TRANSFORMERS score: Decepticons theme chanting revealed (it's a medieval hymn!)

There's just nineteen days left before the CD of Steve Jablonsky's Transformers score comes out, which a lot of us have been looking forward to since the movie came out. Well, Marco van Bergen has discovered something about the soundtrack. Remember the unearthly chanting that's in a lot of the music for the Decepticons, like when Frenzy is hacking the computer and during the "roll call" scene? Marco and I talked about it and comparisons to John Williams's "Duel of the Fates" from the Star Wars Episode I soundtrack came up. The chorals in "Duel of the Fates" were a Sanskrit translation of an ancient Welsh poem called "Battle of the Trees". So might Jablonsky have done something similar with the Decepticons music?

Well, Marco did some asking-around in the right places and here's what he found out:

I was wondering for a longer time now what the great lyrics in the "Decepticons theme" mean, and today, I found out: The Decepticons theme is influenced by the world famous Dies Irae. Jablonsky mixed it up, and uhm, well now you have a meaningless pot of words:

Low-voice-chant:
Tuba, mirum, Tuba, spargens
Tremor, David, mirum, ante

Chant which gets louder throughout:
Totum totum totum totum David
Totum spargens totum david
Totum quarens, sedisti totum

(I wasn't able to understand the rest of it.)

If ya would translate it, it would be something like this:

Trumpet, casts, Trumpet wondrous
Horror, David, Casts, before

Contained, contained, contained contained David
Contained wondrous contained David
Contained seeking, hope contained

So, it's all kinda nonsense (although the real Dies Irae has a biblical meaning behind it).

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Dies Irae. From the opening paragraph:

Dies Irae ("Day of Wrath") is a famous thirteenth century Latin hymn thought to be written by Thomas of Celano. It is often judged to be the best medieval Latin poem, differing from classical Latin by its accentual (non-quantitative) stress and its rhymed lines. The meter is trochaic. The poem describes the day of judgment, the last trumpet summoning souls before the throne of God, where the saved will be delivered and the unsaved cast into eternal flames.

I can sorta see why this particular hymn might have wound up being "adapted" for the Decepticons theme: just the translation of the lyrics sound dark, foreboding, unearthly...

What a neat find! Thanks Marco! :-)

Categories: decepticons, marco van bergen, movies, music, soundtrack, steve jablonsky, transformers