Silvestri is generally viewed as a "B-level" composer. He's not one of the masters, like John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith, but he's a solid professional who always turns it good work which is generally very accessible but also has more of a distinctive voice than some of the duller composers working today. I think that viewing Silvestri as a "B-level" guy sells him a bit short; it implies that what he does isn't as good as the greats, whereas I think what he does is a bit different. Thus, if Williams and Goldsmith are the Wagner and Verdi of film music today, I see Silvestri not as a Bellini (a second-rate guy) but as a Sir Arthur Sullivan (a first-rate guy who's not doing hugely profound work by design and intent).
Silvestri's work tends toward pastiche, mainly because a lot of the films on which he works tend toward pastiche. But pastiche isn't something on which we should a priori discount or look down upon; and it's my view that when Silvestri is allowed to go beyond pastiche (which isn't all that often, admittedly) he can hold his own with anyone. So here's a general rundown on the Silvestri scores with which I'm most familiar. This is not exhaustive, but I think it captures most of his biggest profile scores.
:: Romancing the Stone. This was the first of Silvestri's scores that I recall noticing. It's notable for its use of Latin-American sounds, reflecting the film's setting of Colombia, as opposed to the more "Korngold-esque" style of adventure scoring.
:: Back to the Future, I, II, and III. Silvestri's work on this trilogy is actually pretty interesting. It's known best for the main BTTF theme, which is a big, brassy melody that's most often scored as a march and motif for Marty McFly's adventures. However, the trilogy's wide-range between time periods allows Silvestri to indulge in 50s style madcap comedy stylings, sci-fi adventure, and even Western-style Americana. It's all in great fun, even if the BTTF theme gets a bit repetitive.
:: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Here Silvestri does pastiche-to-the-max, what with his take on comic noir, cartoons, jazzy hard-boiled romance, and more just plain madcap foolery. He breaks absolutely no new ground in this score, but with this much fun being had, he doesn't need to.
:: The Abyss. While Silvestri is best known for his long-standing relationship with director Robert Zemeckis, this score to James Cameron's undersea SF thriller is one of my favorites. I love how Silvestri is able to suggest the unknown vastness of the world beneath the sea, capturing both the fear and the wonder down there. The action writing isn't his best – serviceable, but not particularly notable – but the other stuff is gold. (And it's my firmly held opinion that The Abyss is far, far superior to Aliens, a film whose near-classic status I find incomprehensible.)
:: The Bodyguard. Yes, it had an Alan Silvestri score. This film isn't just the source of Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You", which held sway as the Most Overplayed Song In History between 1992 and 1997 (when "My Heart Will Go On" seized that title). Here Silvestri wrote some noirish, bluesy music that I'm not sure was ever released on CD.
:: Forrest Gump. Silvestri really indulged his penchant for Americana in this film (which I still like, even though it's probably the most hated Best Picture in history). The score is one of Silvestri's most accessible works, full of melodies that are mostly characterized by simplicity, as befits the film's main character. There are two soundtrack albums for Forrest Gump: one features Silvestri's score, and the other is the song-compilation album (I will have more to say about song-compilation albums in another essay, someday.) The song-comp CD includes a suite of Silvestri's music, which basically consists of the suite he wrote for the film's end credits with a prelude of Forrest's Theme, played mostly on the piano before the strings swell and take it over. This is my favorite of all of Silvestri's melodies. I love how it offsets with the gently syncopated piano background, and I love how the piano continues to elaborate on the theme and provide background coloring even when the strings take over. As for the rest of the score, it's pretty much mainstream Silvestri, and that End Credits suite actually covers pretty much all of it.
:: Contact. My favorite of all of Alan Silvestri's film scores. This one is deceptive, sounding much simpler than it really is. In fact, if one listens to the End Credits suite from Contact immediately after listening to the same suite from Forrest Gump, one might initially think that Silvestri has fallen victim to the James Horner self-quoting trap. But the differences quickly become apparent, as the main Contact theme (Ellie Arroway's theme, I suppose) is punctuated by soft horn calls that imply, to my ears, Ellie's constant wishing for the stars. And there are passages in this score that capture the "Sense of cosmic wonder" that dominated everything Carl Sagan ever wrote (he wrote the original novel on which Contact is based). There is also some excellent suspense music, accompanying the scene where the alien transmission is first received. Silvestri builds the suspense nicely, but without loud histrionics; this befits the conflicting impulses in the SETI researchers ("Oh God, I think we've found it!" versus "Oh God, this can't be it.") This probably sounds trite, but Silvestri's score to Contact always makes me want to go off into a field and look up at the night sky.
:: Castaway. Silvestri and Zemeckis took a chance on this one: they left a great deal of the film totally unscored. There is virtually no music in most of the film, and all of the island sequences are unscored. The music only really starts up again when Tom Hanks finally gets off the island on his raft. At that moment, Hanks has done everything in his power, and now he is putting his fate in other hands. Thus, the music of the film is quasi-religious in nature. It isn't specifically liturgical, but I find it has a very solemn, hymnic feel. There's not a lot more I can say about it.
The largest-profile score of Silvestri's with which I am unfamiliar is The Mummy Returns. I have heard that it is an excellent adventure-film score, but I have also heard the complaint that anyone who has dipped into film scores at all will know: "They left the best part off the CD!" (That's another issue I'll delve into some other time.) Silvestri also wrote music for the TV series CHiPS. The wacky music you remember from those chases on the LA Freeway system, and the goofy stuff that accompanied those freeze-frames of everybody grinning at the end of every episode? Yep, Silvestri. But don't hold it against him. Everybody starts out somewhere.
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