Examining Patrick Doyle

I was at Barnes & Noble when something caught my eye. Then it caught my wallet. I made an impulse buy: the score to The Last Legion, some Arthurian movie I’d never heard of, composed by Patrick Doyle.

The Last Legion sounds, predictably, like Patrick Doyle. The only other scores of his that I own are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Eragon, although I am also at least familiar with Frankenstein.

Personally, I think the music to Goblet of Fire was about as good as it was going to get, considering John Williams wasn’t continuing the franchise. It worked out pretty well.

Eragon, by comparison, sounded like Doyle was sleepwalking through the scoring process. The music is wonderful, mind you, but it is just unbearably redundant. If you are scoring a fantasy adventure for bombastic orchestra, please come up with more than one melodic line.

It occurred to me, when I popped The Last Legion into my car stereo, that if you combined it with Eragon, it would sound like one score, with more balance among the thematic material. Enjoyable music.

This is not a new revelation, but it was reinforced at this point: Patrick Doyle’s music sounds like the kind of stuff that was in my head when I first started college. It’s the kind of music that I wanted to get onto the page, but didn’t have the education to do it. It’s the kind of music that essentially drew me into composing.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. This is the kind of stuff I was outlining in my head in high school: good melodic content, but very straightforward orchestration and an almost crippling reliance on triadic harmonies. Either I was precociously imaginative, or Patrick Doyle is like “Film Music Lite.” Maybe a little of both. Obviously, if I hadn’t had enough innate creativity, I never would’ve lasted in the program—I would have discovered that composition is not truly my niche, like many in the Mostly Live Composers Society who became disillusioned and redirected their focus.

In fact, some of the ideas I decided were too good to use until I knew how, or ideas I knew were far too large-scale for Dr. Gooch to permit me to explore, I saved until recently, when I came up with the idea for Fantascapes last winter. In a way, the mediocrity I see in Patrick Doyle’s craftsmanship has encouraged me to not be afraid of producing a lot of mediocrity myself, pursuing at least a few worthwhile cues in the process. Yeah, I don’t mind producing a mountain of crap, if it has a few gems encrusted in it. I can at least warm up to the idea.

So Patrick Doyle appeals to me, yet he doesn’t. He hasn’t influenced my music in the slightest, since I didn’t discover him until a couple years ago, and this so-called “influence” would have been in high school. No, it’s more of a coincidence than an influence.

If I had to describe my current musical aesthetic in terms of influences, I would list them as follows, in no particular order: Jerry Goldsmith, Elliot Goldenthal, James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer, Harry Gregson-Williams, and probably even Nobuo Uematsu. Yes, if you mix all those together, and make it less good, you’d have my aesthetic.

Seriously, though, I don’t mean to denigrate Patrick Doyle’s music or style, nor do I mean to go overboard with self-deprecation of my own musical aesthetic. I guess what I’m saying is that Patrick Doyle’s music often sounds representative of my aesthetic when I’m not trying very hard. Indeed, it sounds sometimes like the through-composed music I improvise in my head while I’m going about my day, only perhaps slightly brighter in tone. Basically, I find Patrick Doyle’s music to be something that I discovered too late—I’ve almost outgrown it, yet it’s a relatively new discovery for me.

I’m just making observations about craft. His and mine. And how I am educated enough not to be taken in by dazzling, pretty, orchestral fireworks displays. I still like his music. I do. I like it but I don’t? If I can dichotomize music I “like” into two categories, “well-crafted” and merely “entertaining,” am I on the verge of becoming a music snob? I think not. Hopefully, it’s just a sign of my craftsmanship and cognizance having grown after achieving two degrees.

This borders on the timeless and impossibly inconclusive debate, "What constitutes good music?" I am not going anywhere near that philosophical quagmire. I'll just say that Patrick Doyle produces entertaining, enjoyable music. And I have grown a lot as a composer. That's all.