Director: Nicholas Mallett
A brief note on episode numbering: While this blog will treat the four subsections of The Trial of a Time Lord as distinct story units - mainly because they were handled as distinct musical units - it would be contrary to talk about "The Ultimate Foe, Part Two" when the episode is named on screen as "The Trial of a Time Lord, Part Fourteen". Your humble blogger therefore proposes to use the popular story titles for convenience when referring to entire musical scores, but to refer to specific episodes within the season by their given number.
What's the score?
Welcome Dominic Glynn, first of the Big Three of late '80s DW music. Glynn provides two of the four incidental scores for this season, and will provide one in each of the remaining three seasons of DW's original run. His work is only a little more dance-inflected than that of the Radiophonic Workshop - in particular, his work this season is really quite close to what Workshop members Peter Howell and Liz Parker were doing the previous year.
There's quite a high proportion of music in the soundtrack to The Mysterious Planet, but a lot of it is background atmospherics. The new theme arrangement and Glynn's scores during this season feature quite a lot of pitchbending - although the means to distort pitch on a synthesizer had been around for several years by this time, and Glynn is far from the first DW composer to use the technique, he certainly seems keen on it. His score for The Mysterious Planet and his next couple also make extensive use of chimes and crystallophonic sounds.
Musical notes
- First things first: let's direct our ears to Glynn's new arrangement of the DW theme tune, which was used for this season only. It's a return to the theme's original key, shifting back down from Peter Howell's F sharp minor to Delia Derbyshire's E minor. More noticeably, it's full of twinkling and chittering sounds. (It's a little bit reminiscent of the "Delaware theme", created in 1972 by Brian Hodgson, Paddy Kingsland and Delia Derbyshire as a test, but ultimately rejected. Perhaps the world just wasn't ready for it yet.) The famous bassline is muted, stripped of resonance and reverb, pared back to just the bare notes. The crash opening of Howell's arrangement is replaced with an almost plaintive downward glide; the explosion at the end of the closing credits is retained, probably due to the use of the same visuals more than anything. Rather than the whooshing, hissing sound Howell used to segue the opening theme into the episode, Glynn lets the theme fade out with a series of high-pitched sighing synth noises. The overall feeling of the theme is subdued, even mournful - this is a theme that knows its parent programme is on trial.
- The first thing we see after the opening theme of Part One is a dizzying flypast of the Time Lords' space station, possibly the most expensive visual effect of the season and widely regarded as one of the finest of the entire classic series. Glynn's opening cue is no less impressive: beginning with the ominous tolling of a bell and a lone synth sigh on the initial approach, it launches into an almighty crashing funeral march as the camera licks its way across the station, fading into melodramatic organ music as the TARDIS is dragged into the antechamber of the courtroom. As Glynn confirms in interview on the DVD, the organ music and the tolling bell were intended to tie in with the scriptwriter's and modelmakers' concept of the space station as being like a cathedral. The bell also calls to mind the TARDIS' emergency signal, the cloister bell. This cue would later provide the basis for "The Trial Theme", a beefy piece of music given away free with Doctor Who Magazine in 1990 and included as an extra on the DVD release of this story.
- Glynn uses incidental cues to distinguish consistently between scenes of the Doctor's adventure and scenes in the courtroom - he's the only composer this season to do so. (Composer's choice or director's request?) It's a small thing but a praiseworthy one in a story that keeps cutting between narrative and meta-narrative, helping to prepare the viewer in a subtle way for each transition. A tinny downward jangle announces the shift from courtroom to adventure. Shifts back to the courtroom are heralded by a low chime and a harsh buzz - except in two instances. In the scenes in Part Three and Part Four when the words "the Matrix" are censored from the soundtrack in an effort to cover up the Time Lords' involvement in proceedings on Ravalox, Glynn holds fire and allows a dry cut back to the courtroom. The effect of this, having built up a comfortable expectation in the viewer that they'll hear a chime/buzz before a scene change of this nature, is to make these moments more likely to snag in the back of the viewer's mind. It may have been wishful thinking for the writers to hope that viewers would remember this bit of plot-significant mystery two months later when explanations would be provided, but at least the music is doing its part to help.
- There are three heavily repeated, highly rhythmic motifs in this story, and the most extreme of them is the theme for the L1 scout robot. The rhythm here is provided by a continuous high synth stabbing, with sinister bass chords overlaid. It's repeated a little too damn much for your humble blogger's liking.
- Significant motif number two is the march for the Tribe of the Free. A rapid one, four, one, four pattern of snare drum and horn synths is augmented here and there with stately fanfares. Queen Katryca gets a particularly grand one on her introduction in Part One.
- Number three is the train guards' march. Upwards pairs of high-pitched synth notes provide the main rhythm, while a bass string sound offers a more interesting second rhythm underneath. The squeaking high notes may be meant to suggest the wheels of the train grinding against metal rails.
- I'm very fond of the melodramatic pitchbending reedy chords that play as Peri rescues the Doctor from the inert L1 robot. The cue is far too bombastic for what's happening on screen, outlandishly so, but it sounds great. Shortly thereafter, Glynn plays an "oo-wee-oo" and a repeating phrase from his DW theme arrangement as the Doctor comes to and does his ripest impression of Jon Pertwee.
Vox pop
This is a thoroughly solid first outing for Dominic Glynn. I don't get the feeling that he's flicking all the switches and showing off what his keyboard can do in the way Peter Howell arguably did with The Leisure Hive (and Keff McCulloch will arguably do with Time and the Rani), but in a sense and for this particular story, that's not a bad thing. It almost feels as if he's always been here. That said, the opening cue really is a tour de force, and those glassy and chimey sounds really add something special to the score.
Availability
- The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story, but does include a photo gallery featuring six and a half minutes of Glynn's music.
- An abridged version of the score was made available for a brief time on the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) release Black Light: The Doctor Who Music of Dominic Glynn, alongside Glynn's music from The Ultimate Foe and Dragonfire.
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