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….
