“While we were dubbing [the score] at Universal many people stuck their heads in and asked, “What big movie is this?” – Kenneth Johnson, Executive producer, The Incredible Hulk

Prior CDs of Joe Harnell’s scores – whether for The Bionic Woman or The Incredible Hulk – contained cues that balanced character themes with funky action music, but this new disc really shows off the composer’s skill for harder-edged orchestral underscore.

The emphasis on jazzy brass and addictive rhythms is still potent, but perhaps more than the other CDs in this ongoing series (as well as Harnell’s music for Johnson’s epic mini-series V), Prometheus immediately grabs you with a sense of urgency that never really lets up; it’s not an action score, but portrait of fear, unease, and ongoing struggle.

Series producer Kenneth Johnson writes in the CD’s liner notes that the 2-part episode which kicked off Season 4 boasted a bigger budget, and also gave Harnell about 40 musicians to work with. The score sounds more robust, but Harnell knew the real value lay not in orchestral might but in the extra colours he could add to the episodic arc where David Banner was stuck in mid-Hulk mode (kinda green, kinda mean, and big fuzzy eyebrows).

“David Rescues Katie,” for example, is a ferocious march with tumbling and spiralling imagery from brass and harp, but the aggressive percussion eventually recedes for a lovely section on flute, with supportive jazzy piano and soft percussion; it’s cool, but it’s also filled with the same empathy that Harnell invested in his “Lonely Man” theme.

The addition of synths is handled with restraint, and in cues like “Prometheus Team Arrives” and “Meteor Enters the Atmosphere,” the low drones are purely to set up a menacing, otherworldly feel without sounding clichéd.

Harnell also balances the mood within cues by playing dissonance against soft tones: the tail end of “Meteor” shifts from a brutish, three-part march to an elliptical 7-note pattern on harp, although he augments the cue’s complexity by maintaining the march, and layering on top six ascending tonal statements. It’s a short cue, but Harnell not only invests great care in layering the rhythms with precision clarity, but uses the short piece to establish the modernistic theme that’ll be used in subsequent cues.

“The Meteorite/The Bee Hive” is a major highlight, mostly because tension comes from woodwinds softly playing that 7-note motif, while Harnell piles on large swathes of consistently sustained chords, evoking the menace Howard Shore used in his psychological thriller and horror scores (particularly Scanners) without slamming audiences with a lot of busy material. The chords just keep building and intersecting, and the effect is riveting.

Prometheus is one of Harnell’s finest works, and although the source materials are in mono, it’s the orchestrations by Harnell and Don Davis (The Matrix) that grab you from the onset. Not one note is a blurred mush, and it’s clear this kind of high calibre of writing kind of went into stasis when TV producers started to apply synth scores in the eighties.

One could argue Danny Elfman’s association with Shirley Walker on Batman sort of rekindled an interest in dense orchestral scores for shows based on comic books and graphic novels – Walker later scored TV’s The Flash, using Elfman’s original theme – and perhaps the quality of music we enjoy in network and cable productions stems from filmmakers and composers applying the ideas and quality that impressed them in their youth. If not for Harnell, then certainly for his contemporaries, the release of these scores is a vindication of sorts, and perhaps it’ll impress another generation, now that it’s been rescued from oblivion.

This limited CD includes the complete scores for both parts, as well as a handful of source cues (two versions of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a player piano tune, an orchestral-jazz lounge cue) and bonus cuts: a shimmering metallic sound (“Spooky Canyon Music”), longer edits of two cues (in slight stereo remixes, like the “Main Title”), and the show’s signature “Lonely Man” theme.

© 2009 Mark R. Hasan