13. Alice In Wonderland

Alice In Wonderland

Included here are 11 tracks that we did not include on the original soundtrack. Also, I included a kind of odd thing here. Rather then putting on some random demos of music that might may or may not have ended up in the score, I decided to do something else.…

By far, my favorite part of this score is “Alice’s Theme”… how it became something of an obsession for me, to hear it with vocals and lyrics singing the name “Alice”, as I was hearing the orchestra do constantly throughout the score… but only in my head. Over time, this theme went through quite a bit of development and metamorphosis.

When I put together the soundtrack, my great pleasure was to take “Alice’s Theme” and “remix” it into little suites with various instrumental and vocal combinations…sometimes with only the boys, sometimes the women and the soloist, sometimes without brass or winds. I would have done a dozen more of those variations if time had permitted, as that is precisely the kind of thing I can do forever. So when I put this extended soundtrack together, I thought it might be interesting (for at least a few hard-core, demented listeners out there) if I took them through my process of how I develop an idea.  I used “Alice’s Theme” as the guinea pig for this experiment.

“Alice Theme (demo 1)”—this is a very early version of the theme in which you can hear the first inkling of the melody, though it begins and ends entirely differently than the final version.

 “Alice Theme (demo 2)”—now you can hear Alice’s melody starting to come together with the celeste playing the primary melody, followed by the introduction on the three-chord ascending motif, which became the secondary theme with a choir, much like it would end up in the final version.

“Alice Theme (demo 3)”—now I’m into laboratory mode. The elements of the theme are clearly evident, and I’m beginning to put them through various tests to see how they hold up. Obviously, I’ve picked up the speed quite a bit to see how it felt to give it more thrust, and I’m playing with the orchestration. Then I let it take several turns in different directions. These are the things I need to work out before I begin writing a note of score. Where will a theme go naturally (with a shove or two), and where does it resist? If I were really being comprehensive, I would include another dozen versions of this with other slight variations and some failures (inevitable)—but that would be beyond boring, so I have spared you.

“Alice Theme (1st recording)”—this was my first attempt to record a wild-track version of this idea (meaning music without being in sync with any picture). Tim and I decided early on to do a certain amount of wild-tracking so that he might have some extra music to play with as he finished the film that was transforming daily as final shots came in.  So here was a first attempt. It was a real orchestra and a real choir, but with no words or lyrics…just melody. Most of the final components are present, as you can hear, but somehow, for me, it didn’t feel complete. I was listening to this recording on the way home from London (where we recorded the choir), that I decided I needed to both expand the entire piece and add actual lyrics which I thought of and jotted down while waiting for my flight in Heathrow. When we returned to London to finish the score a few weeks later, I came prepared for a second go at it, with a new arrangement. So now if you skip back to the first track, “Alice’s Theme”, you have the complete journey…for what it’s worth.

—DE