While my first viewing of Burnt Offerings (1976) proved a memorable one, with several sequences scaring the ever-living daylights out of me, Robert Cobert's atmospheric score did not register. This might have to do with the score being so perfectly integrated within the film that the music is far more often felt than actually heard. Does that make sense?
Jeff Thompson's liner notes declare Cobert's score for Burnt Offerings to be "one of his finest scores of the 1970s." Perhaps. I do not feel that I am well-versed enough in the man's output to offer an agreement or a contrary opinion. But I can and do agree that Cobert's score is excellent.
Conducting a 20-piece orchestra, Cobert deftly employs "minor seconds, string tremolos, repetitive figures, and crescendos to dissonant cords with abrupt releases." At least that is what Thompson wrote in his liner notes. He also calls Cobert a "master of dissonance," which is used "effectively but never unpleasantly to the untrained ear." Being a person with an untrained ear, I can and do heartily concur with that.
Track 27 of this 2011 release features an unused alternate Main Theme that is quite different from the ominous music used in the film. "I wanted to start the movie upbeat," Cobert remembers in the liner notes, "like nothing bad was going to happen to the family."
Whether or not that "jaunty, duple-rhythm" alternate Main Theme would have worked in the film will always be up for artistic debate. I can see and appreciate both sides of the argument for its use or its being left on the cutting room floor. I also greatly appreciate being given the opportunity to actually hear it.
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