André Previn (Rollerball) Rollerball

André Previn was forty-six when he conducted the Rollerball soundtrack. He was at that point the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (a post he held 1968–1979), an Oscar-winning film composer four times over (for Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Irma la Douce, and My Fair Lady), a jazz pianist of standing, and a regular BBC television host. Rollerball's music is unusual within his catalogue because almost all of it is by other composers — Bach, Albinoni/Giazotto, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky — selected and conducted by Previn with the LSO. The three pieces he composed himself are short cues, used as scene-music inside the film's corporate-party set-pieces.

A career across four musical traditions

Andreas Ludwig Priwin was born April 6, 1929, in Berlin, to a German-Jewish family. They fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and reached Los Angeles in 1939. Previn grew up in California, became an American citizen, and was working at MGM's music department in his late teens — orchestrating and arranging Hollywood musicals. He moved between film scoring, jazz piano (his recordings with Shelly Manne in the 1950s remain canonical), classical conducting (Houston Symphony, then the LSO, then the Pittsburgh, then Royal Philharmonic), and operatic composition (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1998).

He died February 28, 2019, at ninety, in Manhattan.

What he was hired to do on Rollerball

Norman Jewison wanted a score that would not feel like a score. The classical pieces — particularly the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor that opens and closes the film, and the Albinoni/Giazotto Adagio in G minor that recurs through the executive scenes — were already widely recognized works. Previn's job was to assemble them, conduct the LSO and organist Simon Preston in performances tailored to the film's edit, and add the small original cues needed for the corporate-party sequences.

The Bach opening is the film's most-cited musical choice. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor is one of the most-recognized organ works in the Western canon — historically associated, in film, with Gothic horror (Universal's Phantom of the Opera) and with cathedral grandeur. Jewison and Previn place it over a near-empty arena in the year 2018, played by Simon Preston on a real pipe organ. The piece's connotations of medieval Christianity are deliberately deployed against a corporate-future spectacle whose entire purpose is to demonstrate the futility of individual effort. See Bach and Albinoni — Classical Music as Corporate Frame.

The Albinoni Adagio (in fact composed by Remo Giazotto in 1958, on a fragment attributed to Albinoni) plays during corporate-executive scenes and Bartholomew's reflective moments. It is the second-most-recognized classical piece in the Western pop repertoire of mourning. Used by Previn here, it makes Bartholomew's loneliness audible without making him sympathetic.

The Shostakovich Symphony No. 5, second movement, plays during the Geneva library sequence. The Tchaikovsky None but the Lonely Heart plays at the ranch under the second corporate-companion scene.

The original Previn cues

Previn composed three short cues used in the film's corporate-leisure environments:

• "Executive Party" — a piece of funk-exotica, used at the laser-pistol ranch party. It is the strangest piece in the score: brassy, percussive, faintly dissonant, the music of a party at which androids are visible.
• "Executive Party Dance" — a related dance cue, slightly more controlled.
• "Glass Sculpture" — a modernist short cue, written for the Multivision recording-session sequence.

These three cues are the only original Previn material in the film. They are conspicuously short — together they run under five minutes — and they have a different texture from the borrowed classical pieces. Critics have read this as an intentional design: the corporate world's own music is brief, brittle, slightly ridiculous, while the music it borrows from the past is grand, sustained, and largely unearned.

"Previn's Rollerball score is one of the most fascinating compilation scores of the 1970s. The borrowed pieces argue with the borrowed-from world — Bach over the empty arena, Albinoni over Bartholomew's loneliness — while Previn's own cues stand for the corporate present as something thin and slightly ridiculous." — The Film Scorer, A Depth in Violence

The London Symphony connection

The performance credit for the soundtrack is Simon Preston, London Symphony Orchestra, André Previn conducting. Previn was simultaneously the LSO's principal conductor and the film's musical director — an arrangement that gave the picture the sound of a major-label classical recording rather than the studio-orchestra sound of most 1970s Hollywood films. The album was issued by United Artists and is still in circulation as a Varèse Sarabande and Soul Jazz reissue.

"Previn brought the LSO into the picture, which is the reason the music has the body that it does. Most film orchestras of the period were assembled session by session. Rollerball sounds like one orchestra playing one program because it essentially is." — The Film Scorer, A Depth in Violence