‘Megalopolis’ may be a mess, but the music by Philly-trained Osvaldo Golijov is a quirky triumph

If Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million sci-fi epic/epic box office flop, has largely confounded viewers and critics — “What the hell did I just watch?” went the headline of one review — the film’s real star may end up being the music.

Not that the score is any less strange than the film, but it’s a good-strange. The atmospherics of a Roman power struggle set in a New York City of the future coexist in the music just as oddly as they do in the film. And yet the blurry, random landscape of the film becomes a virtue in the music, written mostly by Osvaldo Golijov.

The Philadelphia-trained composer pulls off a tricky paradox: the score weaves in any number of musical quotes and near-quotes from other sources: a Ben-Hur sound that is macho, angular and vaguely ancient; superhero music; one section that has John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean dreamily bumping up against Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé; Puccini and Fučík; jazz and rock; and a lot of material that beautifully rides the line between music and sound design.

And yet in the synthesis of it all, the music becomes something totally original.

“Francis said to me, ‘I can name you a particular movie [reference] for almost every frame of this movie.’ And I think that he wanted the same for music,” said Golijov, 63, a Brookline, Mass. resident who earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

The music from Megalopolis is developing a life of its own. The soundtrack is out, and in November the Megalopolis Suite will be performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Riccardo Muti (who is a distant cousin of Coppola’s). Golijov’s opera Ainadamar, about poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, opens Oct. 15 in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera.

Coppola first approached Golijov about writing the score for Megalopolis more than two decades ago. The film itself has been in the making for 40 years.

“He made the decision that he did not want to work with a Hollywood composer, and like all good directors he did research — you know, he asked music people, ‘Who should I be listening to?’ He liked my music, and wrote to me a handwritten letter that I still have next to my piano, inviting me to Napa, and we went through the script.”

A few months later, Coppola told Golijov the movie wasn’t happening, “‘but I have a small movie I want to do. And would you like to do the music?’”

That movie was Youth Without Youth. Golijov then wrote the music for Coppola’s Tetro, and Twixt after that.

For Megalopolis, Golijov worked on the music for about eight months, “but really, like, crazy — like waking up at 3 a.m. and working until 7 or 8 p.m. straight. Because there were more than two hours of music, and so it was really, really intense. And also I wanted to orchestrate the music. Because of Crumb, I thought the colors were important and I wanted them to be mine.”

Crumb is George Crumb, with whom Golijov studied at Penn, and a sensitivity to the power of instrumental color is one of the things Golijov took away from his time with his teacher.

Crumb was not a film composer, though one of his works, the “Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects” from Black Angels, was memorably deployed to horrifying effect in the soundtrack to The Exorcist.

“It’s the awareness that color is meaningful and the tactile aspect of music is meaningful, too — that they tell a story as much as the notes and the rhythms that you choose,” said Golijov. “He had such exquisite sensibility that he was able to have a narrative that was propelled by everything at the same time.”

Crumb’s music has the unusual quality of belonging to no time in particular. Golijov’s music for Megalopolis seems to come out of every era. But while there are plenty of contemporary sounds in the score and a steady pop sensibility, the overwhelming vehicle underpinning the action and emotion is orchestral, a sound palette that endures in film in an era when everything about the culture has changed around it. And for good reason, says Golijov.

“It’s funny that the sound of Hollywood was created in central Europe — it was Korngold and Max Steiner and Miklós Rózsa, and then it was kept alive with John Williams. When the orchestral music is good, [audiences] get transported in a way that is different than with electronics or contemporary ensemble amplified. Maybe it takes 100 people to create that landscape.”