Director: John Black
What's the score?
Roger Limb's first score for DW - the first of many. In this season he's the odd man out, but over the next two seasons he contributes more than a third of the incidental music. From this point until the 20th anniversary, you're never more than two stories away from a Roger Limb score.
Some people regard this story as little more than a run-up to Tom Baker's big finale, and Limb's music seems to contribute to that impression. He tends to convey a general mood rather than emphasise or offer comment on particular moments, and he spends most of this story building up an air of anxiety, which is left hanging at the end of Part Four. He favours low buzzing synths coupled with high and mid range droning sounds.
It's also worth noting that, in stark contrast to the frequent short cues favoured elsewhere in this season in Howell's and Kingsland's scores, The Keeper of Traken features lengthier cues of a minute or two in duration with much longer silences in between. Presumably this was at the request of director John Black, but it may also reflect Limb's preference - his other DW scores tend towards longer cues. He's particularly cautious about intruding on moments of plot exposition, and on the latter parts of the story in general.
Musical notes
- Nyssa has a theme, but like Adric's, it isn't hers to begin with. It plays in full over the scene in Part One in which the young Kassia brings flowers to Melkur. The light sounds of harp and flute, conventionally considered to be feminine instruments, suggest youthful innocence, with a certain otherworldliness in the melody. A minor key variant is heard when Kassia visits Melkur after her wedding and hears him speak. Variants of the theme turn up in Part Two when Nyssa tends to Melkur, and at the end of Part Four when Nyssa leaves Tremas on his own in the council chamber.
- Another notable musical feature of Part One is the diegetic music heard after the wedding of Kassia and Tremas. It's a fast, jolly tune comprised of pipe, xylophone and tambourine sounds.
- Limb is a practitioner of the recap switcheroo, although given his compositional style it's not always easy to spot. In Part Four he extends and merges the last two cues from Part Three, and in doing so he strikingly alters the timbre and balance of the constituent parts. This leads to one of the stronger features of the composition being obscured: the three note phrase that practically defines the re-recorded cue included on the Doctor Who - The Music album is audible in the penultimate cue of Part Three, but is almost completely buried in Part Four.
- In interview, Limb cites Debussy as an influence on his work as an incidental music composer. I'm not familiar enough with Debussy's work to be able to spot any definite references in this score - perhaps there are DW-watching Debussy fans out there who can do better? In any case, Limb's atmospheric but very loosely structured score doesn't generally lend itself to this kind of analysis. It doesn't give commentators like myself very much at all to get hold of, in fact. But the style is an appropriate match for the art nouveau visual design of the story, since Debussy was composing at the height of the art nouveau vogue around the turn of the 20th century.
Vox pop
I prefer music with more form to it, so for me Roger Limb's score doesn't work so well in isolation. As an accompaniment to the TV episodes (which was, after all, its intended purpose), it's fine - as noted above, it's an appropriate choice for the story, and it's pretty enough. It also adds some welcome variety to a season that's otherwise musically dominated by Howell and Kingsland.
Availability
- The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
- Doctor Who - The Music included three tracks from this story: "Nyssa's Theme", actually the cue that introduces Kassia in Part One; "Kassia's Wedding Music", also from Part One; and "The Threat of Melkur", a combination of Dick Mills' sound effects and the penultimate cue from Part Three.
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