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From "Gladiator" to "The Passion" to "Troy," nothing screams "epic" like an exotic-sounding, ululating female singer.
May 25, 2004 | While sitting through "Troy" last week my attention wandered to the film's soundtrack, the last resort of the jaded and popcorn-less. Soon, from the score's generic, thundering drums and sawing strings arose a lone female voice chanting in a nameless tongue, pouring out her melodious lament like a widow over a fresh grave. If "Troy" were the only movie that I'd seen in the past five years, I would have been deeply moved by this exotic, angelic voice. But like any Blockbuster regular, I instantly recognized this woman's wrenching cry as one of the most recklessly repeated musical motifs in recent cinema history: the vaguely ethnic wail.
The story really took off in 2000 with a quiet indie release called "Gladiator." Ridley Scott's Oscar-winner opens over a golden wheat field through which strides a haggard but homebound Russell Crowe. Slowly, a low female voice begins to separate itself from the murmuring strings. In lilting half-steps, the exotic melody rises skyward. It's foreign, but comforting. The woman's words are unidentifiable -- Arab? Indian? Bulgarian? -- yet speak clearly of home and family and long-awaited happiness just beyond reach. Throughout the film, each time Crowe dreams of this far-off resting place, the plaintive vocal returns, even as he finally joins his family in the afterlife.
Hans Zimmer wrote the "Gladiator" soundtrack, and is credited, along with vocalist Lisa Gerrard (formerly of Dead Can Dance), with delivering the vaguely ethnic wail to the masses. Five years later, the wail now makes more appearances in Hollywood "epics" than the requisite heat-of-battle beheading. Any movie with a foreign setting is a shoo-in for a wail or two -- "Tears of the Sun," "Black Hawk Down," "The Four Feathers," "The Passion of the Christ" -- although stateside flicks aren't immune. Probably the oddest recent wail sighting came in Danny Elfman's score for "Hulk," which featured the jolly green giant skipping through the Nevada salt flats to a quasi-Arabian rhythm section and a spirited female screamer of dubious descent.
John Debney, composer for "The Passion," admits that the wail is a full-blown fad, like many other movie music trends that came before it. Television and film music from the 1980s was stuck on the "Miami Vice" sound: repetitive, synthesized riffs over repetitive, synthesized percussion. In the 1970s, it was the saxophone (think "Taxi Driver"). In the '50s, the UFOs massed overhead to the eerie squeal of the theremin. Now, Debney says, the sound "du jour" is the exotic, warbling, ethnic "female vocal" ("wail" is so ugly). Has it been overused? Sure, says Debney. Has it become a cliché? Probably. Should it be banned from movies forever? Let's not get carried away.
There's a fair amount of wailing in Debney's score for "The Passion," performed by vocalist Lisbeth Scott, who despite her white-bread name, assures me she's half-Armenian. This being "The Passion," however, the wailing is sung in actual Aramaic that purportedly means something. As for the authenticity of the music, that's a different story. Debney meticulously researched ancient, traditional Jewish music for several days before declaring that it was too boring for words, even Aramaic words.
"I found that it wasn't as interesting as some of the other ethnic traditional music," Debney says. Director Mel Gibson couldn't agree more. "He wanted a potpourri of a bunch of stuff," says Debney, so the two men started throwing in pinches of Indian and Arab until Scott's ululating "female vocal" packed the proper emotional punch: wrenching, soulful anguish with just the right blend of international flavor.
