Partially imported from the blog of our very talented composer, Bear McCreary, is his take on last night’s episode’s grand finale, featuring a new rendition of Chavela Vargas’s La Llorona.
SPOILERS AHEAD: Tonight’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, aptly titled Mr. Ferguson is Ill Today, is a particularly unusual story. The plot is fractured into multiple accounts of the same narrative from the perspective of each of the major characters, the location was unique and, above all, the story culminates in the death of a principle character, Cromartie. (The episode’s title is actually the first line of dialog Cromartie spoke in the pilot!) While the multi-perspective storyline provided interesting musical challenges, it was the episode’s Mexican location that gave me the most room to explore.
Mr. Ferguson allowed me a second opportunity to produce a song for Terminator, after the season premiere’s searing Samson and Delilah with Shirley Manson. This time, I arranged a traditional Mexican folk tune called La Llorona.
I first heard about this song a few days before I saw the episode. I happened to be hanging out with the episode’s director Michael Nankin (whose skillful touch Battlestar fans will recognize from some of the best episodes of that series, including Maelstrom) and he told me that he was experimenting with the song in his cut. So, even before the spotting session with the producers, I was already thinking about how I could take a traditional Mexican folk tune and Terminator-ize it.
When I saw the sequence in question a few days later, I knew the inspiration would come quickly. The last act of Mr. Ferguson takes on the feeling of a Sergio Leone western. Leone’s collaborations with Ennio Morricone have been a tremendous influence on me, in particular on my scores for the Rest Stop films. So, I felt right at home musically, and simply had to find the right balance between traditional Mexican folk instumentation, the electric strings, metallic percussion, and of course, the vocalist.
The music begins at the top of the act, on the Dia De Los Muertos imagery that haunts this entire episode. As Cromartie walks into frame, a trio of Nylon string guitars enters, arpeggiating a pitch set of B, F, A and E that permeates the entire piece. As the two rhythm guitars spell out the chord in accelerating and decelerating patterns, the lead guitar plays a melody that centers loosely around B and C. The result is a very dissonant harmony that provides tension, but also contains the wide open 5ths and 6ths that are natural to guitar music. If the intervals got too clustery, it would still sound scary, but it would lose the traditional folk guitar feel that I wanted to preserve…
Find the rest of this entry on Bear’s personal blog….
I may be in the minority but I didn’t appreciate the music. I wrote this on Bear’s blog also. I am not fluent in spanish, so the lyrics were lost on me, and maybe they were awesome if you understood them. I will concede that.
But as a regular english-speaking TSCC viewer, the Cromartie ambush scene seemed incongruous with the music that supported it. The music sounded forced and inappropriate. First you hear the rapid fire of machine guns and then the music takes over at a different tone and tempo that in no way fit the action that was taking place on screen. It might have been an “ironic” choice, but it didn’t work on that level either.
I felt pulled out of the action because I was I was bewildered by the choice of the music. Unlike the music in “What He Beheld” and “Samson & Delilah”, the music in “Mr Ferguson” undercut the scene. I was not focused on the action, but on the music.
I am not a musician, but I consider myself a fairly sophisticated viewer, which is why I venture to share my opinion. Because I love TSCC, I want to share my opinion that “La Llorona” was not appropriate for Cromartie’s death scene. It didn’t work.
Now I want to state that Bear is amazing, and I have no axe to grind. But I love TSCC and will provide the feedback that I believe will help the show improve its ratings.
Wow Bear’s blog is fantastic. I love hearing about his choices in his compositions, very interesting.
And I really enjoyed the music. The best part was Cromartie following Ellison, and we see him walk past a graveyard and other images of death… and the music is slowly coming in.
Great work.
I read this blog earlier today on Bear’s site - I love his work and always think it’s fascinating to hear his detail about the process (even if I can only understand one word in six when he gets to the technicalities of the score) - I actually thought the La Llorona song was the original track, so I was happy to hear that Bear redid it for SCC. Now if only the dang SCC score would come out one of these days…Bear said it was pushed back again - I’m dying with anticipation to have it in my hot little hands!
This was seriously the most powerful episode of the 2nd season since the first episode. Oh my god, every single part of this was perfect. Someone should win an award for this episode alone.
So thats why the direction looked similar to Battlestar which is a great thing. Malestrom is one of my favorite episodes in the series. I agree with Bear that it had that feeling of one of the old Italian westerns I think my dad called them Spahgetti Westerns or something like that. Reminded me a bit of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly when Cromatie was in the firefight.
Didn’t need to understand the music just the context which fit right in.
I absolutely loved the mexican folk music playing in the background, as Cromatie tailed Ellison; However, The vocals was something left to be desired.