31 - The Mark of the Rani

Composer: Jonathan Gibbs
Director: Sarah Hellings

What's the score?
The task of composing the incidental music for this story was originally given to freelance composer John Lewis. Lewis wasn't a completely out-of-left-field choice - he'd worked with Brian Hodgson, recently returned to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, on a couple of experimental albums back in the 1970s under the band name "Wavemaker". Sadly, Lewis succumbed to a terminal illness while working on The Mark of the Rani, and he died with only the first half of his score completed. His music went unused, but his commissioning marks another step in DW's transition from the Radiophonic Workshop to freelance composers.
Jonathan Gibbs was now brought in to score this story in addition to Vengeance on Varos. As he explains in the "Lords and Luddites" documentary on the DVD, Gibbs didn't listen to Lewis' music before composing his own. Presumably director Sarah Hellings indicated which scenes she wanted music on, but Gibbs' score for Part One covers more scenes than Lewis'. Lewis' cues are fewer but longer, and all fall on scenes that Gibbs also scored. In another DVD extra, "Playing with Time", Gibbs explains how he used visual cues instead of a click track in order to make the rhythm of his music more fluid.

Musical notes

• The bucolic opening cue of Part One sets the tone for much of the score, with mid-range synth chords and brassy accents. It's picked up again early in Part Two and reprised in the final cue at the end of the story. The "paa pa-paa" brass phrase is used at various points to represent the Killingworth miners. The sound of brass instruments has long been a form of soundtrack shorthand for "t' North", a musical stereotype based on the popularity and perceived universality of community brass bands in working class industrial towns in Britain, particularly colliery bands in mining communities.
• But the trios of brass notes in these cues take the Northern (or rather, "t' Northern") associations still further. Their "paa pa-paa" rhythm calls to mind the second movement of Dvorak's Symphony no. 9 ("From the New World"), or "Goin' Home" as it's widely known thanks to William Arms Fisher. This classical piece, specifically as arranged for brass instruments, is forever linked to "t' North" in the British consciousness thanks to a long-running TV advert for Hovis wholemeal bread, which featured a delivery boy on his bike in an industrial town (actually filmed in the very Southern county of Dorset!) and a "t' Northern" accented voiceover. The pitch of the notes in Gibbs' cue is wrong for the Dvorak piece - too high - but then the Hovis ad arrangement was higher still.
• The opening cue ends with the Rani's signature phrase, three notes in a high-pitched, kind of strained synth voice. It sounds a bit like the horn synth squeezed up an octave. It's jarringly out of line with the rest of the cue, which helps to point out the alien nature of the Rani, and her phrase is heard several times during the story. 
• The Master, meanwhile, is represented by a deeper horn sound. During his first few scenes in Part One, he has his own signature phrase, an inquisitive four note sequence (the Four Notes of Villainy again!) that sounds not dissimilar to the Rani's theme.
• More otherworldly sounds mark out the signs of the Rani's interference in history. Sightings of the titular Mark itself are accompanied by a tinny jangling sound. There's a harsher high-pitched buzzing chime effect for the Rani's mind-controlling grubs. In Part Two, as she plants her metamorphic landmines in Redfern Dell, Gibbs plays an up-and-down clockwork sound.
• It's well worth listening closely during the scene near the end of Part One in which the Rani discovers the Doctor, masquerading as a miner, among the unconscious humans in her laboratory. As she leans over the Doctor to listen for his Time Lord heartbeats, Gibbs provides a bass synth heartbeat sound, while over the top of this he plays the four-beat rhythm of the DW theme tune bassline disguised in the miners' brass tones.
• We have not one but three "oo-wee-oo" moments in the lead-up to Part One's cliffhanger - two high and fluting renditions as the TARDIS is wheeled to the mineshaft and tipped in, and a more plaintive one as the Doctor himself hurtles towards the shaft on a trolley.
• The DVD release includes the option to watch Part One with a reconstruction of John Lewis' score in place of Gibbs' music. It's quite downbeat and very folky compared to Gibbs' pastoral horns and synths, although perversely Lewis' score feels heavier on the synths as well. Signature sounds range from high fluting organ tones for the Doctor, through a sort of oboe/theremin hybrid for the Rani, to a low harpsichord for the Master. Lewis' musical voice is a very distinctive one, and it's a real shame he didn't get the chance to add it to this season's diverse choir of composers.

Vox pop
It's hard to pick a favourite of Gibbs' four DW scores, but I think I like this one the most. Like all his scores, it rewards close and repeated listening, but it's also quite accessible. It's interesting to see what's changed - and what hasn't - in his compositional style since he started working on DW two years earlier.
And with that, we bid farewell to another composer. Jonathan Gibbs' body of work on DW is of a consistently high quality, and although his interests at and since this time lay elsewhere, it's a pity he couldn't have stuck around just a little longer.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.