John Scott: Harem (1986) Suite from the TV Mini Series

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the music included in my channel and make no claims as such. All videos have been uploaded for EDUCATIONAL purposes only to make the public aware of obscure and forgotten works by deserving composers who would otherwise find no online audience whatsoever. Please purchase the music on CD or via digital retailers or streamers whenever possible! ABOUT THE SCORE: In 1986 ABC TV commissioned John Scott to write nearly two hours of music for their two-part mini about a young American woman who becomes kidnapped by a Sultan with dark motivations, and much drama and mayhem follows as her British husband-to-be attempts to rescue her. Scott responded to the exotic locale, period costumes and strong cast of veteran actors with a sumptuous score in the vein of his masterful “Antony and Cleopatra” (and his later “King of the Wind”). Rather than sounding like a Maurice Jarre or Rimsky-Korsakov pastiche, however, Scott’s brilliant and often exotic music is richly and distinctly cut from his own harmonic language. Anchored by an unforgettable main theme - whose endlessly creative variations range from valorous and soaring to darkly sensual - the score is one rich with adventure, high romance and an acute sense of place and time. Beyond the anchoring theme, Scott also penned a bucolic love theme given several rapturous renditions (modulated with intriguing grace notes during moments of danger, such as at 13:07), tense action music, surprising amounts of dissonance and (in the composer’s own words) “pastiche middle-eastern market music” for local color. With almost two hours of music to choose from, this suite mostly focuses upon the ravishing dramatic music as opposed to the tense action music, short commercial bumpers, and flavorful ‘market music’ cues that Scott recorded, though all of these instances are given at least some representation herein. As was common with TV scoring conventions at the day, Scott scored a handful of pivotal sequences “to picture”, while the rest of the 90-odd minutes of music was recorded as a series of library cues the music editor could place throughout the of the film as they saw fit - Scott also approached his work on “Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy” the same year. As a result, many pieces Scott wrote for the two-part film were reused several times throughout the film, while others, such as the resplendent overture-like performance of the main theme heard from 0:00 - 2:49, wasn’t used in the film at all. A battery of specialty woodwind and percussion players join the London recording carried out at Angel Studios in 1986, sumptuously recorded by the late great engineer John Timperley, and Scott himself performs bass flute on a couple of tracks - the last time he ever played as a recording musician before exclusively situating himself as a composer. A NOTE ABOUT THIS RECORDING SOURCE: This suite represents cues taken from two sources: The original stereo master elements provided by the composer himself, which was missing about thirty minutes of music or most likely a single reel (likely located at his London home), and from an older DAT tape source sent from England that contained several pivotal highlights not included in the masters I had access to - notably the main and end titles, a beautiful rendition of the love theme and the ravishing finale cue. Because the sound quality, while stereophonic, is far from ideal in this secondary source, I have lumped those later cues at the end of this suite (26:14 onward).