ABSTRACT

Alan Parker commissioned Trevor Jones to score Angel Heart (1987) having heard his music for Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985). Both Jones and Parker were keen for the director to have an active involvement in the sound of the picture, and Jones turned to a compositional idea he had experimented with while at the University of York in order to achieve this. He constructed a series of ‘toolkits’ for the film, each of which was a bank of twenty-four sounds recorded onto a multitrack tape and that could be employed as and when desired by the director to generate atmosphere within the film. Jones refined the idea further on Parker’s next picture, Mississippi Burning (1988), creating layers of sound that could be played alone or stacked to thicken the texture. Jones’s use of toolkits marks him out as an innovator in both compositional approach and his relationship with Parker as a musically sophisticated director, enabling the composer to retain some control over the score while simultaneously enabling the director to exert a strong authorial influence over the sound of his film.