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Louis and Bebe Barron's Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Film Score Guides) | 
 enlarge | Author: James Wierzbicki
Publisher: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $23.97
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 410025
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 200
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.5
ISBN: 0810856700
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.542
EAN: 9780810856707
ASIN: 0810856700
Publication Date: June 28, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Ships immediately! Perfect and New! 2005 Paperback.
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Product Description
James Wierzbicki's book on the score for Forbidden Planet deals with the composers' backgrounds; the composers' studio techniques; the critcal context of 1950's American science-fiction films and a summary of cirical readings of Forbidden Planet; an analysis of the decontextualized music as presented on the 1977 original soundtrack album; and a cue-by-cue analysis of the Barrons' music as it is actually used in the film. With numerous transcriptions and graphs to illustrate various aspects of musical structure, this study blazes a much-needed trail in the study of electronic music.
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| Customer Reviews:
 for history and analysis June 19, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was happy enough to add this book to my little Forbidden Planet collection. There are disappointments, but the book does have a place.
Author Wierzbicki spends a lot of time running through the story of scifi filmography and scifi musical scoring. He has a tendency to repeat himself and thus overstuff the content of the book. The net result with respect to the Barron's scoring is that not a lot is revealed. We know already that Louis never published his circuit designs (though I have seen a sample on the NPR page featuring the composing pair). So all we really know is the recorded results. Some of their most powerful stuff could not be generated again. Fortunately, they captured everything on tape. More tragically, perhaps, Bebe never revealed much about just how she made compositional choices from the accumulated recordings. Forbidden Planet the filmscore still remains shrouded in mystery.
It is too bad that electronic music notation, which is probably in an advanced state today, was not used to illustrate the examples. The author does attempt to make approximate tonal analysis. That is tricky, since the sound sources used in this music were not steady state (like instruments), but actively transient. But that is part of the musical mystique: electronic music NOT rooted in performance practice.
The most valuable aspect of this book is the separate discussion of the filmscore version done by the Barrons for a vinyl recording, contrasted with the music cues of the movie.
For the historical legacy (lacking any firsthand accounts of the making of the movie) and the double musical analysis, I give this book a moderate yes-vote.
 FORBIDDEN PLANET: Film Score Guide No. 4 August 29, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I finished nearly all of Wierzbicki's highly readable work; that is, you will not be burdened by excessive musicological jargon. It is an entertaining and informative read. In certain terms, it is an experimental analysis, just as the Barron score is an experimental, unusual score for Hollywood back in that Golden Age years. It's what can be termed a good SPECULATIVE analysis; that is, there is NO written score to analyze, so Wierzbicki had to base his observations and conclusions "entirely on aural experience." So it was an exercise that was out-of-the-norm in terms of film score analyses/books that normally rely on a physical (written) score. He would in Chapter 4 make written transcriptions or versions of the audio. With great pitch discrimination, I would assume he could do an excellent job of putting-to-paper elusive sounds that can be rather hard to pin down (especially electronically generated sounds). So Wierzbicki did a fine job in his attempt to decipher and musically intellectualize and describe what essentially is a listening experience.
Chapter 1 is "Origins and Connections," and quite informative. Even more interesting is Chapter 2's "Compositional Techniques" that more squarely discusses the phenomenon of electronic music. Chapter 3 is a very nice read, "Historical and Critical Contexts." Chapter 4 is the technical or analytical musical meat of the book, and the chapter I was most interested in. Chapter 5 ("The Film Score") deal more generally in terms of how the "music" functioned in the visual layout of the film, etc. Chapter 4 included many written transcriptions/versions of the electronic sounds, providing an admirable cue-by-analysis.
Like the Id monster, the score is invisible-in fact, it doesn't exist substantially as a written document but only as an aural event/experience. Wierzbicki admirably attempts to make it less invisible in understanding, to make it more substantial in his precise (or precisely subjective) analysis. He was in a sense in the Krell laboratories, experimenting to decipher or translate this aural score into another level of understanding. This was a hard task given that there was no "physical instrumentality" (no written score) available to him. My main criticism is that there is no new in-depth interview with Bebe Barron discussing the issues presented in the book that would've been an important historical document.
Bill Wrobel 8-29-05
Website: Film Score Rundowns
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