Film music isn’t a genre of music – it’s effectively all genres. For a while it was very largely dominated by romantic symphonic music, then jazz came into it, then other 20th century musical forms, and eventually we’ve ended up in a place where it can be anything. Likewise, there are so many ways of scoring a film – Composer A may score a film one way, Composer B may well have scored the same film a very different way, and they may both have been absolutely great film scores. There’s really no “right answer” here. Which brings me to the question – what is film music for?

This is something I’ve spent much of my time thinking about while watching Shogun on Disney+. It’s the second epic miniseries based on James Clavell’s novel about political scheming in 16th century Japan observed and influenced by an English sailor and has just about everything you might want from one of these things – complex characters and plot carefully woven over an extended runtime, great costumes and battles and landscapes and, well, OK obviously there’s something missing.

I reiterate that there is no right way of scoring a film (or in this case tv show). But having said that, if the showrunners of Shogun had called me up and asked me what I thought they should look for in the score to their show then I’d have said it seems pretty obvious to me what would work best – this is something that clearly offers the scope for a composer to really go big – there’s action, adventure, romance, east-meets-west clash of culture, drama, tragedy – we could have themes! We can have rousing action music! If you want to go the extra mile, we can have music that plants seeds early on that get developed later on.

I realise that it’s 2024 and my views of what film music can and should be are based in what is now the fairly distant past. So what is it for? Well it seems to me that it can help the filmmaker tell their story – it can emphasise things that are there, it can plug gaps that aren’t there, it can subliminally lead the audience to a certain place, it can heighten emotions, it can when necessary dull emotions – it can do anything, really, in the hands of the right person.

John Barry wrote a brilliant score for Out of Africa. It’s pretty much a perfect film score, in my mind. Sydney Pollack originally asked him to write African music for it – Barry had to persuade him that the film was set in Africa but it wasn’t about Africa. He wanted to score the emotions and that’s what he did, brilliantly. Let’s say in a parallel universe that Pollack’s usual composer Dave Grusin had scored the film and had followed Pollack’s instruction – he’d have probably written a great score himself, completely different from Barry’s, blending his usual style with African influences and arriving at a completely different destination but still doing something to elevate the film.

So I’m just repeating myself really – making my facile point over and over again that there are many different ways to skin a cat. But what on earth is the music of Shogun trying to do? Near the end of the first episode, the English character catches the eye of a beautiful Japanese woman when he is hauled before one of the local lords. There’s clearly a connection there – in my version of this film score, that’s the point when the composer drops just a couple of bars of what will later become his love theme. But in the version of the score we actually got, we hear keyboard droning, seemingly oblivious to anything happening on the screen.

In the fourth episode, said lord (Toranaga) returns to the village his people are from. It’s a triumphant return – he is given a hero’s welcome, thousands of troops lined up cheering him as they await his inspection – the locals straining to get a view of the main man, chanting in his honour. The music – surely here, we get a rousing rendition of the character’s theme, we share in the sense of having a momentary relief from the trials and tribulations he’s been through to get to this moment. No, actually – we hear keyboard droning, seemingly oblivious to anything happening on the screen.

I don’t understand what it’s trying to do. The composers – three are credited – are no doubt doing what they were asked to do. But why were they asked to do this? You don’t hear much of it in the show, but on the album you can hear a Japanese influence both from the inevitable percussion flavours and occasionally from vocals – and that’s fine. In fact, Maurice Jarre did that for the 1980 version too. (John Barry would not have approved.) But Jarre also created themes that bind everything together – he created layers of emotion, continually shifting – he created dramatic weight and impetus, giving momentum whenever needed. I realise that Jarre is a rather love him or hate him type of film composer but even the haters would acknowledge his attempt to craft music that reflected the scope of what he was scoring – it was huge to begin with and he managed to make it seem even bigger.

Everything about the music in Shogun seems determined to make it seem smaller – moments of joy are scored with dour, funereal keyboard chords – that flicker of romance I mentioned is scored as if someone’s just been killed – and perhaps I’m just too old, I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand what anyone thinks this music is doing that is a positive for the show itself – why go to all that expense in every other aspect of the production to make it seem like a classic Hollywood epic and then have the music try to turn it into a gritty film noir? What do they think it’s doing? These are genuine questions by the way – I’d love to know what people think.

I think it takes an incredible talent from a composer to make a film better – there aren’t really very many of them who have managed it routinely. But it’s very, very rare that the music actively makes a film worse. With Shogun it’s especially painful because of the opportunity cost – and this is selfish of course, but every episode I sit there thinking about what Joe Hisaishi may have done with this, or Naoki Sato, or any of the other brilliant Japanese composers – I say it’s selfish because I’m effectively saying that I wish this had been scored the way I want and like rather than the almost countless other ways it could have been scored. I say almost countless, because we somehow arrived at an approach that just doesn’t seem to have any purpose. I don’t mind when composers take a big swing and (in my opinion) miss – that’s far preferable to just playing it safe all the time. But this just doesn’t seem to take any swing at all. I’d love to hear from the showrunners about what it was about this musical style that they thought was right, so I could understand it a bit better. Or maybe enough time has passed since the Barry/Jarre/(dare I say) Horner way of scoring these things – and I’m quite happy to admit that it really is an awfully long time now – that we now have people setting the musical direction on things like this who genuinely don’t understand what scope could be added to their projects if they make the right choices. (But nah, I’m probably just too old and am too far removed from what gets people’s blood flowing these days.)

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