Credits:

John Barry

Description:

John Barry’s fifth Oscar-winning score is a profoundly moving body of music, generally (though not entirely) elegiac in tone, very much like the movie for which it was written. It’s also a bit of a mixed bag, occasionally falling back on material that will be familiar to fans of the James Bond movies that Barry scored during the early/mid-’60s. The main title theme uses some of those devices — dense, heavy string passages adjacent to trumpet calls — but it is hardly representative of the full score. The real heart of Dances With Wolves is the pensive, tragic “John Dunbar Theme,” which is far closer in spirit to Barry’s music for Somewhere in Time or They Might Be Giants, films (and scores) far removed from the Bond movies. It seems as though, when Barry is asked to write music for characters that are complex and troubled (of which Bond is neither), he delivers the goods in the guise of musical