Becoming Jane (soundtrack)

Becoming Jane (Original Motion Picture Score) is the score album to the 2007 film Becoming Jane starring Anne Hathaway and James McAvoy and directed by Julian Jarrold. The film's musical score was written by English composer Adrian Johnston and released through Sony Classical Records on 31 July 2007.

The film's score was written by English composer Adrian Johnston. To prepare melodies, he reviewed music books that had belonged to the Austen family.^[1] The first track, "First Impressions", has been described as a "depressing"^[2] song that "exhibits slow, pure and classical piano work";^[3] one critic quipped that it belonged in "Becoming Sylvia Plath ". Later tracks ranged "in mood from upbeat and playful to somber and teary."^[2] Henry Purcell's "Hole in the Wall," also known as "St. Martin's Lane," which is featured in the ballroom scene, was first published in 1695 and is highly unlikely to have been common during the Regency, when Jane Austen was a young adult.^[4] The song was included as a bonus track in the album.^[4]

In his review of the score, Tim Clark of Soundtrack.net lamented the "absence of a truly memorable theme, despite a wealth of thematic material," and found similarities to Dario Marianelli's composition for the 2005 film Pride & Prejudice.^[5] Patsy Morita, a music critic for Allmusic, wrote that the second half of Johnston's score becomes as "unremarkable" as "so many other dramatic film scores of the early twenty-first century."^[1] She continued, "It fulfills its purpose of underscoring the emotion of the story by being moody and slow to change melodically and harmonically, and by using many pregnant pauses and minimalist-leaning repetitive figures."^[1] Steven Weintraub of Collider called "Adrian Johnston's score is a thing of beauty".^[6] Ray Bennett of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Johnston's score "matches the high level of Jarrold’s assured direction."^[7] Richard von Busack of Metro Silicon Valley wrote "one has to tune out Adrian Johnston's soundtrack, with those woodwinds burbling away every time something roguish happens".^[8]