As You Like It
Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It will be released in the U.S. and U.K. after August. There is a new trailer for the film available which features some of the underscore. From the production notes for the film:
The music is written by Academy Award-winning composer Patrick Doyle, who met Branagh as an actor back in the 1980s with the latter’s theatre company Renaissance, and has collaborated on seven of his films. Doyle also plays the part of chief court musician Amiens in the film.
Doyle’s starting point for the score was the music he wrote for three songs in the Renaissance production of As You Like It. These are Under The Greenwood, Blow, Blow Thy Winter Wind and It Was A Lover And His Lass. “Fortunately, they were very loosely based around the pentatonic five-note scale, which is Japanese,” recalls the composer, “So I was ahead of the game!”
As part of his preparation, Doyle watched Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which was based on Macbeth. “In fact, it wasn’t that far removed from what I was going to do in that it was a fusion of east and west. So I thought, ‘Well, if that’s totally acceptable in a Japanese production, I’m on the right lines’.”
Doyle wanted to give the film a Japanese feel musically without ignoring the fact that the Dukes and their courtiers are Western. He made the decision to surround the three songs with Japanese instruments. “So, for example, instead of the harp, we have the koto, which is like a very reedy harp,” he explains.
There's no date announced yet on a CD release for the score.
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