Night after Night

One of the finest scores to slip under the Academy’s radar is James Newton Howard’s soundtrack for M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 ghost story with a twist, The Sixth Sense. Telling the story of how a child psychologist (Bruce Willis) helps a young boy (Haley Joel Osment) come to terms with his disturbing encounters with dead people, Howard’s score, with its Tubular Bells-like piano motif, evokes a sense of solitude, dark mystery, wonderment and discovery. While Shyamalan’s production clocked up six Oscar nominations, the composer’s work went largely unnoticed—a sign perhaps of how seamlessly it had been sewn into the film’s fabric. “Surprisingly though, when Night called me after the nominations came out, his opinion was: ‘Well, you didn't write a singular sounding score,'” Howard tells Apple Music Classical. Night after Night, a collection of Howard’s music from Shyamalan’s films, shows how “singularity”—the idea that each soundtrack should have a musical idea that both shapes and reminds listeners of the film’s narrative—has become central to their collaboration over the years. Rather than setting out to create sweeping melodies and multi-layered orchestrations, Howard’s initial focus is on creating a distinctive musical idea that will serve the picture as a whole. In 2000’s Unbreakable, in which Bruce Willis plays a dad with hidden superhero powers, it arrives in the form of a simple melancholic piano phrase that recurs within changing harmonies. In Signs (2002), an agitated three-note piano motif drives the darkening sense of mystery as the appearance of crop circles on a Pennsylvania farm suggest the presence of alien life; while in 2004’s The Village, the undulating violin arpeggios written for concert violinist Hilary Hahn are threaded through a tale of an Amish-style community living in fear of creatures that inhabit the woods. The idea of exploring these themes outside of the context of each film came to Howard during the pandemic. “I was sitting at my piano with nothing to do, getting very grumpy,” he reveals. “I began constructing these short suites from every film and adding in substantial new material to each one of them.” For the composer, it was a chance to realise the potential of musical ideas that had been left under-explored due to the demands of storytelling on screen. He removed the scary-sounding bits from the originals—“I wanted it all to be meditative; I didn’t want to startle people with a crash and ruin the mood”—and gave the piano a central role, performed here by virtuoso Jean-Yves Thibaudet alongside full orchestra. For listeners it’s not only an opportunity to revisit the soundworlds of their favourite films, but also to appreciate the purely musical qualities of Howard’s scores anew. This is clearly a composer with a deep love of British music from the first half of the 20th century: in the “Cornfield” theme from Signs you can hear echoes of the surging undercurrents of Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes; The Village pays homage to the pastoralism of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. Elsewhere, it’s the pulsing textures of American minimalist music that has clearly caught Howard’s attention, with shades of John Adams, for example, in the “Charades” of 2006’s Lady in the Water. “You don't have to have been a big M. Night Shyamalan fan to enjoy this record,” Howard says. “The music speaks for itself.”