{"id":1519,"date":"2013-02-13T17:19:41","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T21:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/filmmusicnotes.com\/2013\/02\/13\/oscar-nominees-2013-thomas-newmans-score-for-skyfall\/"},"modified":"2023-06-22T11:22:21","modified_gmt":"2023-06-22T15:22:21","slug":"oscar-nominees-2013-thomas-newmans-score-for-skyfall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/filmmusicnotes.com\/oscar-nominees-2013-thomas-newmans-score-for-skyfall\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscar Nominees 2013: Thomas Newman’s Score for Skyfall"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the fourth in a series of six posts on the 2013 Oscar nominees for Best Original Score. After discussing each of the five nominees in separate posts, the sixth post will give my prediction for the Oscar winner and my reasoning behind it.<\/p>\n

\"Skyfall_poster\"Thomas Newman comes from a family with several film composers that began with Alfred Newman, who was the long-time head of the music department at 20th Century Fox and wrote for many films from Hollywood\u2019s golden age in the 1930s and 40s. Thomas himself is a veteran of the industry, having scored dozens of films including Scent of a Woman<\/i>, The Shawshank Redemption<\/i>, American Beauty<\/i>, Finding Nemo<\/i>, and WALL-E<\/i>. Although Newman has yet to win an Academy Award, he has been nominated ten times, most recently for his score to the 50th-anniversary James Bond film, Skyfall<\/i>.<\/p>\n

With such a long-standing franchise, the creation of a Bond film poses unique challenges to all involved. On the one hand, it must uphold enough of the traditions for audiences to recognize the connection with previous installments. Yet on the other hand, it ought to introduce new elements as well in order to keep the series feeling fresh with each outing. The music is no exception, and Newman\u2019s score for Skyfall<\/i> is a combination of both the old and the new, as I demonstrate below in a film music analysis<\/p>\n

Cross-Pollination of the \u201cSkyfall\u201d Song and the Score<\/b><\/h2>\n

Much praise has been lavished on the film\u2019s title song both for Adele\u2019s highly expressive performance and for the song itself\u2014indeed, it has earned Adele and Paul Epworth an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. But even though the song is not part of the film\u2019s original score, it deserves mention because there is much cross-pollination between the music of the song and that of the film.<\/p>\n

For instance, the song both begins and ends with a sustained version of the minor add-9 chord that begins the famous gun-barrel sequence in Bond films:<\/p>\n

\"000018---Minor-add-9-chord\"This chord creates an instant connection with the music of the whole franchise and informs us that what we are about to hear is not just any song, but specifically a James Bond song.<\/p>\n

The Bond sound, however, is worked into the \u201cSkyfall\u201d song in a more fundamental way. After the add-9 chord, we hear a repeated three-chord progression in C minor: i-VI-iv(7)<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

\"000018---I-VI-iv\"At first, there is nothing strange about the progression as it is a fairly standard one in pop songs. But when the rest of the band enters with electric guitar, bass guitar, and percussion, the progression changes ever so slightly to i-VI-IV-iv. That is, the last chord is transformed into a major chord before returning to its original minor form:<\/p>\n

\"000018---I-VI-IV-iv\"<\/p>\n

This subtle change allows the guitar to sound the notes G-Ab-A-Ab in harmony with the progression, as shown in the top line of the example above. The resulting four-note motive is one of the most recognizable in Bond films. It\u2019s the accompaniment figure we hear at the start of the gun-barrel sequence that slyly glides up and down chromatically, and which some have appropriately called the \u201csuspense theme”. When this motive appears in Bond films, it is usually over an unchanging harmony (again, recall the gun-barrel sequence):<\/p>\n

\"000018---Suspense-Theme\"<\/p>\n

Hear it in the clip below:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n