Silva Screen’s CD features suites of the fairly sparse scores from the Red Riding trilogy, a grim crime series set in Yorkshire which aired on Channel 4 around March of 2009.

Based on and distilled from material in David Peace’s four novels, the series producers hired separate directors and composers for each entry, and the first teleplay, 1974, features music by Adrian Johnston, another fine newcomer from Britain’s solid pool of film composers.

Johnston’s approach is mostly acoustic guitar, chamber strings, and small pools of synths, and it’s a combination that works extremely well for the drama that’s told through a sometimes abstract visuals. Perhaps taking a cue from the way characters (and for that matter, truth, lies, and subterfuge) drift in and out of focus, Johnston applies the same technique to the score.

“Swan,” for example, is where the composer starts to reconfigure his short folk theme into abstract tonal patterns, pings, and chimes, and in one way the small patches of thematic de-evolution into tonal shades recalls Harrison Birtwhistle’s The Offence (1972), another similarly grim score dealing with local police, a man’s obsession with a crime case, and young lives being ruined by sick adults. Johnston’s score remains harmonically pleasing and much more traditional, but like The Offence, it’s the electronic cues and an emphasis on minimal themes that stand out.

On CD, the themes and short cue structure are a bit repetitive, but they work extremely well in the teleplay because it’s about a dogged crime reporter obsessed with a murdered child case, and his own moral push to uncover the city police department’s dark inner workings.

The short acoustic theme is frequently applied to the brief romantic interludes which also serve – musically and dramatically – as breaks between the mounting ugliness encountered by the reporter. The music turns into nightmarish swathes of pinched and elasticized chords in the final act, and Johnston focuses on blobs of rhythmic pulses and theme vestiges before coming full circle to the restored main theme with piano, guitar, and cello.

Dickon Hinchliffe’s score for the second teleplay, 1980, is the trilogy’s emotional heart because it’s a suite that ties together the drama’s issues of secrets and obsession, and the curse that afflicts an internal affairs detective’s effort to clean up the muck in the department – something the naïve cub reporter tried to accomplish.

What’s potent about Hinchliffe’s score is the way it captures a sense of being overwhelmed, and it’s largely told through differing arrangements of a singular theme that worms its way through scenes. Sometimes it’s an elegy, a breezy pop jazz piece, or as in “The Moors,” a statement on the depth of betrayal that’s scarred the community for almost two generations.

Hinchliffe also makes use of subtle electronic effects, and creates some great abstract sounds by apparently blending electronic and organic, such as an ongoing motif of coarse bowing that distorts at a far distance.

String instruments give continuity to the trilogy’s music scores and interrelated characters, and Hinchliffe’s emphasis on high register strings, harp, minimalist piano figures, and soft rock instruments like electric guitar and bass also evoke a bit of the period, which in the case of 1980, involves the specter of the Yorkshire Ripper. The interplay between harp and strings also give us a hint of a community under emotional siege, since the Ripper is what keeps the community in fear and draws attention away from the corrupt detectives under investigation.

The final teleplay was scored by veteran Barrington Pheloung (Inspector Morse), who stays within the small orchestra parameters but emphasizes melody and harmony for what’s essentially the wrap-up of the trilogy.

Between gentle harp and woodwind arrangements (“Lost Children”) and full orchestra statements, Pheloung’s music is meant to give closure in spite of the overwhelming tragedies that are being acknowledged: a wrong man convicted of killing a child, a new missing child, a brutalized ex-prostitute, and a filthy secret that slowly corrodes a lawyer and a member of the corrupt detectives.

Pheloung’s main theme is very multi-purpose: it’s a lullaby for stolen lives, a sad lament for the dead children, and a tragic theme for the mentally challenged man wrongly convicted as a child-killer. 1983 basically finishes off the ends of several messed up lives, and it’s probably the main reason Pheloung’s theme had to be so pliable - tragic and uplifting - because one needs some closure, and the gorgeous arrangements force viewers to reflect, and walk away from the teleplays without being utterly depressed.

Some of the edits on Silva’s CD that stitch together cues are a bit too tight, but that’s probably due to overall brevity of many cues, as well as the lack of any resolution; most of the scored scenes don’t end on a moment of justice or victory, so certainly in the cases of the first two teleplays, the composers had to create bridge material as well as take viewers into and out of some stark, grim material.

It’s not a happy album by any means, but a decent mirror of three outstanding dramas.

© 2009 Mark R. Hasan