With Hans Zimmer and his Media Ventures cohorts in the news so much at the time of writing, I thought it prescient to go back and remember one of Zimmer's most successful efforts.  Today he rarely (if ever) actually composes a score himself, but will provide themes and sometimes a bit more and get a host of underlings to collaborate on the rest.  It's a whole new way of scoring films, the most radical change since Max Steiner waved his baton with King Kong seventy years ago.  With so many composers scoring one picture, the idea presumably is that they work off each others' creativity, feed ideas to one another, and (from the producer's point of view) work quicker.  Holding it all together is usually Zimmer.  While I think a lot of the criticism these days is probably justified (a score composed by nine different people and orchestrated by as many more simply cannot be an especially coherent musical work), there was a day when Zimmer was changing things in an entirely different way.

While Black Rain was his first high-profile action score, it was Backdraft that really started to attract attention to his style and get him noticed in much wider circles.  Previously synthesisers had been used in various ways, but almost always either to augment the orchestra and add sounds it couldn't provide, or simply because an orchestra couldn't be afforded.  But technology had moved on so much that by the time Backdraft came along, Zimmer could take sampled sounds and use them as substitutes for real instruments to create a different sound that somehow seemed slightly more hard-edged and appropriate for a film like this (or Crimson Tide, arguably the culmination of his achievements in the field).  

One thing that sets Backdraft apart from modern-day Media Ventures action scores is that there is still a real heart to the orchestral music and actual orchestrations rather than just having the orchestra play in unison, as seems to be the current thinking.  After a Bruce Hornsby song, the score beings in "Fighting 17th" with the main theme, a stirring, masculine anthem that has been used in countless trailers and been ripped off in countless scores since.  "Brothers" is surprisingly tender, a lovely - moving, almost - piece.

"Burn it All" introduces more new ideas.  Probably the darkest cue in the score, it features a female choir being deployed in a rather avant garde manner, along with some dissonant music somewhat atypical for Zimmer (constantly augmented by less atypical percussion).  It's actually an intelligent, striking piece.  Everything comes to a head in the wonderful "Show Me Your Firetruck", a really ballsy track that's as stirring as anything to come from this composer.

Backdraft is certainly among Zimmer's best scores.  It seems so long since he composed a score by himself it's easy to forget that he really has written music of high quality, and he really did prove to be the biggest single influence on film music of the 1990s.

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