MOVIE MUSIC GETTING BIG BOOST IN SCORES FOR `TITANIC,' `KUNDUN'.

Byline: Scott Duncan Orange County Register

Music plays a role in the films ``Titanic'' and ``Kundun,'' each wearing a different mask.

The score to ``Titanic'' by James Horner is a soundtrack in the Hollywood tradition; it creates a sonic framework for director James Cameron's impressive visual images and seeks to heighten the emotions of the story for a wide audience.

Philip Glass is a composer from the avant-garde wings of opera, concert music and performance art. His music to Martin Scorsese's film ``Kundun'' is more a lending of an established style to a film about Tibet, the Dalai Lama and the world of Tibetan Buddhism.

Each soundtrack indicates how film music and concert music are nudging closer together. Horner, a veteran Hollywood film composer, has been picked up by the Sony Classical label, one of the world's largest. Sony will commission Horner to write other, nonfilm pieces for the label. They'll also ask him to adapt a concert work for chorus and symphony orchestra from ``Titanic,'' including music cut from film, for a recording and for performance in symphony concert halls.

From the other direction comes Glass, a peripatetic composer, but one getting more active in film, a direction paralleled by other avant-garde composers such as Michael Nyman and Tan Dun, who recently scored ``Fallen.''

Enter the composer

Film and what we call contemporary music are beginning to entwine, or perhaps return to an era when leading composers such as Aaron Copland, Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and Erich Korngold wrote movie music.

The soundtrack to ``Titanic,'' released by Sony a month before the film opened, has broken sales records for an orchestral film score, topping the pop chart and selling copies in the hundreds of thousands.

Part of this may be simply a huge audience desiring a memento, a piece of ``Titantic'' that will allow them to return to the world of a film that made a strong impression.

Yet that might be selling Horner a bit short. Other blockbuster films have not caused such a breakout by an orchestral soundtrack. Horner has crafted a film score of some complexity, one that closely follows Cameron's sense of pacing, at times acting like a pop soundtrack in its appeal to the mainstream, at others like orchestral music able to be considered on its own.

In undertaking ``Titanic,'' Horner's subject was a luxury cruise ship that is a floating microcosm of society, its class distinctions made mobile and apparent: Stamped in Leonardo DiCaprio's ticket are the words ``third class.''

This is part of what drew John Adams to write his 1991 opera ``The Death of Klinghoffer,'' based on the Achille Lauro hijacking that was a collision of comfortable American culture with the laid-bare conflicts of the Middle East.

`Titanic' task

But ``Titanic'' is also about a faith in technology and the loss of that faith, which had a high cost in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Horner infuses his score with the metallic outbursts of a great machine gone awry. The heart of his score is an eight-minute cue called ``The Death of Titanic,'' in which major-minor chords scream like twisted steel, huge explosions from percussion disrupt the rhythmic flow, and principal themes reappear in wrong-note transformations.

Horner has said he searched for a timeless quality to his music, which had to tie the period of the Titanic to modern audiences. His solution, incorporating heavily Irish music influences, is likely one reason for the score's popularity.

The soundtrack opens with a mournful Irish tune sung in the dreamy style of Enya. Horner later writes a tune in counterpoint that becomes another principal theme and forms the basis for a pop song sung by Celine Dion of the closing credits. This is a miscalculation, because Dion's adult-contemporary style shatters the illusion Horner worked so hard to achieve.

Horner's ``Titanic'' has its share of harp glissandos and Hollywood cliches, but it is score deserved in its popularity, one that's shrewd in moving from synthesized textures to full orchestra in ways that add atmosphere and dimension to Cameron's film.

The Glass touch

Atmosphere is a key to Glass' score to ``Kundun'' (Nonesuch) as well, not as an exterior descriptive device but the atmosphere of the inner spiritual world of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhism that constitutes his universe.

Glass, who is Buddhist, writes in a style now well-known to us; his undulating textures of clear harmonies and simple ostinatos create a meditative state and a sonic platform for almost any kind of visual action, from Robert Wilson's abstract theater stagings to Jean Cocteau's film ``La Belle et la Bete,'' which he recently took on tour.

For ``Kundun,'' Glass used elements such as Tibetan horns, cymbals and singing by Gyuto Monks to add color to his palette. But in the movie theater, the deep bass drum of his opening ``Sand Mandala'' does not resonate with the impact that the compact disc does on a home stereo; blame it on theater sound systems tweaked for midrange sound effects.

Another detail from the compact disc missing in the theater is the way Glass' music suddenly ceases. In Glass' musical aesthetic of lulling repetition, the sharp breaking off of the sound is a structural element. This is missing in the film's more seamless transitions between scenes.

``Kundun'' finds Glass at his most orchestral, his synthesizers geared toward string sounds and using such instruments as bass trombone, bass clarinet, French horn and contrabassoon. The low winds and brass add a majestic depth to some passages, which underlie Scorsese's panoramic vistas of the Tibetan (Moroccan, actually) landscape.

``Kundun'' is a score made for Glass' music, and it animates the film with a rare, interior light and energy that sustains a viewer during Scorsese's long takes. It also provides some of the most interesting Glass music to come along in some years.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) James Horner

``Titanic''

(2) Philip Glass

``Kundun''