I dunno if you've done this already... But can you write an analysis of the Kung Fu Panda soundtrack?
Oh yaaaaay you’re giving me a chance to talk about music and Kung Fu Panda at the same time?!! I am so happy right now and pleased to have the opportunity to yammer away! I need to listen to this soundtrack more to talk about it better, but I’ve just gone through a full relistening right now to help me. This is a really fun soundtrack for so many reasons.
The Kung Fu Panda score hits on some things I admit I tend to gravitate to naturally. I am someone who loves the combination of Western orchestra plus folk music and instruments from particular areas, and I do tend to listen to traditional Chinese folk music on my own. This score unashamedly uses the instruments liberally, erhu and dizi and pipa and more coming to the forefront all the time.
This is far, far, far from the first score to integrate Chinese musical instruments, tonality, and folk motives into a Western orchestra. Mulan, to take just one example, also does it, and there are plenty of great classical composers who do the like. But one has to be careful not to drop into musical stereotypes and generalized exoticization in these instances, especially for composers like John Powell and Hans Zimmer who have no Asian background whatsoever. I think this music, however, is very fresh and reverent to the traditional music from the culture Kung Fu Panda emulates; the scales, instrumentation, and melodic patterns used as far as I can tell are all very consciously, nicely, sincerely done.
From a music theory perspective, this means the composers are taking advantage of certain scales and pitch patterns. The melodies are often pentatonic, meaning that they’re based on a five note scale. Though the scales are limited, the composers are able to take those five notes and give a lot of heart to the music.
For this reason, there are some moments that really sparkle. I love those exuberant moments in “Dragon Warrior Is Among Us” as well as much of the dramatic opening material in “Hero.” In fact, I think the moments where the Chinese instruments take the forefront or are combined with the Western orchestra are typically the best moments in the score. There’s some traditional moments and some very non-traditional moments with these instruments that augment the aural landscape. Sometimes the full Western orchestra (and other instruments like electric guitar) plays with straight European influence… and that can at times be rather prototypical movie music in my taste, techniques that I hear in basically every soundtrack ever (example: much of “Lung Escapes”).
Still, as I would expect from Zimmer and Powell, the color of the soundtrack is rich and diverse. The instruments take on varying roles and provide so much tamberal textures. There are SO MANY instruments used in this score, and every time the ear hears one of them, it is novel and fresh. The writers bring out the emotion and make the music resonate because of this intelligent orchestration. We have full orchestra moments, solos bouncing between instruments, different registers taken advantage of, and basically every instrumentalist who was hired showcased in some special way. Nobody is shafted… we have fun percussion and brass and strings and woodwinds and even choir.
In “Impersonating Shifu,” to take one example of interesting orchestration, we hear a clarinet play on top of a pipa, and elsewhere a low bassoon bumbling around beneath high traditional Chinese woodwinds and a flute and piccolo. It’s a short moment, but it’s a really clever and original combination of instruments.
And let’s not talk about the build-up and climaxing and instrumentation within “Sacred Pool of Tears.” WOW there is some REALLY great stuff in there.
One thing the music soooometimes suffers from is lack of direction, be it melody or dynamics or form. The music is so focused on telling the visual story the movie offers that there is not much structure in the music formally, nor as many distinct themes as one would want a movie score to have. There are themes, but they don’t resonate to listeners as hey should. Often the music bounces around without much melodic or harmonic appeal and doesn’t make much aural sense on its own, or at least is not all that satisfying as independent music. It has color and emotional expression and that’s it. A good example of this is “Lung Escapes,” though it does happen a lot throughout the score. This is pretty common of soundtracks, I will admit, and I’ve heard many far worse than this. But I really, really wish that the composers could have taken more time with their ideas rather than being a little scattered in switching between ideas. We could have sustained the music without changing so much in many places, even given the story.
So I really love the energy of the soundtrack, its use of the pentatonic scale and non-Western orchestra instruments, and the ever-appealing, diverse use of instrumental color. There’s a lot of genuineness and emotion and character and spirit in the music. I would have loved more robust and specific themes as well as more direction to the music, though maybe I’ll catch more subtleties after a dozen more listen-throughs and partially retract that comment later. But all in all I say this is a better soundtrack than most and the tracks might appear in my iTunes sometime. :)
Lastly, I want to compliment the recording of the soundtrack. The music is live and recorded from London (an orchestra that does a LOT of movie music), but the mixing is incredible and I have rarely heard such rich violas in a soundtrack before. Everything is clean, be it brass or the strings or the Chinese instruments, be it sparse instrumentation with solos or a wild combination of voices. Everything is so live and resonant and nicely done.
