42 - Dragonfire

Composer: Dominic Glynn
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
At last, some musical variety! The late replacement of the score for Paradise Towers leaves this as the only story in Season 24 not scored by Keff McCulloch. Dominic Glynn's fondness hitherto for tinkly and chimey sounds (as heard during Season 23) makes him an obvious choice to compose the music for a story set on an ice planet. (Dick Mills assists with a lovely background atmosphere for the "Singing Caves", which was included on the Doctor Who - 30 Years at the Radiophonic Workshop sound effects release.) To the anticipated crystalline noises, Glynn adds a range of sounds that suggest howling Antarctic winds - there's plenty of synth flute and airy gliding sounds throughout, and some lower croaky synths that tend to show up in particularly eerie or villainous moments.

Musical notes

• The chief villain, Kane, gets his own signature sound: a highly melodramatic pipe organ. There's a main five-note theme - four notes and a sting, really - that's first heard early in Part One when a mercenary stumbles into Kane's icy lair. (It's immediately followed by some of those low, croaky sounds when Kane plunges his hand into liquid nitrogen to retrieve the mercenary's dropped gun.) Variations on this theme, or other more grandiose organ phrases, are heard in scenes of Kane killing people, retiring to his Absolute Zero sarcophagus, or gloating in triumph. There's a reprise that builds into a discordant pile-up in his death scene in Part Three.
• The pipe organ is strongly suggestive of cinematic horror. The obvious association is with the 1925 and 1962 adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, although Kane is more often likened to Dracula - lean, pale, very long-lived, appears to sleep in a coffin, doesn't like sunlight. (For some reason, the Internet seems to associate Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor - remember it from Attack of the Cybermen? - with Dracula, although there's no cinematic precedent for this at all.) It's worth noting that Dragonfire's script is laden with references to film theorists, historians and characters - it's entirely appropriate for Glynn to join in with some cinematic gestures of his own.
• A wistful theme in high synth strings and flute is played over model shots of the planet Svartos and of Glitz's ship leaving it. It's a charming piece that helps to sell the model shots to the viewer. Another melancholic flute cue is used in scenes of Kane's unhappy minions plotting against him.
• Other cues echo the melodrama of Kane's organ theme. Your humble blogger could mention the earnest "action movie" bass guitar and cabasa stuff heard in one scene of Kane's staff "bug hunting" in Part Three, or the metallic thumping steps used throughout for the zombie mercenaries, but the real stand-out is the piece that plays when the dragon appears at the end of Part One. It sounds a bit like the sort of staccato histrionics you'd hear being played on the violin in a Hitchcock film, except that it sounds as if it's being banged out on an antique upright piano. 
• Glynn proves to be the master of muzak in the Sylvester McCoy era, and here provides three distinct pieces of diegetic music for the scenes in the Iceworld cantina in Part One. All of them feature the icy, tinkly sound of the glockenspiel: the first piece includes high, airy synths and the flute; the second loses the flute and sticks to the glock and synths; the third takes a strange detour through the warmer musical territory of the trumpet and guitar. The second of these three tunes is only briefly heard in Part One, but makes a return appearance in Part Three in the scene of zombie mercenaries storming through the Iceworld complex and driving the customers out of the cantina.
• The most appropriate instrument of all, the crystallophone, is finally heard near the end of Part Three when Mel announces her departure. The crystallophone, or glass harmonica, sounds like a set of wine glasses being played with a wet finger, and produces sound through crystalline resonance in much the same way - it's rather like a huge, rotating, conical wine glass on its side. What we have here is probably a synth imitation, mind you. The cue opens with a DW theme reference, a little "oo-wee-oo", before - like Mel herself - heading off in another direction.

Vox pop
This is a very theatrical score, which makes it a fair match for the theatricality of the TV episodes it was composed for. In isolation, it has its moments, charming and trying by turns. It is, of course, another solid piece of work from Dominic Glynn, but I wouldn't say it's Glynn's best DW score, or the best of this season. The in-your-face organ music is amusing at first, but outstays its welcome soon enough. The good news, and the important thing, is that it's never less than interesting.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• An abridged version of this 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 Mysterious Planet and The Ultimate Foe.