Almost every major actor and creative artist got their media spotlight throughout the many months of heavy press on Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Brad Fiedel's turn came in April of 1992 in Keyboard magazine.
The top of the cover says "Scoring Terminator 2" which tells us that the article's main focus will be the T2 score, deservingly so. Brad's "pulse-racing" score for the two Terminator films, as the article describes them, was one of those scores that are absolutely inseparable from the film. The T2 score is also extremely unique, composed largely from factory/machine sounds rather than actual instruments, yet its somber and softer moments are just as memorable.
The interviewer asks really interesting questions, and begins asking how different scoring T2 was than the original movie. Fiedel says that, other than the two films being from very different time periods, the second movie isn't as dark and he didn't use much sampled stuff as oppose to the first film. The interviewer and Brad note the somber tone of the T2 score
Keyboard Magazine: The Terminator 2 soundtrack seems almost mournful. Almost all of the tonal parts are in minor modes
Brad Fiedel: "That's my reaction to the story (...) There isn't a lot of space for major triumphant music. Even when they win in the end by finally killing the T-1000, they lose Arnold"
Brad also talks about the themes for the T-1000, the soft string and acoustic guitar motif for Sarah and John, and the theme for the T-800, which interestingly, he changes in the course of the film just as the character changes onscreen: "In the original Terminator, I used a drum machine and a sawtooth wave, fast synth stuff because I wanted to constantly remind you that he was a machine. In T2, it's a combination. I do have some buzzy electronic stuff, especially when he arrives. But I drop that when it becomes clear that he's helping Sarah and John. At that point, I'm just scoring the moment (...) I let the electronic stuff fade and scored the emotions of each moment so that by the end, when John understands that the Terminator has to destroy himself, I'm into absolute classic emotional scoring, exactly as if it were a scene between two human beings."
There's much more on T2 score, some on specific tracks, and then the interview switches focus to the then-upcoming movie Gladiator. The interview spreads into 6 pages
Back to Terminator Trilogy
