Looking for critical DS9 fans

[TheGodBen]

I'm a big DS9 fan, but there is one thing that annoys me when re-watching the episodes; the score. Rumours say that Rick Berman forced the musical score to be bland so as not to upstage the events of screen, and while the score was usually okay, it often lacked impact. To make matters worse, it never had a single voice as each week it would change between different composers.

When I first saw nuBSG I hated it, and one of the things I hated most was the music. The drums really did my head in, so I stopped watching it after one episode. A few months back I decided to give it another chance, and not only has it grown on me, it has become my favourite series on TV right now. And somewhere in the middle of the first season, I fell in love with the music. I now have the soundtracks to the first three seasons.

So I decided to do a little test to see what DS9 would have been like with BSG's score. I took the final ten minutes of In the Hands of the Prophets and put the track Something Dark is Coming over it (the opening score to Lay Down Your Burdens Pt 1). I thought it went very well, so I edited out the DS9 score as much as I could, I edited some small bits out to make the action on screen fit better with the song, and I put it in widescreen.

If you are interested, please take a look.

I'm interested in your opinion because I'm thinking of doing more. The track Adama Falls seems to go well with the end of Duet, and Prelude to War seems to work with the battle in Call to Arms. So should I try more, or give up?

 

[c0rnedfr0g]

my favourite BSG music is Bear McCreary's "Pasacaglia" and the similar "The Shape of Things to Come." I used to play BSG music (esp those songs) while playing Halo 3 Team Slayer. it made it all seem overly dramatic, and the multiplayer didn't have music anyway. You should try to work those songs in somewhere.

Another fav (that would be out of place in ds9 though) is the version of 'All Along The Watchtower' which was played during the last scene of the Season 3 finale.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Oooh, I love the BsG score, and have been using it (behind the scenes of course) to drive the writing on my DS9 follow-up fanfic. That and Juno Reactor--something like "Immaculate Crucifixion" would've been really cool.

 

[TheGodBen]

my favourite BSG music is Bear McCreary's "Pasacaglia" and the similar "The Shape of Things to Come." I used to play BSG music (esp those songs) while playing Halo 3 Team Slayer. it made it all seem overly dramatic, and the multiplayer didn't have music anyway. You should try to work those songs in somewhere.

Another fav (that would be out of place in ds9 though) is the version of 'All Along The Watchtower' which was played during the last scene of the Season 3 finale.

I love Pasacaglia and The Shape of Things to Come, they're the best tracks from season 1. I just can't think of any DS9 clips they might work with though. Any suggestions?

As for All Along the Watchtower, I thought that might go well with the end of In Purgatory's Shadow. I did a very rough test of them together and it seemed to work.

 

[Apogeal Alpha01]

I can't think of another comment on the DS9 score, except to say, "DS9 had a score?" Picking The Wire to watch, at random, I rarely noticed it, mainly occurring at the beginning or end of scenes, DS9 has an entirely different ambiance than BSG. There's always crowd noises, twittering of displays, station noises, etc., that convey their own information.

It seems to me that the dialog is more nuanced than nuBSG. It would have been a shame to cover it with a heavy presence. The score you've put to the DS9 scenes are a little too brooding, and loud. The emotions of those scenes were carried very well by the dialog and action. I think the writers were right to want those scenes to be experienced in a thoughtful way, rather than emotionally as is fairly unavoidable, for me anyway, when viewing the scene you've adapted.

 

[Anticitizen]

The music from TNG-onward always sounded, to me, like the episodes weren't even individually scored, and they just have a repository of 'incidental music' to play. About to cut to commercial? Cue the "ominous horns"! TOS's score, by contrast, was awesome!

Ditto on BSG. Passacaglia and The Shape of Things to Come, previously mentioned, are both on my MP3 player in regular rotation.

 

[tomalak301]

If there was one thing I really hated about Modern Trek was the score. It always sounded so boring and bland, kind of like no work was really done to really have a good score. DS9 was probably the worst at this unfortunately.

 

[AdmiralGarak]

The music from TNG-onward always sounded, to me, like the episodes weren't even individually scored, and they just have a repository of 'incidental music' to play. About to cut to commercial? Cue the "ominous horns"! TOS's score, by contrast, was awesome!

Which is ironic, given that TOS was the one that actually relied upon a repository of incidental music. The spinoffs, by contrast, reused far less music. (Though it did happen. The space battles from "The Die is Cast" and "The Way of the Warrior" are an obvious example.)

 

[TheGodBen]

I can't think of another comment on the DS9 score, except to say, "DS9 had a score?" Picking The Wire to watch, at random, I rarely noticed it, mainly occurring at the beginning or end of scenes, DS9 has an entirely different ambiance than BSG. There's always crowd noises, twittering of displays, station noises, etc., that convey their own information.

It seems to me that the dialog is more nuanced than nuBSG. It would have been a shame to cover it with a heavy presence. The score you've put to the DS9 scenes are a little too brooding, and loud. The emotions of those scenes were carried very well by the dialog and action. I think the writers were right to want those scenes to be experienced in a thoughtful way, rather than emotionally as is fairly unavoidable, for me anyway, when viewing the scene you've adapted.

I can certainly understand your viewpoint, I'm often annoyed by certain TV shows and films having an overly bombastic score to create a false sense of excitement. The Sopranos wouldn't have been half as good had they decided to put a backing score to it.

But why shouldn't the end of In the Hands of the Prophets have a brooding score? Winn is trying to assassinate Bareil and get the Federation kicked out of Bajor; it is a dark moment. Most of what is going on in the dialogue is O'Brien and Dax talking technobable that isn't all that important to the plot. Oh, and Sisko shouts "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" That's nuanced dialogue right there. For the ending where Kira is talking about her faith and how much she has changed in the last year, I stopped the track.

Remember the ending to BOBW part 1? The way the music swelled up and went out on a powerful string piece? It added to the power of that moment, it didn't detract from it.


Also, I'm just going to point out that in the scene I edited above I never put music over a scene that didn't already have it. The score on the show and the track I put over it begin and end at the same time. In fact, with all the suggestions I have made for score replacements it is the exact same way, the BSG track will only play over areas that already had music in it.

 

[Navaros]

I hate the nuBSG 'music' (I use that term loosely).

I agree that the DS9 music wasn't very good, nor has any of the music in Trek been good since TOS with it's awesome epic dread music.

Adding nuBSG music to DS9 doesn't help the problem though, it just makes it worse. It swapped bland music, for bland and overbearing music.

Watching that makes me see why Berman kept the music bland in modern Trek. It seems it's a very fine line between being extremely overbearing & obnoxious (nuBSG); being too bland to ever remember (modern Trek); and getting it done perfectly (TOS). Glad Berman stopped at the middle choice rather than going extreme to the other end of the spectrum and thus ruining the show (unlike bland music which has no impact on the show, other than making it pale in comparison to TOS when it comes to music integration). But putting epic dread music exactly like that in TOS into DS9 would have been ideal.

 

[Sci]

I can't think of another comment on the DS9 score, except to say, "DS9 had a score?" Picking The Wire to watch, at random, I rarely noticed it, mainly occurring at the beginning or end of scenes, DS9 has an entirely different ambiance than BSG. There's always crowd noises, twittering of displays, station noises, etc., that convey their own information.

It seems to me that the dialog is more nuanced than nuBSG. It would have been a shame to cover it with a heavy presence. The score you've put to the DS9 scenes are a little too brooding, and loud. The emotions of those scenes were carried very well by the dialog and action. I think the writers were right to want those scenes to be experienced in a thoughtful way, rather than emotionally as is fairly unavoidable, for me anyway, when viewing the scene you've adapted.

I think that television that tries to emphasis intellect over emotion OR emotion over intellect is doing it wrong. They're equally important parts of the human experience, and the lack of a strong score for DS9 is a crying shame. Besides, scores can convey important intellectual concepts as well -- consider the musical relationship between the Doctor Who main theme and the Master's theme in Series Three of that show, which was an early clue to the audience about the history those two characters have together long before it's spoken about in dialogue.

I also disagree that DS9's dialogue is more nuanced. It may be more verbose, but that's not the same thing. It's not worse, either -- it's just different. More formal.

 

[Apogeal Alpha01]

I can't think of another comment on the DS9 score, except to say, "DS9 had a score?" Picking The Wire to watch, at random, I rarely noticed it, mainly occurring at the beginning or end of scenes, DS9 has an entirely different ambiance than BSG. There's always crowd noises, twittering of displays, station noises, etc., that convey their own information.

It seems to me that the dialog is more nuanced than nuBSG. It would have been a shame to cover it with a heavy presence. The score you've put to the DS9 scenes are a little too brooding, and loud. The emotions of those scenes were carried very well by the dialog and action. I think the writers were right to want those scenes to be experienced in a thoughtful way, rather than emotionally as is fairly unavoidable, for me anyway, when viewing the scene you've adapted.

I can certainly understand your viewpoint, I'm often annoyed by certain TV shows and films having an overly bombastic score to create a false sense of excitement. The Sopranos wouldn't have been half as good had they decided to put a backing score to it.

But why shouldn't the end of In the Hands of the Prophets have a brooding score? Winn is trying to assassinate Bareil and get the Federation kicked out of Bajor; it is a dark moment. Most of what is going on in the dialogue is O'Brien and Dax talking technobable that isn't all that important to the plot. Oh, and Sisko shouts "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" That's nuanced dialogue right there. For the ending where Kira is talking about her faith and how much she has changed in the last year, I stopped the track.

Remember the ending to BOBW part 1? The way the music swelled up and went out on a powerful string piece? It added to the power of that moment, it didn't detract from it.


Also, I'm just going to point out that in the scene I edited above I never put music over a scene that didn't already have it. The score on the show and the track I put over it begin and end at the same time. In fact, with all the suggestions I have made for score replacements it is the exact same way, the BSG track will only play over areas that already had music in it.

I agree with you about the Sopranos, that is a powerful theme and really set the tone for an entire episode. That throbbing heartbeat was marvelous. I love it.

In nuBSG, the crew is faced with the constant threat of the final annihilation of the handful left of an entire species. That's worth brooding about.

In ITHOTP, the issues were thoughtfully discussed to lead one through a rational consideration of the profound cultural differences between The religious Bajorans and the secular Federation. Differences that each had a right to hold, and weren't going to budge from, were about to clash. We're concerned with not only who would prevail after the collision, but how.

The possible culmination, the death of Bariel, would have been momentous, but hardly a world shattering event. Kais had been lost to Bajor without the world ending.

Star Trek wants to focus on the understanding and resolution of such differences -- without breaking the other bonds people commonly hold, rather than a struggle in which one side or the other must prevail at all costs. My argument isn't that the score couldn't have been better in some subjective way. People might complain about bland scores; music that evokes deep emotions instead of simply conveying such emotions isn't appropriate for DS9. IMHO.

 

[Apogeal Alpha01]

I can't think of another comment on the DS9 score, except to say, "DS9 had a score?" Picking The Wire to watch, at random, I rarely noticed it, mainly occurring at the beginning or end of scenes, DS9 has an entirely different ambiance than BSG. There's always crowd noises, twittering of displays, station noises, etc., that convey their own information.

It seems to me that the dialog is more nuanced than nuBSG. It would have been a shame to cover it with a heavy presence. The score you've put to the DS9 scenes are a little too brooding, and loud. The emotions of those scenes were carried very well by the dialog and action. I think the writers were right to want those scenes to be experienced in a thoughtful way, rather than emotionally as is fairly unavoidable, for me anyway, when viewing the scene you've adapted.

I think that television that tries to emphasis intellect over emotion OR emotion over intellect is doing it wrong. They're equally important parts of the human experience, and the lack of a strong score for DS9 is a crying shame. Besides, scores can convey important intellectual concepts as well -- consider the musical relationship between the Doctor Who main theme and the Master's theme in Series Three of that show, which was an early clue to the audience about the history those two characters have together long before it's spoken about in dialogue.

I also disagree that DS9's dialogue is more nuanced. It may be more verbose, but that's not the same thing. It's not worse, either -- it's just different. More formal.

My musical education is lacking. I admit it. Those clues fell on deaf ears!

 

[Sci]

I can't think of another comment on the DS9 score, except to say, "DS9 had a score?" Picking The Wire to watch, at random, I rarely noticed it, mainly occurring at the beginning or end of scenes, DS9 has an entirely different ambiance than BSG. There's always crowd noises, twittering of displays, station noises, etc., that convey their own information.

It seems to me that the dialog is more nuanced than nuBSG. It would have been a shame to cover it with a heavy presence. The score you've put to the DS9 scenes are a little too brooding, and loud. The emotions of those scenes were carried very well by the dialog and action. I think the writers were right to want those scenes to be experienced in a thoughtful way, rather than emotionally as is fairly unavoidable, for me anyway, when viewing the scene you've adapted.

I think that television that tries to emphasis intellect over emotion OR emotion over intellect is doing it wrong. They're equally important parts of the human experience, and the lack of a strong score for DS9 is a crying shame. Besides, scores can convey important intellectual concepts as well -- consider the musical relationship between the Doctor Who main theme and the Master's theme in Series Three of that show, which was an early clue to the audience about the history those two characters have together long before it's spoken about in dialogue.

I also disagree that DS9's dialogue is more nuanced. It may be more verbose, but that's not the same thing. It's not worse, either -- it's just different. More formal.

My musical education is lacking. I admit it. Those clues fell on deaf ears!

Hehehe. Good pun.

If you're interested, tap out the beat to the Master's theme. (Should be easy to do -- just copy the beats that the characters were tapping out when they were being mind-mojoed.) Then, watch the Doctor Who main titles and tap out its beat. You'll notice that the beats are basically the same -- the tempo is just slightly faster for the DW theme song.

 

[TheGodBen]

The possible culmination, the death of Bariel, would have been momentous, but hardly a world shattering event. Kais had been lost to Bajor without the world ending.

At the time that ITHOTP aired this might be true, but looking back on the series now we can see that had Bareil died here then the implications would have been seismic. Winn wanted the Federation to leave Bajor back then, and as the new front-runner to become Kai she would have been in a better position to do this. We know from the Circle trilogy that the Cardassians were just waiting for the Feds to leave so that they could swoop back in and take control of the wormhole. Knowing which side the Cardassians ended up on during the war, if they had been in control of the wormhole then the Dominion would have been almost unstoppable. It is a very critical moment in galactic affairs, even if we didn't know it then.

As for the emotional power of the score, I believe that it is very important. It strikes me that the Borg were only scary when there was a powerful score to help. Q Who and BOBW 1&2 all had scores by Ron Jones (who later in season 4 was fired by Berman because his music was too powerful). In the later TNG Borg episodes, they weren't all that scary. It is the same way with all the Borg episodes in Voyager; weak scores and bland Borg. In First Contact they were kind of scary, helped by a good score from Jerry Goldsmith. Finally, even though Regeneration wasn't a great episode, I felt scared by the Borg for the first time in years. That episode happened to have a great brooding score by Brian Tyler. The Borg were at their best when they were scary.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

Yeah, TOS was the only series to really rely strongly on the music backing up scenes. They did a great job with it too, much of it was very well done and added a lot. From TNG onward they had nice sounding music occasionally, but it usually wasn't played up much. I don't think it is a huge deal.
I would argue that a good score can probably make anything seem better, but an average or underplayed score never really made anything worse. I don't think any of the TNG series music ever dropped below average quality..except for the much hated Enterprise theme which was just wildly out of place.

 

[TheGodBen]

I don't think any of the TNG series music ever dropped below average quality..except for the much hated Enterprise theme which was just wildly out of place.

Personally, I found any score by Paul Baillargeon to be horrible. I would regard Children of Time, Valiant and The Siege of AR-558 to be five star episodes were it not for the music he composed which knocks a star off each. I don't know why, but his music just irritated me greatly.

I liked scores done by David Bell. It was always very similar, but he could adapt it well whether it was a big battle scene or a character moment. He did the music for Improbable Cause, Rocks and Shoals, Sacrifice of Angels and In the Pale Moonlight, just to name a few.

As you might be able to tell, music is very important to me. There was four composers who did the work on DS9; the two I named above, Jay Chattaway and Dennis McCarthy (who composed both versions of the opening theme). I can always tell who composed the music for an episode by the first few notes.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

Oh it is important to me too, I'm actually a musician. The fact that a lot of the TNG/ds9/Voy music tended to be a little more quiet and in the background made it not as much as a factor for me.
I often don't even pay much attention to the music in these series. Not like in TOS where the music is louder, higher quality and really worked to make scenes come alive. It definitely would have helped any of these shows to have higher quality dynamic music. I guess for me personally it just wasn't ever a huge problem though.

 

[TheGodBen]

Not like in TOS where the music is louder, higher quality and really worked to make scenes come alive. It definitely would have helped any of these shows to have higher quality dynamic music. I guess for me personally it just wasn't ever a huge problem though.

Well they had to have louder music in TOS, Shatner gave every word such gravity that they had to have powerful music to match.

 

[TheGodBen]

I made a second video, this one based around the battle in Call to Arms. You can view it here. Remember to watch in HD.