David Shire Score The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

David Shire composed the score for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) using a twelve-tone row as the melodic foundation, layered over jazz-funk rhythms. The result is one of the most distinctive film scores of the 1970s ��� atonal enough to feel dangerous, grooved enough to feel like the city it's set in. Shire would go on to score The Conversation (1974), All the President's Men (1976), and Norma Rae (1979), but he has consistently identified Pelham as a turning point.

"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three... is one of my signature scores. We spotted the movie, and the director went off to pre-production... on another film. I was pretty much left to my own devices, but I knew what I wanted. It took me a month to find it." — David Shire, StoryBeat

Shire used serial technique because the film demanded organized chaos

The score's dissonance is structural, not decorative. Shire built the main theme from all twelve notes of the chromatic scale without repetition — a technique drawn from concert-hall serialism — then set it against funk bass lines and jazz drumming. The twelve-tone row gives the music an unsettled, criminal quality; the rhythm section makes it move.

"What's exciting is when a film asks you to do something you've never done before, like The Taking of Pelham 1.2.3. I eventually realized the way to get the sound I wanted was through serial techniques." — David Shire, Cinescores Center

"I even wound up going back on something I learned along the way with serious composition of using a tone row as the basis for a score, which was semi-serial." — David Shire, StoryBeat

The score was designed to sound like New York

Shire's stated goal was to capture the city itself — its energy, its danger, and its underlying order. He described the target as a kind of productive disorder, a system that looks chaotic from the outside but runs on invisible structure.

"I wanted a New York sound that expressed... New York in the seventies was this pretty wild place... but there was always that grid of avenues and streets... Serial device was the template." — David Shire, StoryBeat

"The sound I wanted was a kind of organised chaos that was expressive of New York." — David Shire, Cinephilia & Beyond

In a 2016 interview for the Kino Lorber Blu-ray release, Shire condensed the idea further:

"Chaotic but controlled." — David Shire, HighDefWatch (2016)

Shire worked without supervision and against type

Joseph Sargent left Shire alone during the composition process — an unusual degree of freedom for a film composer. Shire used the time to reject the obvious approach. A hostage thriller in 1974 could have been scored with the tense orchestral idiom of Bullitt or The French Connection. Shire went the other direction.

"When you're working as a film composer you're helping a director fulfil a vision that they initiated, and I didn't want to write the same old stuff you'd heard on other action pictures." — David Shire, Cinephilia & Beyond

The instrumentation worked the extremes of the sonic range

Shire knew that subway noise and dialogue would crowd the mid-range frequencies, so he scored for the edges. The low end was tuba, snarling trombones, electric bass, and timpani. The high end was screeching reeds, explosive trumpets, and electronic piano. The drums played both rock and jazz patterns. The result cuts through the production sound without competing with it.

The score went unreleased for two decades

Despite its reputation, the Pelham score was never issued on LP in the 1970s. The first CD release came in 1995 from Retrograde Records. Quartet Records later issued an expanded reissue mastered from Shire's personal archive tapes, adding roughly fifteen minutes of music beyond what appears in the film.