Picnic at Hanging Rock OST 1975 with the Ascent Theme

 

I was surprised to find out there is no actual soundtrack for this lovely, deservedly famous movie, despite the beauty of the theme music which was written by Bruce Smeaton.  In a way it makes sense, kind of, since the remainder of the tracks are the abhorrent Zamfir pipes of pan folk songs we all grew up with, sadly, and very well known and tiresome classical pieces.   Presumably the detestable nature of the Zamfir stuff was enough reason to avoid forcing any human to listen to more of it.  But it's tragic the ascent theme wasn't released.

I hadn't noticed the music at all actually when I saw the movie, but I was a kid at the time, what I remember is being highly impressed with the extreme beauty of the cinematography (and the girls) as well as the depth of the emotional themes and the mysterious story which I thought was based on a true story, but today in the age of wikipedia we can learn it was purely fictional from the beginning.  

People have put together unofficial soundtracks it seems with the different pieces, and these are what I uploaded.  But it's obviously beholden to the progressive music of the 70s, eg early Genesis or Pink Floyd with the varying minor chords, classical-derived, the very odd time signature which I think is said to be in 17/8, and the beautiful spacey synth sound, as I call it.  If you haven't heard the Ascent Theme before, you'll see what I mean, it's really quite stunning, too bad we can't have a full album's worth of this stuff, I suppose we did back when Pink Floyd made Meddle and Echoes, etc.: