Filmtracks: A World Apart (Hans Zimmer)

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Written 2/2/25

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Buy it... for a fascinating, intellectual examination of Hans Zimmer's first solo dramatic score, one that previews many of his stylistic tendencies in the five years to follow.

Avoid it... if you expect the tone or narrative of this music to make any sense whatsoever for the concept, his infusion of traditional African vocalizations completely at odds with his otherwise contemporary style.

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A World Apart: (Hans Zimmer) Among the many politically charged anti-apartheid films of the 1980's and 1990's, the British production of A World Apart in 1988 was fairly well received and awarded. Chris Menges' movie tells the tale of the screenwriter's own family as they became involved in the movement to promote equality in South Africa. In 1963 Johannesburg, a young privileged white girl's world is turned upside down by the exile of her Communist Party-active father and her mother's participation in a campaign against apartheid that eventually leads to her arrest. By the end, the girl joins the cause in protesting the South African government. The drama is largely a footnote decades later, though it represented a major step forward in the career of composer Hans Zimmer. Immersed in an exciting period of his life when he was living in England and stepping out of the shadow of composer Stanley Myers, Zimmer was finally receiving his own solo assignments by 1987, when he debuted with lead credit for the ridiculous comedy Terminal Exposure. His work with Myers on the 1985 movie My Beautiful Laundrette earned him the job of scoring A World Apart without Myers, and it was a fateful credit that caused him to be discovered and recommended for Rain Man not long after. From there, his career was launched. While A World Apart is a modest place for a reputation to earn its stripes, Zimmer exhibited a number of characteristics in the work that obviously found an evolved home in Rain Man. He had not yet completely established his own set of assistant writers in 1988, making this era of film music among the most fascinating for collectors of the composer. The instrumentation, themes, and style of A World Apart is clearly rooted in Zimmer's sound of the late 1980's, a blend of his familiar synthetics joining with orchestral strings and a handful of solo accents to preview sounds that would become well familiar not long after.

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The soundtrack for the film is laden with new recordings of traditional songs of Zimbabwe and South Africa performed for this occasion by the Messias Choir and achieving a distinct source-like feel. A trio of covers supplied by Lovemore Majaivana and the Zulu Band also play a prominent role. Zimmer's score fits between these splashes of authenticity without making any significant attempt at matching ethnicity. Recorded in pieces at several separate studios, Zimmer's team combined the synthesizers typical to his career with varied soloists, the string orchestra, and traditional vocalizations to achieve a sound unique to this film. The keyboarded synthetics, drum pads, acoustic guitar, and electronic wind instruments of A World Apart are pure Zimmer of the era, as are the somewhat stylish rock-inspired swing to his progressions. The orchestration of the strings isn't particularly complicated and lacks the resounding force that he would command from the same room just a couple of years later. A penny whistle is a notable contributor. The African vocals are an early preview of the many times these tones would intersect with his career, and they tend to be a bit raw in their presence here. The composer anchors the score with two themes, the primary one being a very simple, six-note motif that repeats itself several times in ascending question form before answering itself with a descending six-note alternative. Neither phrase resolves to key despite being somewhat inspirational and marginally cool, which is an interesting comment about the unfinished business in the story's protagonists. This idea is developed in its highly contemporary stylings at the outset of "A World Apart Suite," the primary, 18-minute assembly of the most important cues from the score for the album release. Its chords vaguely guide the following suspense material before returning to friendly keyboarding at 7:35 for a pensive moment. This more restrained tact continues at 10:40, the theme's underlying chords only mingling with the secondary themes, and 14:30, where Zimmer dissolves the theme down to solo piano and percussion.

The main theme of A World Apart anchors the first three minutes of "A World Apart - End Title" in even more contemporary shades. The score's heart, though, lies in the secondary theme for the 13-year-old girl, Molly. The composer supplies a quick summary on electronic oboe and strings in "Molly's Theme" but provides its most compelling development in "A World Apart Suite." Heard first in that track from the strings at 3:50, this melancholy idea explores elegantly dark pathways prior to enunciating itself fully at 7:57 on the oboe tones with caring and patience but more than the minimal dose of Zimmer tragedy at the core. The rendition at 10:56, forcing the oboe tones up into the penny whistle range, evokes a bit of Ennio Morricone's The Mission but contains none of the same warmth at this moment. The theme's secondary lines at 11:50 are more soothing and elegant in Zimmer's preferred neo-classical sensibilities. The theme's evolution at 13:20 is highly compelling, and the composer's rendition at 16:22 evokes all the beauty that listeners would come to expect from his quasi-ethnic dramas and The Lion King in the coming years. The descending secondary lines of the Molly theme that close out "A World Apart Suite" are Zimmer romanticism at its best. A cyclical, rising suspense motif serves as a third identity in A World Apart and debuts at 1:12 into that long suite track. Plucked on strings and acoustic guitar, this motif offers low string drama of pretty significant weight. This idea expands to even greater depth at 2:54, turns sickly at 5:24 for a moment, and regains its dramatic form at 10:25 and 12:11, both instances reminding of the darkness and peril being fought in the film. A few truly unique ideas also litter the suite, notably a passage at 6:05 that applies Zimmer's pan pipe effects and choral tones of celebration over tasteful percussion for a minute. The bulk of the score's dissonant fear is housed in the second half of this suite as well. The standalone "Amandla" cue extends electronic textures out of source speech and crowd noise from the film, but Zimmer does briefly dabble in some lightly keyboarded ideas at the end of this recording.

The last third of "A World Apart - End Title" very abruptly shifts to a traditional-like vocal performance over droning synths and percussion that has no connection to (or even a smooth transition from) the preceding ultra-modern performances of the main theme. The juxtaposition between the two halves of the credits is jarring, to say the least, the first half appropriate for Black Rain while the second half essentially source material. The entirety of the soundtrack for A World Apart is schizophrenic in this regard, the authentic traditional representations from vocals and percussion completely at odds with Zimmer's sometimes uncomfortable blend of contemporary keyboarding and more appropriately dramatic strings and wind effects. The two primary themes are each attractive, the main one purely rooted in the coolness of Zimmer's early career while the Molly theme a preview of the many lovely character identities for strings and woodwinds that he would conjure in the coming years. The album for the soundtrack doesn't do it any favors, the alternating of the score and traditional pieces, especially with the bulk of the score forced into Zimmer's usual format of lengthy suite, making the whole listening experience very unstable. An avid listener will want to pull those two themes, as well the suspense one, apart into their own presentations. The original 1988 Milan album only provides about 23 minutes of actual score material once all the other portions are removed. Sound quality has always been satisfying with this work, Zimmer's tendency towards an engaging, wet mix at the forefront with soloists whimsically floating on top already in full effect by this point. The same flawed presentation anchored by the one massive score suite has persisted in countless re-issues through the years, Milan particularly fond of re-packaging its Zimmer scores into collections with each other, some of them 2-CD to 4-CD sets. While those compilations are often highly merited, A World Apart isn't a highlight on any of them. It's a basically functional score that is interesting as a preview of the composer's style to come, but it fails to generate a consistent experience and offers absolutely no narrative flow. Approach the work with intellectual curiosity more than anything else. *** @Amazon.com: CD or Download

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For Hans Zimmer reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 2.85 (in 128 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 2.96 (in 299,193 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

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