The music of 'Independence Day'

It could be said that without Independence Day, we would not have Hans Zimmer and cinema as we know it would be entirely different. Since that movie's release in the summer of 1996, the ripple effects have been steadily felt. Like Jaws in the 1970s, Independence Day redefined what was expected of a summer blockbuster. It inaugurated an age of cinemagoers who increasingly demand end-of-the-world thrill jobs with big special effects, extensive sound design, and musical bravado. It was one of the first films to effectively use the Super Bowl as a launching pad for its marketing campaign, and proved that promising bigger and better spectacle could be a key selling point.

Amidst what was a very speedy production to insure release before Tim Burton's competing alien movie, Mars Attacks, composer David Arnold — who has subsequently become well-known for his scores for James Bond and the Sherlock series — was brought in to compose the score. After successfully working on Roland Emmerich's film Stargate, Arnold was becoming mentioned as a successor to John Williams, able to write movie music that combined subtle details with robust pomp and circumstance.

With Independence Day the request was no small feat: to write one of the most patriotic scores ever. Subtlety wasn't in order here; from the opening credits, Arnold's score is built on distorted bass lines, big brass, and drums — lots of drums. Dean Devlin, producer of the film, said, "you can leave it up to a Brit to write some of the most rousing and patriotic music in the history of American cinema."

Within this bigness, though, is something more. What allows the music to shine, and what keeps it interesting even 20 years later, is a precision and detail hiding behind the bombasticism. It was one of Nicholas Dodd's early films as conductor and orchestrator, and early on he proved why he would become such an important player in the scores for almost 100 contemporary films of the last 20 years — such as Avatar, Quantum of Solace, Moneyball, and The Good Dinosaur.

With methods of composition shifting more and more into the digital realm, traditional orchestration is an underappreciated skill, but when a score is crafted with an orchestra as backbone, the person who plays the orchestra is of paramount importance. Dodd provides a delicacy to the arrangements that intricately feeds the patriotic brass-and-drum effect without any loss of heart and soul. It's why the film still works amidst its strange balance of improbability, comedy, and hokey action. It's effective on a deeper level and sells you on the narrative even if you don't find it compelling.

While there has certainly been an uptick over the past 20 years in movies featuring apocalyptic scenarios, there has also been an aesthetic shift towards bigger budgets for films that promise to overwhelm the senses and throw narrative consistency to the wind. Hans Zimmer found a calling within this world as one of the most in-demand composers, with legions of students getting their careers started by scoring the many films Zimmer was too busy to do himself.

Listen to YourClassical's Movies stream all day today — Friday, June 24 — as we feature music from Independence Day: Resurgence in our mix of great film music.

With Independence Day: Resurgence Harald Kloser and Thomas Wander — director Roland Emmerich's go-to composers since The Day After Tomorrow, build on Arnold's foundation but take their score in a new direction. The sound is more damaged, and less sure of itself than that of the first film in the franchise. It brings characteristics not unlike Alexandre Desplat's take on Godzilla, and the most recent Batman/Superman film where Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL duke it out.

The strings swell around each other, and much of the percussion speaks to our understanding of its role in today's cinema as defined by Zimmer and those in his oribt. In 1996 Zimmer released scores for the films Broken Arrow (which Fox used heavily to promote the original Independence Day) and The Rock. Both of those, in this new world that Independence Day has wrought, seem almost like low-budget indies.

Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker, and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.