http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/02/the_time_signature_
of_the_terminator_score_is_a_mystery_for_the_ages.html
As THE TERMINATOR celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, the film
continues to raise important questions: What are the risks to humanity
of ascendant machine intelligence? How does a society correct the
catastrophic missteps in its own past? And, most important, what the
dickens is that weird time signature in the film's score? The other day,
upon realizing that 2014 marks three decades since the film was
released, I decided to stream the cautionary robot fable to see how it
held up. I didn't make it past the opening titles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwiPOtTDG7c
As the score kicked in, I immediately recognized it was in a strange
time signature. I'm a (very) amateur musician, and my ears are attuned
to bizarre beats. This was as jarring as it gets. A disorienting
rhythm-- in particular the driving, industrial-sounding beat that gets
louder and more prominent as the opening theme progresses. It wasn't in
5/4 or 7/8, both of which I can generally suss out with not much
difficulty. I tried to count the beat in my head, and by tapping on my
thigh: "DAH-doonk, dah-doonk, dah-doonk, gonk gonk." But for the life of
me I couldn't make anything fit. My world had been ripped apart, much
like Sarah Connor's when she discovered she was being hunted by an
implacable killing machine from the future.
First, a quick primer on time signatures for the uninitiated. Most
straight-ahead rock songs are written in 4/4 time. You can count
"1-and-2-and-3-and-4" with the bass drum thumping on the 1 and 3 and the
snare drum cracking on the 2 and 4. Similarly, when you hear a waltz you
can usually count off "1-2-3, 1-2-3" without much trouble.
These are both easily digestible time signatures that are pleasing to
our sense of order. Sometimes, however, a song will stray from the
standard beats and get a bit weird. Dave Brubeckąs łTake Five˛ is the
classic example of a song in 5/4 time. Listen to the repeating lick on
the piano (łdo-DA, do-DA, doo-DAH˛) and steadily count out ł1-2-3-4-5˛
with the 1 falling on the first łdo,˛ the 3 near the second łDA,˛ and
the 4-5 syncing with the łdoo-DAH.˛ Another mainstream piece in an outré
time: Peter Gabrieląs sprightly łSolsbury Hill,˛ which is in 7/4. You
can hear the bass drum thump seven times with each line of the verse.
Okay, back to THE TERMINATOR. Come with me if you want to live... in a
world where we definitively know the time signature of the film's score.
I paused the movie and took to the Internet, confident the source of all
information would give me closure, letting me exhale and enjoy some
unfettered cyborg ultraviolence.
No such luck. I quickly found a thread on a message board for Lansing
audio products in which my question had been posed, but the initial
responses were all wrong or unhelpful. Someone offered a link to
tablature in 3/4 time, which is incorrect. Someone else suggested it was
in 6/8, when it clearly isn't. My frustration mounted along with the
original poster's as he checked back in, still waiting for an answer.
Soon I found another thread on a different message board where that same
person had repeated his inquiry-- and had again received unsatisfying
results. I noticed that at the bottom of one of these threads a
respondent had offered a plausible theory that the song was in 13/16.
But the original poster still wondered: Where is the sheet music, or
some other official source, so we can settle this once and for all?
When I Googled the score's composer, Brad Fiedel, I found a tantalizing
tidbit. "TERMINATOR was very difficult," said Fiedel, "because I was
using many different synths and sequencers and because I didn't have
midi available on many of them I had to sync them by hand. This is why
the main theme is in a very odd time signature. The looping of the
Prophet-10 was just a little short of a complete measure."
At this point I needed to know the full story. So I found Fiedel and got
him on the phone. He was happy to take me back to the early '80s and set
the scene. He explained that before THE TERMINATOR, he'd worked on a
score for a TV movie about Hitler's last days. The producers were
concerned that lush string music might lend sympathy to Hitler, so
Fiedel conjured up a crashing, metallic ruckus. It was this sound that
formed the germ of the later TERMINATOR score.
Fiedel was at heart an improviser. To create the TERMINATOR theme, he
first set up a rhythm loop on one of the primitive, early-'80s devices
he was using. (In those days, Fiedel was firing up a Prophet-10 and an
Oberheim.) He recorded samples of himself whacking a frying pan to
create the clanking sounds. Then he played melodic riffs on a
synthesizer over the looped beat. Amid the throes of creation, what he
hadn't quite noticed-- or hadn't bothered to notice-- was that his
finger had been a split-second off when it pressed the button to
establish that rhythm loop. Being an old machine, there was no
auto-correction. Which meant the loop was in a profoundly herky-jerky
time signature. Fiedel just went with it. The beat seemed to be falling
forward, and he liked its propulsiveness. He recorded the score that way
and (not being classically trained) never wrote down any notation. The
music he'd improvised went straight into the film. With its
collaboration between fallible humanity and rigid machinedom, the score
was especially well-suited to the material at hand.
Much like the creators of Skynet, Fiedel was only later forced to
consider what he had wrought. He got a call from the legendary film and
TV composer Henry Mancini, who was planning to record an album of movie
scores with a full orchestra. Fiedel was giddy to learn that Mancini
wanted to include the TERMINATOR theme. But then Mancini asked for the
lead sheet-- the notes the bandleader would use so the orchestra
musicians could walk in off the street and nail the recording in one
take.
Fiedel enlisted a friend named George Kahn, a jazz musician who had a
music degree and more formal training, to help set the score to paper.
"He called me up and said, 'Brad, what time signature is this in?' I
said, 'I dunno, 6/8?' He said, 'No, it's quirkier than that.'"
(Incidentally, a subsequent search turned up the fact that Fiedel
related a version of this anecdote to Film Score Monthly in 2013. I
don't know why it didn't show up on my computer in my initial search.
I'm blaming our capricious machine overlords.)
"Brad works mind to fingers to keyboard," Kahn says now, "and he
bypasses paper. So I had to sit down and figure it out." You might say
it was as though Kahn had been sent back in time to the early '80s--
dropped into a world that wasn't his own and he didn't understand-- on a
mission to safeguard the conception of a precious thing that he hoped
would live on into the future.
And the verdict? "It's in 13/16. Three plus three plus three plus two
plus two."
Sure enough, primed to listen for this grouping, I was at last able to
count out the beat. DAH-two-three-DOONK-two-three-CLANK-two-three-GONK
-two-GONK-two. Never has drumming on my thigh felt so cathartic.
Epilogue:
Brad Fiedel went on to write the theme for TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY
(in the much less jarring time signature of 6/8, because he felt that
film had more warmth), and scored various other film projects before
leaving Hollywood to make his own music. He's currently producing a
one-man musical about the artistic arc of his career.
George Kahn is a touring jazz musician with his own record label.
Henry Mancini sadly died before he could record that album of movie
scores.
The Skynet artificial intelligence system went online in 1997, quickly
achieved self-awareness, and remains dedicated to the extermination of
all humanity.