The Score to The Name of the Rose

James Horner's 1986 score to The Name of the Rose deserves more attention...

To be clear, Umberto Eco's 1980 novel The Name of the Rose is a fantastic work that can probably never be perfectly adapted. That being said, I quite enjoyed the recent miniseries featuring John Turturro as William of Baskerville and the 1986 film adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud is near and dear to my heart.

The 1986 adaptation is notable for its tremendous visual flair and for an equally tremendous cast of character actors. While Sean Connery does a great job as Brother William, the rest of the film is an embarrassment of riches as well: F. Murray Abraham, William Hickey, Michael Lonsdale, Ron Pearlman and Feodor Chaliapin Jr., just to name a few. But I'm excited anytime I watch a movie and one of the monks (or Valentina Vargas) shows up.

It's a movie I've long adored -- despite its flaws -- and I'm not sure I've ever given quite enough credit to James Horner's score. I think part of this, at least for me, is Horner's association with a lot of big, mainstream films with more traditional orchestral scores -- films such as Titanic and Braveheart. He also provided the excellent, driving theme for Aliens, which was quite influential and also fairly traditional. But he frequently combined choral, electronic and orchestral elements and I feel like The Name of the Rose may be a perfect balance of the three.

We have, in essence, a medieval and monastic film, so it stands to reason to find both elements represented here. Monastic chanting definitely plays a role, though not to an overbearing degree. Likewise, I feel like Horner avoids many of the more cliche medieval cinema musical elements as well, and everything is warped through experimental synth styling in a way that reminds me of the line from the novel's prologue: "But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world..."*

As pointed out by music reviewer Jonathan Broxton at Movie Music UK, Horner made use of various instruments that would have been present in the time period, but the intentional use of synth resulted in a score that is "embellished and enhanced by a vast array of dark, brooding electronic textures which give the entire thing a sense of mysterious isolation, otherworldliness, and overarching dread."

I highly agree with Broxton on the tone here. Horner's score feels like a mysterious and appropriately tenuous veil between the known and the unknown, between the mortal and the supernatural, between this Abbey on the edge of the world, it's library of wonders and the infinite unknown beyond.

You can stream the score anywhere you get your digital music and while I'm delighted to see that there is a physical vinyl release, I do wish it had received the full treatment of an illuminated album cover complete with splotches of green poison.

* As an aside, the film's trailer was featured on the Labyrinth home video I had as a child. We wore the tape out from excessive viewings and actually had to have the VHS tape repaired. This resulted in weirdly warped sound. So I have an even more distorted sample of Horner's score stuck in my head due to excessive viewings of not Name of the Rose but Labyrinth.