‘War Horse’ Album: Chronological Order and Unreleased Music

By Jason LeBlanc

The album is in chronological order with 2 exceptions:

06 Plowing should go before 05 Seeding, and Horse Vs Car (something that should have been obvious when the track list first leaked – can’t seed a field until you have plowed it!) and 13 No Man’s Land, the dissonant first half takes place after the action-based second half.

As far as unreleased music goes, early reports that the film was wall-to-wall score were just plain completely wrong. The OST is a VERY good summation of the score as a whole. In addition to the 65 minutes there, there were about 5, maybe 6 short cues in the film that aren’t on the OST, that total maybe 8-10 minutes at the most.

So the complete score would have easily fit on one disc and been a SUPERB presentation. The extra cues are not redundant and would have enhanced the listening experience. That being said, Williams did pick the best cues to be on the OST, I wouldn’t trade any of them for an unreleased cue.

The extra cues I can remember from one viewing of the film:

– A short cue that plays after 01 Dartmoor, 1912 that leads into the Auction scene
– A maybe 2 minute cue that leads into 06 Plowing (It’s essentially 8 straight minutes of music in the film)
– A short cue after 08 The Charge and Capture featuring Joey’s Theme that starts on Joey in possession of the Germans and continues through Albert getting Captain Nichol’s letter
– I think the music for Emilie’s grandfather’s story about the carrier pigeons is unreleased
– I think there was a short cue after Emilie and Joey are captured by the Germans when she goes over the hill riding Joey for the first time

Can’t remember if there were any others right now.

There really isn’t much, huge portions of the movie play with no score at all (and it was the right decision)