One reason is that after LOTR, many are looking to the Kong film, which cost a good deal of money, as the big film people want to see at the end of the year.

We've had a lot of score rejections & replacements but Peter Jackson's post-LOTR King Kong is more high profile than most. In fact, John Williams would probably have to be canned from a Star Wars or Indiana Jones movie to generate more talk.

In any case, I was talking about the Shore dismissal with a friend and it lead into asking the kinds of basic and universal questions that I tend to ask.

In this case, I asked, thinking about Danny Elfman on SPIDERMAN 3 as well, why would a composer put up with this kind of treatment?

My friend, ever the realist, replied that movie music is just another sound effect and if composers want respect, they should write symphonies.

But they don't. They stick with making movies despite the temp tracks, the rejections, the short time schedules, and the producers and directors butting their heads in. Why? Is it just the money? The fame? A love of working on movies? The opportunity to connect with a large audience? What?

Some people paint and have to have their way. Other people become matte painters and will produce masterpieces to very specific specifications. Some people write and won't have so much as a comma tampered with. Other people become journalists and have their stuff routinely re-written, edited, chopped, or dropped without flinching.

Why are people one way or another about this?
And what goes on in the head of someone who has just has a score dumped? Is it 1) No biggie so long as the check don't bounce. 2) It was only 2 weeks of work anyway and I can reuse most of the score in the next one. 3) I can't believe this, that was some of my best work, Goodbye Cruel World, I'm jumping off a cliff.

Some time back I asked a similar question about the lives and habits of film composers, I asked, what does the film composer think about at 4 in the morning?

Of course, I learned one answer when an interviewer called a composer up on the phone once late at night and found him drunk!

But I'm thinking here of the composer's morale. It doesn't sound as if the film composer gets much respect these days. Maybe he never did. Yet, like a pro, he shows up and does what the job requires. But what does he think about what he's asked to do and what does he think when he sees his stuff and that of others routinely sent to scrap. Is it no big deal? Just part of the job? Or does it effect things in deeper more significant ways?

In Rozsa's autobiography, Rozsa finally sums up that he didn't like the cinema and wondered what he would have created had he never become a film composer. It was a summation of regret. Partly it was a reaction to certain attitudes and people he met in the business. But I also think he thought he was wasting himself. And I understand it, because when you play a lot of Rozsa scores, you realize all of them are good but he seems to go through a stretch of repeating himself rather than reaching new heights.

I've had to work within a form or formula before too. In fact if you have a job where you go in and do the exact same things each day, you know how this works. The pattern even makes the work easier because you know that as long as you follow the thing you're giving the boss what he wants, but while you can be creative within the framework, the framework can constrain you in negative ways as well. When it solidifies into a template you always use, the work stagnates and suffers.

And if you can hear signs of this in Rozsa in the old studio days when all the work on a film was more compartmentalized, you can imagine what the effect of current constraints are on modern composers with everyone insisting on their say. But the composer is still at it so maybe the effect isn't detrimental.

Another interviewer asked a bunch of directors what films they would make if they had unlimited budgets. More than a couple said they wanted limited budgets, that the constraints were necessary to the work, that they couldn't make a film with an unlimited budget. It was an interesting reply. So, maybe the poor composer feels the same, maybe he needs to know that if he goes off base he'll get rejected in order to work and what I think would suck is actually of benefit.

Part of my issue with Howard Shore being rejected off of Kong is that he is a film composer whose work I have tended to point to as being an example of an artist working in the medium. When going to see a film scored by Shore, you're never quite sure what you're going to hear. It may be a relatively traditional score, such as The Fly or Looking for Richard, or something bizarre, such as Naked Lunch or Crash. In fact, I would say that the Shore/Cronenberg collaboration has been fascinating because of the amount of experimentation Shore was able to do within the framework of a film score, Videodrome perhaps being the most ambitious. To the best of my knowledge, Shore has only been rejected once, and that by Ron Howard (I will withhold my opinion of Howard, suffice it to say it has never been very high).

So that brings us to your central question: why?

Well, there is always the argument that a composer's music reaches millions more people when heard in a film than in a concert hall or on CD. The problem with idea is that the audience isn't actually listening to the music. They're watching the film, and most people aren't aware of how what the score is doing in a film unless it has a prominent shmaltzy love theme or is really inappropriate.

There's also the money. Scoring a major motion picture can really pay well. If a composer has managed to get a gig like that, in addition to being paid for their work, they also get royalties. A sweet deal. Of course, few composers can get a project like that quickly. In fact, this message board is full of people lamenting about how really talented composers such as Bruce Broughton and Lee Holdridge are so unrecognized by Hollywood that they're consigned to lesser projects.

However, there are some composers, Shore most definitely included, who view film music as its own art form, discrete from any other, and are intrigued and stimulated by the challenges offered by it.

Composing a good score for a film is hard. Not only do you have to come up with reasonably new material (once again, I won't say anything here, but I'm sure that some of you know what I'm thinking ), but you also have to relate that material dramatically to the film that you're scoring. Each movie presents its own criteria, it's own set of challenges. The director will have certain ideas, and there are the demands of the genre as well.

Some composers take rejected scores in their stride. I remember both Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith shrugging off the practice in interviews, saying, "that's life." In fact, this may be the most self-preserving way of dealing with this situation. Because on the other hand, you have somebody like Gabriel Yared, who was so pissed that his score that he worked on for a year was rejected and replaced with a paint-by-numbers James Horner score that he makes the conflict public. I don't see any listing of an English language title in production that he's scoring other than the upcoming Anthony Minghella project, and I don't expect to for some time.

Working with constraints is an aspect of art that, truth be told, is necessary. The imagination can encompass a lot of things, including some that are better left occupying the imagination. What is important in executing an art is dealing with the practical aspects of the medium.

quote:

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Originally posted by Swashbuckler:
Not because the music isn't worthwhile, but rather because in today's cinema, music is often merely used as a patch to cover up silence. The idea of the score being a way by which the audience can connect with the characters and events unfolding on the screen is something that it seems fewer and fewer filmmakers care about.

The problem with idea is that the audience isn't actually listening to the music. They're watching the film, and most people aren't aware of how what the score is doing in a film unless it has a prominent shmaltzy love theme or is really inappropriate.

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It's a little hard to admit this given how much I like the art of film scoring, but I think the era of film music is now over. Not because film music is bad. Rather, it is because film music is no longer necessary.

Once upon a time, Steiner, Rozsa and Newman were the emotion and the sound effect. When images were more crude and more primitive due to technological limitations. When movies resembled theatre plays more than they do today.

With the advancements in sound editing and sound effects, I'm not really sure if a film score has a place in a modern movie.

I can only speak for myself, but more often than not, I find music in today's films funny, distracting and out of place. Not because the music doesn't fit, or is bad. Simply because I find that well designed sound effects convey a more realistic movie experience than a movie score does.

Source music is just about the only type of music that seems to fit. Syrupy strings underscoring a loving kiss (with or without a sunset) are just too hilarious. Drums & a military march are cliché. Rising and falling string chords over the image of a stormy sea are completely out of place in the middle of the ocean.

Even the Star Wars march made me smile at the beginning of Episode 3... a relic of a time past.

Should film composers write symphonies to get respect? I'm not sure that everyone should. Some film scores were never meant for the concert hall, and some composers' styles don't translate too well.
Take Rachel Portman. Her Little Prince opera, as lovely as it is, is about 60 minutes too long (on a 90 minute running time). It presents nothing new; just a regular Portman score with (rather monotone, recitative-style) vocals.
Shore's Lord of the Rings Symphony isn't really one. It's a condensed film score.

Rozsa was a fantastic concert hall writer. Few today could equal that. Not in quality - that's for each listener to decide. I'm thinking more about form. Rozsa's scores fit the screen. His concert works fit the concert hall.

From Sonata for Jukebox by Geoffrey O'Brien:

Composers often describe being kept awake by their own melodies, until they are forced to get out of bed and write them down. At some moments it becomes clear to the victimized listener that the songwriter has escaped from insomnia by inflicting it on someone else. "Put the tune in their brains!"

Or is not something scarier at work, the activation of an embedded voodoo code that takes possession of any available brain matter? Babalu colonizing the hearer through the essentially passive intermediation of Desi Arnez? A wrathful Tibetan deity singing about the end of the world whether you want to hear it or not, except that he has foregone his usual conduit of deep-chanting monks and weirdly recruited Barry Manilow for the purpose?

And, as if on cue, to further answer my question about what the composers themselves think & feel, there was this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4353680.stm

I hate to think that Dinko is right, that film music as I know it has become redundant and obsolete. But that may be one explaination for why so many scores don't seem to please, why Gabriel Yared is washed up in Hollywood, why the the older composers still working seem too out of place today, and why the era of generic note-spinning & Sonic Wallpaper scores has taken over.

Music really isn't about subtext and emotion any more, it's just filler, a utilitarian sound that does transitions, speeds things up, or tells you you're supposed to look at the scene as being sad or happy or what have you.

I can follow Dinko's line of thinking on this, but if it's really true, I still think it's a bad trend. I still believe in the power of the older style. Either have a score that does something or have no score but don't keep on with this do-nothing sludge in-between.

But the old style score means also allowing the composer a freer reign and that's opposite the current flow.

But maybe that's it--we're in the transition period where people haven't gotten used to the idea scores must change in form or go altogether. The old notions of what a film score is are still holding on (especially on AMC & TCM every night) but are really dinosaurs headed for extinction.

I'm sure we're not the only ones talking about the millions spent on the Kong score and Shore's replacement. Somehwere, execs are looking at Kong, Spiderman 3, and others and having a strategy meeting. "Should we have 2 scores written for every film in case we need to drop one a month before the premiere? Should we be using library cues? Do we need music at all? Should we build a Compose-9000 machine?"

I'm sure, at some level, if they haven't already been discussed, there are serious questions rippling through the film world right now. And composers, producers, directors, and audiences all have their opinions & positions.

Ultimately though it's up to the consumer. You can't make a star out of someone who the public doesn't want. You can't get them to not laugh at film music they think is too overbaked. Since the bottom line is cash and not art, the only way to insure the cash is to please the consumer. And if the consumer responds favorably to one approach over another, that approach will be repeated.

And producers either believe or are getting the feedback that it's a risk to the profit margin to score films the way they've been scored for 70 previous years.

Now, should I embrace the changes of the future or remain a luddite about them? Do I excoriate today's filmgoing youth for their lack of respect for culture or try to relate to and cheer on the changes they are putting forward?

Dr. Strangelou: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Remote Control, Sonic Wallpaper, and the two week replacement scores of James Newton Howard.

I like Geoffrey O'Brien by the way. As your excerpt shows, he's obviously cryptic, but his books Phantom Empire and Hardboiled America are excellent.

That's an interesting theory, one open to debate as a whole new topic. I'm sure the composer has more personal investment in a film than say the prop guy does. I'd say the director, writer, actors, and composer each have strong investments in what they are contributing. The composer may have the least of all these actually--it depends on the emotions of the individual composer compared with who else is working on the film.

Some films do well without music, but most do not. Music is responsible for pulling the appropriate emotion out of the audience. Do the old classroom textbook example thing. Watch a scene from a film that has one kind of music... watch it again with entirely different music. There's a difference

Those days are not long gone, although it can be argued very well. If they are gone, then it's because director's don't know what kind of emotional response they want from the audience beyond exhilaration or sentimentality. There are more emotions than that, and when only these are enticed out of us again and again and again, we're tired of it. Movies seem dead.

I agree with Dinko that the era of truly creative film music (as personified by Rosza, Korngold, Newman, Goldsmith, Williams, Shore and many more I could mention) is now at an end and that the majority of people in the business now take a more painting-by-numbers approach. I'm inclined to see this as yet another example of the way film has been transformed from an art form into (for want of a better phrase) a cash cow, particularly in Hollywood - a place increasingly populated, it would seem, by men in grey suits who know that even the smallest risk they take could jeopardize the trillion-dollar opening of their blockbuster on Indepedence Day.

The great irony of all this, of course, is that the studio system, which once made film music great, is now largely to blame for its decline. Quite possibly, the future of film music lies with independent filmmakers, who are still willing to go out on a limb and give new talents a chance.

As an aside, it's interesting to note the trajectory that the art of scoring films has taken over the years: from mickey-mousing to creations of great melodic and thematic ingenuity, and now back to mickey-mousing again. I don't think this is the fault of today's composers; they do what they do because they have to make a living, not through choice (with the exception of the Remote Control lot - I don't think they know any better).

People resent being bullied into an emotional response by corny movie-music. People are contemptuous of that sort of cheap Pavlovian manipulation. And people have every right to hate the very concept of movie-music. Just as they hate laugh-tracks. Mort Sahl said that the laugh-track is America's homegrown contribution to fascism. And you can throw in movie-music too. I can't blame anyone for having an instinctive hatred for movie-music.

From Misty Water-Color Memories of The Way We Dinked by Dinko: "Syrupy strings underscoring a loving kiss (with or without a sunset) are just too hilarious. Drums & a military march are cliche. Rising and falling string chords over the image of a stormy sea are completely out of place in the middle of the ocean."

The simple ugly truth of the matter is this: movie-music is inherently corny. Which explains why so many people would rather listen to soundtracks than listen to movies.

From Spring Bulletin by Woody Allen: "Musicology III: The Recorder. The student is taught how to play Yankee Doodle on this end-blown wooden flute, and progresses rapidly to the Brandenburg Concertos. Then slowly back to Yankee Doodle."

It's the audience's fault. Today's most popular musical genres are: rap, country, heavy-metal. It's hopeless.

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Originally posted by Luscious Lazlo:
It's the audience's fault. Today's most popular musical genres are: rap, country, heavy-metal. It's hopeless.

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Man, you guys are a cynical lot!

Check these props from the song-soundtrack crowd!

Ok, we can say that film music is or has been used in a corny and manipulative way. And I can see someone saying, "This music is telling me how I should feel rather than letting me feel it myself. Butt out, I'm not a puppet."

Of course, it can be said that every element in a movie, all the aspects of its form: the script, lighting, camera movement, direction, editing, etc. etc. are geared to manipulating an emotional response (and I thought that was why people went to movies, to get caught up in stories, dramatic situations, and to feel something). I mean if you find music distracting and films manipulative just stop watching them and just live without anything fictional.

It seems today that guys like LL and Dinko are representative of a crowd that wants to remain aloof and superior to this ("I wouldn't fall for that." Smirk. Smirk). Of course, it could simply be that you respond negatively to what you see as corn ("You'll have to do better than that to get me, Pavlov.")

Ok, I can follow the logic in your points of view.

I think I have to disagree with Dinko that just because the technical side has improved, because we have less stage-bound visuals, the steadycam and computerized fast camera movement, and that because you can mix a sound-scape of effects using 128 tracks, that there's no longer a need or use for film music.

I still think films require music. I think that that music needs to be better (a tough word to define in this context) than the majority of what we're getting or that producers/directors are allowing us to have.

But it's obvious that musical tastes and tastes in film have changed especially with the young. We still have Broadway musicals but they don't sound like Cole Porter. We still have film music but it doesn't sound like Max Steiner. And we still have movies but they don't resemble films of the past unless as an intentional post-modern homage.

But even if what the audience expects and demands has changed, the basic premise hasn't changed--music in films still has a dramatic purpose and a place in film. The musical styles may change but music still has a positive effect on the audience experiencing the film and so makes its presence legitimate.

Now is that music still the place of an emotional heart, of subtext, of humanizing the visuals, of connecting to an audience? Yes, I think it still can be if used with that goal in mind. The approach has pitfalls. Obviously now, there are guys like LL on watch-towers with BS detectors scanning the horizons for any signs of corn to dismiss.

Tracking in a Rap song under a car chase may be an adrenaline rush that connects with an audience too and that may be what the future of film music is going to be (note that films still require this music being there to help provide the rush).

In my own opinion, if all the cinema is today is a roller coaster ride and if Rap is cool but a conventional film score is too corny, well I think I'd rather be square.

Of course, the allure of being cool has always been attractive to all cultures even as it has manifested itself in a wide variety of forms that seem utterly dated and ridiculous to us today.

But maybe being cool today means to be condescending of anything that reeks of cultural heritage from the past. Homer no. But my Homies yes.

And what I'm hearing from you is that there's a resistance or even a hostility to conventional film music that is making the culture flow against it. That in turn leads to rejected scores, Remote Control, temp tracks, pop song scores, talk of no scores at all, and a change in the overall sound, use of, and approach to film music from how it was in the past.

So Ok, is there any kind of score that does the works? One that works as part of the drama, that can bring an audience into a film, be an emotional heart, also be listenable as music, while still being subtle enough to not be corny or pushy and yet avoid being comatose and thus pointless? Or is there no such score any longer?

Wait a second. I just don't buy it suddenly. My reactionary side is kicking in. If people wanted this kind of subtlety in films JEANNE DIELMAN would be a household word and we'd all be watching Ozu, Bresson, Bergman, and Jon Jost films and demanding more of the same. Instead it's Ozu who? and everyone's all excited about LOTR with its vast plains of fighting creatures and King Kong.

Nope, I think people still want excitement and big drama and that means syrupy strings and elephantine choirs and the bells and cannons from the 1812 Overture. I mean why have Hot Spicy visuals and score them with Cream of Wheat-sounding mush music or just sound effects alone. Oh, a big score is manipulative, it gets in the way, it keeps me from getting into the picture. But big visuals aren't manipulative? Come on now. People want a big corny operatic LOTR epic trilogy but can't stand any Wagnerian music in there because that's corny? Now you have my own BS detector going off.

Sorry, I don't mean to offend you here, especially since I've respected your other positions and respected you Dinko as a person and friend, but you guys or your positions sound like smug prissy jerks. Your viewpoint may still represent a whole generation of more smug prissy jerks, but it's still the viewpoint of smug prissy jerks. That may be the fashion, that may be what's cool today, you have have the majority, and you may dictate tastes, but if this poverty of sound is what you really want in your films because it's cooler to stand on the mountaintop of rarefied air and be above being touched by crude, corny, manipulative big & bold old orchestral music, you can have it.

Sure the old sound could go over the top, but your solution is that even Sonic Wallpaper is too much, that it's no scores at all because any music at all now goes over the top and is telling you how to think and feel or is a distraction or keeps you from thinking and feeling in a way you'd prefer? No way. I understand the logic of the position, why you've come to it, but it cheats us. It hamstrings movies, it takes away one of their strongest means of effect, and I don't think it makes them into a more effective movie experience, quite the contrary.

LL equated film music with the fascism of the laugh track. But if film music is inherently corny and fascist then all films are fascist in the same way even without any music since they are even more insistent on manipulating me on what to think and believe regardless. You can't reject film music for being fascist while still accepting films as non-fascist. You can still dislike the laugh track and the film score.

You can say as Dinko doies that it distracts and tells me what and how to think but you have to accept that the content of the film itself does that as well and you should consider giving up watching films altogether if you want to avoid being manipulated.

Unfortunately, though, there are too many of you who feel this way about film music to push you aside. The producers pander to you so they aren't going to go against your laughs and attitude and impose on you what you won't accept. But they aren't ready yet to give up on music and remove it entirely so what we get instead is a producer's solution a la Rick Berman, a very watered-down namby-pamby type of scoring.

And that's why everything is going into the toilet.

And I think North By Northwest illustrates a great deal of truth in what Dinko said before about technology improving to the point that film scores may be obsolete. Compare two of its most famous scenes: the drunken car chase and the airplane attack. The former absolutely relies on Herrmann's music; the latter is unscored. Why? Try watching the first scene without music. It looks a little ridiculous: rear projection, limited sound effects, Cary Grant convincingly drunk but not convincingly (in my opinion) looking like he's swerving down a mountain fearing for his life. The scene is certainly meant to be funny on some level, for sure, but it must also be suspenseful and thrilling, and that exhiliration is generated almost exclusively by Herrmann's music. Today, we can make car chases look and sound a lot more "realistic" (in quotes because car chases never happen in real life like they do in the movies, so their "realism" only goes so far). Perhaps "convincing" is a better word. With all the advances in sound effects, visual effects, and editing a car chase can generate much more of its exhiliration without the aid of music. And then, if you look at the airplane attack, that's a scene which would not be that much more convincing with modern technology; it's about as "realistic" as it could get. And conversely, a great deal of that scene's suspense is generated by its lack of music. Music would seem more like clutter in that scene. And in a contemporary car chase, which is generally already clutter upon clutter of sound and visual effects, music certainly does seem a little redundant.

However, you cannot point to one example like this and declare that film scores are obsolete. If The Ghost and Mrs. Muir were made today, it would require the most passive of sound design, and I doubt you could shoot a movie that would look much better than the original already does. Hence, the same quality and amount of music would be needed to achieve the same effect as the original. Of course, the fallacy in this argument is that the whole face of filmmaking has changed: North By Northwest might be made today (though it would look and sound much different) but The Ghost and Mrs. Muir would be laughed out of any pitch meeting (unless you could make it funnier and rewrite it so that the leads were in their early 20s). They just don't make movies like that anymore. By which I don't mean that movies are worse, just that they are different.

I'll have a lot more to say on that subject if we keep talking about it, but for this post I'd like to point out that we've really strayed from the original topic, which was: why do composers continue to work in a medium that seems to treat them worse and worse with each passing year.

I think a large part of the answer is: what else are they going to do? For whatever reason, many of them feel (or felt) called to this profession. Why don't they write symphonies? For one thing, there are already more concert composers out there than orchestras have money to commission works from. And the distribution of such work is abominable; if you think you have a hard time finding the latest film score release, try finding contemporary chamber music some time. Concert composers may have more freedom, but with a few exceptions their work is heard by a very small number of people, and when it does reach that specialized audience you would be hard pressed to say the music is respected any more than a film composer's. Classical audiences hate contemporary music, by and large. They don't want it on their radios or in their concert halls. You can blame serialism if you want to (it seems like most people do) but the phenomenon predates it. There are still people who, attending a concert where the first half is all Beethoven and the second all Stravinsky, will leave during the intermission to avoid having to sit through the Stravinsky. If even he hasn't gained their respect yet, what hope does a contemporary composer have?

So if the film composer is fed up with film and knows s/he will fare no better in the concert hall, what has s/he to do? Write pop songs? It's not unheard of. Do commercials? I bet lots of them already do. Can they organize a massive strike to call for more freedom? I guarantee you, there will always be more hacks waiting in the wings to take their place. So what do you do? You bear it. Richard Band eventually got fed up and decided he wasn't going to score any more horror films. What has he been doing since then? Commercials, and library music for reality TV shows (though now he's working with Stuart Gordon again).

If you're willing to work with electronics or smaller ensembles, you can probably have more freedom in indies (or fake indies, like movies made by "Warner Independent") where diversity and originality are still encouraged. But if your specialty is orchestral music, which most of those productions can't afford, what are you supposed to do? You just write the best damn music you can and hope the test audience likes it.

Kirk

P.S. Lou, I am wondering, in all sincerity...what does "prissy" mean in the context in which you have used it? Smug I get, but prissy?

No, prissy means prim, prudish, and easily bothered by excesses. I see film music as strong emotion, like tango dancing or hot sauce. To be against it seems, to me, to be against having a strong emotional element in films and therefore prissy.

While it's difficult to define what emotional music is or even to explain why listening to music can communicate or stir up emotional feeling in people, we have to try our best.

The Herrmann music in both your examples is emotional music. Emotional music isn't just love themes or music that points to warm interpersonal relations. And each of those two scores is appropriate to the emotional center of those two very different films.

TG&MM is about the sea and its emotional lure on people and a kind of non-physical love and admiration between two adults with the emphasis on the female protagonist. The music the film has is a "yin" score that underlines all of that content.

NBNW is less about interpersonal relationships and has less of the style of music you find in TG&MM. It's about a male protagonist and is basically a chase film. It's also about being a plaything, about being dwarfed by larger forces, politics, and institutions than you can personally handle. And the score, based on some wild South American dance rhythm, is a "yang" score that underlines all of that content.

Each is appropriately emotional music speaking from the heart of their respective films. And emotional music isn't just music of the "yin" type.

As for scoring or not scoring the cropduster attack in NBNW: It's very possible that the right selection of music would work well during the attack, but they had the noise of the plane flying overhead and they went against the cliche and tried for another approach that worked. For whatever reasons, right or wrong, Hitchcock always thought of his set pieces without music and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

But just because this scene works without music and succeeds on its sound alone doesn't mean that whole films will work without music.

Now music in films often has a functional side as well, to cover up mistakes. If the drunken drive looks a bit fake, then the music helps communicate what it's supposed to be emotionally even if the images are weaker at doing the same thing. The score boosts up and supports the film at that point and this is an element of film music that films rely on often, even today when they could do the same scene and make it look much more visually believable.

Getting back to the original question, why do composers put up with their mistreatment, is nice. But finding out the root causes of why composers are mistreated in the first place is equally a propos. And it seems that LL & Dinko may express a common public attitude of hostility towards film music that lies at the root of the whole situation.

That said, I follow what you say. If you are a composer and you're good at it but the job sucks while still paying well where else can you go? A university post? To try composing without patrons in a classical market that won't listen to anything that doesn't sound like it was written after 1850? In a way, it's like the army or the mafia, you can't unjoin. So, they have you over a barrel which means they have the power to mistreat you: "Yeah, you don't like it. Whatcha gonna do about it?"

Well, if you're Gabriel Yared, you can publically complain about it, or if you are Danny Elfman, you can walk from SPIDERMAN 3, but you do so at the risk of earning a costly reputation for being difficult that way.

So the "poor, homeless" composer (I wish I were so poor & homeless) has to the make the imposed alterations, follow the temp track, and give them the bland, non-music they want. He or she also has to accept the score rejections when all else fails and do it not just without fuss or resistance but even with a smile and enthusiasm.

If Rachel Portman is "devestated" by a score rejection, someone may not wish to hire her because they don't want to devestate her if they have to reject her score. Instead, the job will go to some more tough-as-nails guy who treats rejection with a shrug.

One would think working as a film composer would be better than working in fast food but at times the only difference seems to be the pay scale. Meanwhile, the Social Darwinists should drop all their other studies and head out to Hollywood instead.

In any case, through the discussion on this topic we've already had some good facts and theories about what composers go through, what they feel about their jobs, the factors behind pressuring and rejecting composers, why the situation has developed as it has, why the composers put up with it, and what (little) they themselves can do to change it.

Now, if you look over most of the often long-winded posts I've written here at MM.com over the years, you'll see me coming back time and again to these same basic issues.

You know my stance: most film music today is poor. It doesn't work dramatically in the films I see and it doesn't please as music to listen to away from films.

I have an interest in knowing why and in seeing if the trend is permanent or can be fixed.

I'm also aware that some good scores are still being produced despite the overall trend. And I'm aware that there are many who feel the absolute reverse of what I do, that the film music I like and champion is poor and outdated and that the newer scores are vastly superior experiences at both the levels of working in films and away from them.

And I see where there are some who go beyond the notions of old vs new or better vs poorer quality in scores to question if orchestral music or any kind of music beyond source music is appropriate for film.

It seems to me that these are where the various battlelines are drawn from the suites of the top Hollywood moguls right down to the sound coming out of my CD and DVD players.

The whole topic brings out the intellectual detective in me: ok, we have a situation, let's look at it and examine it from all sides and angles so we can understand what is going on.

And, in this case, the discussions here in this topic have helped me to get a slightly better handle on things than I had before, they've helped me better refine and define the overall picture and for that I thank everyone who has contributed so far.

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Lou Goldberg wrote:
The Herrmann music in both your examples is emotional music. Emotional music isn't just love themes or music that points to warm interprsonal relations. And each of those two scores is appropriate to the emotional center of those two different films.

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This does not mean film scores are obsolete, however. What it means is that using music to establish a landscape rather than using sound effects is now more of an artistic choice independent to each film, whereas it used to be common practice. I don't see this as a negative turn of events at all; it only means that film now has greater potential to be a more varied art form. But perhaps after going through some courses in sound design and learning just how much work and genuine artistry goes into making a good soundtrack, I'm more open to the idea of soundtracks not dominated by music. Or maybe I've just listened to too much John Cage and my entire idea of what constitutes music has changed.

I do agree with you that the overall quality of film scores today is poor. But I also feel that the overall quality of films being scored is poor, and mainstream film has been mostly absent from my radar for a long time now. The same goes for mainstream film scores.

The films I've seen this year that I've really liked have all used music wonderfully. 2046 with its heavy, dramatic strings and strong themes, The Consequences of Love with its lighter, brooding score and tongue-in-cheek electronica (which seem like they should be jarring, but complement each other quite well), Brothers Grimm with it's big orchestral theme-juggling, Danny Eflman's two Burton efforts, which I think contain some of his best score music in years (even if the songs are rather a let-down). Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart is one of the most intensely sickening films I've ever experienced, and its electronic noise music (a far cry from anything I have ever heard used in film before) is a large part of that. My second favorite film of the year so far, Antonioni's short Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo, succeeds beautifully through its sparse, music-less sound design, only to be lifted to divine heights at exactly the right moment in the end by the arrival of Palestrina on the soundtrack. Of all the films I've seen this year, the only film I probably would have liked more with better music is Batman Begins. If I routinely went to the multiplex, I would probably be able to cite a lot more than that one example, but I rarely show my face there anymore if I can help it. But I'm still hearing wonderful uses of music in the films I see; it may be a far cry from the kind of music you love (though you should really check out 2046 if you haven't yet) but I don't see the expansion of musical forms in film music as a negative thing, provided the music is used well.

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Lou Goldberg wrote:
Now music in films often has a functional side as well, to cover up mistakes.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
Dinko--On reflection, I wonder about your position. I mean does the music really not work at the emotional level for audiences or are you just objecting to some false layer of music that is put in over the reality you'd rather have be pure?

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A bit of both...?
If the music is distracting because it does not work on an emotional level, then its basic role of creating or increasing the emotion carried by the images is flawed. In such a case, the music not only does not achieve its purpose, it breaks the viewer's relationship with the movie in which he is attempting to immerse himself. It does that by suddenly creating a parallel train of thought to the viewer's interaction with the movie: the viewer becomes a critic, and at least for a while, sees the movie not as an experience, but rather as a piece of different gimmicks assembled together to artificially create some sort of dream which the viewer is supposed to relate to.

I would not refer to the reality in movies as pure. The whole idea of a movie is unrealistic. Since everything is false in such a film, movie music is no worse than other aspects of the moviemaking process. Of all of them however, I find the specifically composed (instrumental) film score to be the most artificial and least appropriate.
I can live with talking trees carrying midgets to fight a demonic wizard, whether on screen or in a book. I'm not so sure about the tree's antimodernism rant being underscored with a 100-piece off-screen orchestra.
The music is not telling the audience what to think anymore than the movie itself, including story, acting, effects, lighting, setting, etc. As such, film music is part of the overall movie watching experience. I don't think one can object to the music, but not to the movie if there is a problem with the message. Yet, believing in elves somehow seems easier than believing in the underscore.
There are all kinds of weird people in the world. Elves might just be one kind. Few of the weird (real life) people are accompanied by leitmotivs everytime they make an appearance, however.
This is also part of the reason I find opera particularly ridiculous. I don't know many people who speak by singing. And when they do, they are not accompanied by an orchestra (or any other music making instrument or ensemble). Ballet = same thing.
Sung, non staged opera (or ballet) is a different matter however. Stripped from the acting, the music, just like a film score, gains a life of its own... and becomes more believable.
The ballet or the opera, becomes a theatre play without the music.

Hitchcock films are practically all films about situations and their music reflects that. Also, Hitchcock isn't above using sound and score in blatantly out-to-shock-you ways. There is a moment in a film without any music, THE BIRDS, where the lights go out and you hear a bird cry like a scream at just that second. It's the equivalent of something jumping out at you and saying "Boo!"

The music in Hitchcock films, especially the Herrmann music in Hitchcock works along these lines.

As for your term "landscape" which I take to mean a kind of setting or background created through sound, well yes, you can create this without music and could even in the days of poorer mono sound recording.

I've seen a number of films that have wall to wall scores throughout their entire running time that wear out their purpose and welcome and make me wish for moments where there isn't music.

Let's look at film sound with dialogue, silence, sound effects, and music. And a soundtrack doesn't stand alone because there is always a visual that it is linked to. But let's consider it alone for the sake of analysis.

So we do without the score. We can choose to create the landscape without using music to help create it. Ok. And it can work, meaning that the approach can produce a film that still interests and communicates to an audience, and the film gains certain benefits from its choice not to use music.

It allows the audience an easier opportunity to make a wider interpretation and it allows for extra "realism" in a manufactured work of art. However, the film gains this by trading in the positive aspects of what music can bring to it. So, let's bring the score back for certain sections and see the effect.

According to Paul Johnson, art is about structuring reality, and sometimes that means narrowing the focus to one path which music can certainly do. Music brings its own power to make us feel. Music linked to image is a kind of montage which can produce a meaning built from the two. And there are many more effects that having a score can produce.

As for crutch music, music that fixes things, I can understand your opposition. In the first place, while music can improve things, it can't save a film, it can't make a bad film ever become a good one. But let's say a filmmaker has shot and edited a sequence and when it shows, people are unclear about what is going on, they don't get what the filmmaker intends. Ok, the filmmaker tripped up somewhere and is at fault. So the filmmaker goes to the composer and gets a piece of music that clairifies the intention in a way that audiences can now understand. I don't see why music can't be used in this way and I wouldn't expect filmmakers not to rely on it. Should they count on it before hand to fix scenes that aren't working at the script stage? Probably not. There is no saying that the music they hope will fix things really can.

Dinko--My initial reaction is to ask you why things must be so earthbound, why they can't be phantasmagorical but instead have to follow the laws of physics so to speak. I mean here we have art, a space where things can be different and surreal, where people can sing and dance in the streets accompanied by 100-piece orchestras you cannot see but can most definitely hear and you seem as if you don't want it to do any of that but to remain absolutely representational of the same world that surrounds it, even when it depicts the unbelievable. There are no film scores in life so there should be no film scores in film. Even when the film has elves, you can believe in the elves before you can ever believe in the music--odd since you know the leves are fake but the music is real. Maybe that's the problem, everytime you hear a music cue in a film you think of an orchestra playing on a sound stage somewhere.

Well, is the problem here with the medium or with you? You say a film score creates a train of thought parallel to your own that works against it and signals your critical faculties and brings you out of the illusion into reality. In other words, you see the music as having the effect of a Brechtian alienation technique. If so, it creates the exact opposite of the kind of response it has been put in there to achieve. But does it have this effect on everyone because music just doesn't work within the medium of film, or is it just you and others of your awareness and intellectual level that music doesn't work for. Maybe you are too aware for the average film with music to work on you and you require a special diet of films without music. However, maybe the guy sitting next to you doesn't have your alergic condition and isn't alienated by the score but is drawn in by it, he gets on that parallel train of thought and rides it to exactly the destination the train is headed towards. LL would sneer and call it being manipulated, but the crying or screaming audience member may be happy to have been so manipulated.

I really like Rozsa and all but I have noticed that when he made his comeback in film scoring from 1976 to his retirement in 82 he wrote different theme melodies etc but most of the rest of the music was all the same. You take away the main theme melody and all these scores sound almost identical. Of all the comeback scores I like parts of Fedora, Eye of Needle and Providence the best. Last Embrace too. And all those are very similar.

But even before this late period where the scores sound like a continuation of each other, I feel there are other times when Rozsa is spinning his wheels. It's not that the music is bad or isn't right for the film but that it plateaus at a certain level of quality and doesn't breakout to the greater heights of quality that I know he has in him.

Maybe that isn't entirely Rozsa's fault. Maybe he felt uninspired by MOONFLEET and TIP ON A DEAD JOCKEY and needed a BEN-HUR to bring out his best.

Compare these later scores with some of his earlier ones like THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET, LYDIA, THE POWER, THE RED HOUSE, and others (JUNGLE BOOK being the extreme example), and the differences jump out at you. Even many of his M-G-M scores had that same orchestral sound that other composers' scores at that studio had. Maybe if he had worked for smaller studios he wouldn't have fallen into that "sameness" he did working on so many pictures for the same studio.

Even if it's only the addition or emphasis of a single instrument, that was often enough to help set one score apart from another. Perhaps Rozsa should have worked with different orchestrators instead of the same friend?

And to answer the question of why film composers put up with all that they do, despite claims that they love the immediacy of hearing music performed moments after they finished writing it, they love the challenges, etc., they all do it mainly for one reason: THE MONEY. If they got paid one-tenth what they did, not a single one of them would bother writing another score. They'd probably try their hands at writing pop songs or video game music. But they WOULDN'T be writing film scores.

They wouldn't be writing symphonies, either, because classical music pays almost nothing when you compose such a work, and the performance royalties are pretty much nonexistent. And mechanical royalties for a solid-selling classical CD would probably bring about $2,000 to the composer, which would not pay him/her very well for the months or years it took him/her to compose the piece and prepare the scores and parts for the recording.

Like it or not, it's in large part because of the homes and cars and boats and other stuff that film composers can buy that they are in and remain in the business. It is, in fact, a business.

For starters: per the Lou & Dinko crossfire, let me throw in this bit of research compiled by Yours Truly circa 1976 (?!)--

"...The musical scores of these films are generally agreed upon to have enhanced the emotion of fear to the extent that the music was an integral part of the film. Not only in King Kong and Jaws but in Bride Of Frankenstein, Psycho and Hunchback Of Notre Dame are the lurid rhythms of brass and string combined so tightly. The American Journal Of Psychotherapy states how musical strains 'under certain circumstances may confirm an interpretation and thus reinforce...they may represent both the expression of a feeling and the resistance against the examination of the feeling.'"

That Journal quote sure seems to capture how music in and of itself can result in polar opposite reactions. And I'll interpret a step further and opine that the same thing applies to the mere inclusion of music in film a la the "crossfire"! But who needs pop psychology. For me it all boils down to the fact that we have reached the point of crassest commercialization to the point that it's what will sell and by "sell" we are talking any and every product tie-in inclusive. And to hell with art!

For our purposes, read "art" as really good film music composed by recognized masters past & present {mostly past }.

Now, I don't want to comment on the 'past vs. present' ordeal. It's been discussed to death and then some.

But the motivations of contemporary film composers is a more interesting issue. I'm sure it varies considerably, but part of me wants to believe that they're in it for ARTISTIC purposes. They have creative musical souls that are very "visual" in nature and that need an outlet somehow (part from growing up with strong visual stimuli, part from having access to musical equipment that doesn't require a lengthy education). That it pays better in Hollywood than in the concert hall is just an added bonus, I think. Still, there's no guarantee that you will make a lot of money when you embark upon the road to film music composition.

It may be correct that you need to write "absolute" music (symphonies etc.) in order to gain respect from the musical elite, but snobbery of that kind is the result of ignorance and the age-old prejudice of "what is popular is necessarily worse in quality" than any point-of-departure for a genuine assessment.

We've seen - time and again - that established film composers have created fine concert works that rival those of contemporary classical composers. When they want to.

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Originally posted by Thor:
We've seen - time and again - that established film composers have created fine concert works that rival those of contemporary classical composers. When they want to.

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Getting back to the original premise that Thor just commented on, I think there are different reasons why composers are attracted to this work that may vary as much as there are composers themselves.

One thing we know is that to be a composer in Hollywood requires a friendly personality, a fair amount of talent (either in composing or ripping off other composers), an ability to work fast and on-time for deadlines, flexibility, and the strength to take rejection.

In a way, I'm led to yet another metaphor/analogy between the film composer and the newspaper reporter. The reporter also has to write a very streamlined text where things are simple, easy to read, in a basic style, where individualistic touches and purple prose are frowned upon, they have to meet deadlines, and they often have text chopped or re-written or dropped for space. In some ways, it too, seems like a thankless job, but people do it.

Now money & other factors aside, both composers and reporters could work other gigs with more respect, but talent, desire, ability, professionalism, or what have you, keeps them at the word processor and staff paper. Who they are and what they do seem to align. We all have to do some job and this is what seems to fit.

As for where the topic went, to a question of whether there should be music in films, it's still an interesting question.

Let's consider a shot in a film without score. Say two people kissing. Well, that in itself should communicate the basics, right? But what if the director wants to communicate more. Romantic music, scary music, comic music, all provide more information, some reinforces the shot, others work in contrast or counterpoint but give us another way to read the image.

Think of this equasion: Shot + Music=More Info than just silent shot alone.

When cinema figures out how to create a shot that communicates everything without the need for the music to comment, music will probably disappear. We might even be at that place now, but Hollywood hasn't agreed and still uses scoring and orchestral scoring at that.

As for JNH's replacement score, I liked it. I don't know if I could play it a lot on its own and love it over time, but in the film, the descending Kong motif, the love theme, the choir, etc. all seemed to fit.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
Think of this equasion: Shot + Music=More Info than just silent shot alone.

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Absolutely true. Now think of this equation: Shot + Music = More Info than is needed. Superflous information can be either discarded, or consciously absorbed and analyzed.

In other words:
We take the original equation
Shot + Music = More Info, and rewrite it as such:
Shot + Music�ª = More Info�ª
The added presence or increase of the music leads to more information, which can be either absorbed on a subconscious level, or actively accounted for during the scene.

However, since the human brain is currently limited in the amount of information it can process at any one time, though admittedly some brains are capable of more multitasking than others, then the actual equation could be:
Shot + Music�ª = [More Info]
where the [square brackets] represent a constant value.

Hence, if [More Info] is kept constant, all other things being equal ("ceteris paribus" and all that crap) then any increase in the music component, will inevitably lead to a compensating decrease in the "Shot" component, such that the equality to the constant [More Info] component remains as it was originally set.

for me, Shot + Music = emotion

The reason I listen to film music is for the unique form of emotion derived from an orchestra. I tend to like stongly thematic scores the best, but these are as imbued with emotion as the more complex and challenging dramatic offerings. Visuals allow for a specific emotional underpinning.

I like Beethoven's 5th, but Delerue's Chouans! totally blows me away. There is an immediacy, intensity and grandeur directly related to a storyline and its characters. It's no mystery to me that GD would have written the score, though I do not know the ultimate quality of the movie.

Generally in agreement about King Kong, though the big ape did tug at my heart a time ot two.

The very first thing I added to this thread was the notion that we are looking far too reductively at cinema, and I think this is still happening. There are many, many more ways to add information (or emotion) to a shot of two people kissing. The framing of the shot, the lighting, the way the actors kiss, how long the kiss goes on, how one kisser is holding the other. And this isn't even taking into account the context of the story in which this kiss takes place, which is surely going to add more information to what the shot means than anything else will.

I am not saying (and would never say) this disregards music as a way of communicating ideas and emotion. All I am saying is that music's ability to communicate ideas doesn't necessitate its presence in film. Music is simply one of the many, many tools at the filmmaker's disposal. They choose whichever tool they feel will help them get the job done. A lot of the time, music is that tool. Sometimes it isn't.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
When cinema figures out how to create a shot that communicates everything without the need for the music to comment...

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I'll eat my shoe if music ever disappears from cinema. No method of cinematic communication will always work better 100% of the time. Just because other methods can sometimes do the job just as well doesn't mean music is going to go away. It's not an either/or situation, and it never has been.

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Originally posted by Scorro:
I like Beethoven's 5th, but Delerue's Chouans! totally blows me away.

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You are quite right that visuals often allow a specific emotional underpinning. But sometimes they do not, and furthermore there are innumerable cases in which there is a specific emotional underpinning in music composed independent of any visuals.

This is sort of what I was talking about above. I have a passionate disdain for any laws or equations that people try to impose on this sort of thing. There are far, far too many variables to reduce film music (and/or cinema) to "Shot + Music = More Info" or "Shot + Music = emotion." There are so very many exceptions to rules such as these that to treat them like rules at all seems to me rather ridiculous.

Kirk
NP - Iva Bittova

***To whom are you referring? I'm not arguing, just curious. I can certainly think of film composers who have written works that rival the best that "contemporary classical" composers come up with, but aside from maybe Jerry Goldsmith, the only examples I can think of are composers who wrote/write just as frequently for the concert hall as they did/do for film. Or if not as frequently, at least frequently enough that they can't be considered film composers who are just "crossing over" now and then***

I am referring to guys that are PRIMARILY film composers, of course, such as Williams, but also someone like Danny Elfman. When he FINALLY composed a piece for the concert hall, I wasn't that surprised to hear that it sounded as good as any contemporary classical piece I've heard (although a little too eclectic, perhaps). The evolution of the piece, the exploration of various instrumental timbres etc. That pieces of the "Seranada Schizophrana" eventually ended up in a film score is perhaps symptomatic of these composers' need to VISUALIZE their music or to reach beyond the concert hall. But in no way does it undermine their compositional skills or sense of originality.

Also, most of the "cross-over" composers (Tan Dun, Corigliano, Goldenthal, Glass etc.) have no need to QUALITATIVELY separate between the celluloid screen and concert stage. Yes, they are fully aware of the different demands that the two media require, but I'm sure their motivations for doing both is based on a desire to communicate some ideas through their music, first and foremost.

I don't sit at my keyboard fuming with anger when I type my responses. Until your last post I thought this was a normal, frank conversation. I don't know how you talk with your friends, but when I get into arguments about art/politics/religion/whatever with mature people, we can call each other's ideas "ridiculous" or "full of crap" without hurting each other's feelings. Forgive me for not using smilies to assure everyone that I mean no harm.

And all I have to go on is what is written in the posts. Perhaps I should have said "formulae" instead of "rules." In either case, I find such an outlook overly reductive and I did my best to explain why I thought so. Formulae are generally considered universal; this is where I inferred the presence of "rules." Any time I misinterpret someone's comments, I am quite eager to have the knots untangled.

In that spirit, I would like to point out a few things about the paragraph of mine you quoted.

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I wrote:
I have a passionate disdain for any laws or equations that people try to impose on this sort of thing.

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There are so very many exceptions to rules such as these that to treat them like rules at all seems to me rather ridiculous.

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Kirk

Thank you for the thoughtful disambiguation. Somehow Elfman's piece totally slipped my mind. And I wasn't sure about Williams because I don't know how much concert work he writes compared to his film music (despite what he is best known for).

Incidentally, I agree with pretty much everything you said, though I'm all about Lou's comment:

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I think there are different reasons why composers are attracted to this work that may vary as much as there are composers themselves.

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