Monday Music "Anvil of Crom" by Basil Poledouris

  Man the meme is still rolling along.....

I am continuing my string of "bugaloo" songs.  This discussion was started in the "Monster Hunter Nation, Hunters Unite", back in November of 2019? it is a Facebook group with enthusiast of the ILOH "International Lord of Hate" A.K.A Larry Correia.  We were talking about what song would we use if we looked out of our window or glanced at our security camera and saw this.....

One of the alphabet bois lining up to take down your house...What would be your "Valhalla" song and you would set it up to play as you load up magazines set up the Tannerite Rover and prepare yourself.

 I figured it would scar the alphabet boys if they come busting in and hearing a song about people standing for their beliefs and willing to fight for them no matter the cost, Good Music  unlike that crap they listen to now.  What can I say, My humor is warped....just a bit. Next week will be "Bleed it Out" by Linkin Park, Now that should really cause some psych evals., hehehe, some poor ATF guy trying to explain the attraction to his mother because he is imaging himself as The savior of the American Way"  instead of the initials of a convenience store....But hey it is ATF...and they ain't right.

   Anvil of Crom is a musical track from the Soundtrack from Conan the Barbarian.

Conan the Barbarian is a 1982 American epic sword-and-sorcery film directed by John Milius and written by Milius and Oliver Stone. It is based on the character Conan, created by Robert E. Howard. The film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Earl Jones, and tells the story of a young muscular barbarian warrior named Conan (Schwarzenegger), who seeks vengeance for the death of his parents at the hands of Thulsa Doom (Jones), the leader of a snake cult.

Ideas for a Conan film were proposed as early as 1970; executive producer Edward R. Pressman and associate producer Edward Summer began a concerted effort to get the film made in 1975. It took them two years to obtain the film rights, after which they recruited Schwarzenegger for the lead role and Stone to draft a script. Pressman lacked capital for the endeavor. In 1979, after having his proposals for investments rejected by the major studios, he sold the project to Dino De Laurentiis; his daughter Raffaella produced the film. Milius was appointed as director and he rewrote Stone's script. The final screenplay integrated scenes from Howard's stories and from the Japanese films Seven Samurai (1954) and Kwaidan (1965). Filming took place in Spain over five months in the regions around Madrid and the province of Almería. The sets, designed by Ron Cobb, were based on Dark Age cultures and Frank Frazetta's paintings of Conan. Milius eschewed optical effects, preferring to realize his ideas with mechanical constructs and optical illusions. Schwarzenegger performed most of his own stunts, and two types of swords, costing $10,000 each, were forged for his character. The editing process took over a year, and several violent scenes were cut out.

Conan the Barbarian was distributed by Universal Pictures in North America and 20th Century Fox in other territories. It premiered on March 16, 1982 in Spain and May 14, 1982 in North America. Upon release, the film received mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike, mainly positive for its action sequences, production design, directing, visual style, effects and Schwarzenegger's performance, but negatively received for its violent content and screenwriting. Despite this, the film became a commercial success for its backers, grossing between $68.9 million and $79.1 million at box offices around the world against its budget of only $20 million. However, the revenue fell short of the level that would qualify the film as a blockbuster.

The film earned Schwarzenegger worldwide recognition. Conan the Barbarian has been frequently released on home video, the sales of which had increased the film's gross to more than $300 million by 2007. In the years following its release, it became a cult film, and its success spawned a sequel, titled Conan the Destroyer (1984). 

"Riddle of Steel"

Milius recruited his friend, Basil Poledouris, to produce the score for Conan; they had had a successful collaboration on Big Wednesday. The film industry's usual practice was to contract a composer to start work after the main scenes had been filmed, but Milius hired Poledouris before principal photography had started. The composer was given the opportunity to compose the film's music based on the initial storyboards and to modify it throughout filming before recording the score near the end of production. Poledouris made extensive use of Musync, a music and tempo editing hardware and software system invented by Robert Randles (subsequently nominated for an Oscar for Scientific Achievement), to modify the tempo of his compositions and synchronize them with the action in the film. The system helped make his job easier and faster; it could automatically adjust tempos when the user changed the positioning of beats. In the montage where Conan grows up, for example, Poledouris had Randles prepare, over the phone, a long accelerando that landed on precise moments in the picture along the way. Poledouris would otherwise have had to conduct the orchestra and adjust his compositions on the fly. Conan is the first film to list Musync in its credits.

Milius and Poledouris exchanged ideas throughout production, working out themes and "emotional tones" for each scene. According to Poledouris, Milius envisioned Conan as an opera with little or no dialogue; Poledouris composed enough musical pieces for most of the film (around two hours' worth). This was his first large-scale orchestral score, and a characteristic of his work here was that he frequently slowed down the tempo of the last two bars (segments of beats) before switching to the next piece of music. Poledouris said the score uses a lot of fifths as its most primitive interval; thirds and sixths are introduced as the story progresses.The composer visited the film sets several times during filming to see the imagery his music would accompany. After principal photography was completed, Milius sent him two copies of the edited film: one without music, and the other with its scenes set to works by Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev, to illustrate the emotional overtones he wanted.

Big Fight Scene, Battle of the Mounds

This is the one that I have on my phone that prompted the background for this post.

Few against Many....Us vs .gov

Poledouris said he started working on the score by developing the melodic line—a pattern of musical ideas supported by rhythms. The first draft was a poem sung to the strumming of a guitar, composed as if Poledouris was a bard for the barbarian. This draft became the "Riddle of Steel", a composition played with "massive brass, strings, and percussion", which also serves as Conan's personal theme. The music is first played when Conan's father explains the riddle to him. Laurence E. MacDonald, Professor of Music at Mott Community College, said the theme stirs up the appropriate emotions when it is repeated during Conan's vow to avenge his parents. The film's main musical theme, the "Anvil of Crom", which opens the film with "the brassy sound of 24 French horns in a dramatic intonation of the melody, while pounding drums add an incessantly driven rhythmic propulsion" is played again in several later scenes.

Poledouris completed the music that accompanies the attack on Conan's village at the beginning of the film in October 1981. Milius initially wanted a chorus based on Carl Orff's Carmina Burana to herald the appearance of Doom and his warriors in this sequence. After learning that Excalibur (1981) had used Orff's work, he changed his mind and asked his composer for an original creation. Poledouris's theme for Doom consists of "energetic choral passages", chanted by the villain's followers to salute their leader and their actions in his name. The lyrics were composed in English and roughly translated into Latin; Poledouris was "more concerned about the way the Latin words sounded than with the sense they actually made." He set these words to a melody adapted from the 13th-century Gregorian hymn, Dies irae, which was chosen to "communicate the tragic aspects of the cruelty wrought by Thulsa Doom."

The film's music mostly conveys a sense of power, energy, and brutality, yet tender moments occur. The sounds of oboes and string instruments accompany Conan and Valeria's intimate scenes, imbuing them with a sense of lush romance and an emotional intensity. According to MacDonald, Poledouris deviated from the practice of scoring love scenes with tunes reminiscent of Romantic period pieces; instead, Poledouris made Conan and Valeria's melancholic love theme unique through his use of "minor-key harmony". David Morgan, a film journalist, heard Eastern influences in the "lilting romantic melodies". Page Cook, audio critic for Films in Review, describes Conan the Barbarian's score as "a large canvas daubed with a colorful yet highly sensitive brush. There is innate intelligence behind Poledouris's scheme, and the pinnacles reached are often eloquent with haunting intensity."

From late November 1981, Poledouris spent three weeks recording his score in Rome. He engaged a 90-instrument orchestra and a 24-member choir from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, and conducted them personally.The pieces of music were orchestrated by Greig McRitchie, Poledouris's frequent collaborator.The chorus and orchestra were recorded separately. The 24 tracks of sound effects, music, and dialog were downmixed into a single-channel,making Conan the Barbarian the last film released by a major studio with a mono soundtrackn  According to Poledouris, Raffaella De Laurentiis balked at the cost ($30,000) of a stereo soundtrack and was worried over the lack of theaters equipped with stereo sound systems.

       

                                                       And of course the instant classic

"Best in Life"