John Barry's fifth Oscar-winning score is a profoundly moving body of music, generally (though not entirely) elegiac in tone, very much like the movie for which it was written. It's also a bit of a mixed bag, occasionally falling back on material that will be familiar to fans of the
James Bond movies that
Barry scored during the early/mid-'60s. The main title theme uses some of those devices -- dense, heavy string passages adjacent to trumpet calls -- but it is hardly representative of the full score. The real heart of
Dances With Wolves is the pensive, tragic
"John Dunbar Theme," which is far closer in spirit to
Barry's music for
Somewhere in Time or
They Might Be Giants, films (and scores) far removed from the
Bond movies. It seems as though, when
Barry is asked to write music for characters that are complex and troubled (of which
Bond is neither), he delivers the goods in the guise of musical material that reflects those elements. Some elements familiar from the
Bond films can be found scattered throughout this soundtrack, particularly the violin-driven "stings" that open
"The Death of Timmons" and the horn calls that herald its closing; the string parts underneath the hyperactive percussion of
"Pawnee Attack" might've been lifted right out of
From Russia With Love and
"Stands With a Fist Remembers," with its secondary violin part, in the upper register of the strings. Much of
Dances With Wolves, however, shows a broadening of
Barry's sound -- he uses the vast canvas of
Kevin Costner's movie and
Dean Semler's cinematography as the basis for one of the most richly scored soundtracks of his career, working with one of the largest orchestras ever heard in one of his films;
"Journey to Fort Sedgewick," "Kicking Bird's Gift," "Two Socks at Play," "The Death of Cisco," and
"Journey to the Buffalo Killing Ground" have an almost
Copland-like majesty about them, and
"The Buffalo Hunt" is one of the finest pieces of music the man ever wrote. At times, it sounds as though
Barry had every string player and hornist in Los Angeles present, and topped it all out with an oversized percussion section, but none of the music or the scoring here sound excessive.
Dances With Wolves has appeared in several CD editions, some featuring bonus tracks, and in 2000 became the first soundtrack ever released as a Super Audio CD (with presence on the percussion and the horns that will knock the listener's socks off). ~ Bruce Eder
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