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SCORES 23 THEMES BY 15 COMPOSERS. Dances with Wolves The John Dunbar Theme John Barry The English Patient The Mission River Ennio Morricone On Golden Pond.
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Kevin Costner's 1990 Dances With Wolves received ten Academy Awards, including ones for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Music Score. Composer John Barry had earlier won Oscars for Born Free (1966), The Lion in Winter (1968), and Out of Africa (1985). Arguably, Dances With Wolves is his most majestic score, and features music not usually associated with the Western genre or with the American Indian. Instead, Barry offers an epic style that exudes a serene, idyllic character, deftly matching its music to the film's often turbulent story, which is set in post-Civil War South Dakota.
There are three dominant themes in the score: the stately, lyrical melody associated with the main character, Lt. John Dunbar; the charming love theme; and the muscular journeying theme. The Dunbar theme is beautiful in its lonely serenity, confining itself to the middle ranges of the strings, with flowing accompaniment from the harp. The love theme is as slowly paced and nearly as serene, but is brighter, the strings soaring ecstatically in their upper ranges. The journeying theme, first heard in the film track CD issued under the title Journey to Fort Sedgewick, is livelier and features prominent writing for the French horn, which imparts a heroic, rugged character to the music.
The same kind of vigor and epic music are evident in the various Buffalo Hunt cues. In the Fire Dance music, rhythms exhibit exotic characteristics associated with more traditional American Indian music from older Western film scores, but the thematic material is serene and peaceful in its gentle flow and slower pacing. In the end, Barry gives the listener an epic score, whose overriding sense of tranquility conveys the idyllic life of the Sioux tribe and the misfit Civil War hero, Lt. Dunbar, who joins the Sioux and falls in love with the white squaw living with them, named Stands With a Fist.
Appears On
Year | Title / Performer | Label / Catalog # | AllMusic Rating |
---|---|---|---|
2014 | Selmer Saxharmonic / Milan Turkovic | MDGCD 6101852 | |
2010 | 1194 | ||
2008 | Sony Music Distribution | ||
2004 | Legacy / Epic | ||
2000 | Epic / Sony Classical Essential Classics | ||
1990 | Epic |
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