This is the last in a series of six posts on the 2013 Oscar nominees for Best Original Score. I have already parsed each of the five nominated scores in some detail in my previous posts. So what is my prediction for the winner? Mychael Danna’s score for Life of Pi. Although this probably comes as no surprise, it is worth considering many of the things that this score has going for it.

Past Oscar Wins

Data from the last ten years of the Oscars reveals some interesting patterns in the winners for Best Original Score. First and foremost, 90% of scores that won were for films that were also nominated for Best Picture. This year, Life of Pi, Lincoln, and Argo have nominations for both Best Score and Best Picture. The last score to win whose film was not nominated for Best Picture was Eliot Goldenthal’s score to Frida all the way back in 2002. This is not to say that scores for films without a Best Picture nomination won’t win, but certainly the odds are against them.

Of the past ten years of Best Score winners, 60% of them were for films that also had nominations for both Best Picture and Best Director. This year, only Life of Pi and Lincoln have these other nominations. It’s not as if Argo is out of the running, but the vast majority of recent winning scores are linked to these other nominations.

Other Awards

Besides the Oscars, we might also consider the histories of two other prestigious prizes, the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs. In the past ten years, 70% of Best Score winners also took home the Golden Globe earlier in the year. And in fact, Golden Globe score winners have also won the Oscar for the last five years in a row. This year, Life of Pi won the Golden Globe.

Some might say that because Thomas Newman’s score for Skyfall won the BAFTA this year, that it will have an advantage on Oscar night. But in the past ten years, only 40% of BAFTA winners went on to win the Oscar as well. From this perspective, things look better for Life of Pi than for Skyfall.

Subjective Aspects of the Score

Life of Pi is the only film to earn its composer two Oscar nominations, one for the score and one for the song, “Pi’s Lullaby”. Even if the song loses to Adele’s and Paul Epworth’s heavily favoured “Skyfall”, the nomination speaks well of Life of Pi’s score since the song is actually a part of Mychael Danna’s original score. In addition, “Pi’s Lullaby” occurs over the main titles, which introduces the sense innocence and wonder of Pi’s childhood with a delightful montage of various zoo animals that the music suits perfectly. The sequence is therefore a “money scene” for Danna’s music, in other words a scene in which the music is both highly emotional and unforgettable.

Life of Pi is also the kind of film that calls for prominent, foregrounded scoring in many scenes. So it is unlikely to come away from the film not having noticed the music at all. But more than that, the emphasis on consonant chords and lush, sustained harmonies in the score suits the highly spiritual and emotional nature of the film. Consider, for example, the music we hear as Pi helplessly watches the ship with all his family members sink into the ocean’s depths. Its solemnity and beauty creates a heart-wrenching effect that is hard to forget, especially with the use of a choir, which enters at 0:25 in this clip:

Comparison with the Other Nominees

The score for Life of Pi also looks very strong when compared to the other nominees. Neither Skyfall nor Anna Karenina are nominated for either Best Picture or Best Director, a fact that, as we saw, significantly decreases their chances of winning Best Score. Moreover, both films have an extra strike against them. Anna Karenina was the only film of the Best Score nominees not to break into the 100 top-grossing films of 2012, a fact that certainly harms its chances in a business that is intensely profit-driven. Skyfall earns the extra strike because, incredible as it may seem, a James Bond score has never taken home the Oscar.

While John Williams’ score for Lincoln is a sensitive treatment of the subject matter, it is not what you would call prominent film music. Since most of the film is given to elegantly polished dialogue that must be heard above any other sounds, space for the music is far more limited than in most other Williams scores. In addition, most of our attention during the film is focused on understanding the complexity of the dialogue, the political motivations of each of the characters, and even trying to keep the names of many characters straight. Again, this leaves little room in our memory for music, no matter how well crafted it may be.

In Argo, Alexandre Desplat gives us a fully competent score that fits the emotional ups and downs of the narrative. But, like Lincoln, there is so little music in the film that it becomes difficult to remember afterwards. Most of the score is devoted to atmospheric music rather than themes and leitmotifs that stick out in one’s mind. The most memorable music in the score occurs when the American hideaways have safely made it out of Iran by plane. But even so, this scene is at the end of the film. The music we have heard up to this point is hard to recall, especially as much of it is placed under the all-important dialogue.

Factors Against Life of Pi Winning

Now of course I’m not saying that Life of Pi is sure to win, only that it is the most likely of the five. So we ought to consider some of the factors working against a win for Life of Pi.

Although a Bond score has never won, Skyfall has the advantage of being the 50th-anniversary film of the Bond franchise. Newman is also a veteran of the business that many believe is long overdue for an Oscar win. Many Academy members may feel the same way. Finally, as I mentioned, its title song is favoured to win and that could carry over into a win for the score, even though the song is not Newman’s.

Despite the subdued quality of Lincoln’s score, the film seems tailor-made to please the Academy. According to an L.A. Times study, 94% of the Academy is Caucasian, 77% are male, and the median age is 62. A film that glorifies the actions of a prominent white male of about the same age might well appeal to most members. It might well be the case that most members vote for this score not only because it is a well done score by one of the all-time greats of film composers, but also because they appreciate Lincoln as a whole and wish to recognize its merits with awards in several categories.

And while Desplat’s score for Argo may not be all that memorable or lengthy, the film has claimed the Best Picture award from the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild Awards, and the Directors Guild Awards. This momentum that Argo has built up could translate into a win for Desplat.

But in the end, all of this evidence in favour of Life of Pi could be entirely moot. After all, this is the Oscars, and as we know, anything can happen.

Mychael Danna is a Canadian composer who studied music at the University of Toronto, during which time he was composer-in-residence for the city’s planetarium. He began his career in film music by scoring Atom Egoyan’s Family Viewing in 1987, and has since scored many more of Egoyan’s films and an increasing number of Hollywood feature films including Being Julia, Little Miss Sunshine, and Moneyball.

Life of Pi is in part about an Indian family that decides to emigrate to Canada, an ideal story for Danna’s musical style, which is known for combining Western and non-Western sounds, as well as incorporating aspects of popular music. All of these elements come together in a unique synthesis in Life of Pi, as a brief film music analysis of four scenes will show.

“Pi’s Lullaby”

In addition to the nomination for his entire score, Danna has also earned a nomination for Best Original Song for “Pi’s Lullaby”. We hear this song over the main titles, which are shown with images of animals in naturalistic settings in the zoo owned by Pi’s parents. The music sets an idyllic tone for the first portion of the film, when Pi is filled with innocence and wonder while growing up in India.

One of the most striking features of this song is its instrumentation. Its blend of East and West begins right away as high strings in tremolo (rapid repetition of a note) are combined with an Indian-style vocal sung in Tamil by the Indian singer Bombay Jayashri. After the song’s thirty-second introduction, strings in the mid-range add a more prominent Western sound. Not long after, one can also hear the higher strings and a wordless choir brought in for a grand, sweeping effect. But several Eastern instruments are heard throughout as well: bansuri flute, santoor hammered dulcimer, mridangam drums, and various other drum and percussion sounds. Near the end of the song, the accordion and mandolin make an appearance to indicate the connection Pi’s father, and Pi himself, have to Paris (discussed below).

A pop music influence is evident in the harmony of the song. Once the bass enters after the song’s introduction, the chord progression is I-iii-vi-IV, a slight variation of I-V-vi-IV, what I call the “ballad progression” because it occurs in so many ballad-type pop songs. But unlike the pop use of this progression, Danna abandons it early on and keeps the harmony changing throughout most of the song. The fairly regular chord changes and use of mainly root-position chords are both reminiscent of pop as well, but even here Danna includes differences such as syncopation in the chord changes and inversions of some of the chords.

This cue is tightly constructed from start to finish and certainly deserves the Oscar nomination it has received. Hear it below:

“Piscine Molitor Patel”

This cue is heard as Pi is describing the origin of his name, which is from a swimming pool his father once swam in called the “Piscine Molitor” in Paris. As Pi tells this story, we hear music that is distinctly French: accordion music in the style of a waltz. When the scene transitions to Pi’s childhood in India, we hear the Indian instruments I mentioned with “Pi’s Lullaby”. The sitar then enters with a clear statement of what becomes Pi’s theme:

We often hear this theme performed on the breathy bansuri flute later in the film. Hear the French music from the start of this clip, and the Indian music from 1:35:

“The Whale”

In the second half of the film, Pi struggles to survive after being stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Pi’s first tactic is to construct a small raft that he ties to the lifeboat in order to avoid contact with the tiger. “The Whale” occurs in a nocturnal scene in which Pi is delighted by some luminescent algae that the lifeboat happens upon. Within moments, however, a giant whale rises out of the water, tipping Pi’s raft and spilling all the food and water he had taken from the lifeboat for safekeeping.

The music here is both mysterious and ominous. We hear an ostinato (repeating figure) on the semitone Ab-G played on a Balinese gamelan gong, which gives the ostinato an otherworldly character. The figure is set in C minor, a key traditionally associated with tragedy (Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for instance). The ostinato could be called the “Perils of Night” theme because it is always heard in night scenes when Pi is in some sort of danger or when his situation seems particularly hopeless, as in this cue and two others:

• “Tiger Vision” – Pi fails to catch the attention of a passing ship with several flares
• “Back to the World” – Pi realizes that the island he has reached is carnivorous and that he would die if he stayed there

Hear “The Whale” below:

“First Night, First Day”

This scene depicts Pi’s first night on the lifeboat and the transition into the next day. The style of the music here is typical of many cues in the score. The harmony is composed of lush, slow-moving, consonant chords. The instrumentation begins with strings, then the bansuri flute and vocals are mixed in along with other electronically enhanced and highly reverberant sounds. It is not difficult to hear in this cue the influence of Danna’s early work for the planetarium (mentioned in a previous post), an appropriate connection given that the scene depicts a wordless transition from night to day, as one might experience in a planetarium show. As morning breaks, one can almost feel the sun’s rays in the music with the addition of higher electronic sounds, then a boy soprano singing a bright vocal line backed up by a low wordless choir and, again, reverberant electronic sounds.

Hear it below:

I was delighted to hear this news as he is a fellow Canadian and fellow graduate of the University of Toronto, where he studied composition. In fact, it seems Danna was always interested in setting music to images as one of his earliest jobs was as composer for the McLaughlin Planetarium, which is now defunct but still stands literally right beside the Faculty of Music at the university. (Ironically enough, the property has now been purchased by the university to be used by the Faculty of Music!). This gave Danna his first taste of setting music to images. And actually, you can still hear some of this music on YouTube. Here is a clip of his score from the last show ever produced at the planetarium:

But it was my experience at that university that once brought me into contact with Danna.

When I completed my Master’s degree in music at the University of Toronto, Mychael Danna was invited to speak at the convocation ceremony. He spoke with an eloquence and honesty that is rare for any public speaker and his speech has stuck with me ever since. He began by telling us (tongue-in-cheek) that when he completed his degree there, he had found, to his chagrin, that all the court composer jobs had dried up centuries ago, so he had to find another way to make a living as a composer. Instead, he chose to take his chances at film composition, but the ride was certainly not a smooth one. He remarked that you never know what a film is going to be like in the end, especially if the director has very few films to his or her credit. With this in mind, he told us that he once “turned down a little movie you might have heard of called The Sixth Sense.” Of course, that film went on to become a huge hit and Danna ended up kicking himself. But he pressed on nonetheless.

He then mentioned that at one point he became so disheartened with the process of tracking down film scoring jobs and the whole industry that he seriously considered dropping music altogether and going to law school. Though he didn’t exactly say what disheartened him, I’m sure one major factor was his score for Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), which was rejected only a few days before it was to be recorded. Danny Elfman was then hired as a replacement.

Fortunately, Danna did not go to law school and continued to score films. His message to us was therefore that one should expect formidable challenges along the roads of our chosen careers (especially those of us in music) but always to retain belief in oneself in order to overcome them. It was so refreshing to hear this kind of realistic yet still very positive speech at a time when we are filled with such uncertainty about our future. It was the best graduation speech I’ve ever heard.

So it would be great to see Danna win at least one Academy Award this year, and things are certainly looking up as just last night he won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score for Life of Pi. In case you’re wondering what his music for Life of Pi sounds like, here is the lullaby that’s been nominated for Best Original Song:

As you can hear, Danna’s sound is a unique blend of non-Western instruments and lyrics, electronic new-age-like sounds, and the traditional symphony orchestra. At other times, he also incorporates elements of minimalism, as in his score for Little Miss Sunshine, a clip of which I’ve posted here:

The minimalism sound is also a big part of his score for Moneyball, as you can hear in this clip:

Good luck to Danna on February 24 at the Oscars – I’ll be rooting for him!