043: The Man Who Would Be King OST, by Maurice Jarre

Maurice Jarre (France)
The Man Who Would Be King OST (1975)
10 tracks, 30 minutes
Listen on YouTube

The Man Who Would Be King is a 1975 film based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling. Starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine and set in the 19th century, it follows two British officers adventuring around India and Afghanistan, until one of them becomes revered as a god-king in the city of Sikandergul. It’s a classic tale of hubris punished, with more than a dash of colonialism and orientalism.

The soundtrack, composed by Maurice Jarre, is quite a mix between Western classical music, British folk and military music and Hindustani music, and features a brass-heavy orchestra and heavy use of Indian instruments such as the sarangi, sarod, surbahar and shehnai and even some slightly misplaced Tibetan horns. As is common for film music, a lot of the material is based on a few short motifs that are developed and varied throughout the film. A neat touch for The Man Who Would Be King, though, is that the most prominent motif is lifted in its entirety from the melody of the old Irish song ‘Minstrel Boy’ – a song which becomes important to the plot near the end of the film. By that point, the theme has come around so many times in so many different ways, we already know every note of it.

What I enjoy the most in this soundtrack is its very particular combination of Western and Indian classical musics that really evokes, for me, the 18th and 19th century interest that Western composers had in South Asian music. It’s heard most clearly when the Indian instruments are not playing, but where the North Indian melodic and rhythmic elements are transposed into the setting of the Western orchestra. I’m not sure whether this was Jarre’s intention or not, but I think it really captures that spirit of orientalist composition of the time: it’s rather clumsy and made without the depth of knowledge required for sensitive fusion (or at least composed specifically to sound that way). It’s that lack of sensitivity that makes this style rare today, but from a purely musical standpoint, it creates a sound that is very much rooted in time and place, and all the more evocative for it.