![]() No, there is an instrumental portion in the main titles, but it is strictly a percussive rhythm and not a theme). The Title SongĪlthough, like the previous Bond films, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides a memorable popular theme with the main titles, it is one performed instrumentally rather than vocally, something that had not been done in previous Bond films. For Barry then, it seems that the new face of Bond required toning down the reliance on the Bond theme. We do hear the older guitar-riff version of the theme when Bond and Draco come to rescue Draco’s daughter Tracy from the hands of Blofeld, but, significantly, this was director Peter Hunt’s decision, not John Barry’s. There are a few times the Bond accompaniment alone is heard, as when Bond has what he thinks is his request for resignation signed and returned to him by M, or when Bond first meets the young women being trained as Blofeld’s “angels of death”. In large part, this has to do with the fact that the theme is not incorporated into either the film’s title piece or main song (“We Have All the Time in the World”) the way it was in Goldfinger (and Thunderball as well). The use of the Bond theme is also downplayed more than in the previous films. Thus, from the start, and even before we see Lazenby as Bond in the film, the music alerts us of a striking change to the film’s style and does so in a way that, like the very choice of Lazenby, is something of an experiment. It wasn’t just trendy it was a groundbreaking application of electronic music that would presage decades of synthesizer use by film composers everywhere.” “The film’s release in December 1969 marked the first time any major studio had featured the synthesizer so prominently, and at the same time fully integrated within the traditional orchestra. Here it is in the first of these:Īs Jon Burlinghame notes in his book The Music of James Bond, The first new musical element of Barry’s score is the replacement of the guitar riff in the James Bond theme with a Moog synthesizer, which occurs in the gunbarrel opening, the precredit sequence, and the end credits. Below I give a brief film music analysis demonstrating how the score fuses both the old and the new with this extra emphasis on the new. But he also includes new elements that serve to distinguish this score from the previous films and give it an appropriately fresh sound that matches the fresh face audiences were now seeing in the role of Bond. ![]() Naturally then, in his score for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Barry uses many of the same techniques as he did in his previous Bond scores, including those we saw in his score for Goldfinger. And when Bond is taken by force to see Draco, the caretaker whistles the tune to “Goldfinger” as he sweeps the floor. No with Grant’s garrotte-watch, we hear “From Russia with Love” when Bond looks at his own miniature underwater breathing apparatus from Thunderball, we hear the title song of that film. With Honey’s belt and knife, we hear “Under the Mango Tree” from Dr. And when Bond has supposedly resigned from the secret service, we hear snippets of themes from the previous films as he looks nostalgically at the trinkets he has collected from the assignments in those same films. In the title sequence, for instance, brief clips from the five previous films are shown behind the credits. And indeed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service makes a concerted effort to forge deliberate links with the previous Bond films. So how does one “do Bondian beyond Bondian” exactly? As Jeff Smith points out in The Sounds of Commerce, “producers Harry Saltzman and Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli have frequently acknowledged the importance of a consistent formula to the durability of the series,” part of which is the music. What I did was to overemphasize everything that I’d done in the first few movies, just go over the top to try and make the soundtrack strong. “to make the audience forget that they don’t have Sean. As the film’s composer John Barry himself admitted, he had With Connery having become so strongly associated with the character, his replacement, Australian model George Lazenby, certainly had big shoes to fill. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, released in 1969, was the sixth film in the James Bond franchise, and the first not to star Sean Connery as 007.
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