James Cameron’s Avatar was released in December 2009 to much acclaim.  The film had been in some form of production since Cameron released is previous Oscar-winning film, Titanic (1997), beginning with a short script that outlined the tale of a corporation coming to an earthly moon called Pandora to extract a valuable mineral called unobtanium.  The corporation meets with resistance from the indigenous race called the Na’vi, who want nothing more than for their planet’s life to be left intact and for the humans to abandon their quest and leave in peace.

The soundtrack is credited to James Horner, the same composer who developed the scores for Titanic and A Beautiful Mind (2001).  His style sounds like he has drawn heavily from the New Age genre of music, replete with accentuated and pandiatonic grooves and nonabrasive melodic ideas, though it remains firmly in the film music classification because of its sequential harmonic progressions and epic orchestrations.  Over the years, Horner has developed a unique sound in the film-scoring industry, following his greatest influences  Jerry Goldsmith (1929 – 2004) and John Williams.

Musically, the soundtrack is surprisingly subtle.  The general idea of the soundtrack is to underscore the storyline rather than to run and develop with it.  Upon a first listen without having seen the movie – or knowing anything about it, for that matter – it elicits a sense of primitive existence.  I would liken most of it to filling in the sounds that you would hear when wandering through a forest (yes, I realize that string orchestras and electronic drums usually don’t hang out in the middle of a forest, but bare with me).  Basically, it is very much in the background, and very little of it moves to the foreground.  Once I finally saw the movie, this was definitely the case.  There was never a moment in the movie where the visual aspect subsided to allow for a thematic idea to cut through and say, “I am important and will be commenting on this film from here on out.”

Unlike movies like The Lord of the Rings (Howard Shore) and The Dark Knight (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard), which are structured off of a handful of motives that are developed and manipulated from beginning to end of the soundtrack, the Avatar soundtrack is driven at a harmonic level.  Melodic motives are few and far between, and there are two that I can find on an aural level.  The first is a collection of four notes that live in a B minor centricity, each note harmonized by triads in such a way to suggest a Lydian inflection.  This melodic fragment is usually followed immediately by three notes descending stepwise to fill in a minor third, which almost sounds like a chromatic mediant modulation, except for the fact that the harmonies under the entire melody would suggest an E minor centricity.  This motive is used relentlessly throughout the movie to point of the listener having to be deaf to have not noticed it within the first 10 minutes.

Another melodic idea that stands out is an incomplete neighbor figure followed by a downward arpeggio; however, it is present in the beginning of the score and near the end.  It might be far more present than I’m able to find without looking at the score, but at a surface level, this figure is extremely undeveloped but very much in the foreground as far as the score is concerned.  At first listen, it sounds quite chromatic, but the motive out of context is clearly diatonic.  The chromatic sound can be attributed to the motive often occurring outside of the established centricity.

From a harmonic standpoint, the score sadly embodies the stereotypical modulation by a third.  At nearly every section end, the music suddenly modulates by a third, either chromatically or diatonically.  There is no attempt to smooth out the seams between key areas, except for the occasional common tone, but more often than not, the common tone that holds through to the new harmony screams out, “Listen to the key change, and notice I that exist in both!!”  What saves the harmonic progressions from being utterly cliché is the fact that the main melodic idea discussed above is steeped in mediant relationships, easily allowing a progression from tonic to mediant to dominant, etc.  Horner must have realized this abundant relationship in the motive and decided that it should be used in excess to clearly show that it is intentional, thus blurring its potential passage into the cliché.

There are many nuances in this soundtrack that I cannot help but comment on.  The first and most obvious to me is how much this score sounds like the music from Titanic, which can be attributed mostly to the shape of the melodic gestures, as well as to the continuous flow of the music.  What separates these soundtracks in my mind is that, despite being a well-conceived score, the Titanic soundtrack is nearly completely synthesized.  I’m not sure why this was, because the budgets for both movies were astronomical, and one would think that Cameron would have allotted a little more funding to be able to hire an orchestra.  Avatar redeems the composer in this respect, as it makes use of mostly real musicians with only a bit of electronic enhancement, mostly in the form of percussion.  A second aspect of this score is how much it sounds like the theme from Civilization IV.  This theme is actually entitled Baba Yetu and was composed by Christopher Tin, utilizing a Swahili translation of the Lord’s Prayer.  This sound is closely linked with the tribal aspects that Horner was shooting for in his music to portray the Na’vi.  I was not able to place the language of the text that he uses in the score, but I think it is a safe guess that he utilized the language of the Na’vi, developed by James Cameron and Paul Frommer, much as Howard Shore set Elvin text written by J. R. R. Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.  The similarities are rather drastic, but I wonder if it is because of the restrictions of the industry and the use of such a standard convention for portraying something foreign and primal.

In general, the soundtrack is about what I would have expected: the imagery of the movie is only hinted at throughout the score; the motives are present, consistent, yet manipulated to show progression.  The orchestration is standard, and feels a little overused, but it is a vast improvement from his previous big film score.  The important thing is that it is not distracting.  By no means is it really engaging, but it is not distracting, and I feel as though it does what it was intended to do: support the storyline of the movie rather than evolving along with it.  Score: 5.5 out of 10.