Against my better judgment, I have, despite having what could be flatteringly called limited film listening from the past decade, given that I only started actively doing it last year, decided to put together a top twenty list after all. So, with the knowledge that my list is going to be inevitably hampered, and with the knowledge that I will be displeased with it no matter how it comes because numerically ranking scores is sort of like plucking feathers, here is my list.
• Where a score is not for film, I have marked it as such.
• I have elected to choose only one score from any given franchise or series except where a different composer is attached to a film. (For example, to use the case of the MCU, I could include a variety of scores because many composers have been attached, but I could only pick one of Silvestri's MCU scores. Capiche? And, to be clear, this still allows me to pick many Silvestri scores that are not MCU-connected.)
• I have also elected not to include remake scores, which places a bunch of Disney scores I don't care about and have never heard outside of consideration and forces me to exclude The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on Switch, which would otherwise have a place in the top ten.
• I am also including a composer of the year, as well as a list of what I'm going to call 'criminal exclusions.'
First in short-form, then in long-form. My apologies in advance.
01. | Solo: A Star Wars Story, John Powell
02. | Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Bear McCreary
03. | How to Train Your Dragon, John Powell
04. | Ori and the Blind Forest, Gareth Coker vg
05. | La Ligna Droite, Patrick Doyle
06. | Star Wars: The Force Awakens, John Williams
07. | Rodina, John Robert Matz vg
08. | Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, James Newton Howard
09. | Bravely Default, Revo vg
10. | The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Daniel Pemberton & Samuel Sim tv
11. | Wolf Hall, Debbie Wiseman tv
12. | Journey, Austin Wintory vg
13. | Fossil Echo, John Robert Matz vg
14. | Beyond Skyrim: Bruma, Daniel Ran vg
15. | The Last Airbender, James Newton Howard
16. | Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Mark Chait tv
17. | Rim of the World, Bear McCreary
18. | The Imitation Game, Alexandre Desplat
19. | Gravity, Steven Price
20. | Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, Noriyasu Agematsu vg
Composer of the Decade: Bear McCreary
Runners-Up: John Robert Matz, John Williams, Austin Wintory, Steven Price
Nr. 1 | Solo: A Star Wars Story, John Powell
What can I say about this that has not already been said?
How about that this is the single most successful merger of one composer's style with John Williams? Joel McNeely's Shadows of the Empire score included some more dissonances, but ultimately it was striking in how close it was to a Williams score. And Giacchino's Rogue One? However excellently put together that was, the poor man had four weeks to write it and it shows. The orchestrators ought to be commended.
Solo, however? This is a merger of Powell's voice with Williams', not a sublimation of it. Powell already wrote two career-best scores before it, and then he did it again with Solo. In doing so, Powell showed a way forward for Star Wars music that had simply never occurred before: not an aping of Williams, but a merger of it; evolving the sound of the series while still keeping core components in place. And leaving all that aside, it's an exciting, thematic, fun score to listen to. Really, really good stuff.
Nr. 2 | Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Bear McCreary
Bear McCreary has had a stellar decade. Not only has he wrote some of the best television scores ever written, he has also at last made the leap to Hollywood. And he did so in the most huge, overblown, unbelievably dramatic way possible - and it's fantastic. Once again, what can I say about this that already has not been said?
It's hardly a perfect score, but its virtues are such that the flaws it does have are rendered effectively irrelevant. Big, bombastic, thematic, intelligent - and, sure, exhausting, but whatever - again, what more can I say?
Nr. 3 | How to Train Your Dragon, John Powell
I could effectively repeat myself. What more can I say?
John Powell wrote one of the best animation scores ever written - energetic, busy verging on frenetic, yes! thematic!, and with some fantastic orchestration to boot. He then followed it up with two scores that were equally as good. It's one of the finest film score trilogies we have.
Nr. 4 | Ori and the Blind Forest, Gareth Coker (vg)
Videogame music never has bad decades - I don't think bad decades exist for music, to be quite honest with you - but surely this will go down as one of our finest. Austin Wintory, Gareth Coker, and John Robert Matz among many, many others all made their big debuts; and on the Japanese end of the fence, Yasunori Mitsuda's Valkyrie: Azure Revolution and Yasunori Nishiki's Octopath Traveler managed that rare feat of actually getting film score lovers to listen to them. Who wudda thunk? In fact, so well-regarded was Mitsuda's score that Jon Broxton said this:
> Had it not been written for a video game, this would have competed for honors as the best score of any type written in 2017.
Never mind that it ought to have competed for honors regardless, it's stunning to see the score present on such a list to begin with, never mind winning Broxton's 2017 game score award. (Nishiki's score would go on to win the 2018 award, alas without any accompanying commentary.) You must understand - I grew up on Japanese game scores. The fundamental unit of my musical experience is much more Nobuo Uematsu then John Williams. I adore SNES and PSX-era JRPG scores, and I still listen to them regularly.
I'm digressing.
Gareth Coker wrote a gorgeous, gorgeous score filled with natural beauty and beautiful themes for this game. Go listen to it. It's the equal of any given film score - and, frankly, often better then quite a lot of them.
Nr. 5 | La Ligna Droite, Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle also had a solid decade. For my money, this was the best of it. Doyle has always been able to pull a certain tone out of the strings that no other composer seems to manage, and of all the Hollywood composers, he's perhaps the most able to write music of sheer beauty.
La Ligna Droite is a gorgeous blend of Glass-esque minimalist mannerisms with Doyle's own sense of grace and beautiful strings writing and the result is mesmerizing. I love minimalist music to begin with - and I refer specifically to the classical strand of it - and this takes all that I love with minimalist music and merges it with all the stuff I love about all the other music I listen to.
Nr. 6 | Star Wars: The Force Awakens, John Williams
GASP-SHOCK-HORROR I hear you say. "Fairchild, what the hell are you doing? A Star Wars score outside of the top five? What's wrong with you?" Well, I'm sorry. I've never been taken in by the Star Wars films, and I'm still mostly unfamiliar with the soundtracks as a whole (though I know the major themes, of course).
So here you go. My favorite of them is this one. What can I say? "Rey's Theme" is gorgeous. And, yes, Williams is a master of his craft etc. etc. we all know that already, so I'll save you the familiar bromides.
Nr. 7 | Rodina, John Robert Matz (vg)
You'll recall I mentioned this composer a couple scores ago, and here he is in the flesh. It's Fossil Echo for which he has gotten attention, and rightly so; I find myself gravitating more towards this sci-fi score, though. It's exciting, intense, and dramatic - "Aggressor Unknown" may be one of the finest action pieces of the entire decade.
And, as with all of Matz's scores, it's rooted in a beautiful yet simple main theme, an electric piano (it's a synth, but let's be fair, electric piano conveys much more of the timbral qualities of the patch he's using) theme that's only a few notes, yet it's instantly recognizable.
Beyond this, the score is of course rooted in the orchestra we all know in love, often in intense, Zimmer-esque mode, though far more intelligent. And Matz does not neglect other developments, either: there's a decent blend of synths here, and yes, even some sound design elements ala Gravity (which, as you already know, will be appearing later on this list).
Am I going to tell you to go and listen to it, because you, sweet summer child, you babe swaddled in the cashmere blanket of ignorance, have never heard of it? Yes! Go to his Bandcamp page, cue it up, sit back, listen.
Nr. 8 | Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, James Newton Howard
Just as Powell merged his voice with John Williams, so too with the Fantastic Beasts films did James Newton Howard walk a line between his voice and John Williams. In truth, Howard probably stays closer to himself, or even to Desplat, then to Williams, at least as far as his harmonic sensibilities go - let's remember, Williams was one of Hollywood's finest jazz pianists back in the 50s. (Powell, on the other hand, did borrow more from Williams' harmonic vocabulary.)
So while Howard keeps his own harmonic language intact, and his own sense of melodicism intact, we hear all of this through - yes! you guessed it, well done! - orchestration that often resembles Williams as much as it resembles Howard himself. The result, once again, is one of the best scores of the decade.
Yes, this is a fun, exciting score, probably the best score for any of David Yates' Harry Potter films - superior certainly to Nicholas Hooper's bafflingly bland HP scores (whatever their redeeming qualities, they were not only not what prior scores in the franchise would've suggested, they weren't even what Hooper's own past music would've suggested) and Desplat's scores, which, though solid, are more muted then I'm accustomed to from Desplat - complete with a lovely main theme that still hasn't gotten a fair chance to shine on its own.
(Listening to The Crimes of Grindelwald's soundtrack, you'd better believe I was pissed when I realized that "Traveling to Hogwarts" on album had Howard's theme when, in the film, it had "Hedwig's Theme" dropped in!)
If it is not as thematically tight as Williams' scores are, then can we truly blame him? From the sounds of it the production of these films is a little shaky - scripts written one at a time, no true overarching plan in place, and let's face it, Howard has never had an interest in Williams' brand of tight thematic construction. (Even Powell doesn't, as the numerous themes proliferating the HTTYD scores show.)
Nevertheless, both this and its sequel score (you can pretend that I've included both within nr. 8, if you like) are marvelous scores, undoubtedly the best HP scores since Goblet of Fire if not Prisoner of Azkaban, and they are well worth a listen, not only for HP fans but also on their own merits.
Nr. 9 | Bravely Default, Revo (vg)
You may certainly count me as baffled that Octopath Traveler got the measure of love it did - while Nishiki's harmonic language is fantastic and the orchestration is lovely, his melodic sense is somewhat weaker. Solid, but not exceptional. Frankly, there's too much of Kenji Ito in Nishiki's soundtrack for me to truly love it, and I've never been sold on Ito's SaGa scores, which is where Nishiki seems to have derived his greatest inspiration from.
(Go check out The Orchestral Saga: Legend of Music. It's up on YouTube. You'll want the track labelled "Battle 2, Encounter with Seven Heroes, & Four Sinistrals Battle Medley from Romancing SaGa 1-3" - don't worry about looking it that track specifically. Look up 'orchestral saga legend of music' and a playlist will pop up, and that track is the last of them. It'll be an educational lesson in how Nishiki orchestrates his music.)
It's especially baffling, because, as debut JRPG scores go, Bravely Default from 2012 is far superior. Revo's melodic chops are far and away beyond Nishiki's and indeed they're beyond most film composers - let this be a lesson to you that, with only a small handful of exceptions, the best melodists are all working in videogames these days - and Bravely Default bears one of the qualities I love most in a score: It's fun!
It's fun, fun, fun. This is an energetic, joyous score - it's far and away one of the best JRPG scores of the decade. Where to begin with highlights? "Eternity's Moment" is a gorgeous, gorgeous piece of music for the music box. How about "Conflict's Chime," one of the finest battle themes of the decade, or even "Wicked Flight," which is balls-to-the-wall intense and yet another excellent battle theme?
Nr. 10 | The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Daniel Pemberton & Samuel Sim (tv)
It's been a good decade for everything, but it's been an especially good decade for television, and this is undoubtedly one of the finest. Pemberton is one of our most inventive, and Samuel Sim is, uh, also there. (I kid. I just haven't heard any of his work outside of this.)
Say you're Netflix and you're doing a prequel series to one of the most beloved films of the 80s, which had one of the finest soundtracks of the 80s, by one of the finest composers alive. Whaddaya gonna do? The world may never know why Netflix didn't at least ask Trevor Jones to come back for it - it's not like the man didn't have television experience - but the option of a Jones-like score was there. Would that have been good? Let's face it, it would've been criticized for not being Jones himself. That's the inevitable result of that.
So Netflix did the next best thing and brought on two composers to do something completely different, and that's exactly what Pemberton and Sim did, composing a magnificent, primeval-esque score, effectively inventing for themselves a new sort of orchestra for the musical world of the series. (Not that I've ever seen it.) Hows' about that?
'Course, it'd be no good without musical chops to back it. Thankfully, musical chops do back it up. It's an excellent soundtrack - one of my favorites of 2019 as you may remember, and it's still one of my favorites.
Nr. 11 | Wolf Hall, Debbie Wiseman (tv)
Here's another television score for you, from one of my absolute favorite composers. Debbie Wiseman, alas, has never quite gotten the plaudits and projects that her skill demands. Aside from the French film Arsene Lupin - for which acquiring the soundtrack seems to require a small fortune - she has been writing marvelous scores for television for decades now.
And Wolf Hall is my favorite of them. Just as La Ligna Droite merged Doyle's grace with Glass's minimalism, so too does Wolf Hall merge Wiseman's sense of beauty and grace with minimalist techniques as well with an almost intangible sense of early music: it's modern techniques with Tudor instruments, as she put it. It helps that the main theme is one of the most beautiful she's written, and it's reprised several times throughout the score. Wiseman is perhaps the preeminent composer of beautiful music working.
The score actually had such an impact that there was a little bit of media attention directed to it back when the show emerged. Wiseman popped up on no less then two different television shows alongside a small chamber group to perform "Entirely Beloved (Cromwell's Theme)" - and her soundtrack actually hit number one in the Classic FM chart!
Nr. 12 | Fossil Echo, John Robert Matz (vg)
And the man pops up again. Once again, a beautiful main theme roots a gorgeous score with a natural, organic tone to it, and it's rooted here in the solo violin, performed live, and indeed live instruments pop up all over the soundtrack. Sampled instruments definitely have their part, but numerous hand percussions, and soloists, also appear all over.
Plenty of ground is covered over the course of this soundtrack - from the exciting and the heroic to the comedic and everything in between.
For you, dear reader? Just go check out the "Main Theme." Then listen to everything else.
Nr. 13 | Journey, Austin Wintory (vg)
"Whaaat? Fairchild, you're putting this Matz fellow ahead of Journey, of all things?" Frankly, you should regard these rankings as loose and malleable. I tried to put it in the most sensible order I could. I could've easily made this score my nr. one pick and put Solo down here. Now what would you say to that, I wonder.
Here's another videogame composer who made their breakout with a soundtrack of stunning beauty - it does seem to be what is called in the parlance of our times a Thing, doesn't it, especially with videogame music.
And, yes, there's another wonderful main theme here for me to praise. And this one really is pretty: straight up in the first track, you can hear it on the cello. Ah, the cello. Has any instrument been given such a reputational battering the past twenty years? We are suffused with scores that replace cello sections with a solo cello and with scores that have sad cello smathered all over them without an ounce of consideration for what they're doing.
It's a sad state of affairs. Journey is something of an antidote: the solo cello performed truly live, with great sensitivity and feeling and placed in its most beautiful context. The whole score for Journey is performed live, by a group of soloists as well as a strings section, and Wintory's intelligent and sensitive writing makes sure that everything shines.
Nr. 14 | Beyond Skyrim: Bruma, Daniel Ran (vg)
If I wanted to, I could have included both Elder Scrolls V and Bruma here. Ultimately, I chose not to. You can probably guess the reasons why.
The modding capabilities of Skyrim are well known, and there are a number of other soundtracks for mods as well as a handful of 'soundtrack expansions' to augment Soule's own originals. Of these mod soundtracks, though, Daniel Ran's for Beyond Skyrim: Bruma must surely stand out as the best of them, for it is produced with highest-grade samples and even managed to get a live choir on-board.
Ran's music equals Soule's at every turn, and even utilizes some of Soule's themes, not just from Skyrim but from either Morrowind or Oblivion or possibly both, I can't remember; and his originals match Soule, too: just check out "Of Storms and Half-light."
Not just inspired by Soule, there's faint traces of JRPG scores in Ran's music, too, and if you read his blog, it'll reveal that Nobuo Uematsu is a strong influence on him also. This isn't too evident in the soundtrack here, with one exception: "Northern Cry" borrows an ostinato from Yasunori Shiono's "The Savior of Those on Earth," from Lufia II. How's that for a deep cut? Go and compare them, I'll wait. And if you're going to tell me that it's coincidence, I've already gotten that covered. Ran admitted to it on The Annotator podcast.
This provides me with a wonderful segue into the area where Ran bests Soule: his combat music is considerably better then Soule's own originals - more developed, more cohesive, and more exciting. Not just "Northern Cry," check out the catchy "Arch Henchman" also, and not just that but "Blood Frenzy," which actually uses one of Soule's own battle themes.
Nr. 15 | The Last Airbender, James Newton Howard
If the movie was an awful, shameful execution of stunning mediocrity and planning that approaches 'invade Russia in the winter' as far as wisdom goes, then the soundtrack was far better then it had any right to be, but then, James Newton Howard's been doing that for Shmalyanman's movies for a long time.
I said before that Howard wasn't interested in Williams' tight thematic constructs, and this soundtrack is an excellent demonstration of that. The most obvious and overt themes, as far as mine ears could pick out on first listen, are a two-note motif that gets tossed up and down the scale, and a flowing, descending strings line that passes from violins all the way to cellos. That's not to say they're the only themes, but they're the most obvious.
Rather then create themes, Howard aims more for orchestration 'presets,' which, aided and abetted by a handful of recurring motifs, tie the whole soundtrack together. If you're willing to abandon overt leitmotivic and thematic structure, and you should be, then you'll understand fully why this is still one of the best scores of the decade.
Nr. 16 | Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Mark Chait (tv)
You may remember this from the very high ranking I gave it back in 2019 - in fact, while mine was not the only list to include it, I gave it the highest ranking of everyone whose list included it.
All the reasons I gave back then stay true now: it's a beautiful, beautiful soundtrack. "The Passion to Heal" is still one of the best cues of 2019 and one of the best of the decade. Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the sort of beautiful that you just don't get in the West outside of Debbie Wiseman, videogame composers, and occasionally Patrick Doyle.
Nr. 17 | Rim of the World, Bear McCreary
This marks our boy Bear's second appearance on this list, and I assure you, there are many other scores of his that were worthy contenders. Ultimately, though, Rim of the World is the sort of cake you can have and eat, too. It's chock-ful of themes for each character, and "Alex's Theme" is still quite possibly 2019's best melody.
And the soundtrack has plenty of other fine themes, too. "Rim of the World" (the first track) provides a sampler of - I think - all of the character themes alongside its adventure motif, and the rest of the soundtrack is equally excellent. It's a strongly 80s-inspired score, here filtered not through the composers of the 80s but through Bear McCreary who grew up in the 80s. Inevitably, it doesn't match the 80s. It's a modern score, but it's a modern score transliterated through the 80s, filtered through, as it were.
Your own perception will, naturally, vary. I'm sure many are disappointed that it isn't an 80s score. Many probably dislike it for being a modernized 80s score. For me, though, given that I did not grow up in the 80s, I find it fantastic. I could've easily ranked it higher, but I could never have put it below the twenty spot.
Nr. 18 | The Imitation Game, Alexandre Desplat
I said before that there are few Western film composers that write beautifully. While Debbie Wiseman and Patrick Doyle are undoubtedly the two foremost examplar of the breed, Desplat, a genuine Frenchman - and there are few melodists and orchestrators capable of beauty then the French, just look at Ravel - also dabbles sometimes.
For my money, his main theme for The Imitation Game is one of the best. (Yes, yes, I keep praising main themes. Well, they keep being good!) And the whole soundtrack is fantastic, too. There's not just the main theme, there's also a defeated theme present as well, which brings us the necessary dose of sadness that a Turing movie must have.
Nr. 19 | Gravity, Steven Price
So you've got room for one Steven Price on your list, and it's gotta be one, otherwise you're going to push out every other score that you want to include, that you have to include, so you ask yourself, what's it going to be? Our Planet is out of the question, it's overrated; and you never heard The Aeronauts. So you ask yourself, between The Hunt,, Gravity, and Ophelia, all of which you really like, which are you going to pick?
You decide on Gravity. You loved the music even before you saw the movie, you loved the music so much it became that rarest of films, the film you saw because you loved the music so much. In later years, no quantity of love for music would do that for you. Loss? Maybe. You seem happy enough with it.
Ophelia,, you reckon, has a touch too much stylistic inconsistency to pull through; and The Hunt, much as you love it, is still less then Wonder Park, which you completely forgot about right until this sentence, and let's face it, Gravity is still Steven Price's most stylistically distinctive work.
But, you could've put Wonder Park there just as easily. Don't forget that.
Nr. 20 | Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, Noriyasu Agematsu (vg)
And finally I arrive at what you could, fairly, call the 'token twentieth.' By the time I reached this point in my list I was running out of soundtracks to reach for, and this could easily have been a dozen other soundtracks. I've decided, instead, on the one that I love the most.
Where Nishiki and Revo both made their breakouts with their JRPG scores, for Agematsu, this is simply another in a long line of JRPGs he's scored: he partook in the soundtrack of two Wild Arms games prior to this one, as well as the Chaos Rings series, and a bunch of other projects too. (Revo has the band Sound Horizon to his name, and Nishiki worked at Konami for a few years going freelance.)
I think, though, that Brave Exvius is the best of Agematsu's JRPG work: it is, for starters, performed by a live orchestra, and its orchestral writing is considerably better then, say, his Wild Arms work. It's a solid, classic-style JRPG soundtrack well within the FF vein, and after listening to it you'll be hoping that Agematsu gets the call for the next mainline FF game.
Oh, and for the track I'll recommend you, as I seem to be doing that with every underknown videogame score. "Duel!!" is one of the best main battle themes - in fact, I'd place it above Bravely Default's "Conflict's Chime" - ever written. Truly, it's up there with Hamauzu's and Sakuraba's best. My sole complaint about it is that I wish it were longer - but every individual part is so immaculately put together that it juuuuuust gets away with it.
Composer of the Year
Well, of course it's going to be Bear McCreary. Yes, yes, lots of other composers had fantastic decades, but Bear McCreary has had the best. In 2010, he was scoring the first season of Human Target; here in 2020, he has two Cloverfield films and Godzilla: King of the Monsters to his name alongside a veritable cornucopia of other television and film credits. (And game credits, too! I forgot about Dark Void. No matter. Too late to revise my list now.
So, who're the runners-up? John Williams had possibly his last decade full-stop and wrapped it up with Star Wars, providing for Rise of Skywalker a soundtrack far, far superior to the film that it was written to (there's a commonality between films and games: scores that outweigh what they're scoring).
John Robert Matz went straight from nobody to somebody, and he is now leading an excellent career as a composer of choice for many indie projects.
Austin Wintory also went straight from nobody to somebody, and is now leading an excellent career as a composer of choice for many AAA-studio projects.
Steven Price also went straight from nobody to somebody, and is now leading an excellent career as a composer of choice for nature documentaries.
(That joke is getting a little tired now, so I'll halt there.)
Criminal Exclusions
All of John Williams' other work; anything, anything at all by Michael Giacchino or James Horner; a whole lot of other Alexandre Desplat scores; and an impressive bevy of other scores not just from film but also from television and videogames. (How is there only one Japanese game score on this list? It's criminal. Hitoshi Sakimoto should have at least one place on it, and I haven't even heard Valkyrie: Azure Revolution [though, to be fair, what I've heard is that Mitsuda basically wrote a very Sakimoto-esque score anyway].)
I'm sure all of you have your own criminal exclusions.
Wrapping Up
Wowzers, that's a hell of a write-up! Yeah, I just spent two-and-a-half something hours on this, so I hope ya'll enjoy it.
Here's to another decade of excellent, excellent music.
Huge thanks to Craig for running this - it can not be an easy thing to do! - and of course to CC for continuing to play host to all of us, and to our various regular reviewers: Broxton, Southall, Bennett first and foremost among them. And my thanks also to the Filmtracks community. Ya'll're great.
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