Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard were recently fea­tured on KCRW’s “Morn­ing Becomes Eclec­tic”; on their web­site you can lis­ten to the inter­view and excerpts of the sound­track or read the transcript.

Zim­mer explains that each of the char­ac­ters were so dis­tinct, clearly defined and pow­er­ful that each could have musi­cal iden­ti­ties that were very sep­a­rate. In fact, the col­lab­o­ra­tors often split the work — New­ton tack­led the music for Har­vey Dent, played by Aaron Eck­hart, while Zim­mer cre­ated the Joker’s theme.

“I kept churn­ing around…how do you describe anar­chy, how do you describe a vil­lian and not do it in a way that’s been done before? One of the things I got very much from the char­ac­ter was a fear­less­ness, and an even­ness in a way. The Joker is the only per­son you can trust in the movie. The Joker is the only one who will never lie to you because he is con­sis­tent about his phi­los­o­phy,” said Zimmer.

“I really wanted to do the whole thing just with one note. I had this idea that rather than what a note is in the con­text of the notes sur­round­ing it, what could I do emo­tion­ally through a per­for­mance within one note? How much can I stretch the mean­ing of a sin­gle note and get it down to such min­i­mal­ism. I failed slightly. I had to use two notes in the end.”

Thanks Rachel!

In a turn­around it appears that the James New­ton Howard/Hans Zim­mer sound­track is once again eli­gi­ble for an Acad­emy Award nom­i­na­tion. It had pre­vi­ously been ruled out (Nov 10th) because 5 com­posers were named on the cue sheet; which was deemed to be too many. In response the ‘affected par­ties’ sub­mit­ted infor­ma­tion to the con­trary, lead­ing The Music Branch Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee to con­clude that Zim­mer and Howard had author­ship of the score, putting the music back in con­tention for an Oscar.

Source: Vari­ety

A 2 CD spe­cial edi­tion of the Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard sound­track fea­tur­ing bonus remixes and new tracks will be released on Decem­ber 9th.

From the press release,

‘The Dark Knight: Orig­i­nal Motion Pic­ture Sound­track’ returns with the ASCAP-winning com­posers from Bat­man Begins– Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard for a pow­er­ful orches­tral score. The Spe­cial Edi­tion fea­tures the com­plete score on two CD’s plus four bonus remix tracks; it also con­tains an 8x8x40 page hard­bound book.

Disc: 1
1. Why So Seri­ous?
2. I’m Not A Hero
3. Har­vey Two-Face
4. Aggres­sive Expan­sion
5. Always A Catch
6. Blood On My Hands
7. A Lit­tle Push
8. Like A Dog Chas­ing Cars
9. I Am The Bat­man
10. And I Thought My Jokes Were Bad
11. Agent Of Chaos
12. Intro­duce A Lit­tle Anar­chy
13. Watch The World Burn
14. A Dark Knight

Disc: 2
1. Bank Rob­bery (Pro­logue)
2. Buyer Beware
3. Halfway To Hong Kong
4. Decent Men In An Inde­cent Time
5. You’re Gonna Love Me
6. Chance
7. You Com­plete Me
8. The Fer­ries
9. We Are Tonight’s Enter­tain­ment
10. A Watch­ful Guardian
11. Why So Serious?(The Crys­tal Method Remix)
12. Poor Choice Of Words(Paul van Dyk Remix)
13. Gun­pow­der And Gasoline(Remix by Mel Wes­son)
14. Rory’s First Kiss(Remix by Rye­land Allison)

Buy the Dark Knight 2 Disc Spe­cial Edi­tion Sound­track from Ama­zon | Offi­cial Score Website

The release date for the sound­track has been announced. It will be released on July 15th. More infor­ma­tion can be found here.

Warner Bros. Records will release four dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tions of The Dark Knight sound­track: a stan­dard jewel case CD, a 2 LP set of heavy-weight 180 gram vinyl ver­sion, a spe­cial edi­tion digi­pack, and a collector’s edi­tion with spe­cial art­work to come after release.