I don't know what will happen to you with these things, but I listen to the music of “Rocky” and I get a tremendous desire to do what I have never done before:
run like a crazy person through the streets of the neighborhood, throw pine cones in the air, feel the stitch of aerobic effort and still continue
.
After three minutes, when the topic ends, I calm down and once again become the champion of a sedentary lifestyle.
Sometimes I think that, without Bill Conti's compositions, “
Rocky” would have been just another boxer's movie
, the typical fable of the loser who rises above poverty, has his epic moment and returns to filth.
Following this reasoning, Sylvester Stallone owes almost everything (success, millions, fame, career) to the adrenaline-inducing “Gonna Fly Now”, the anguishing “Going to the Distance” and the moving “The Final Bell”.
Sylvester Stallone in the first film of the "Rocky" saga.
There is music that seems to contain the film genre for which it was written: that of the “Mission Impossible” series, for example,
the work of Argentine Lalo Schifrin
, is “the” soundtrack that symbolizes espionage, in the same way as
Ennio .
Morricone defined the western with many of his scores
.
Or is there a better accompaniment to a desert ride than “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”?
What other theme would we put to a duel in the sun other than “The Ecstasy of Gold”?
I risk saying that these compositions function as memes.
You listen to them and, even if you haven't seen the film for which they were written, you are already located in a certain narrative territory.
John Carpenter created a very simple music with a synthesizer for the first film in the “Halloween” saga (1978).
Today, almost half a century later, that tapping on the keyboard can only mean one thing:
something bad and horrible is about to happen
.
Ennio Morricone, when he received the Oscar for the music of the western "The Hateful Eight."
Photo;
AFP
I continue to risk: all the low blows of “Cinema Paradiso”, by Giuseppe Tornatore, would have drawn fewer tears without Morricone's music (a full-fledged cracker), and I wonder how much my sister would have cried with “Love Story”,
more beyond the drama of Ali McGraw dying of cancer and leaving Ryan O'Neal inconsolable
, without the very effective song by Francis Lai and Carl Sigman.
Video
.
Someone might tell me that it is the script that gives a certain imprint to the soundtrack, that frames it within a (permit the pomposity) semantic field and not the other way around.
Could be.
I am not an expert in anything and even less in music.
But returning to the themes of “Rocky”,
I can't imagine them having the same symbolic effectiveness accompanying scenes from a veganism documentary
.
Stallone's film was very low-budget and
only had $25,000 allocated to its soundtrack
, which included composer's fees, orchestra and recording costs.
The only one who accepted for that money was Bill Conti, who came out with a masterpiece that would reach number one on the charts in 1977, be nominated for an Oscar and become
a stainless anthem
.