Daily #2

Danny Elfman’s music is a never-ending exploration of Gothic musical taste. Elfman is an unusual film score composer, which is usually made of precocious talents of solid education from the best academies. Seventy-one-year-old Danny Elfman, instead, is a self-taught artist who discovered his passion for music later in life, and cut his teeth in a pop-rock band, the Oingo Boingo. In 1985, he was commissioned the soundtrack for Tim Burton’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and since that moment, the two become inseparable. Elfman authored 17 of the 20 features Burton directed. This is more than a fellowship, it is a brand, a unique style in the world of score, because Elfman’s music is instantly recognizable for its mysterious atmospheres, so motile, so slippery, between the circusy and the dazed, truly the essence of dark Gothic. Musicologists and music theories love its intimate refinement and its complexity. With the 1988 Beetlejuice, Danny Elfman’s music becomes known worldwide. Just listen to the main motif, that eerie introduction taking after Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat and growing into an uptempo of strings and winds and the shortest musical phrases you can think of frantically mixing and matching with one another. Conducting the orchestra at the recording studio was the great Lionel Newman, 20^th Century – Fox’s authority on music, with eleven Oscar nominations under his belt. During rehearsals, Newman kept making interpretative choices that countered Elfman’s ideas, and kept a generally cavalier attitude towards him. He is known for saying: “Please, Ludwig Van, I’m trying to get some work done, here!”. The next day, Newman was replaced. Thirty-six years later, the music for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is still airy and fantastic, although not that festive mix of surprise and originality. The main motif takes off the earlier film, but with added irony and some humoristic mimesis that we ascribe to the composer’s age. Among the several popular songs included in the feature, the most captivating is Tragedy by the Bee Gees, used in the incredible scene of anatomical reconstruction starring Monica Bellucci.