The Exorcist: Music Excerpts From (1973 Film)

Artist: Jack Nitzsche , Anton Weber , George Crumb , Krzysztof Penderecki , and Mike Oldfiled
Label: Wea International
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Soundtrack
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 766482443420
EAN: 0766482443420
ASIN: B000005JTS

Release Date: 2001-01-02

The Exorcist: Music Excerpts From (1973 Film)

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Tracks:

Iraq
"Georgetown/""Tubular Bells""
"Five Pieces For Orchestra, OP10
Polymorphia
String Quartet
Windharp
Night Of The Electric Insects
Kanon For Orchestra And Tape
Tubular Bells
Fantasia For Strings

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Album Description

1996 Japanese reissue on Warner Brothers of Mike Oldfield's epic soundtrack to William Friedkin's 1973 horror classic starring Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow and Ellen Burstyn. Features the original classic version of 'Tubular Bells'. Originally released in 1973 on Warner Brothers.

Album Details

Only available from Japan! This is not the soundtrack version for the director's cut re-released in theatres in 2000

Customer Reviews:

Curiosity Pieces.......2006-04-26

Way back when the movie was a hit, Warner Brothers intended to release a soundtrack that included dialogue from the film. It has been reported by William Friedkin that Mercedes McCambridge refused to grant her permission and that project never made it to light. This record, which has been around since the Seventies, contains maybe only two pieces that made it into the film. The rest of the music is new classical: dense, discordant, intense and mostly unpleasant. Some will appreciate the talent involved, but it is not the sort of music most people would want to listen to while reading or dusting the house. Whether or not it might have worked in the film is beside the point. It wasn't, and so calling this recording a motion picture soundtrack is misleading.

Difficult to rate..........2005-07-27

I bought this CD for the Penderecki...I'm a big fan of his dissonant music, and so I love Polymorphia, the String Quartet and the Kanon (Canon). The Penderecki pieces dominate the score, and timewise probably take up about half the disc, considering it's only 44 minutes long.

I also enjoy the Crumb and Henze piece, although they're quite short. (If you're feeling drowsy and need to be alert...play the Crumb piece at full volume...guaranteed to wake the dead!)

I would give this disc a 5 star rating except for:

1) The price
2) The short playing time
3) The fact that it's only available as a Japanese import, and the booklet is written totally in Japanese!

My advice is that if you can find the Penderecki pieces elsewhere (I know you can find the SQ...the others may be more difficult since many Penderecki discs seem to be out of print) then I'd bypass this disc.

If money is not a concern (and you're fluent in Japanese!) then I think it's an excellent disc and would recommend it.

PEA SOUP AND CHARM!.......2003-11-26

NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS BABE! Still ticks after three decades - and an absolute MUST for the collector. SOUND QUALITY IS EXCELLENT ON A GOOD SYSTEM [should be fine on all systems] and just enough to tickle the senses.

GREAT - RARE FIND! [not quite sure why its not locally available though ...................]

Exorcist CD: The Version You've Never Heard (& STILL Haven't).......2002-06-06

As an ardent and lifelong fan of cinema and all things horror, I had been looking for the soundtrack to this film for quite some time. I was quite excited to see it pop up as a "You Might Also Enjoy" response to a previous Amazon purchase, although more than a little daunted by the price...but I figured what the heck, I'm STILL listening to the Psycho soundtrack after four years, I'll certainly get my money's worth out of it. Boy was I wrong!

First, the liner notes are in Japanese - and only the track names were in katakana, so I couldn't make heads or tails of anything but the titles ("TU-BU-RA BE-RU-ZO" (Tubular Bells), etc.). Yes, it's an import, but if you were hoping for insider insights from the packaging, better brush up on your kanji.

Second, the tracks are exactly what the CD title says: musical EXCERPTS. All the cuing, level dynamics, etc. are intact - these are not the evenly modulated source recordings of the score, they are the non-dialogue, non-sound-effects sound tracks from the movie, with all the stops and starts and dynamics added on top of the original recordings to suit the action in the movie. For long periods at a time, there will be EXTREMELY low or even NO sound coming from your speakers (when Friedkin was putting the sound track together, he wanted periods of ABSOLUTE silence to creep out the audience; to this end, he not only recorded nothing onto the sound track, he had the engineers put TAPE over those portions of the celluloid so that there would be absolutely no audio output! This is great and innovative cinematography, but makes for a lousy CD - I really don't relish paying an arm and a leg for NO audio data on a disc!). Then, in the space of about three nanoseconds, the volume will swell to tweeter-busting levels.* I found myself forced to play remote jockey so much I could never sit back and enjoy the music.

None of this is to detract from the brilliance of the score (and please note, this is NOT a Michael Oldfield work, as a previous reviewer described - he contributed the song everyone knows from the movie, Tubular Bells, but did not compose the film score). All of these tracks successfully contribute to the film's brutally suspenseful effect on the viewer. But the tracks, as delivered on this CD, were never meant to be experienced independent of the visuals. This is why smart marketers will put "The Original Soundtrack" on film score albums (and PUT the original soundtrack on the disc in the first place), so that people will know the recording is the ORIGINAL recording of the music, and not the highly remixed version used on the actual film.

So, if you want to spend an hour jamming furiously on the Up and Down volume buttons of your stereo remote, please be my guest and buy this CD, but know that mine is collecting dust on a shelf, where it's been since immediately after the first listening. If you are a true fan of the movie, you probably have the DVD - check to see if your version has the music as an isolated track. If so, you have no need of this CD.

*On a technical note, for those of you postulating these level problems are the fault of my equipment, I have a high-end Denon Dolby Surround receiver and a Kenwood pre-amp, and used my [expensive] Sennheiser headphones to listen to the CD. Not sound engineer-level stuff by any means, but certainly good enough to be able to give a decent listen, so I would have to fault the CD, not the equipment, in this case....

What are you waiting for?.......2002-05-03

Chances are, if you're interested in the soundtrack to this excellent film, then you're a big fan and should just buy it.

It's that simple.

Scary? Uh, you better believe it. You may not have noticed all of the music on this disc while watching the film, but much of it was there, beneath the layers of scary atmosphere and creepy visuals.

It's well known that director William Friedkin literally threw Lalo Schifrin's original score out the door when he heard it. Friedkin then went out and bought albums of the type of music he wanted and selected these 'pindrops'. The result is fantastic.

Notice that another great horror film, Kubrick's The Shining, uses the film of Penderecki to great effect. 'Polymorphia' is used in both films. An amazing piece with an absolutely incredibly buildup from silence to a nearly deafening wall of tension and the slow, deliberate trickly-like sound of bows slapping violin strings.

'Night of the Electric Insects' is perfect if you really want to scare the pants off someone. Screeeeeeech!

This is a great disc. Why, oh why, is it only an import in America? Makes no sense. Nevertheless, it's worth the extra money for the import.

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