Music
The score was composed by Thomas Newman and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1994, which was his first Oscar nomination. The majority of the score consists of dark piano music, which plays along the main character's role at Shawshank. The main theme ("End Titles" on the soundtrack album) is perhaps best known to modern audiences as the inspirational sounding music from many movie trailers dealing with inspirational, dramatic, or romantic films in much the same way that James Horner's driving music from the end of Aliens is used in many movie trailers for action films. A central scene in the film features the "Letter Duet" ("Canzonetta sull'aria") from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
Read more about this topic: The Shawshank Redemption
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“But the dark changed to red, and torches shone,
And deafening music shook the leaves; a troop
Shouldered a litter with a wounded man,
Or smote upon the string and to the sound
Sang of the beast that gave the fatal wound.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In benevolent natures the impulse to pity is so sudden, that like instruments of music which obey the touch ... you would think the will was scarce concerned, and that the mind was altogether passive in the sympathy which her own goodness has excited. The truth is,—the soul is [so] ... wholly engrossed by the object of pity, that she does not ... take leisure to examine the principles upon which she acts.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)