Director: Ron Jones
What's the score?
For this "country house murder" pastiche set in 1925, Roger Limb uses his now-familiar buzzing mid-range synth sound, but adds a piano for period flavour. Most of the cues are extremely short. As usual, Limb holds fire during expository scenes - the Doctor defending himself and the reveal of George Cranleigh's identity in Part Two - but he also maintains a reverent silence for the entire duration of the cricket match in Part One. He also gets a break during the party scenes, when stock music takes over.
Musical notes
- The party scenes that occupy much of Part One and the early portion of Part Two are set to a selection of dance tunes from the 1920s, taken from stock. The Millennium Effect website has a comprehensive list of the tunes used. Although these are used diegetically (we see the butler's hand changing the records), two of the tunes were recorded after the year in which the story was set... It's a pity the stock music couldn't have been matched to specific scenes with a bit more self-awareness - "Has Anybody Seen My Gal" (a.k.a. "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue") would have been an amusing choice for the scene in Part Two in which Charles Cranleigh asks if anybody's seen his fiancée.
- The rest of the time, Limb either buzzes and tinkles quietly in the background, or indulges in melodramatic flourishes of the dun-dun-daaa! variety - the opening cue from Part One is fairly representative. There's a hint of characterisation in the music, with low notes representing the murderous George Cranleigh and high notes the Doctor or Ann Talbot, but this isn't applied uniformly.
- A small note - Part Two features (what I think is) the first use in Limb's work of a four-note phrase to represent villainy. The actual sequence of notes changes from score to score, but the basic concept makes repeat appearances. It will play quite a large part in Limb's score for Arc of Infinity; we might associate it with tragic villainy, then, except that it also pops up briefly in Time-Flight.
Vox pop
Well, it's time to drop the mask, and I'm not talking about George Cranleigh's Harlequin costume. There isn't a lot to say about Roger Limb's music in this story, because there just isn't a lot of music; that leaves me with space to fill, which makes this a convenient point at which to address my opinion of Limb's first six scores in general.
Firstly, though, I should stress that Limb's music undergoes a radical change in his final two scores, and I'll be a lot more complimentary about those. The following remarks only concern his work 1981-83, and in no way reflect on his work 1984-85.
The problem I have with Limb's work in Seasons 19 and 20, when he dominates the musical landscape of DW, isn't that he favours a meandering compositional style with only occasionally structured cues. Nor is it that, despite the tremendous range of synthesized sounds available to him (and his contributions to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop - A Retrospective album show that he knew of their existence), he restricts himself to a narrow band of irritating waspish sounds. Either of these things would be tolerable without the other (the meandering more so than the wasps, I'd suggest). The problem is both things in combination, compounded by Limb's repeated use of the same technique six times in succession. There are brief flashes of something more - the show pieces of Kassia's theme and wedding music in Part One of The Keeper of Traken, the froggy sounds and furious march in Part Four of Four to Doomsday, the addition of the piano in Black Orchid - but they are only flashes, and they're not enough to alleviate the more general gloom.
The chief point in favour of Limb's score for Black Orchid is precisely that there's so little of it - without a stand-out cue, it simply fades into the background and lets the stock music do all the heavy lifting. Innocuous is the word for it. Limb's previous two scores were largely background affairs too, and when a scene required the music to take centre stage, he generally came through. That's not something I can say of his next three scores, which sound more like a composer at war with his client. My opinion of Roger Limb's work will eventually get better, but first it's going to get worse.
Availability
The problem I have with Limb's work in Seasons 19 and 20, when he dominates the musical landscape of DW, isn't that he favours a meandering compositional style with only occasionally structured cues. Nor is it that, despite the tremendous range of synthesized sounds available to him (and his contributions to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop - A Retrospective album show that he knew of their existence), he restricts himself to a narrow band of irritating waspish sounds. Either of these things would be tolerable without the other (the meandering more so than the wasps, I'd suggest). The problem is both things in combination, compounded by Limb's repeated use of the same technique six times in succession. There are brief flashes of something more - the show pieces of Kassia's theme and wedding music in Part One of The Keeper of Traken, the froggy sounds and furious march in Part Four of Four to Doomsday, the addition of the piano in Black Orchid - but they are only flashes, and they're not enough to alleviate the more general gloom.
The chief point in favour of Limb's score for Black Orchid is precisely that there's so little of it - without a stand-out cue, it simply fades into the background and lets the stock music do all the heavy lifting. Innocuous is the word for it. Limb's previous two scores were largely background affairs too, and when a scene required the music to take centre stage, he generally came through. That's not something I can say of his next three scores, which sound more like a composer at war with his client. My opinion of Roger Limb's work will eventually get better, but first it's going to get worse.
Availability
- The BBC DVD release does not include the full isolated score. The DVD photo gallery features four and a half minutes of music; however, three minutes of this are compiled from the stock music used in the story, and only ninety seconds of Roger Limb's score are included, making this the least available of all the Radiophonic Workshop's DW scores.
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