Second thoughts
Jun. 25th, 2013 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerSometimes they're good. Sometimes not so much.
We're rewatching Deep Space Nine at the moment, and I've fallen in love with the opening sequence all over again, and especially the music. I loved the music of TNG (itself a second thought to some extent, and none the worse for it) and was fascinated by the way DS9's theme took the first four-note phrase of the older theme and developed it in different ways that I found by turns intriguing and--at first--irritating. TNG's music was all about movement, exploring, travelling; DS9's was about stillness, standing fast, standing guard, and it expressed that feeling brilliantly with notes that spanned barlines and phrases that blithely ignored any suggestion of a beat. One theme said "here we go!"; the other said "here I stand." I found them both irresistible, as well as an object lesson in some of the ways to make the same notes say very different things.
So of course they had to ruin it in season four by bunging a beat under it, not to mention cluttering up the visual with far too many spaceships going zoom across the screen, because they didn't trust the new stories to speak for themselves. It's still good, but it's no longer great. I suppose it's easily done when you have committees working on every production and no single vision guiding the creative process; like putting Solsbury Hill into common time, like tacking a sequel hook on to a story that's complete in itself, you forget what you meant to do, you miss your own point.
Shame, though.
We're rewatching Deep Space Nine at the moment, and I've fallen in love with the opening sequence all over again, and especially the music. I loved the music of TNG (itself a second thought to some extent, and none the worse for it) and was fascinated by the way DS9's theme took the first four-note phrase of the older theme and developed it in different ways that I found by turns intriguing and--at first--irritating. TNG's music was all about movement, exploring, travelling; DS9's was about stillness, standing fast, standing guard, and it expressed that feeling brilliantly with notes that spanned barlines and phrases that blithely ignored any suggestion of a beat. One theme said "here we go!"; the other said "here I stand." I found them both irresistible, as well as an object lesson in some of the ways to make the same notes say very different things.
So of course they had to ruin it in season four by bunging a beat under it, not to mention cluttering up the visual with far too many spaceships going zoom across the screen, because they didn't trust the new stories to speak for themselves. It's still good, but it's no longer great. I suppose it's easily done when you have committees working on every production and no single vision guiding the creative process; like putting Solsbury Hill into common time, like tacking a sequel hook on to a story that's complete in itself, you forget what you meant to do, you miss your own point.
Shame, though.
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no subject
Date: 2013-06-25 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 05:17 pm (UTC)(I don't think I got much further than the start of Season 4, myself... Whenabouts did they find Odo's planet of origin?)