Passion

Twenty-one tracks drawn from a film’s cues, and the subtractive test bites. The frame is compelled. The Feeling Begins must open, a single reed line out of silence that sets the record’s place and grief before anything is stated, and the run from Passion through It Is Accomplished to Bread and Wine is the necessary close: agony, release, sacrament. Zaar and A Different Drum carry the middle. Elsewhere the record is assembled more than required. Of These, Hope returns within three tracks; With This Love returns for choir; Troubled and Disturbed hold a colour and say nothing another track does not. Perhaps a fifth of the record could go with little loss.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it is made through sound. The Passion is moved out of the European cathedral and back to the ground it happened on and the peoples around it: a Christian story sounded through an Armenian duduk, a Persian kamancheh, a Turkish Sufi ney, an Egyptian trance rite, West African drums and, at the centre, the qawwali voice of a Pakistani Muslim singer. The sacred is heard as one devotional ecstasy shared across faiths, and the man suffering in it as a man of the Levant. That is a meaning, not only a mood. Beyond it, most of the record discloses states, doubt, trouble, dread, release, rather than a condition, and the film’s own argument is not carried without the film.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Elevation comes more than once and of more than one kind. The title track is the summit: a slow build of drones and percussion under which Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice enters and rises in long melismas, answered by a boy soprano, a height of devotional transport that few records of its decade reach. The Feeling Begins has a grave, open height in its first minute. It Is Accomplished is the warm kind, an exultant release of drums after the agony. Zaar reaches trance; Gethsemane and Stigmata hold a low dread. Between the heights much of the record is level, beds that hold a colour, and some synthesiser pads of their years lower a peak rather than carry it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The archetype is the deepest in the Western tradition, and here it is half built. The sequence follows the Passion’s own shape in titles placed at the ends: the agony in the garden, the raising of Lazarus, then the wounds, the passion, the last word from the cross and the meal that remembers it. The record builds descent and release in sound: the long middle of doubt, sand, breath and shadow is a wilderness, and the close turns from the cry of Passion to the drums of completion and a quiet table. What holds it: the structure is the Gospels’ and the film’s, laid by titles and order more than built within the music, and it has no human figure.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the Hollywood biblical score, orchestral and European since the epics of the 1950s, and the singer’s own art rock, which had already taken in African drumming. The turn on the first count is large: a Gospel film scored with no orchestra, from musics of the Near East, Africa and South Asia played by their masters and fused with samples, then issued as a long instrumental album three years after So (1986). The stake was real: the film was under protest, the record had no single, and it opened a new label. What holds it is a proven path: Jon Hassell, who plays here, and Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) had placed the bet.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Would changing the form change what the record knows? Partly. Its knowledge, that the Passion belongs to many traditions at once, is carried by its texture: each piece is a meeting of players from different traditions over a shared electronic ground, and an orchestral or single-tradition setting would lose it. The title track is the strongest case, a qawwali voice and a Western boy soprano in one line. The sequence frames a long wordless middle between Gospel titles at the two ends, and the close is placed with intent. What holds the figure: the form remains a suite of short cues, many of which could be reordered without loss, and the two reprises are a soundtrack’s habit rather than the album’s argument.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Thirty-seven years supply evidence, real and bounded. The record has stayed a reference for musicians and composers, its layering of live masters over a sampled ground studied as a method, and through its companion compilation, Passion: Sources, and the careers it opened to a Western public, it sends listeners on to the traditions it drew from. In the record, return repays in the production: the parts separate on close listening, and the meeting of tuning systems and timbres gives detail on each hearing. The semantic return is thinner. With no words and a frame lent by the film, there is less to reinterpret: the meaning is found at once and does not reorganise on return.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The field is the film score of its decade and the crossover record that came to be called world music. The intrinsic force is clear: the record showed that a major film could be scored from non-Western traditions played by their masters and fused electronically, without orchestra or pastiche, and that such a score could stand as an album. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the duduk and the wordless Near Eastern voice became common sounds of the historical and religious epic after it, a line of influence widely claimed and not proved; the label it opened carried its players to a wider public. Part of the force was Hassell’s and Eno’s, and its reach among composers exceeds its public reach.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued, in print and streamed. Presence is continuous but narrow. The record is heard by musicians, by the singer’s listeners and by those who follow film scores, and its title track and The Feeling Begins are used and borrowed; but it is seldom placed among the central albums of its decade, and its public presence is a fraction of So’s. The fabric bears its moment in part: some synthesiser pads and drum treatments are of their years, though the acoustic instruments at the core of most tracks are fixed to no year. Charged for presence, it sits at 8.5.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Command of the recorded medium is high and in places load-bearing; the production is the record’s achievement. Players from many traditions, some recorded at different times and some sampled, are placed in one acoustic space so that each line is distinct and none is reduced to colour, and differences of pitch and tuning are used rather than corrected. The title track’s build, drones, percussion, the qawwali voice and the boy soprano entering in turn, is exact in pacing and balance. Zaar’s percussion is dense and legible. The faults: some synthesiser beds are generic for their year and thin beside the players, and Troubled, Disturbed and Open are made to the standard of good underscore, not of the summit pieces.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs most of the record: traditions meeting over a single electronic ground, in a dry, warm acoustic, toward devotion. Take the two most distant elements: Zaar, a trance rite of drums and voices with no Western element, and With This Love (Choir), an English boy choir in a hymn-like line. They obey the same law, because the meeting runs both ways, and the title track joins the two extremes in one piece. The range is wide: trance, lament, hymn, march, drone. What holds the figure: the law loosens in the cues, where some pieces obey a film scene’s need for tension or unease more than the record’s own, and the synthesiser palette sometimes sits apart from the players rather than holding them.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The sacred is held fully, as suffering, ecstasy and sacrament, and across several faiths at once. The body is held through the Passion’s wounds and through dance and trance in Zaar. The natural order is evoked by title and sound: sand, breath, night, shadow, a wilderness. Community is held in the rite and the shared meal. What holds the figure at its lowest: consciousness is held only as states, doubt, trouble, dread, and never as a person; the state, labour, history and the family are absent or present only by the story’s inheritance. One frame joins what is there, but it holds few orders, and most of them by title.

Score: 6.9 / 10