The late 1970s to the early 1980s were a busy period for composer David Shire. In 1978 and 1979 alone, he wrote the scores for The Defection of Simas Kudirka, Straight Time, Norma Rae, Fast Break, The Promise, Old Boyfriends, and Daddy, I Don’t Like It Like This, as well as for Apocalypse Now and Kramer vs. Kramer. However, the latter two were not used.

Our album is dedicated to three scores from this extraordinarily prolific period in Shire’s career; a trio of scores that complement each other while highlighting the composer’s versatility and ingenuity. His contribution to Kramer vs. Kramer didn’t survive some late post-production decision-making; The Defection of Simas Kudirka earned him an Emmy nomination; and the credits for The World According to Garp (wrongly) list him as merely an adapter for a score that plays deliciously with the conventions of diegetic and non-diegetic music.

The late 1970s were hectic for David Shire professionally and stressful in his personal life. He and his wife, Talia Shire, separated, and it was while going through divorce proceedings that he was asked by producer Stanley Jaffe to write the original music for Kramer vs. Kramer, a film that deals in excruciating detail with the pain and horror of a relationship coming to an end and a son getting lost in the ensuing divorce battle. Shire remembers his initial reaction to the film with a succinct remark: “I never came out of a first screening of a picture I had been hired to score with moist eyes.” As he was worried about the prospect of his soon-to-be ex-wife gaining full custody of their son, Shire felt particularly sensitive about the portrayal in the film of a young child going through a comparable situation.

Kramer vs. Kramer is primarily about Billy, the son of Ted and Joanna Kramer. One morning, the boy finds that his mother absent. He only sees his father, still fully dressed, lying on his bed. Who is going to make his breakfast and get him ready for school?

Ted is reluctant to tell his son the truth — that his mother has decided to leave the family, ostensibly to ‘find herself’. Ted hasn’t fully processed the news himself. Overwhelmed and underprepared, the father quickly tries to throw together some breakfast for his son, before rushing off to the office. The next few weeks are awful: Ted must deliver at his job, take care of his son, and come to terms with the fact that his wife is no longer interested in either him or Billy. It is a tough battle because Ted remains, at his core, completely self-centered. The audience is given an impression of why Joanna may have had enough of her husband.

While Ted struggles to find the right balance in his new life, Billy slowly but noticeably disintegrates. He is the one who gets lost in the shuffle. Sometimes he is given the feeling of being in the way — of Ted’s professional responsibilities, of Joanne’s self-fulfillment, of both his parents’ emotional needs. It takes a medical emergency for Ted to wake up from his stupor and finally devote his attention to Billy. After a courtroom hearing has turned into an inhuman spectacle Ted and Joanne realize where their priorities must be.

Kramer vs. Kramer is interested in the granular detail of its characters’ inner lives, the turmoil they experience, and how it manifests in their everyday existence, particularly in Ted’s and Joanne’s interactions with Billy. It was an emotional watch for Shire: he knew that what he had just seen was something special – one of those projects that only come around a few times during a career. Yet the composer was apprehensive, as he says: “I told producer Stanley Jaffe that I thought the picture was great and obviously moved me. But I thought that a score would actually harm the film by pushing the drama over the top. He smiled politely and said I was very kind but he really wanted a score and hoped I would try. Of course, I would love to be a part of such a wonderful film, so I told him I’d try. Which I did and wrote about thirty-five minutes of music.”

Shire developed a score for strings, woodwinds, and brass. He carefully spotted the film: there would be long stretches without music. Silence was meant to convey the characters’ isolation. Still, Shire wrote pieces for the opening credits (including an alternate version), for Ted’s desperate attempt at preparing breakfast for Billy, the frantic run to the ER, Billy reuniting with his mother, the end credits, and several other scenes. Shire was careful to keep the music light — he knew that the biggest mistake he could make would be to drown the whole film in overbearing sentimentality. Still, his initial instinct was to be proven correct.

“After the first try-out preview,” Shire remembers, “Stanley felt about ten minutes of music actually wasn’t needed and was sorry he had to cut it—same thing after the second preview. By the third and final preview, I saw what was coming, and before Stanley could tell me, I asked him to do a final mercy killing. I would have loved to have my name attached to such a great film.” Yet Shire knew the film worked better without his score. It was not a small comfort. His pieces were replaced with some compositions by Vivaldi and Bach. Often, they accompany the same scenes for which Shire had originally penned music. Some scenes, though, were left without music. Shire understood the producer’s decision and accepted that subtlety was what made the film a success: Kramer vs. Kramer went on to win five Academy Awards and became one of the most celebrated dramas of the 1970s. Away from the screen, Shire experienced a personal happy ending: the split from Talia Shire proved amicable, and they have collaborated on several projects since their divorce.

One year before his experience on Kramer vs. Kramer, Shire had been nominated for a Primetime Emmy for his musical contribution to the celebrated television film The Defection of Simas Kudirka. It called for an entirely different musical approach, because the (true) story is set in an altogether different time and place: the titular Lithuanian radio operator Simas is unhappily living in the Soviet Union with his wife and children. His grandfather had told him spectacular stories about the freedom people enjoy in the United States, far away from the oppression Simas now experiences at the hands of the KGB. One day, when the ship he works on travels to the coast of Massachusetts, Simas sees his big chance to enjoy the same liberty he has heard so much about. On the vessel are several diplomats, there to negotiate fishing rights. When an American ship comes alongside the Soviet ship for the negotiations, Simas jumps aboard, landing on the deck of the USCGC Vigilant. He is now on US territory.

His request for political asylum is denied. A diplomatic kerfuffle ensues, which ends in humiliation for the Americans: after having returned Simas to the enemy, they realize that the radio operator is (unbeknownst to himself) half-American. The public is outraged and demands not only that heads roll but also that Simas be freed from Soviet imprisonment and granted a new life in the United States. The case of Simas led to new guidelines for handling defections and, less importantly, to a television film being made about his story.

Shire’s music for The Defection of Simas Kudirka is one of his proudest achievements, and for good reason: he developed an outstanding theme for the young man that elaborately captures his charm (sometimes bordering on naivety), and which Shire weaves in and out of the score. There are shades of that melody even in the more tense and dissonant suspense pieces that underscore Simas’s fear of being found out by the KGB, which appears to monitor his every move and gesture. While in the writing for violins, violas, cellos and basses, these tense moments evoke some of Shostakovich’s caliginous string quartets, the more light-hearted passages call to mind Tchaikovsky; an obvious inspiration, as Shire acknowledges: “I got another Emmy nomination for this one, and if I had received it in person, I would have thanked Tchaikovsky publicly, just as Dimitri Tiomkin famously thanked several of his classical influences when he accepted his Oscar for High Noon.”

Five years later, in 1982, Shire was hired to provide the score for The World According to Garp, an adaptation of John Irving’s bestselling quasi-Bildungsroman. It was one of the first prominent big screen roles for Robin Williams and his first dramatic role, one that required him to show his full emotional range. The actor succeeded beautifully in bringing T.S. Garp to life, the son of a nurse who raped a brain-damaged soldier who was suffering from priapism, becoming pregnant as a result. The film follows Garp as he navigates the complexities of life. One of the film’s themes is the discovery and acceptance of one’s sexuality and desires, and the claiming of agency over them despite society’s standards and taboos.

These ideas are explored in several ways, most obviously (and problematically) in Garp’s mother’s telling of his conception. Later, Garp meets a transsexual by the name of Roberta (an early role for John Lithgow) and befriends her without ever questioning or even discussing her gender. His mother eventually takes in several young women who protest against male violence (and, it is implied, men in general) by cutting off their own tongues. When Garp gets into a conflict with these women, tragedy ensues. The last act of the film is grim as we witness Garp falling out of love, giving in to an affair, suffering a temporarily debilitating accident, and – finally – losing his life.

It is difficult for any composer to find just the right tonal balance for a film that veers between satire, romance, tragedy and broad comedy, with dream sequences interspersed throughout. David Shire managed to find the balance, though: his music being a complex, intricate composition that plays with the conventions of both diegetic and non-diegetic soundtracks throughout. For example, in an early scene, as Garp comes home late, and he hears and sees a neighbor playing his saxophone. What commences as a diegetic piece of music gradually becomes non-diegetic when a small orchestra picks up the theme. Source music segues into the score and vice versa several times throughout the film.

Shire was required to flex his musical muscles in other ways, too: for a particularly memorable cartoon sequence, he penned a military march, and for yet another dream sequence a heroic theme worthy of Superman. One of the film’s high points is scored with a tense tonal cluster à la Penderecki, while for a Christmas scene Shire made an adaptation of ‘Jingle Bells’. At other moments in the film, arrangements of ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ and ‘Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder’ (the anthem for the US Air Force) can be heard.

Said citations are brief, though, and Shire’s score is original, which makes it all the more surprising that he is only credited as an adapter for The World According to Garp. The credit can only be explained circuitously. The composer himself recalls: “I wrote a main title theme which accompanied a delightful visual sequence of a baby floating around in space. I was very proud of the theme, as was director George Roy Hill. But he soon told me he was going to try the Beatles’ recording of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, which he also thought worked very well. Obviously, I wanted my theme, from which a lot of the rest of my score was derived, to be the one used. Two test previews were coming up, and George said he would use my title music for one of them and the Beatles for the other and see which one the preview audiences reacted most favorably to.”

The result was clear, and David Shire’s main title theme was scrapped in favor of the Liverpudlian musicians. Several other cues went unused, too (much like Kramer vs. Kramer and The Defection of Simas Kudirka, The World According to Garp features a small amount of carefully spotted music). Shire, disappointed by the decision to use a pop song rather than his own composition for the arresting opening title, requested his credit be given as adapter only. George Roy Hill reluctantly agreed. To this day, Shire very much regrets his “all too hasty and ill-considered” decision, especially since Hill never hired him again. The World According to Garp is one of the best known (and both financially and critically successful) films the composer has worked on.

We are delighted to make these three diverse scores available for the first time. The tracklist was curated by the composer and myself, producer Stephan Eicke, avoiding repetition while preserving the individual scores’ concepts and structures. They reveal carefully crafted, complex, and colorful compositions that complement each other while each showing different facets of David Shire’s work from his most fruitfully creative period.