“Usually, the Monster Gets the Music”: How Silence of the Lambs Breaks all the Rules

For the first time ever, a live orchestra played along with Silence of the Lambs. Composer Howard Shore himself was in the room, ready to dish secrets thirty-five years in the making.

© Nicky Sims / London Soundtrack Festival.

For the very first time, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs was showed with a live orchestra to bring to life the undeniably movimg, murky and unsettling score written by the great Howard Shore. In the audience sat the man himself, cosied over his walking stick, waving at an enraptured Barbican audience who sat back into the twists and turns of the psycho-thriller as if it was the very first time of viewing.

The orchestra plucked and pulled sonorous bubbles of swooping melodies throughout the film. Never so grandiose and impressive as in the opening as Clarice, played by Jodie Foster, catapults herself up and over obstacles and crumbling walls, chasing towards – or perhaps more succinctly, away – from a path that’ll bend around her across the coming hours. The orchestra will follow her every move, fiddling through bouts of sanity and insanity.

After sitting to the very end of the credits, with the orchestra brandishing to a crescendo and end-stopping just as the screen crashed into darkness, the audience spent a minute shaking off the spook of Hannibal Lector’s infamous stare. Thankfully, the cheer and good-will of Howard Shore’s deep voice greeted us as we clambered back into the hall for the much-anticipated Q&A.

Shore began teasing out a lot of the techniques that were hidden in the ominous lethargy of the score. “A lot of the score is this suspenseful piece, you know, to increase the tension of the story, and it’s using a lot of dark colours in the orchestra to do that. For instance, there’s no trumpets in the score. They’re too bright. The flutes are all playing in lower registers. Everything I could do to kind of darken the atmosphere, I was doing with the orchestra.”

Silence of the Lambs remains so relevant today because of the multifaceted, fragmented exploration of horror, both familiar to the genre (say, cannibalism), and more abstract, or socio-political (say, sexism). On my second watch, the genius of the camerawork digging beneath the fingernails of the male gaze seemed as if it were commentary from our age, not four decades ago. Shore picked up on this: “"Jonathan [Demme] suggested to me that we take the point of view of Clarice as the principal character—not like her, but really be with her. That’s really against the tradition, because usually the monster, the creature, would be the featured player."

Shore spoke as score not as companion but as counterpoint to the performances, which he tracked delicately against each movement and expression of the actors. The score as an entity in itself was exacerbated by the music as physical artefact. "I used to write scores by hand, then fax them to the copyist in London, who set it up on the podium. Then I’d fly from New York to London, go to the studio, and start recording with the orchestra." With such a sweeping performance so full with instruments, it’s hard to imagine the effort, time, energy and craft that went into creating, not the least preserving, the physical forms. “There’s something alive about them, something slightly deep. Today, everything is done on computer, but back then, even little communications were personal."

Shore picked up on this thread; when asked if he looks back at the score critically, especially having watched it anew, he resisted: “I don’t change anything at this point. It’s like 35 years old. It’s a little historic now, a piece of history." There was a gorgeous iteration of grief, yearning and nostalgia in his answer that only a seasoned artist might express: “Ober Deniz orchestrated the piece. I didn’t orchestrate it, but he did a really good job. I miss him. He introduced me to the LPO, and he was a great guy, a great orchestrator […] I wish Ober was here—he would have loved it." We oo’ed as an audience, hearts warmed, hearts breaking.

Tapping into Silence of the Lambs in this way brought the rest of his work into conversation. Shore painted his career as one continuous journey, a thread weaved and pulled in prisms of light that is still, at the end, the same thread. “"One thing kind of handshakes to the next piece. Things I did in Silence of the Lambs, in Cronenberg scores, probably found their way into Lord of the Rings or into Jonathan Demme’s films. One thing led to another."

This event was part of the first London Soundtrack Festival. To sum up the impressive event, which serves to spotlight the often overlooked importance of soundtracks, Shore pressed a wide smile to the audience. "It’s just been such a privilege to be here and to feel this extraordinary love for the music.” Indeed.