I was at the ballet. Except it wasn't the ballet. I was in a theatre. Suddenly I was plucked from the audience with someone else (don't ask me. I don't have a clue). We were each handed a puppet that looked like a fish. And, yeah, it was Nemo and Dory. I have no idea where that came from. Die Frau and I haven't yet attempted watching Finding Nemo with the kiddo. Anyway, these puppet fish were large and appeared to be designed by Julie Taymor - which I'm totally fine with. Then the music began. It was Stravinsky's The Firebird. I don't remember if it was the suite or the complete ballet but it was there. So this other person and I were "swimming" around the stage in a way that seemed to to make total sense with the music.
Then came the weird part.
I was dreaming (Duh. You knew that part, right?). The strange part was that my conscious self knew I was dreaming. I knew both that I was in a dream and that I was lying there in my bed. The strange part is that I knew what was coming next. I awoke on the downbeat of 'The Infernal Dance of all King Kaschei's Subjects."
Even in my dream it was one of the loudest things I've ever heard.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Goldsmith in session
I came across this yesterday and thought it was pretty interesting. The scoring session is from The River Wild and two things are readily apparent: 1. studio musicians do make mistakes (though not often) and 2. just because Jerry's music is simple doesn't mean it's easy to play. I think for a lot of his music it's because there's so much space in it that requires that you actually, I don't know, count. Anyway. It's a rare and interesting look into the process even though that process has evolved somewhat since.
Also, check out the look that Goldsmith gives the orchestra at 2:36. Priceless.
Also, check out the look that Goldsmith gives the orchestra at 2:36. Priceless.
Monday, August 30, 2010
The Film Composer's Bookshelf
(Updated below)
In a recent discussion the question of what books would be of use to the budding film composer came up and I needed some time to think about it and gather some information together. The following is by no means exhaustive. I also think that having a well-rounded library is important. To that end, I've included not just books about the technical aspects of film scoring, but also selections dealing with aesthetics, case studies and anecdotal evidence.
Karlin, Fred and Wright, Rayburn. On The Track: A Guide To Contemporary Film Scoring: This text is invaluable. The music examples alone are worth the price of the book but there's so much more than that. Every aspect of scoring a film is discussed from sending out demos to getting a gig to meeting with the director and producer to knowing what the hierarchy is on the mixing stage. The second edition (which is what I have) has a lot of updated musical examples with a special emphasis on James Newton Howard. There are a lot of Jerry Goldsmith examples, too. The first edition of the book had a click book as an appendix. This would've been pretty invaluable at the time, but as computers have taken a much larger role in laying out timings, it has become somewhat antiquated. That being said, I still think having a click book - or at the very least understanding how click timings work, which is still covered in the book - is a pretty valuable tool. If you only get one book about film scoring technique, this is the one to have.
Burt, George, The Art of Film Music: George Burt is a composer who attempts to take a deeper look into film/music interaction with a special emphasis on the music of David Raksin, Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North and Leonard Rosenman (somewhat offputtingly, he also uses examples of his own scores alongside these guys). This is the sort of text that, as much as the author tries, is largely accessible only to those who are musically literate.
Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music: A Neglected Art: This was the first book I ever owned about film music. It was pretty out-of-date then (in the late '90s) and to my knowledge has never really been revised. It provides a pretty good overview of the history of film music, but there are a lot of places where he gets into specific cases of how film music functions in a given context. A fair number of musical examples but almost nothing contemporary. Prendergast has strong opinions and isn't afraid to share them. Some of which he's taken to task by...
Brown, Royal S., Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music: I picked this up several years back. It largely deals with aesthetics and can occasionally be dense and can get bogged down in film and music theory, but it can be insightful, too. There are several scores that are considered somewhat more in depth (among others, The Sea Hawk, Laura, and Double Indemnity. A significant portion is also given over to Hitchcock/Herrmann).
Adorno, Theodor and Eislier, Hanns. Composing for the Films. I'm still working through this for the first time myself, but it seems to come up - along with Claudia Gorbman's maddeningly out-of-print Unheard Melodies - in damned near every bibliography of every film music study I come across (not a small number anymore). It's an interesting - though occasionally dense - read and is the first attempt (in 1947!) of a codification of the aesthetics of music in film. Many of its ideas are wrapped up in the socialism vs. capitalism debate so consider yourself warned.
Davis, Richard. Complete Guide to Film Scoring. This book was given to me and is really just an overview of the business side of scoring. There's very little in it that deals with technique and craft. Basically, "Get it done. Get it done one time." Duh. But there are some really great interviews in the book as well.
Halfyard, Janet. Danny Elfman's Batman: A Film Score Guide: This is a terrific little read and is a more-or-less exhaustive case study of Elfman's momentous and far-reaching score.
Henderson, Sanya Shoilevska. Alex North, Film Composer: This was pretty clearly Ms. Henderson's doctoral dissertation. It's valuable for its inclusion of scores that cut a wide swath across North's career in Hollywood including A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, and The Misfits (with a few others). She discusses in detail the interactions of North's music with the films he scored and how he "got inside" the character of those films.
Morgan, David. Knowing the Score: Film Composers Talk About the Art, Craft, Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Writing for Cinema: This little tome is basically a series of interviews. Jerry Goldsmith, Michael Kamen, Elliot Goldenthal, John Corigliano and others offer up surprisingly frank anecdotes and the ups and downs of their lives in the film business. It's an interesting insight into their ideas about writing music for films. Anyone who has never scored a film, reads this and still wants to score films may have the temperament needed for the occupation.
Rózsa, Miklós. A Double Life: This is Rózsa's autobiography. It is fantastically entertaining and it's almost difficult to believe that one person did so much. Then one has to remember that the man moved in a lot of artistic circles in his lifetime. It's amazing to read about how much the man looked down on Hollywood and was a bit of a culture snob. There are several really entertaining stories including one about Stravinsky refusing to acknowledge a piece of his own and a scene in Ben-Hur that was original supposed to be shot with topless women for "authenticity."
Smith, Steve. A Heart At Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann: Apparently no one knows more about Bernard Herrmann than Steve Smith. This intelligent and literate biography portrays Benny in all his brilliance, his fiery personality, and all his contradictions. Worth the read about the guy who is largely responsible for and the forerunner of modern American film music1.
I've intentionally chosen to leave scores out of the discussion. It's too messy a subject and is becoming less and less important in contemporary film scoring unless you wind up spending more time as an orchestrator (which isn't a bad thing - those folks make pretty good money). I will however mention this: if it's at all possible you should attend one of Steven Scott Smalley's film orchestration seminars. It's four hundred bucks for the seminar, plus plane tickets and lodging (unless you know somebody who lives there), but it's just about the best four hundred bucks you'll ever spend. two days of intense discussion and score study and nearly 400 pages of scores and sketches. I would imagine that they haven't updated many of the score samples since 2003, owing to the fact that Scott hasn't worked much lately (because he's, well, kind of a hippie and tried to cram 40 years worth of work into 20 years so that he could retire and live off the land) but it's still worth the trip2. Yes, I do reference the scores. A lot.
1. Yeah. That last bit is solely an opinion of my own. But maybe a topic worth exploring in the future.
In a recent discussion the question of what books would be of use to the budding film composer came up and I needed some time to think about it and gather some information together. The following is by no means exhaustive. I also think that having a well-rounded library is important. To that end, I've included not just books about the technical aspects of film scoring, but also selections dealing with aesthetics, case studies and anecdotal evidence.
Karlin, Fred and Wright, Rayburn. On The Track: A Guide To Contemporary Film Scoring: This text is invaluable. The music examples alone are worth the price of the book but there's so much more than that. Every aspect of scoring a film is discussed from sending out demos to getting a gig to meeting with the director and producer to knowing what the hierarchy is on the mixing stage. The second edition (which is what I have) has a lot of updated musical examples with a special emphasis on James Newton Howard. There are a lot of Jerry Goldsmith examples, too. The first edition of the book had a click book as an appendix. This would've been pretty invaluable at the time, but as computers have taken a much larger role in laying out timings, it has become somewhat antiquated. That being said, I still think having a click book - or at the very least understanding how click timings work, which is still covered in the book - is a pretty valuable tool. If you only get one book about film scoring technique, this is the one to have.
Burt, George, The Art of Film Music: George Burt is a composer who attempts to take a deeper look into film/music interaction with a special emphasis on the music of David Raksin, Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North and Leonard Rosenman (somewhat offputtingly, he also uses examples of his own scores alongside these guys). This is the sort of text that, as much as the author tries, is largely accessible only to those who are musically literate.
Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music: A Neglected Art: This was the first book I ever owned about film music. It was pretty out-of-date then (in the late '90s) and to my knowledge has never really been revised. It provides a pretty good overview of the history of film music, but there are a lot of places where he gets into specific cases of how film music functions in a given context. A fair number of musical examples but almost nothing contemporary. Prendergast has strong opinions and isn't afraid to share them. Some of which he's taken to task by...
Brown, Royal S., Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music: I picked this up several years back. It largely deals with aesthetics and can occasionally be dense and can get bogged down in film and music theory, but it can be insightful, too. There are several scores that are considered somewhat more in depth (among others, The Sea Hawk, Laura, and Double Indemnity. A significant portion is also given over to Hitchcock/Herrmann).
Adorno, Theodor and Eislier, Hanns. Composing for the Films. I'm still working through this for the first time myself, but it seems to come up - along with Claudia Gorbman's maddeningly out-of-print Unheard Melodies - in damned near every bibliography of every film music study I come across (not a small number anymore). It's an interesting - though occasionally dense - read and is the first attempt (in 1947!) of a codification of the aesthetics of music in film. Many of its ideas are wrapped up in the socialism vs. capitalism debate so consider yourself warned.
Davis, Richard. Complete Guide to Film Scoring. This book was given to me and is really just an overview of the business side of scoring. There's very little in it that deals with technique and craft. Basically, "Get it done. Get it done one time." Duh. But there are some really great interviews in the book as well.
Halfyard, Janet. Danny Elfman's Batman: A Film Score Guide: This is a terrific little read and is a more-or-less exhaustive case study of Elfman's momentous and far-reaching score.
Henderson, Sanya Shoilevska. Alex North, Film Composer: This was pretty clearly Ms. Henderson's doctoral dissertation. It's valuable for its inclusion of scores that cut a wide swath across North's career in Hollywood including A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, and The Misfits (with a few others). She discusses in detail the interactions of North's music with the films he scored and how he "got inside" the character of those films.
Morgan, David. Knowing the Score: Film Composers Talk About the Art, Craft, Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Writing for Cinema: This little tome is basically a series of interviews. Jerry Goldsmith, Michael Kamen, Elliot Goldenthal, John Corigliano and others offer up surprisingly frank anecdotes and the ups and downs of their lives in the film business. It's an interesting insight into their ideas about writing music for films. Anyone who has never scored a film, reads this and still wants to score films may have the temperament needed for the occupation.
Rózsa, Miklós. A Double Life: This is Rózsa's autobiography. It is fantastically entertaining and it's almost difficult to believe that one person did so much. Then one has to remember that the man moved in a lot of artistic circles in his lifetime. It's amazing to read about how much the man looked down on Hollywood and was a bit of a culture snob. There are several really entertaining stories including one about Stravinsky refusing to acknowledge a piece of his own and a scene in Ben-Hur that was original supposed to be shot with topless women for "authenticity."
Smith, Steve. A Heart At Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann: Apparently no one knows more about Bernard Herrmann than Steve Smith. This intelligent and literate biography portrays Benny in all his brilliance, his fiery personality, and all his contradictions. Worth the read about the guy who is largely responsible for and the forerunner of modern American film music1.
I've intentionally chosen to leave scores out of the discussion. It's too messy a subject and is becoming less and less important in contemporary film scoring unless you wind up spending more time as an orchestrator (which isn't a bad thing - those folks make pretty good money). I will however mention this: if it's at all possible you should attend one of Steven Scott Smalley's film orchestration seminars. It's four hundred bucks for the seminar, plus plane tickets and lodging (unless you know somebody who lives there), but it's just about the best four hundred bucks you'll ever spend. two days of intense discussion and score study and nearly 400 pages of scores and sketches. I would imagine that they haven't updated many of the score samples since 2003, owing to the fact that Scott hasn't worked much lately (because he's, well, kind of a hippie and tried to cram 40 years worth of work into 20 years so that he could retire and live off the land) but it's still worth the trip2. Yes, I do reference the scores. A lot.
1. Yeah. That last bit is solely an opinion of my own. But maybe a topic worth exploring in the future.
2. Though if you do attend, particularly in L.A., you have to be prepared for a couple things. First, if you're a classically trained composer, you're going to bang your head on the table a fair bit because of the pop musicians that raise their hands when Scott starts talking about the octatonic scale. Second, you'll most likely be one of the youngest people in the room (out of one hundred people, the only person younger than me was a Brazilian kid named Thiago who was a student at UNC-Greensboro).
Monday, August 23, 2010
Krull, Part 2: Under the Influence
Previously, I waxed rhapsodic regarding James Horner's score for Krull and how it's one of my very favorite film scores (I'm a brass player. Sue me.).
Awhile back something occurred to me about this particular score. One of the criticisms of James Horner's technique is that he's a little too liberal with his tendency to borrow from himself and others, past and present. Which is totally legitimate. He does it. A lot. Over the course of his career he's cribbed from a lot of folks (Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Pärt, Goldsmith and Horner, to name only a few). Krull represents something relatively unique in Horner's output. So far as I can tell, he doesn't make any direct quotations of other works. There are a lot of allusions to other works but since the history of music is built on such allusions, we can't fault Horner too much for this.
Before we get going, let's take another listen to the first cue from the film. This encompasses not only the title sequence (about the first three-and-a-half minutes) but the series of sequences that follows for the next four minutes):
This sequence is great in that it sets up nearly all of the thematic material for the entire score. In order of appearance, these themes/motifs are:
Gustav Holst - The Planets - At first glance this might seem somewhat obvious, but not necessarily in the ways that you'd expect. Much has been made about Horner's driving rhythms suggesting those of 'Mars'. The driving rhythms of 'Mars' are echoes through much of the score, though Horner never quotes anything directly1. After 'Mars' the movement of The Planets that really get pressed into service is (as far as I can tell) 'Neptune', with its arpeggiated chords, mediant relationships, bitonality and wordless female chorus (more on that later).
Erich Wolfgang Korngold - The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood - Okay. so I suppose these might seem a bit obvious or unfair, but they are the archetypal Hollywood swashbuckler scores. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean though.
You can hear a similarity in both the bold, brassy fanfares and the long-line melody that characterizes both scores and how Horner's themes (though with somewhat more modern orchestration) place the heroic themes of Krull squarely within the Korngoldian (Classical film score) tradition2.
Wagner - "Zauberfeuer," Die Walküre ("Magic Fire," The Valkyrie, Für Menschen, die nicht Deutsch sprechen.) - This particular piece comes into play as an influence on the score when Colwyn is retrieving the Glaive from a river of lava (in the highest cave in the tallest mountain...). The "sparkling" or "effervescent" nature of the orchestration along with striking harmonic and rhythmic similarities make for an interesting comparison and I think Horner both captures and modernizes it rather nicely.
"But Herr," you say, "What about the women's chorus?" I'm glad you asked. The material performed by the women's chorus seems to have its origin in several works. Most notably it seems to be derived from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Debussy's "Sirènes" from Images, Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 7, Sinfonia Antartica, and Holst's "Neptune" from The Planets.
So there you have it. What my ears hear when I listen to Krull. Actually that's not true. What I hear is Horner filtering other works through and weaving it with his own musical language.
1. The primary driving rhythm of the score is dotted-quarter/sixteenth/eighth/eighth cell. Though on it's own a fairly banal figure, it can be traced (among other things I'm sure) to the third movement March of Holst's First Suite in E-flat for Military Band. Don't forget that Horner spent a good deal of time in England as a youngster and even studied at the Royal Academy of Music for a time. The English are pretty proud of their music and Horner would've heard a lot of it.
2. Many (critics mostly) have complained over the years that Korngold's music "sounded like Hollywood." You can imagine why this is a flat and feckless case against his music as there was no such thing as a "Hollywood sound" until Erich Korngold and Max Steiner came along. Korngold doesn't sound like Hollywood. Hollywood sounded like Korngold!
Awhile back something occurred to me about this particular score. One of the criticisms of James Horner's technique is that he's a little too liberal with his tendency to borrow from himself and others, past and present. Which is totally legitimate. He does it. A lot. Over the course of his career he's cribbed from a lot of folks (Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Pärt, Goldsmith and Horner, to name only a few). Krull represents something relatively unique in Horner's output. So far as I can tell, he doesn't make any direct quotations of other works. There are a lot of allusions to other works but since the history of music is built on such allusions, we can't fault Horner too much for this.
Before we get going, let's take another listen to the first cue from the film. This encompasses not only the title sequence (about the first three-and-a-half minutes) but the series of sequences that follows for the next four minutes):
This sequence is great in that it sets up nearly all of the thematic material for the entire score. In order of appearance, these themes/motifs are:
- Women's chorus motif (0'17)
- Four-note fanfare for the main character, Colwyn (1'11)
- Colwyn's theme (1'48)
- Rising four-note broken triad representing the Glaive (2'36)
- Material for the Beast and his Slayers, mostly textural in nature (3'37)
- Bits of the Love Theme which will be further elaborated in the next cue (5'01)
Gustav Holst - The Planets - At first glance this might seem somewhat obvious, but not necessarily in the ways that you'd expect. Much has been made about Horner's driving rhythms suggesting those of 'Mars'. The driving rhythms of 'Mars' are echoes through much of the score, though Horner never quotes anything directly1. After 'Mars' the movement of The Planets that really get pressed into service is (as far as I can tell) 'Neptune', with its arpeggiated chords, mediant relationships, bitonality and wordless female chorus (more on that later).
Erich Wolfgang Korngold - The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood - Okay. so I suppose these might seem a bit obvious or unfair, but they are the archetypal Hollywood swashbuckler scores. Here are a couple of examples of what I mean though.
You can hear a similarity in both the bold, brassy fanfares and the long-line melody that characterizes both scores and how Horner's themes (though with somewhat more modern orchestration) place the heroic themes of Krull squarely within the Korngoldian (Classical film score) tradition2.
Wagner - "Zauberfeuer," Die Walküre ("Magic Fire," The Valkyrie, Für Menschen, die nicht Deutsch sprechen.) - This particular piece comes into play as an influence on the score when Colwyn is retrieving the Glaive from a river of lava (in the highest cave in the tallest mountain...). The "sparkling" or "effervescent" nature of the orchestration along with striking harmonic and rhythmic similarities make for an interesting comparison and I think Horner both captures and modernizes it rather nicely.
"But Herr," you say, "What about the women's chorus?" I'm glad you asked. The material performed by the women's chorus seems to have its origin in several works. Most notably it seems to be derived from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, Debussy's "Sirènes" from Images, Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 7, Sinfonia Antartica, and Holst's "Neptune" from The Planets.
So there you have it. What my ears hear when I listen to Krull. Actually that's not true. What I hear is Horner filtering other works through and weaving it with his own musical language.
1. The primary driving rhythm of the score is dotted-quarter/sixteenth/eighth/eighth cell. Though on it's own a fairly banal figure, it can be traced (among other things I'm sure) to the third movement March of Holst's First Suite in E-flat for Military Band. Don't forget that Horner spent a good deal of time in England as a youngster and even studied at the Royal Academy of Music for a time. The English are pretty proud of their music and Horner would've heard a lot of it.
2. Many (critics mostly) have complained over the years that Korngold's music "sounded like Hollywood." You can imagine why this is a flat and feckless case against his music as there was no such thing as a "Hollywood sound" until Erich Korngold and Max Steiner came along. Korngold doesn't sound like Hollywood. Hollywood sounded like Korngold!
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
The Best of the Best of the Best...SIR! The Jerry Goldsmith Edition
So our own Reed posed the following question on my Facebook page and I thought this would be a good forum to elaborate.
Today I'm just going to focus on the Jerry Goldsmith question. I figure that's enough to get us started.
By my count, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 scores that one could classify as "science fiction". Among these are: Alien, Chain Reaction, Coma, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Explorers, The Illustrated Man, Hollow Man, Logan's Run, Outland, Planet of the Apes, Runaway, The Satan Bug, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Star Trek: Nemesis, Total Recall. The fantasy genre, as we all know, is more difficult to pin down because of the various blendings that can happen with so many other genres. Among others, I have: Baby: Secret of the Lost, Legend, Gremlins, The Haunting, Legend, The Omen Trilogy, Poltergeist, Poltergeist II, The Mummy, Powder, The Secret of NIMH, Small Soldiers, The Star Trek films (they fit both genres) Supergirl.
Before getting started though we have to address some problems that are central to trying to pick a series of "best of" scores by someone like Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith wrote music for film and television for nearly fifty(!) years beginning in the early days of television at CBS in the 1950s and scoring his first feature film in 1957. One of the main problems is that as the technique of film scoring changed over time, so did certain aspects of Goldsmith's scoring technique (pre- and post-Star Wars). In my view Goldsmith had essentially 3 compositional periods (with some line-blurring between periods). The 1960s and '70s more-or-less fall into a period of their own (I am, however, going to divide them by decade into two subcategories, because it's my blog.). The 1980s (what one might term Goldsmith's musical Wanderjahre because of the way film music was starting to change/be invaded by rock and pop musicians). Finally there was basically 1990-2004, during which he spent a few more years whittling his sound down to the essentials. Couple these with the fact that Goldsmith wrote great scores in literally every genre of film. Westerns? Check. Horror? Sports films? Check. Sci-Fi, fantasy, period film and drama? Check, check, check, check. Porn? How about Basic Instinct?
So by dividing his career into these discreet periods, I submit for your approval the following:
The 1960s:
Best science fiction score: Planet of the Apes. Yeah. You should've seen this one coming. Goldsmith wrote a lot of scores utilizing twelve-tone technique throughout the '60s and '70s including The Illustrated Man and The Satan Bug. This is his best sci-fi score of the '60s. Hands down, bar none. There are a lot of other good scores, but this is the pinnacle of his sci-fi work for the 1960s. In fact, Planet of the Apes may arguably be (one of) the finest example(s) of what concert composers of the time had been wrestling with for almost twenty years. Someone managed to combine Schoenberg's technique (freely adapted, like so many others) with Stravinskyian and Bartókian rhythmic inflections. It's possible that until John Corigliano scored Altered States that Planet of the Apes was the wildest orchestral film score ever written. The only use of electronics is the echoplex on the strings1.
At this point, though, I don't really have a fantasy score to pick because it hadn't become institutionalized in Hollywood the way it seems to be now. I could be wrong - my knowledge of the genre is pretty limited, actually - but it seems that at this point in time, "fantasy" meant Anything Ray Harryhausen Is Attached To such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Mysterious Island, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration. A bit.
The 1970s saw an influx of science fiction-oriented films and certainly an increase in the fantasy element (though, to be fair, isn't all science fiction fantasy to some extent?).
The 1970s:
My pick for Goldsmith's best sci-fi score of the 1970s is actually a draw. I couldn't choose between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien. I realize this may be cheating the rules a bit but, again, my blog. It also just happens that they were both made in the same year. If you really forced to pick, I'd have to go with Alien. Blasphemy, I know. But it's the more compositionally interesting of the two; and for me, compositionally interesting trumps more often than not. My runner up is Logan's Run, with its deft use of much of the same sort of elements that made Planet of the Apes so interesting plus heavy doses of electronic mayhem of the time.
As far as fantasy is concerned, I think I have to pick The Omen. But, Herr, it's a horror film. Okay, well it's not so horrifying anymore but I've heard it got the blood pumping back in the day. It's what would now be called a supernatural thriller more than an out-and-out horror film but it's about the Antichrist for cryin' out loud. It doesn't get much more fantastical than that! Besides, Jerry's score basically updated Bernard Herrmann's take on the horror film, adding - again - Bartókian and Stravinskyian rhythmic devices.
The 1980s:
The 1980s saw both the sci-fi and fantasy genres take off like a rocket as we became a post-Star Wars world. I think Goldsmith's best sci-fi score of the 1980s actually came in 1980 with Peter Hyams's Outland. It's a testament to the composer when three such distinct takes on the sci-fi genre can be rattled off in relatively quick succession when you put Outland together with Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It helps to reinforce what Goldsmith always said about trying to find the humanity in the film rather than rely on any gimmickery. Explorers is a really wonderful score, full of a youthful buoyancy.
In the 1980s the fantasy genre seemed to inspire some of Goldsmith's richest and most imaginative writing. The Final Conflict (the final installment of The Omen Trilogy) is rich with both music of light and darkness. The Secret of N.I.M.H. contains some of his most hauntingly lyrical writing. Both Poltergeist films let Goldsmith both reach back to his days in television (scoring several fantastic episodes of The Twilight Zone) and stretch his orchestral chops, creating music that is dense and terrifying yet never loses sight of the humanity of the story, embodied in the theme for the little girl, Carol Anne, and her mother who tries to retrieve her2. So what's my favorite? Legend. It was a toss-up between that and Poltergeist but there's something so...magical about this score. It simply shimmers and to my ear is probably Goldsmith's first truly successful blending of orchestra and electronics where you don't really "hear the seams" as it were. It also lays bare the fact that Bartók and Stravinsky weren't the only composers important to Goldsmith. If Legend - and Poltergeist for that matter - has a concert hall cousin, I would hazard a guess that it would be Ravel's Daphnis Et Chloé (not the suites, but the whole damned thing3.
The 1990s:
From 1990 to his death in 2004 my favorite sci-fi score of the period is a no-brainer. Total Recall. Is it completely over the top? Yes. Is it a great film? Maybe. Maybe not. Does it take a lot of liberties with Philip K. Dick's original story, rendering it nearly unrecognizeable? Pretty much. It also happens to be one of the most solidly developed scores in Goldsmith's entire career with nearly every cue developed from a single, audaciously simple musical idea and functions on multiple levels within the film4. My other favorite sci-fi score for this final period is Hollow Man (also directed by Paul Verhoeven). Compositionally, though, Hollow Man doesn't really sustain its musical interest beyond the first hour or so. Once everything goes to hell Goldsmith basically turns on the blood and guts scoring and goes straight for the musical throat of the film (It's still a wonderfully constructed score).
At first I was tempted to choose The Mummy as my favorite fantasy score of Goldsmith's final period. And I do love. How I love it so. I bought this score album the same day as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Guess which one got more play time in my CD player that summer? As I've mentioned before, it was reported that Goldsmith hated this score and the fact that director Stephen Sommers wanted him to keep going over the top musically and basically wanted Jerry to abandon all subtlety. Which he did. So I'm going to change midstream. The Mummy is my favorite over-the-top fantasy score of the period. My favorite subtle fantasy score? Powder. Nobody saw the film, and I'm not going to comment here about the "extracurricular activities" of the film's director, but it has a beautiful and tender score that just warmly draws you into the story of a boy who is an outcast because he looks different and has a unique gift.
So there you have it, dear reader(s). Feel free to weigh in as you see fit.
1. Even then, Goldsmith's score is far more listenable and - I think - more involved with the film's diegesis on a subtextual level).
2. Astute observers will note the similarities between Poltergeist and an episode of the original Twilight Zone series entitled "Little Girl Lost", in which a girl falls through her bedroom wall into another dimension - scored by Bernard Herrmann.
3. You don't know it? Go check it out. Right now.
4. One day I hope to get to that blog post.
"A question for those concerned: what, in your opinion, is Goldsmith's best Fantasy score? What is his best sci-fi score? What is his best score not in those two genres? Same question for James Horner? Same question for one film composer of your choosing."First of all, Reed, you're a dirty bastard. Second of all, a great set of questions that may actually (*gasp!*) generate some honest-to-goodness discussion (though I won't be holding my breath).
Today I'm just going to focus on the Jerry Goldsmith question. I figure that's enough to get us started.
By my count, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 scores that one could classify as "science fiction". Among these are: Alien, Chain Reaction, Coma, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Explorers, The Illustrated Man, Hollow Man, Logan's Run, Outland, Planet of the Apes, Runaway, The Satan Bug, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, Star Trek: Nemesis, Total Recall. The fantasy genre, as we all know, is more difficult to pin down because of the various blendings that can happen with so many other genres. Among others, I have: Baby: Secret of the Lost, Legend, Gremlins, The Haunting, Legend, The Omen Trilogy, Poltergeist, Poltergeist II, The Mummy, Powder, The Secret of NIMH, Small Soldiers, The Star Trek films (they fit both genres) Supergirl.
Before getting started though we have to address some problems that are central to trying to pick a series of "best of" scores by someone like Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith wrote music for film and television for nearly fifty(!) years beginning in the early days of television at CBS in the 1950s and scoring his first feature film in 1957. One of the main problems is that as the technique of film scoring changed over time, so did certain aspects of Goldsmith's scoring technique (pre- and post-Star Wars). In my view Goldsmith had essentially 3 compositional periods (with some line-blurring between periods). The 1960s and '70s more-or-less fall into a period of their own (I am, however, going to divide them by decade into two subcategories, because it's my blog.). The 1980s (what one might term Goldsmith's musical Wanderjahre because of the way film music was starting to change/be invaded by rock and pop musicians). Finally there was basically 1990-2004, during which he spent a few more years whittling his sound down to the essentials. Couple these with the fact that Goldsmith wrote great scores in literally every genre of film. Westerns? Check. Horror? Sports films? Check. Sci-Fi, fantasy, period film and drama? Check, check, check, check. Porn? How about Basic Instinct?
So by dividing his career into these discreet periods, I submit for your approval the following:
The 1960s:
Best science fiction score: Planet of the Apes. Yeah. You should've seen this one coming. Goldsmith wrote a lot of scores utilizing twelve-tone technique throughout the '60s and '70s including The Illustrated Man and The Satan Bug. This is his best sci-fi score of the '60s. Hands down, bar none. There are a lot of other good scores, but this is the pinnacle of his sci-fi work for the 1960s. In fact, Planet of the Apes may arguably be (one of) the finest example(s) of what concert composers of the time had been wrestling with for almost twenty years. Someone managed to combine Schoenberg's technique (freely adapted, like so many others) with Stravinskyian and Bartókian rhythmic inflections. It's possible that until John Corigliano scored Altered States that Planet of the Apes was the wildest orchestral film score ever written. The only use of electronics is the echoplex on the strings1.
At this point, though, I don't really have a fantasy score to pick because it hadn't become institutionalized in Hollywood the way it seems to be now. I could be wrong - my knowledge of the genre is pretty limited, actually - but it seems that at this point in time, "fantasy" meant Anything Ray Harryhausen Is Attached To such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Mysterious Island, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Okay, so that's a bit of an exaggeration. A bit.
The 1970s saw an influx of science fiction-oriented films and certainly an increase in the fantasy element (though, to be fair, isn't all science fiction fantasy to some extent?).
The 1970s:
My pick for Goldsmith's best sci-fi score of the 1970s is actually a draw. I couldn't choose between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien. I realize this may be cheating the rules a bit but, again, my blog. It also just happens that they were both made in the same year. If you really forced to pick, I'd have to go with Alien. Blasphemy, I know. But it's the more compositionally interesting of the two; and for me, compositionally interesting trumps more often than not. My runner up is Logan's Run, with its deft use of much of the same sort of elements that made Planet of the Apes so interesting plus heavy doses of electronic mayhem of the time.
As far as fantasy is concerned, I think I have to pick The Omen. But, Herr, it's a horror film. Okay, well it's not so horrifying anymore but I've heard it got the blood pumping back in the day. It's what would now be called a supernatural thriller more than an out-and-out horror film but it's about the Antichrist for cryin' out loud. It doesn't get much more fantastical than that! Besides, Jerry's score basically updated Bernard Herrmann's take on the horror film, adding - again - Bartókian and Stravinskyian rhythmic devices.
The 1980s:
The 1980s saw both the sci-fi and fantasy genres take off like a rocket as we became a post-Star Wars world. I think Goldsmith's best sci-fi score of the 1980s actually came in 1980 with Peter Hyams's Outland. It's a testament to the composer when three such distinct takes on the sci-fi genre can be rattled off in relatively quick succession when you put Outland together with Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It helps to reinforce what Goldsmith always said about trying to find the humanity in the film rather than rely on any gimmickery. Explorers is a really wonderful score, full of a youthful buoyancy.
In the 1980s the fantasy genre seemed to inspire some of Goldsmith's richest and most imaginative writing. The Final Conflict (the final installment of The Omen Trilogy) is rich with both music of light and darkness. The Secret of N.I.M.H. contains some of his most hauntingly lyrical writing. Both Poltergeist films let Goldsmith both reach back to his days in television (scoring several fantastic episodes of The Twilight Zone) and stretch his orchestral chops, creating music that is dense and terrifying yet never loses sight of the humanity of the story, embodied in the theme for the little girl, Carol Anne, and her mother who tries to retrieve her2. So what's my favorite? Legend. It was a toss-up between that and Poltergeist but there's something so...magical about this score. It simply shimmers and to my ear is probably Goldsmith's first truly successful blending of orchestra and electronics where you don't really "hear the seams" as it were. It also lays bare the fact that Bartók and Stravinsky weren't the only composers important to Goldsmith. If Legend - and Poltergeist for that matter - has a concert hall cousin, I would hazard a guess that it would be Ravel's Daphnis Et Chloé (not the suites, but the whole damned thing3.
The 1990s:
From 1990 to his death in 2004 my favorite sci-fi score of the period is a no-brainer. Total Recall. Is it completely over the top? Yes. Is it a great film? Maybe. Maybe not. Does it take a lot of liberties with Philip K. Dick's original story, rendering it nearly unrecognizeable? Pretty much. It also happens to be one of the most solidly developed scores in Goldsmith's entire career with nearly every cue developed from a single, audaciously simple musical idea and functions on multiple levels within the film4. My other favorite sci-fi score for this final period is Hollow Man (also directed by Paul Verhoeven). Compositionally, though, Hollow Man doesn't really sustain its musical interest beyond the first hour or so. Once everything goes to hell Goldsmith basically turns on the blood and guts scoring and goes straight for the musical throat of the film (It's still a wonderfully constructed score).
At first I was tempted to choose The Mummy as my favorite fantasy score of Goldsmith's final period. And I do love. How I love it so. I bought this score album the same day as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Guess which one got more play time in my CD player that summer? As I've mentioned before, it was reported that Goldsmith hated this score and the fact that director Stephen Sommers wanted him to keep going over the top musically and basically wanted Jerry to abandon all subtlety. Which he did. So I'm going to change midstream. The Mummy is my favorite over-the-top fantasy score of the period. My favorite subtle fantasy score? Powder. Nobody saw the film, and I'm not going to comment here about the "extracurricular activities" of the film's director, but it has a beautiful and tender score that just warmly draws you into the story of a boy who is an outcast because he looks different and has a unique gift.
So there you have it, dear reader(s). Feel free to weigh in as you see fit.
1. Even then, Goldsmith's score is far more listenable and - I think - more involved with the film's diegesis on a subtextual level).
2. Astute observers will note the similarities between Poltergeist and an episode of the original Twilight Zone series entitled "Little Girl Lost", in which a girl falls through her bedroom wall into another dimension - scored by Bernard Herrmann.
3. You don't know it? Go check it out. Right now.
4. One day I hope to get to that blog post.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Batman to the Rescue
I grew up listening to the music of movies by watching the movies. I wasn't able to listen to film music away from films until I was sixteen, got a job and started to have my own disposable income. I nearly wore out VHS copies of Superman, The Ten Commandments (yeah, seriously; as a ten-year-old), episodes of the late-eighties reboot of Mission: Impossible and today's particular special, Batman. My ears perked up the very first time I saw Batman. I didn't know why it resonated with me so much, but it did. (Interestingly, this is another one of those scores that's been on my regular playlist ever since I bought it in 1994). Perhaps even then I was able to subconsciously connect the gothic nature of both music and image. So, as with Krull, the folks at La-la-land Records have seen fit to not only release Danny Elfman's complete score to Batman, they were good enough to include a second disc that was the original album release and scads of extras (including one very funny hidden track).
For over twenty years now there's been one cue I've been dying to hear separate from the film. It's the point in the film where Batman comes crashing through the skylight of the Flugelheim Museum Restaurant to rescue Vicky Vale from the Joker (the first time). It's the first truly bold statement of the Bat-Theme on its own, separated from being embedded in another musical context and is performed largely in the brass with powerful accompaniment from the strings and percussion. (You can watch the video here.) Sadly, it sounds like this particular cue was recorded in a hurry. Something sounds..."off" about it. There's a particular moment around 0:15 where the horns sound almost as if they're playing the wrong key. It's either scored badly, performed badly, or both. It's still one of my favorite scores ever and I would like to think it - along with a handful of other scores - was instrumental in the development of my musical awareness.
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Krull, Part I
I saw Krull for the first time my freshman year in college. My roommate was a Star Wars guy and one day asked if I'd ever seen it. Once he got over the astonishment of it, he immediately pulled out his VHS copy of Krull and we watched it right then and there. I was enthralled (sometimes it doesn't take much). I realized that there was a great deal in common with Star Wars but mostly the ways that it incorporates so many aspects of Arthurian legend (not to mention various other archetypes). Did the film have its weaknesses? Absolutely. Did it aspire to be greater than its budget allowed? Definitely. In the long run, it seems to have aged comparatively well when you place it up against many of the other post-Star Wars films of the time. This probably owes to the fact that it doesn't take place on Earth and its setting owes a great deal to the highly romanticized versions of the medieval Arthurian legends.But I digress.
I don't remember how, but I acquired my own VHS copy as soon as I could. I even pre-ordered the DVD pretty much as soon as its released was announced. But the coup was when I was browsing at a Barnes and Noble (a Barnes and Noble!) and happened across the Southern Cross pressing of the score:
I was unbelieveably stoked. For the next 45 minutes I walked around the store, clinging to that CD like Gollum to his Preciousss. It quickly went on my playlist and I listened to it over and over again. As a matter of fact, it's been part of my regular listening rotation consistently since the day I bought it. At some point during college the now defunct Super Collector somehow acquired a set of master tapes from Krull and pressed their own release that was a more-or-less complete score for the film. The sound quality was no different from the the Southern Cross release, just double the music!
Then it finally happened.
The good folks at La-la-land Records (increasingly becoming the Little Label that Could) saw fit to release their own complete score (with a few bonuses) that seems to be mastered from newly recovered elements. The quality is much, much better. They seem to have removed the artificial sounding reverb from the original release(s) and applied a more natural-sounding reverb. The score is still bright and powerful, and the producers seem to have smoothed off some of the rough passages - of which there were many. For a lot of film music lovers this has been one of those "holy grail" scores. It has a bold main theme for the film's male protagonist, Colwyn, muscular action music for the adventure aspects of the score, brazen moments of pure orchestration that remind you that Horner is, in fact, a highly-trained, highly-skilled composer and a beautiful and yearning love theme for Colwyn and Lyssa - held captive by The Beast for the majority of the film - that in some distant way seems reminiscent to me of British folk song.
It's a fun film and, as I remarked to a friend, probably my favorite of the post-Star Wars fantasy failures. In recent years, though, it seems to have gained somewhat of a cult following. I would like to think that the terrific efforts of James Horner have something to do with it, but I also know that it's largely because - like Star Wars - the film remains largely upbeat for its duration (also a credit to Horner).
This is all prelude, though. There's more to come. Meantime, check out the first cue in the film, "Main Title and Colwyn's Arrival". Great swashbuckling stuff!
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tax Evasion
Updated below.
I've become quite tired of hearing about how people think their taxes are too high. I don't necessarily like paying my taxes, but at least I understand what they're for.
To that end I would like to profer a solution:
If you don't like paying your taxes, you shouldn't have to anymore.
You read that right. You should be able to opt out of paying your taxes.
A few quick notes about your tax-free existence:
You'll no longer be allowed to utilize a service or work for a business, company or institution that receives or is paid for through tax dollars. In the event of a health or safety emergency, don't bother calling 911. You don't contribute. Are you a teacher at a public school or university? You're going to have to find a new job. You're now mooching off the state. You are also now going to have to send your kids to private school (again, make sure that it's one that doesn't receive any public funds) or you're going to have to educate them yourself. And then there's the food. It looks like you're going to have to grow your own food and maybe even raise your own livestock. Either that or you're going to have to make sure that you buy all of your food from growers who don't receive government subsidies, either to grow a certain crop or, as in the case of many, not to farm all of their land. The little things? Sports? They're most likely out as many of your favorite franchises either receive some sort of finanical backing from local or state governments or they play on land that is either owned by or whose construction was funded by the public. The arts? We won't even GO there.
Finally, all of this is moot as you'll not be able to utilize any roads, highways or interstates that are built or maintained under the auspices of government funding.
I would like to apologize for this little diversion, but it's just something that was welling up inside of me for a long time now. It seems absurd that people have no idea what their taxes pay for. Is there a tremendous amount of waste? Of course. No system is perfect when you've got 535 basically speaking for 350 million.
It's a travesty that we value an education so little in this country that schools everywhere, at every level, are being "forced" to cut programs, curricula and activities. Naturally, there is plenty of blame to go around. Administration, municipalities, unions, teachers and, of course, ordinary tax-paying citizens all shoulder part of the responsibility for the failures of education. And my solution isn't just throw money at it blindly. The way I see it is that somebody (or, rather a large group of somebodies) paid their taxes when I was a kid to make sure that I had educational opportunities even though I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in my home town. I would be willing to gamble that at least 50% of my elementary school (possibly much, much more) were on free or reduced lunch. What happens when we no longer want to help these kids get at least one solid meal a day? Do we say "Sorry, kid, but it's your own fault you're poor" or even more sinister, "This is God's punishment for ____." That's a load of bunk.
This is a pretty raw post. I just wanted to, in the words of a friend of mine, "Crap it out." Feel free to comment, debate, excoriate (me, not each other), whatever.
I've become quite tired of hearing about how people think their taxes are too high. I don't necessarily like paying my taxes, but at least I understand what they're for.
To that end I would like to profer a solution:
If you don't like paying your taxes, you shouldn't have to anymore.
You read that right. You should be able to opt out of paying your taxes.
A few quick notes about your tax-free existence:
You'll no longer be allowed to utilize a service or work for a business, company or institution that receives or is paid for through tax dollars. In the event of a health or safety emergency, don't bother calling 911. You don't contribute. Are you a teacher at a public school or university? You're going to have to find a new job. You're now mooching off the state. You are also now going to have to send your kids to private school (again, make sure that it's one that doesn't receive any public funds) or you're going to have to educate them yourself. And then there's the food. It looks like you're going to have to grow your own food and maybe even raise your own livestock. Either that or you're going to have to make sure that you buy all of your food from growers who don't receive government subsidies, either to grow a certain crop or, as in the case of many, not to farm all of their land. The little things? Sports? They're most likely out as many of your favorite franchises either receive some sort of finanical backing from local or state governments or they play on land that is either owned by or whose construction was funded by the public. The arts? We won't even GO there.
Finally, all of this is moot as you'll not be able to utilize any roads, highways or interstates that are built or maintained under the auspices of government funding.
I would like to apologize for this little diversion, but it's just something that was welling up inside of me for a long time now. It seems absurd that people have no idea what their taxes pay for. Is there a tremendous amount of waste? Of course. No system is perfect when you've got 535 basically speaking for 350 million.
It's a travesty that we value an education so little in this country that schools everywhere, at every level, are being "forced" to cut programs, curricula and activities. Naturally, there is plenty of blame to go around. Administration, municipalities, unions, teachers and, of course, ordinary tax-paying citizens all shoulder part of the responsibility for the failures of education. And my solution isn't just throw money at it blindly. The way I see it is that somebody (or, rather a large group of somebodies) paid their taxes when I was a kid to make sure that I had educational opportunities even though I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in my home town. I would be willing to gamble that at least 50% of my elementary school (possibly much, much more) were on free or reduced lunch. What happens when we no longer want to help these kids get at least one solid meal a day? Do we say "Sorry, kid, but it's your own fault you're poor" or even more sinister, "This is God's punishment for ____." That's a load of bunk.
This is a pretty raw post. I just wanted to, in the words of a friend of mine, "Crap it out." Feel free to comment, debate, excoriate (me, not each other), whatever.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
A Very Good Year
When you compose 4-6 scores a year, you're bound to run up against a few films that test the limits of your inspiration. Jerry Goldsmith was known for being prolific and speedy. I once read the phrase "Mozartean swiftness" in relation to how quickly he could write. During the sixties he averaged four films a year (bearing in mind that from 1960-1962 he only wrote five scores but he also wrote a pile of television music).
In the 1990s he composed - among others - Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Rudy, The Shadow, The River Wild, First Knight, Star Trek: First Contact, The Ghost and the Darkness, Air Force One, The Edge, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, Star Trek: Insurrection, The Mummy and The 13th Warrior.
1997 saw only three scores (only!), but all of them quality and what I see as the coalescence of what one might call Goldsmith's "late" period. (I have no empirical evidence for this, just my ears.) Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, and The Edge were all released in the same summer (AFO released first but scored last owing to Goldsmith replacing Randy Newman's score at the last minute). All three are diverse and top-notch scores. Air Force One is Goldsmith's first full-throated action outing since Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990). Apparently Wolfgang Petersen wanted a full-blooded action score with a hyperpatriotic sound. Goldsmith delivered in spades. L.A. Confidential is a rich fusion of modern orchestral techniques and jazz-inflected trumpet solos (performed expertly by longtime session player Malcolm McNab) evoking a 1950s "cool jazz" ethos. I'm also firmly convinced that in any other year Jerry would've finally won another much-deserved Oscar for L.A. Confidential had it not been for That One Movie1.
The Edge, though...
The Edge is an interesting outdoor adventure yarn written by David Mamet and superbly acted by Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin2. Any movie where Anthony Hopkins gets to utter the line (regarding the bear who tracks the pair), "Today...I'm gonna kill the motherfucker!" automatically gets my vote for awesome. I bought the score based on the recommendation of a filmmaking friend who actually wasn't big into the music of Jerry Goldsmith. At the time I also hadn't realized that Jerry Goldsmith was my composer of choice. So I bought the score and was instantly in love with it. It's a long-line, broad and expressive melody that is surprisingly malleable in how it's able to be used in the film. The entire score is an exercise in the clarity and restraint that are hallmarks of Goldsmith's style (I know it's difficult to think of a score like Air Force One or Total Recall as restrained but they're really very "spacious" scores). The score is rich and varied and utilizes several themes but "The Edge" theme is dominant throughout.
Interestingly, The Edge is the only score that I know of from the last twenty years of Goldsmith's career - that's orchestral - where he actually took an orchestration credit (alongside longtime collaborator Alexander Courage). It's been oft remarked that being an orchestrator for Jerry Goldsmith was like being a glorified copyist. I seem to remember reading that either Arthur Morton or Alexander Courage said something about "taking the music on the green paper and putting it on the blue paper" (or vice versa). Basically you're a glorifed copyist. One might be tempted to think that they're massively understating their importance; until you listen. I can't tell you who did what. Seriously. I can't. I have over a hundred Goldsmith scores and have listened to this one regularly since I bought it all those years ago. When the orchestration is that seamless, you know the orchestrator is practically invisible.
Anyway, it's a terrific score.
More to follow. Maybe.
1. Seriously. How did it happen that he only ever won ONE Oscar? Oh, right. The Academy doesn't know shit about what it does.
2. Arrec Barrwin!!!
In the 1990s he composed - among others - Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Rudy, The Shadow, The River Wild, First Knight, Star Trek: First Contact, The Ghost and the Darkness, Air Force One, The Edge, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, Star Trek: Insurrection, The Mummy and The 13th Warrior.
1997 saw only three scores (only!), but all of them quality and what I see as the coalescence of what one might call Goldsmith's "late" period. (I have no empirical evidence for this, just my ears.) Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, and The Edge were all released in the same summer (AFO released first but scored last owing to Goldsmith replacing Randy Newman's score at the last minute). All three are diverse and top-notch scores. Air Force One is Goldsmith's first full-throated action outing since Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990). Apparently Wolfgang Petersen wanted a full-blooded action score with a hyperpatriotic sound. Goldsmith delivered in spades. L.A. Confidential is a rich fusion of modern orchestral techniques and jazz-inflected trumpet solos (performed expertly by longtime session player Malcolm McNab) evoking a 1950s "cool jazz" ethos. I'm also firmly convinced that in any other year Jerry would've finally won another much-deserved Oscar for L.A. Confidential had it not been for That One Movie1.
The Edge, though...
The Edge is an interesting outdoor adventure yarn written by David Mamet and superbly acted by Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin2. Any movie where Anthony Hopkins gets to utter the line (regarding the bear who tracks the pair), "Today...I'm gonna kill the motherfucker!" automatically gets my vote for awesome. I bought the score based on the recommendation of a filmmaking friend who actually wasn't big into the music of Jerry Goldsmith. At the time I also hadn't realized that Jerry Goldsmith was my composer of choice. So I bought the score and was instantly in love with it. It's a long-line, broad and expressive melody that is surprisingly malleable in how it's able to be used in the film. The entire score is an exercise in the clarity and restraint that are hallmarks of Goldsmith's style (I know it's difficult to think of a score like Air Force One or Total Recall as restrained but they're really very "spacious" scores). The score is rich and varied and utilizes several themes but "The Edge" theme is dominant throughout.
Interestingly, The Edge is the only score that I know of from the last twenty years of Goldsmith's career - that's orchestral - where he actually took an orchestration credit (alongside longtime collaborator Alexander Courage). It's been oft remarked that being an orchestrator for Jerry Goldsmith was like being a glorified copyist. I seem to remember reading that either Arthur Morton or Alexander Courage said something about "taking the music on the green paper and putting it on the blue paper" (or vice versa). Basically you're a glorifed copyist. One might be tempted to think that they're massively understating their importance; until you listen. I can't tell you who did what. Seriously. I can't. I have over a hundred Goldsmith scores and have listened to this one regularly since I bought it all those years ago. When the orchestration is that seamless, you know the orchestrator is practically invisible.
Anyway, it's a terrific score.
More to follow. Maybe.
1. Seriously. How did it happen that he only ever won ONE Oscar? Oh, right. The Academy doesn't know shit about what it does.
2. Arrec Barrwin!!!
Friday, May 21, 2010
Life and Death
There is a legend about the buddha that one night, on the cusp of attaining enlightenment, he waged a great battle with (Devaputra) Mara, the chief of all demons and master of all human passions. Mara conjured all manner of things to distract Siddhartha. When he fired arrows at Siddhartha they became nothing more than harmless lotus blossoms, showering him. Mara's final test was to ask why he, Siddhartha, deserved enlightenment. Siddhartha said nothing. Still deep in meditation, he stretched out his hand and touched the earth beneath him with the tips of his fingers. The Earth acknowledged Siddhartha and trembled and shook with mighty force, bearing witness to Siddhartha's awakening. Mara had no choice but to abandon his quest and Siddhartha rose that morning the Buddha; the awakened one.Why is this relevant to the discussion? I'm not sure. But something about the touching of the earth suddenly spoke to me. When we touch the earth beneath us, we touch the edge of the universe figuratively and maybe even literally. Cosmology has recently inferred the existence of dark matter. Nobody is sure why it's there or what it does but one thing is sure: it is the most abundant of all "stuff" in the universe. It can be thought of as an interconnected web that scientists quite literally believe binds the universe together.
I don't know why these thoughts occurred to me while thinking about my recently deceased grandfather (other than the fact that it's a perfectly natural course when someone familiar dies) but, rather than fill me with a sense of dread or existentialism about my own existence, I found it a calming, peaceful thought. In that moment I thought to myself "When I touch the ground beneath me - and know that I am touching the ground beneath me - I am touching the whole of creation. From the big bang fourteen billion years ago to Jesus' walk in Galilee some two millenia ago to a galaxy a trillion trillion miles away; they are all at my fingertips. At that moment, the whole existence of the universe is for me to understand that it is there." This isn't meant to be thought of egocentrically; but merely that in this moment, the entire existence of the universe has - for me - come down to this moment of understanding.
Life doesn't have to have a point or a meaning, just the understanding that it is amazing.
So does this make any sense at all?
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Choose My Adventure For Me
So I've got a bunch of posts in the works and I can't decide which one to finish first. So I'm putting it to you, my good readers. Which of the following would you like to read?
A series of posts breaking down the score to Avatar on CD and how it fits into James Horner's total oeuvre. (This would probably be at least three posts). I realize this is a long time coming from my "First listen" post back in December, but I didn't even see the movie until mid-January so cut me some slack!
A discussion of a potential film music canon (as suggested long ago by The Temp Track)
The postminimalist nature of Don Davis's score for The Matrix (an extension of a paper I wrote years ago).
Your 10 (or so) favorite film music moments ever (courtesy of the Pikey's recent post)
And, finally, thoughts on the best film scores of the first decade of this millenium.
So there you have it. And remember...Your opinion counts!
A series of posts breaking down the score to Avatar on CD and how it fits into James Horner's total oeuvre. (This would probably be at least three posts). I realize this is a long time coming from my "First listen" post back in December, but I didn't even see the movie until mid-January so cut me some slack!
A discussion of a potential film music canon (as suggested long ago by The Temp Track)
The postminimalist nature of Don Davis's score for The Matrix (an extension of a paper I wrote years ago).
Your 10 (or so) favorite film music moments ever (courtesy of the Pikey's recent post)
And, finally, thoughts on the best film scores of the first decade of this millenium.
So there you have it. And remember...Your opinion counts!
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Little Pleasures
My drive home lends itself rather well to the ebb and flow of a well-planned film music playlist.
I take I-35 most of the way home but I take a circuitous route to get there that requires me at one point to be on I-29 south to take I-35 north (in order to avoid construction on this). The merge ramp from I-29 south to I-35 north is a single-lane brdige that actually crosses over itself to go north. Traffic often slows to a crawl - if not a complete standstill - on this bridge/merge depending on the time of day (usually by the time I'm on it).
As I merged onto the ramp yesterday, traffic slowed just as "The Asteroid Field" from The Empire Strikes Back came on. The music paced the external action perfectly. As traffic began to speed up, so also did the tempo. Once I merged fully onto I-35 and was back up to speed, the cue locked into its tempo and carried me through the next four miles of weaving in and out of the "interstate asteroids" beautifully.
Some people would say this was luck, but in my experience there's no such thing as luck.
I take I-35 most of the way home but I take a circuitous route to get there that requires me at one point to be on I-29 south to take I-35 north (in order to avoid construction on this). The merge ramp from I-29 south to I-35 north is a single-lane brdige that actually crosses over itself to go north. Traffic often slows to a crawl - if not a complete standstill - on this bridge/merge depending on the time of day (usually by the time I'm on it).
As I merged onto the ramp yesterday, traffic slowed just as "The Asteroid Field" from The Empire Strikes Back came on. The music paced the external action perfectly. As traffic began to speed up, so also did the tempo. Once I merged fully onto I-35 and was back up to speed, the cue locked into its tempo and carried me through the next four miles of weaving in and out of the "interstate asteroids" beautifully.
Some people would say this was luck, but in my experience there's no such thing as luck.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Raise A Glass
Happy Birthday, Jerry Goldsmith.
Last year I lamented that it's sometimes still difficult to accept that there would never be another new Goldsmith score. The last twelve months, though, have seen a flood of releases of Goldsmith scores in expanded or previously unreleased form that amounts to an embarrassment of riches, including:
The Boys from Brazil
Cain's Hundred (t.v. series from the early 1960s)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
Freud
I.Q./Seconds
In Harm's Way
Innerspace
Islands in the Stream
Lonely are the Brave
One Little Indian
Rent-A-Cop
Sebastian (with additional music by Tristram Cary)
Twilight Zone: The Movie
The Pikey will let me know if I've forgotten anything. Most of these I haven't been able to acquire (legitimately) due to the lack of necessary funds but they're out there in one form or another and will be for awhile so I'm not too worried about it. The Pikey and I have discussed how it's quite likely that, at this rate, nearly all of Goldsmith's scores will be available commercially in the next few years. And why not, when there are folks like me clamoring for the stuff?
One score in particular that I'm looking forward to the prospect of is that of an early John Frankenheimer film called Seven Days In May, a taut political thriller wherein a cabal of generals threatens to overthrow the president because he supports nuclear disarmament. Goldsmith chose to score the film using only pianos and percussion and with typical sparse spotting. I think the score totals less than 30 minutes.
So there it is. Once again we mark the anniversary of the birth of the great Jerry Goldsmith.
Last year I lamented that it's sometimes still difficult to accept that there would never be another new Goldsmith score. The last twelve months, though, have seen a flood of releases of Goldsmith scores in expanded or previously unreleased form that amounts to an embarrassment of riches, including:
The Boys from Brazil
Cain's Hundred (t.v. series from the early 1960s)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
Freud
I.Q./Seconds
In Harm's Way
Innerspace
Islands in the Stream
Lonely are the Brave
One Little Indian
Rent-A-Cop
Sebastian (with additional music by Tristram Cary)
Twilight Zone: The Movie
The Pikey will let me know if I've forgotten anything. Most of these I haven't been able to acquire (legitimately) due to the lack of necessary funds but they're out there in one form or another and will be for awhile so I'm not too worried about it. The Pikey and I have discussed how it's quite likely that, at this rate, nearly all of Goldsmith's scores will be available commercially in the next few years. And why not, when there are folks like me clamoring for the stuff?
One score in particular that I'm looking forward to the prospect of is that of an early John Frankenheimer film called Seven Days In May, a taut political thriller wherein a cabal of generals threatens to overthrow the president because he supports nuclear disarmament. Goldsmith chose to score the film using only pianos and percussion and with typical sparse spotting. I think the score totals less than 30 minutes.
So there it is. Once again we mark the anniversary of the birth of the great Jerry Goldsmith.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Okay, so I'm not crazy
Well, maybe a little bit, but not about this.
During the presentation of the Cecile B. DeMille award to Martin Scorsese at the Golden Globes they played a montage of clips from all of his films. It ended, naturally, enough, with scenes from his upcoming Shutter Island. Under the scenes from Shutter Island I heard something familiar. A bass line and rising chromatic figure that I knew all too well. I actually backed it up just to make sure I'd heard it correctly. Yep, there it was. Plain as day. The passacaglia from the Penderecki Third Symphony. I immediately became intrigued and found that there was no composer credit for the film. Apparently Scorsese uses all found music for this particular film. People who know his films know that this isn't anything new and that he oftentimes treats the original scores composed for his films in a similar manner.
Anyway, the list of works/composers is actually pretty damned impressive. Penderecki, Giacinto Scelsi, John Adams, Ingram Marshall, Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Lou Harrison and others.
Check out the track listing for the soundtrack to Shutter Island.
During the presentation of the Cecile B. DeMille award to Martin Scorsese at the Golden Globes they played a montage of clips from all of his films. It ended, naturally, enough, with scenes from his upcoming Shutter Island. Under the scenes from Shutter Island I heard something familiar. A bass line and rising chromatic figure that I knew all too well. I actually backed it up just to make sure I'd heard it correctly. Yep, there it was. Plain as day. The passacaglia from the Penderecki Third Symphony. I immediately became intrigued and found that there was no composer credit for the film. Apparently Scorsese uses all found music for this particular film. People who know his films know that this isn't anything new and that he oftentimes treats the original scores composed for his films in a similar manner.
Anyway, the list of works/composers is actually pretty damned impressive. Penderecki, Giacinto Scelsi, John Adams, Ingram Marshall, Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Lou Harrison and others.
Check out the track listing for the soundtrack to Shutter Island.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Ahhh, New Music
I had a piece premiered this last Friday afternoon at the Missouri Music Educators Association meeting. (Osage Beach is so lovely this time of year. Except not.) Anyway, I wrote a brief Magnificat a few months back and the choir that gave its premiere did a really great job with it; especially considering it's a difficult piece (so I'm told). It's only about two-and-a-half minutes but it has a great deal of rhythmic complexity which was fun to work out. Many folks were very complimentary of the piece and much to my surprise several even expressed interest in performing it. So that's nice. Hopefully soon I'll figure out a way to embed the piece here on the old blog. I guess I need to get me one of those website thingies.
Interestingly, no one asked why I only set the first two lines of the Magnificat text.
Interestingly, no one asked why I only set the first two lines of the Magnificat text.
Friday, January 01, 2010
The Demise of the Title Sequence
I was trolling around the internets and stumbled upon this article about the demise of the title sequence in film. A great title sequence can jumpstart a film or provide a subtle look into what the film is about before it even gets going. I found the following which I found to be pretty entertaining:
Anyway, I got to thinking about how few films have title sequences anymore. As a composer, I'm highly interested in the title sequence for several reasons, not the least of which is that if the filmmaker has an original score this is an excellent opportunity for the composer and director to set the tone of the film. It also got me thinking about the Grand Master of film title designers, Saul Bass and some of the incredible title sequences he designed.
One of my favorites, North by Northwest:
While the title sequence seems to have gone the way of the dodo, there are some recent entries that are nice:
But the title sequence that really stands out in recent memory as capturing that sense of Saul Bass's animation style and setting the tone is Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can:
So my question to you, dear reader(s), what's your favorite title sequence, new or old?
Anyway, I got to thinking about how few films have title sequences anymore. As a composer, I'm highly interested in the title sequence for several reasons, not the least of which is that if the filmmaker has an original score this is an excellent opportunity for the composer and director to set the tone of the film. It also got me thinking about the Grand Master of film title designers, Saul Bass and some of the incredible title sequences he designed.
One of my favorites, North by Northwest:
While the title sequence seems to have gone the way of the dodo, there are some recent entries that are nice:
But the title sequence that really stands out in recent memory as capturing that sense of Saul Bass's animation style and setting the tone is Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can:
So my question to you, dear reader(s), what's your favorite title sequence, new or old?
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