been remarked that his Eastern Orthodox upbringing influenced his work, and I agree. This is most readily apparent in his use of choirs and voices in his best pieces, which always add a depth that others who use choirs can not attain. His voices are dark and prophetic, always hinting at the ancestral layers beneath the film’s protagonist, even when the protagonist is Steven Segal in Under Siege.
My goal was always to meet him one day but alas, on November 8, 2006, he died from cancer. I did not find this out until a few months later, but I felt this loss for a long time. He was my musical hero, and now he is gone.
Some very good tributes to him can be found on Youtube. The first is a short retrospective, which showcases some of his best themes put to images from the films (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI-Ks3-8E8U). The second (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9meRcliFMU) is a much longer and better one, with action clips from his films. Another one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me8jrklLK7A&feature=related) uses some of his more recent music. But the one that always gets me is the simple tribute with only his kind face set to “the Search” from Conan the Barbarian (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dFZsMR-6fY).
Just before he died, he also conducted pieces from Conan the Barbarian in Ubeda, Italy. Some of those in attendance took amateur video of the performance, which can also be found on Youtube. The pieces are chopped up, but are still very good.
Basil Poledouris’ Website (http://www.basil-poledouris.com)