In the antipodes of the rooted musical convictions of his brother David and of his cousin Randy, based on conventional symphonic purposes, Thomas Newman is one of the most innovative composers of the new generation, without doubt intended to create school -Return To Paradise (1998), by Mark Mancina is a clear example of this-. His undefinable style, always in constant movement, in the beginning a product of the evolution and radical transgression of the canons established by the phenomenon of the pop songs that were prevailing around the end of the eighties in the juvenile nature movies, and that conditioned the composition of the soundtracks of his first era, as The Lost Boys (1987), has merged in an exceptionally singular way in experiments as The Rapture (1991) or the delicious psychodelia of Unstrung Heroes (1995), paradigms of his more committed musical solutions, with the classic sound of Hollywood, producing authentic masterpieces as The Shawshank Redemption (1994) or Oscar And Lucinda (1997).Each one of his soundtracks, in spite of be designed on some increasingly solid musical theorems, have a total structural autonomy, inspired in many cases by the own essential characteristics or by the sounds that a place or a situation could suggest, and that they have not of be necessarily evident: a grasshopper or a cricket in Flesh And Bone (1990) suggest the election of a marxaphone, a phonograph or an ocarina, and the beautiful sound of the wind in a meadows in The Horse Whisperer" (1998) inspire the execution of a musical fund that mixes flutes and oboes with manipulated wind sounds, and that gives colour to the main melodic line. In Meet Joe Black there is no musical ideas of this type, since it is a most classic score in the line of Scent Of A Woman (1992), a work with which it shares many elements and orchestral solutions; something thoroughly understandable if take into account that the director of both movies is Martin Brest, and that the action elapses in either case in the city of New York. As always, Thomas Newman offers us a great digest of themes and musical motives, all them with independent entity but that, thanks to the instrumentation -here conventional- achieve to maintain a homogeneous order that confers solidity to the score. Meet Joe Black, isn't in my opinion among the best five works of his author, what is not obstacle to confirmed it as one of the better film scores of the year. D.R.C.
