Bach and Albinoni — Classical Music as Corporate Frame Rollerball
Norman Jewison and André Previn assembled Rollerball's score from borrowed Baroque, Classical, and twentieth-century pieces — Bach, Tomaso Albinoni / Remo Giazotto, Dmitri Shostakovich, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Previn's baton. The three original cues Previn composed are short and used only inside the corporate-leisure environments. The compilation strategy is one of the film's most-discussed formal decisions and one of its more disciplined arguments about its own subject.
Bach over the empty arena
The film opens on Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), performed on pipe organ by Simon Preston, against a wide shot of the empty Houston arena while technicians prep the track.b1 The piece is one of the most-recognized organ works in the Western canon — historically associated with the dramatic Gothic horror tradition (Universal's Phantom of the Opera, 1925; Disney's Fantasia, 1940) and with cathedral grandeur.
Jewison and Previn use the recognizability deliberately. The corporate-future spectacle they are about to depict has appropriated the music of the European medieval church — the music of the institution that has been comprehensively erased by the time of the Geneva sequence ("We've lost those computers with all of the 13th century in them. Not much in the century, just Dante and a few corrupt Popes").b27 The corporate world cannot produce Bach. It can only play Bach. The opening musical decision is the film's first declaration of the historical theft the corporate world has committed.
"The Bach Toccata over the empty arena is one of the great opening choices in 1970s cinema. You can build a thesis statement out of the sound design alone. The piece carries an entire civilization in its first chord, and the picture is about a world that has put that civilization in a summary." — The Film Scorer, A Depth in Violence
The Bach returns at the freeze-frame closing (b38). The corporate-context for the piece has by then inverted: the chant the music swells under is "Jonathan! Jonathan!" — the name of a single body the corporation tried to erase. The opening's reading is the corporation has taken Bach. The closing's reading is the body has taken Bach back.
Albinoni's Adagio during the executive scenes
Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio in G minor — in fact composed in 1958 by the Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto, supposedly on a fragmentary Albinoni manuscript discovered in Dresden, which manuscript has never been independently verified — is the second most-recognized classical-music piece in the Western pop repertoire of mourning. Rollerball uses it during corporate-executive scenes, in particular around Bartholomew's reflective moments. It is also used at the ranch party (b14) under the lavish executive-society leisure.
The Albinoni/Giazotto choice is technically interesting because the piece is itself a kind of corporate-administrative product — a mid-twentieth-century composition issued under a Baroque attribution to make it more saleable in the postwar classical-recording market. Previn and Jewison may not have known the attribution was fraudulent in 1974, but the music's actual provenance fits the film's argument exactly. Rollerball uses, as the soundtrack of corporate grief, a piece of postwar musicology dressed in Baroque clothing.
Shostakovich in Geneva
Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, second movement, plays under the Geneva archive sequence.b27 The choice is unusual. Shostakovich's Fifth was the symphony the composer wrote in 1937, after Stalin's denunciation of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, with the public subtitle "A Soviet artist's response to just criticism." The Fifth is the symphony of a major artist composing under a totalitarian state's surveillance. Played under the Geneva sequence — the place the corporate state has erased the thirteenth century — the Shostakovich choice quietly compares the corporate-society's information-management to the Stalinist musicology of the late 1930s.
"Previn's selections are not random Baroque-and-classical cuts. Each piece carries its own history with totalitarianism: Bach's cathedral, Albinoni's postwar musicology fraud, Shostakovich's surveillance Fifth. The compilation argues by lineage, not just by mood." — The Film Scorer, A Depth in Violence
Previn's three original cues
The three pieces Previn composed himself — Executive Party, Executive Party Dance, Glass Sculpture — total under five minutes of screen time. They are diegetic source music: party scenes, the Multivision recording session. Their texture is funk-exotica, brassy and slightly dissonant, the music of a party at which androids are visible. Critics have read this as intentional contrast: the corporation's own music is brief, brittle, slightly ridiculous, while the music it borrows from the past is grand, sustained, and historically un-earned.
"The original Previn cues are the cheap modernist music the corporation actually generates. The classical pieces are the cultural inheritance the corporation has stolen. The score argues both halves at once." — The Film Scorer, A Depth in Violence
The London Symphony Orchestra performance
Previn was, simultaneously, the LSO's principal conductor (1968–1979) and the film's musical director. The recording sessions for the soundtrack were LSO sessions. The album, issued by United Artists in 1975 and later reissued by Varèse Sarabande and Soul Jazz, presents the program as a coherent classical-recording program rather than a film-score collage.
"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
The compilation-score lineage
Rollerball's compilation strategy is the direct ancestor of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Kubrick's borrowed-Strauss/Ligeti score is the immediate precedent — and the strategy Kubrick refined further in Barry Lyndon (1975), which was released six months after Rollerball. The three films together define a small mid-1970s genre: prestige English-language pictures scored from the existing classical-music catalogue rather than with original music. The Shining (1980), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and the entire Wes Anderson catalogue carry the lineage forward.