When people listen back to Dirty Harry in hundreds of years (as I’m sure they will, if people of the future are anything like me), they’ll be able to hear much of the major musical developments of the 20th Century in one place.
It’s got elements of funk, free jazz and aleatoric music, lounge music, 20th Century harmony, pop music, orchestral filmscore, rock and even collage.
You can hear the evolution of rhythmic approaches to film scoring from the latin and swing of Mission:Impossible and Bullitt to something with a much heavier and insistent backbeat. As pop was influenced by heavy rock and funk from the mid 1960’s onwards, this much weightier music was the perfect accompaniment to the growing cynicism of 1970’s cinema, whilst retaining the incredibly strong material and impeccable jazz-influenced writing that Lalo Schifrin was known for.
Dirty Harry is full of completely disparate musical elements that somehow sit alongside, on top , and sometimes smash right into each other, and yet the result is a completely balanced whole – it shouldn’t work, and yet is does work - it works perfectly in the film (influencing the next decade of films that followed) and just as perfectly as a listening experience.
And either despite or because of its fearlessness in conception and execution, it hasn’t dated a minute in the 44 years since it was first created,. It would be just as exciting and effective underscoring some film or television today as it was in 1971 - It remains as relevant in this era as in any other.
And like all great works of music, it continues to reveal and surprise after 100 listens.