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 It was pretty out-of-date then (in the late '90s) and to my knowledge has never really been revised.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.

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).

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:

1. Women's chorus motif (0'17)
2. Four-note fanfare for the main character, Colwyn (1'11)
3. Colwyn's theme (1'48)
4. Rising four-note broken triad representing the Glaive (2'36)
5. Material for the Beast and his Slayers, mostly textural in nature (3'37)
6. Bits of the Love Theme which will be further elaborated in the next cue (5'01)

Those things in mind, let's break down the influences of those themes.

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!

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.

"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.

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.

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!