The film's co-director Tom Tykwer contributed music to the film along with his longtime collaborators Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek. Both Klimek and Tykwer,contributed additional music to Don Davis' score for The Matrix Revolutions (2003) directed by Wachowskis and shared a rapport with the directors. According to Tykwer,music became a character for the film that supported several elements of the film.[1]
The score was written even before the film began production. The music was recorded in Leipzig,Germany with the MDR Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Radio Chorus,and Gene Pritsker served as the orchestrator.[2] He further adapted the score into a stand-alone six-movement symphony for the orchestra,called "The Cloud Atlas Sextet",written by one of the film's main characters,ambitious composer Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) along with a group of six musicians.[3][4] Tykwer described it as a melody that begins from "a simple string line to a riff in a 1970s rock piece,to a jazz sextet playing in the background at the Cavendish party" along with a group of subjective voices. The piece was the eventual motif of the film's musical palette as it demanded something beautiful and malleable enough to take the audiences through five centuries.[3]
Reception
The Cloud Atlas soundtrack received critical acclaim. Film Music Magazine critic Daniel Schweiger described the soundtrack as "a singular piece of multi-themed astonishment",and selected it as one of the best soundtracks of 2012.[5][6]Filmtracks.com gave a mixed review,describing it as "a score that may sound superficially impressive in its ambition but is revealed to be a lifeless zombie in search for its soul."[7] Danny Bowes of Reactor wrote " The music,as it should be with one whole storyline being about the composition of the "Cloud Atlas sextet," is wonderful."[8] James Christopher Monger of AllMusic wrote "Tykwer,Klimek and Heil could have tried to take on Cloud Atlas' immensity head on,utilizing the kind of explosive,heavy artillery that has become the norm for big spectacle films (which is what many composers would have done after feasting their eyes on the film's epic,sumptuous visuals),but by choosing a more nuanced discipline,they've not only helped to illuminate the film's emotional core,they've gone and unearthed it."[9]
↑ Pritsker, Gene (2014): Composing Cloud Atlas Symphony. In: Stoppe, Sebastian (ed.), Film in Concert: Film Scores and their Relation to Classical Concert Music, pp. 145–160. ISBN 9783864880605. doi:10.25969/mediarep/16802
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