Extensions...

So, courtesy of Reed and Michael there's been somewhat of an ongoing discussion on one of my recent postings about film music, modern music and academics (and the snobbery that's attached to the latter 2). I thought I would bring the discussion to the main forum, so-to-speak, and continue to elaborate here.

I think part of the problem academics have with film music is that most of them - smart as they are - don't understand/can't comprehend that it's not meant to be a stand-alone art form. It has to be approached on its own terms rather than as a piece of concert music. If it's eventually capable of functioning as concert music then all the better. (I would love to hear a 50-60 minute work for chorus and orchestra based on The Matrix.) Film music is supposed to be subservient to the picture and heighten the drama (something we're actually starting to get away from - like in the late '60s - because some people think that drum loops are music).

But let's look at some of the "academic" arguments against film music. They say film music has no form. Not so. The film itself is actually the form. Creative composers have often been able to work within this medium to utilise traditional formal structures (albeit on a smaller scale). Michael Kamen wrote in so-called "classical forms" every opportunity he got writing sonatas, theme and variations (which is what film music essentially is), baroque dance forms, etc. and he was brilliant. They say it's restrictive. Perhaps it is, to an extent. In some regards, however, film music has been way ahead of the curve (nowhere has this been more evident than in the use of technology in music). My favorite fallacy: all film composers are hacks who don't have any understanding of "real music". Okay, try these on for size. John Williams studied at Juilliard. Jerry Goldsmith studied at USC and LA City College. Basil Poledouris has degrees in music composition and film(!). James Horner studied with Malcolm Arnold at the Royal College of Music in London. Marco Beltrami studied composition at Yale. Don Davis and Bruce Broughton both studied composition at UCLA. Elliot Goldenthal studied with Aaron Copland and John Corigliano at the Manhatten School of Music. David Raksin and Alfred Newman studied with Arnold Schoenberg. Bernard Herrmann studied for a time at Juilliard. Miklos Rozsa received a doctorate in musicology from the Leipzig Conservatory. Among the heavy hitters in contemporary film music Danny Elfman remains one of the few who has received little or no classical training. And his music is incredible (if anyone even mentions the word "ghostwriter" I'm gonna scream). I think that's enough. Finally, my favorite argument. They say it's bad music. While I'm certainly not going to disagree that there is a lot of bad film music it has to be taken in perspective. There's a lot of bad music in any genre. There's a lot of bad classical music. Has anyone heard Beethoven's Battle Symphony lately? I didn't think so. You know why? Because it's not very good. Jerry Goldsmith once said something on a DVD commentary about the amount of music one has to write for a film. He said that if he wrote 10 good minutes of music per film then he was, more often than not, happy with the result. With as little time as most composers are given to write music for film, it's unrealistic to expect that every note should be an artistic achievement.

The influence of film music has been very much what I would consider a double-edged sword. In many cases, it has actually done much to further the general public's acceptance (mostly on a subconscious level) of modern music. This leads me to one of my theories of modern music that I've had for a long time which is a concurrence with something Michael wrote. When the general public is exposed to "modern" music in conjuction with another artistic medium (more often than not a visual stimulus) they are far more likely to accept what they hear than if they were hearing it for the first time as a piece of "pure" music (God how I hate that term). Think of how many seminal pieces of 20th century music began life as ballet rather than concert music; Stravinsky's The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, Debussy's Jeux and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe were all ballets first. Even Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (awesome) was originally intended to be staged as a ballet as well as a concert piece. And Stravinsky may not have scored any films but his style was a major influence on film scoring during the golden and early-silver ages of Hollywood. At the same time I think that (aside from what influence pop music has had on the current generation of composers) film music has had more to do (either intentionally or unintentionally) with the "return to tonality" in concert music than any other musical genre.

The influence of Philip Glass has more to do, I think, with the medium of film itself rather than his music. In a sense it hearkens back more to Stravinsky and riffing on an ostinato than it does Philip Glass (In a manner of speaking Glass is just taking Stravinsky's ostinato technique to an extreme). This particular technique suits film pretty well because directors and editors, more often than not, are recutting a film up until the last possible minute (even as or after the music is recorded) and from a technical standpoint it's easier to write an ostinato figure with a slow harmonic rhythm so that you can trim a measure (or 10) here or half of a measure there and lose as little as possible of the original intention of the music.

Any more thoughts? Or have we exhausted this one?

In Memoriam Jerry Goldsmith

I can't believe I missed it. Jerry Goldsmith died a year ago yesterday. He was one of the greatest and most diverse composers to ever write for the silver screen with a particular knack for little character films and science fiction (although I wouldn't slight most of his vast action output, either). He was nominated for the highest achievement one can receive in film 17 times and won once for 1976's The Omen. He enjoyed long collaborations with the likes of Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Hollow Man), Franklin J. Schaffner (Planet of the Apes, Patton, The Boys From Brazil), Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace, Small Soldiers) and Michael Crichton (Coma, The Great Train Robbery, The Thirteenth Warrior).

He began his career not as a composer but as a clerk/typist at CBS in the 1950s after taking classes in film scoring as USC with Miklos Rozsa. Soon he was scoring live radio programs and episodic television. He soon worked his way into regular episodic television scoring lots of now-forgotten CBS shows and several episodes of The Twilight Zone (the original is still the best). By the early '60s he was scoring between 4 and 9 (!) films a year creating works for such critical fare as A Patch of Blue, Planet of the Apes, and The Sand Pebbles. The '70s brought such films as Chinatown, Logan's Run, and the Oscar winning score for The Omen. The '80s brought more work and, in a post-Star Wars Hollywood, a huge sylistic shift that brought with it films like Ridley Scott's Legend (well, the European print of the film has Jerry's score. It was dumped once the film came stateside 2 years after is was made and replaced with a - gulp! - Tangerine Dream score. Ugh. Thank you, Sid Sheinberg) Poltergeist and Total Recall (yes, it was released in 1990, but it was made the year before! Incidentally one of Goldsmiths' personal favorite scores). The '90s brought such fare as Basic Instinct, Rudy, L.A. Confidential, The Edge, Air Force One, Mulan, The Mummy (which Goldsmith hated), and The Thirteenth Warrior. The twilight of his career brought scoring assignments that seemed more like favors for friends than anything. Hollow Man, Looney Tunes: Back In Action, The Sum of All Fears, Timeline (which was withdrawn because the film was a mess and heavily reedited. By this point Jerry was battling cancer and Brian Tyler stepped in to write a serviceable, though ultimately forgettable, score) and the underrated Star Trek: Nemesis. I would also be remiss not to mention that his theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture graced the beginning of every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation winning an Emmy for best theme and would go on to write the noble theme (and win another Emmy) for Star Trek: Voyager.

A friend of mine who played for Goldsmith a couple times once told me that Jerry had figured that he had written so much music for television and film that every minute of every day, somewhere in the world something with his music attached was being shown. That's impressive.

Despite his vast film and television output, he wrote only a handful of concert works. His "classical" works include the cantata Christus Apollo for orchestra, chorus and mezzo-soprano soloist based on a text by Ray Bradbury (with whom Goldsmith had been friends since his days at CBS), Music for Orchestra, commissioned by Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony in the early 1970s, and Fireworks, an abashedly neo-romantic work which Goldsmith wrote as a celebration of his hometown for his first concert series with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1999.

I still remember when my friend Mike called me to tell me that he had read that Jerry had died. It was like a very close friend had died. I was in a funk for a little while and knowing that I would never hear a new Jerry Goldsmith score again was a difficult pill to swallow. Even though I never met the man (regrettably) I always felt like I had known him a little bit through his music. One of those few composers in Hollywood that had his own sound (there are now even fewer) and, if you listened closely enough, you could in many cases hear his personality come through his music. You could always tell when he loved his subject and you could always tell when he was kind of poking fun at it (a la The Mummy).

For all those that derided film music as nothing more than a red-headed stepchild to "classical" music he said, "If our music survives, which I have no doubt it will, then it will be because it is good." I think this goes for any kind of music.

Jerry, for those of us that never met you but grew up on, learned from and knew you through your music, we still miss you.

Godspeed, Mr. Scott

James Doohan died today at his home in Washington. He was 85. CNN's story is nice.

Home Field Advantage...

I watched the Major League Baseball All-Star Game last night. Ugh.

I'm not going to go on and on about how much of a dope Bud Selig (the commissioner of major league baseball) is. That ground has been trod...frequently. I think, though, that playing the All-Star Game for home field advantage in the World Series is one of the worst ideas in the history of bad ideas. It used to be that the American League and the National League alternated home field advantage on a yearly basis. Even this wasn't the best solution. Home field advantage is one of those things that should be based on the teams' records over the course of the entire season and not one lousy game that doesn't even effect the outcome of the regular season.

"He's probably a National League fan". Is that what you're thinking? You would be right. I may live in Kansas City, but the St. Louis Cardinals are my team. They have been since they were the "Deadbirds" several years back. But if I were a Royals fan (ha!) I'd still say that using the All-Star Game to determine home field advantage is nothing more than a publicity stunt. And a stupid one at that.

The All-Star Game used to be about putting on a show for the fans and having a good time as a ballplayer without any real performance expectations. It was an exhibition. Now that the game "counts" it's no longer any fun to watch. It's like watching any other game.

Life As A Music Inventor

So I've been working on this piece for months for a friend for violin solo and chamber orchestra. Months. I've more-or-less aborted the piece about a half-dozen times. It's been painstaking because it seems like my compositional materials were thwarting my intentions at every turn.

NEWSFLASH! Contrary to mass belief, a piece of music rarely springs to life instantaneously (well not concert music anyway) - jazz excluded.

So after about 4 months of gestation the piece is finally - and quickly - starting to take shape in my mind. It's so exciting! It turns out that much of the material I previously wrote will actually make it into the piece afterall. I was just trying to find the right "glue" to hold the whole thing together. For the first time since I finished my last film score my brain is a whir of musical activity! I love that initial moment of creative realisation. It's awesome (in the archaic, take-your-breath-away, sense of the word)!

I just wish I weren't at work right now so that I could actually work on it. I find it so difficult to concentrate at work even when I'm not doing anything work-related (such as posting on my blog).

War of the Worlds

So I dragged my wife to see Spielberg's War of the Worlds Monday night (sorry B & T! We'll be more than happy to catch it again with you guys at the drive-in!). Holy crap! I know there are a lot of people out there poopooing Spielberg's vision, but I thought that the film, even with its minor flaws, was bloody awesome! I thought that the tension that was built up was incredible. The problem is, most moviegoers aren't perceptive enough to pay attention to all the different aspects of a film (especially one like this). Film is more than visual effects and dialogue. There is music (my personal favorite), sound effects/design (which, despite what some people think, is not the same as music), special effects, editing, costuming and makeup. When all of these things come together at their best they can create the ultimate moviegoing experience (which is about illusion, not reality; although I have mentioned to my wife that perhaps I should have my own theme music. She rolled her eyes.).

But I digress.

I thought that one of the most brilliant elements of the entire film was, in fact, the sound design. It was absolutely amazing. Clever, too. Despite what I said about sound design and music not necessarily being the same thing I have to admit that the alien invaders moved quite musically. The tripods moved to a nice little waltz rhythm in 3/4 time (3 legs, triple time, brilliant!). Also, the ominous clarion call sounded by the tripods to communicate to each other was actually performed by a tuba player in Los Angeles named Jim Self. It's just like his visitors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is Spielberg trying to tell us that he believes that music actually is a "universal language"? I would be interested to hear Mr. Spielberg's thoughts.

I don't normally gravitate toward scary movies, though I've already scored my fair share as a composer. I hate blood and guts and gore for the sake of gore (sometimes you do what pays the bills). I love movies like War of the Worlds and Signs because they use subtlety and atmospherics (both aural and visual) in order to ratchet up the tension. People may not like these particular examples, but I think they should be case studies in effectively creating tension and a God's-honest real scare. The people who don't like them are generally the same people I wiped the floor with in my undergraduate film theory class (in which I was the only musician!). In my opinion the greatest scary movies are the ones in which you hardly see "the bad guy" (Jaws, Aliens) and when you finally do it's not until one of the most pivotal points in the movie. I guess that's another reason why Aliens is also one of my favorite movies (Vietnam allegory aside). James Cameron did such a terrific job building tension throughout the first half of the film.

I guess what it really boils down to is that I will take a poor Steven Spielberg film (and M. Night Shyamalan and James Cameron) over most others on a good day.

That said, I'm going to get back to writing my theme music.