Lady in the Water

《水中女妖》是作曲家James Newton Howard与曾凭借《小村》获得奥斯卡提名的著名导演M. Night Shyamalan的第五次合作，在这次电影原声中，Howard算是交出了一份令人满意的答卷。鉴于影片的灵异风格，大部分的作曲家都会在作品中采用钟或者咿咿呀呀的宏伟唱诗班来表现令人惊悚的声音效果。但在这方面，Howard展现了他对旋律非常高的辨识度，比如在专辑第一首作品《Prologue》中，他就埋伏下许多可以发展的主题。尽管受到管弦乐队规模的限制，Howard也一直采用高亮度的音色来代替沉重的打击乐器，他不希望刻意的制造影片的恐怖气氛。《The Great Eatlon》是所有配乐中最有音效感觉的作品，但放在整张专辑中也不会显得过于突兀，只会令人感觉一股宏伟壮丽的暗流在慢慢壮大。原声专辑的最后还重新编排了Bob Dylan的几首作品，包括《The Times They Are A-Changin》《It Ain't Me Babe》《Maggie's Farm》。 Film composer James Newton Howard marks his fifth collaboration with director M. Night Shyamalan on Lady in the Water. Shyamalan, of course, is known for his imaginative, sometimes surrealistic mystery films The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, and Lady in the Water is another of them, with its story of a nymph residing in and around the pool at an apartment complex. Howard has at his disposal a large orchestra and chorus, and he uses them to create music that is often swirling and circular, with some conventional moments of exciting anticipation or climax here and there. One obvious influence is Philip Glass, although Howard's music rarely displays Glass' rhythmic urgency to go with its short, repetitive figures. Rather, the real antecedent for this score is Ennio Morricone's classic music to the classic film Days of Heaven (1978). In fact, there are moments when Howard's score seems practically identical to Morricone's. That score takes up 42 of the nearly 60 minutes on the soundtrack album, the rest given over to four covers of Bob Dylan songs. The six-minute version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" by A Whisper in the Noise is slow and reflective to the point of being soporific; the arrangement seems to go against the point of the lyrics deliberately. Amanda Ghost's "Every Grain of Sand" is also taken slowly, but in a way that is more appropriate to the song's words. Silvertide presents rock renditions of "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Maggie's Farm" that sound like what the Black Crowes would do with them.