"...It's given a moody underlining by the haunting music of composer Carter
Burwell, who based part of his score on a traditional Scandinavian folk tune,
'The Lost Sheep.' " - Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 1996.
" ***** As strange as it sounds, Carter Burwell has done
for the Dakotas what Maurice Jarré did for Arabia." - Roderick Scott,
Cinemusic.net, 1996
Carter's
Notes
"Fargo" announces itself as a true-crime drama.
And yet the perpetrators of the crime are buffoons. If the music
plays the humor, it kills the suspense. If it plays
the drama, will it kill the humor?
The answer to this question seemed to be to play
the drama with exaggerrated seriousness - as melodrama. Bombastic excess
on the part of the music seemed to help the comedy.
The scene is Minnesota and North Dakota in a winter
whiteout, and the exaggerated cheerfulness of the characters only
makes the situation more lonely and hopeless. I wanted to contrast
the smallness of their humanity with the endless white landscape
by playing them with fragile solo instruments: harp, celesta, and
hardanger fiddle. The hardanger - native to Scandinavia -
is a fiddle with sympathetic strings that add a shimmering glowing
drone to the played notes.
Even before the Coens shot the film I'd started researching
Scandinavian folk music in the vague hope that it would be informative,
and I found a folk tune that had become a hymn called "The Lost Sheep."
Its title was perfect for Bill Macy's character, but its soulful
sadness was perfect for the film as a whole, so I expanded on it
using a film-noir orchestration. It became the opening music
for the film.
Film Stills
Film Info
Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Composed, Orchestrated and Conducted by Carter Burwell
Music Editor: Todd Kasow
Music Scoring Mixer: Mike Farrow
Contractor: Emile Charlap
Recorded and Mixed at Manhattan Center Studio, NY, NY
Starring Fran McDormand, William Macy, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare
U.S. Release March, 1996
Buy
the CD
from Amazon
Download Soundtrack
from Amazon
Buy the DVD
from Amazon
The CD contains the scores to both Fargo and Barton
Fink.
Buy the Book from Amazon
Audio Samples
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audition and download tracks from that store. For demo purposes, click on mp3 for an excerpt, or
the Flash triangle to stream the entire piece.
