FSFT5: Desert Island Discs aka Is There A Film Music Canon?

So I’ve decided to wade into the shark infested waters that I have so far avoided.  When I first started the Film Score Friday Top 5, there was one list that I avoided like the Swine Flu: Top 5 Scores, what could also be termed a so-called “Desert Island” list (as in, if you were stuck on a Desert Island, which scores would want to have with you).  Both of these lists, or questions postulated to a person, point to a similar idea: the canon. 

The term canon in this context is not the large gun fired from a Pirate Ship or other sailing vessel, or even the imitative musical device used in works as far ranging as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” to Pachelbel’s  infamous on in D heard everywhere, at least according to one comic.  No, in this sense, canon is meant as a collection of works or artists that we hold up as exemplars of whatever genre under consideration.  In criticism, historiography, and other such disciplines, this can become a rather thorny topic.  As a musicologist in training, one learns the “Western Art Music” canon (you know, those dead Germanic guys: Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Brahms, etc), but at the same time, scholars are now attacking that very idea not only because of its very limited scope, but also because of the very way in which it was created.  (If you wish to know more, I would direct you to the recent articles by University of Oklahoma musicologist Dr. Sanna Pederson.) 

So all this brings me to a crisis of sorts in my own study of film music.  Since deciding a few years ago to make film music my primary area of study, I have been doing my best to acquaint, and in some cases reacquaint, myself with those scores and composers that most people talk about: Korngold, Steiner, Herrmann, Rozsa, Goldsmith, along with the more contemporary practitioners (Williams, Elfman, Zimmer, etc).  But no matter how much I hear or read, I still feel like there is so much out there that I have yet to hear.  I know I have a dearth of Hermann in my ear largely because my school’s library doesn’t have much of his music (mainly one compilation disc of his work with Hitchcock and the North By Northwest score), but even beyond Herrmann, I still feel like there is so much that I don’t know. 

Which brings me to the question in the title of this post: Is there a Film Music ‘Canon?’  My instincts say yes and no.  On the one hand, we humans have the insatiable urge to catalog and categorize things; put them into neat little boxes.  Witness the overabundance of lists not only by the AFI but just about every major trade publication and magazines.  But by doing so, what do we gain?  We know not everyone is going to agree:  sure Mozart was a genius, but was he that great?  (Personally, I say yes, but that’s another blog entirely, we’re here to talk about film music.)  The obvious gain is that it does help one to have a place to begin when trying to get into a new genre of music, art, film, etc, but it also has the adverse cultural effect of giving message board trollers something to rant about and rail against – which is maybe my biggest fear: either leaving something out or going for the obvious choice. 

So, now that I’ve given you an entirely too long introduction, here is my response to the question of:  If you were on a desert island, and magically had power and a stereo system but could only have 5 film scores with you, what would they be?  Not a ‘best’ list, but rather a personal one.  Yes, I took the easy way out.

 1) The Empire Strikes Back – John Williams:  Obvious, yes, but I couldn’t survive long on a desert island without my “Imperial March.”

2) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – James Horner: My love for this has been stated elsewhere in this blog, ‘nuff said.

3) The Hunt for Red October – Basil Poledouris:  Not only was Poledouris born in my home town of Kansas City, Missouri (like famed director Robert Altman), this score is one of my long time favorites…if only for the opening title with its Russian chorus.  But the rest of it is also pretty good.  More a sentimental pick, I would still like to have it with more on this remote atoll.

4) North By Northwest – Bernard Herrmann:  One of the few Herrmann scores I know well, and a favorite.  The off kilter meter is great and fits the film so well.

5) The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly – Ennio Morricone:  Morricone’s scores for Leone are so iconic and well known that his scoring for the Old West has passed into cliché.  But that doesn’t make it any less amazing.  Besides, when I start having imaginary gunfights on my Desert Island (either out of boredom, insanity, or both), I could hardly imagine a better soundtrack.

 So what if magically I had five more CDs on the island?  Or maybe instead of taking my top 5 symphonies I grabbed five more scores and stuck them into my magical duffle bag that also survived the calamity that washed me ashore this remote Desert Isle, those would be:

 6) Star Trek: The Motion Picture – Jerry Goldsmith:  Goldsmith perfectly scored the first Trek film, and it still bugs me to no end that Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory dissed it.  Yes, I know that it’s “just a TV show,” but a show so steeped in nerd culture should know better.

7) Battlestar Galactica Season 1 – Bear McCreary:  The Season 4 album has more music and overall was his best season on the show, but so many of my favorite cues are on the Season 1 album that that’s the one I’d grab.

8 ) There Will Be Blood – Jonny Greenwood:  It might be a little early for me to put this on the list considering I just heard it for the first time a week ago…but what a week it has been.  I hope to write a post on this one sometime in the near future.  I know that there are those who hated this score, but I found it amazing upon my first listening, and even more so once I saw the film.

9) Dodes’kaden – Toru Takemitsu: Not Kurosawa’s best film, and probably not Takemitsu’s best score, but there is just something about the main theme that I love so much: a joy, a simplicity…but also a melancholy.  It also sounds like it could light right into the song “MacArthur Park” which could be a bad thing to some people.

10) Lost Season 1 – Michael Giacchino:  Hey, I’m stuck on a Desert Island, you didn’t actually expect me to leave this off, did you?

 Well that’s it for now.  Disagree?  Of course you will, instead it’s…inevitable.   So I want to hear from you.  What would you choose?  And what would you include in a so-called ‘canon?’

Film Score Friday NOT Top 5: Summer Score Round-Up Spectacular!

Okay, I know this more than just a day late coming, but better late than never, right?  So what follows is a list of most of the films I saw this summer (in theatres) and some thoughts on their scores.  Plus, I’m also including a few major soundtrack releases from the summer, and as an added bonus to you, loyal reader, an extra special discussion prompt!

 Note: These are roughly in the order in which I saw them.

 Star Trek – Michael Giacchino:  I’ve already written on this in an earlier post, so I won’t say much else here except that this was one of the best scores I heard this summer.  To me, only two other scores can really compete with this.

 Terminator Salvation – Danny Elfman:  A good score from Elfman, not great, though.  The opening cue is very good, and he does a good job integrating the original Terminator thematic ideas in it.  The guitar based cues humanize the music and make us identify with the resistance soldiers, but overall the score, like the film, is just lacking that something special.

 Up – Michael Giacchino: The second of three in the 2009 summer of Giacchino (the third, Land of the Lost I have yet to hear or see).  Giacchino does another great job of knowing just how to score a Pixar film: sentimental and bumping right up against cliché without going over.  Here, he uses a sound that is meant to evoke that of the ‘20s and ‘30s, almost like a silent film orchestra, for those scenes dealing with the old man’s past; evoking the nostalgia that leads to his quest.  It’s wistful and wonderful, and also heartbreaking when it needs to be.  All three of his Pixar scores (The Incredibles and Ratatouille prior to this) are among the best of recent years.  They have that playful quality that reminds us that movies can be fun without being rude, violent, or sexy, much like Pixar films themselves.

 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – Steve Jablonsky:  I really don’t have much to say about this one.  The film was mixed in such a way that the music was hard to hear most of the time, and I never did pick up the CD release.  For more discussion, I direct you to the post on Herr Vogler’s blog.

 Moon – Clint Mansell: The score that surprised me the most this summer, and if I had to pick a ‘best’ score I heard this summer (of just what I heard, there are a lot I didn’t, so don’t get mad), it would most likely be this…or maybe Up.  It’s just a deceptively simple score and has two main ideas: a piano ostinato that you hear almost throughout in some form, and a lyric melody used in two cues on the CD release.  There are many cues that are more atonal and electronic in nature (reminding me of the middle section of “Echoes” by Pink Floyd), but the main idea is the piano ostinato, which drives home the solitude and repetitive nature of the main character’s life.

 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Nicholas Hooper:  I’ve already said a bit on this.  The score was definitely a step up for Hooper from Order of the Phoenix, but it’s also no Prisoner of Azkaban.  I’ll direct you to my comments elsewhere on this blog.

 District 9 – Clinton Shorter: I really want to like this score because there is a lot to like about it, but for me it really smacks of the Zimmer/Howard score for The Dark Knight…and there are just too many similarities to ignore.  There are times when a cue is structured a lot like a cue for the CD release of Knight, which means that most likely that Knight cue had been temped in so Shorter was sort of locked into how that cue was edited to picture.  This was Shorter’s first “major” motion picture (according to IMDB he had done a lot of TV work prior).  That said, I look forward to hearing what he does in the future.

 Inglourious Basterds – Ennio Morricone, et al.:  Supposedly  Tarentino wanted Morricone to score the film, but scheduling wouldn’t allow for it, so he did the next best thing: he used music Morricone (and a few others) had already written, and I must say that it worked.  Luckily Tarentino didn’t use the most iconic of Morricone’s cues (the ones from the Leone westerns), which would have proved too distracting.  But the ones he did choose worked very well and the end result was one of the best films of the summer. 

Other Releases: 

Battlestar Galactica Season 4 – Bear McCreary:  Yes, more Galactica music.  I know I sound like a broken record, but McCreary really outdid himself in season 4.  I mentioned a few cues in my Top 5 list a month or so back, but the entire album really deserves a listen by all.  I don’t know why McCreary hasn’t done a major studio film release, but it’s hard to imagine that he won’t be getting the call soon.  I’ve heard the sound he created for BSG cropping up in so many other scores recently that it’s getting somewhat annoying. 

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan – Complete Score – James Horner:  The most exciting score to be (re)released this summer.  Long out of print on CD and then only in a shorten form, Horner’s first major work in Hollywood, and, in my opinion, one of his finest scores.  Maybe it’s all my nostalgic memories of watching the movie, but there is a quality about the music that fits so well with them film.  And as many people have commented around the Internets, how can you not help but scream “Khan!” during the “Buried Alive” cue. 

Discussion Question: 

It’s recently been announced or rumored (who knows which with the Web rumors) that Ridley Scott will be getting to work on an Alien prequel film soon.  Should this actually happen, who do you think should write the score?  Just as the franchise has a quite a pedigree of directors (Scott, James Cameron, and David Fincher…I’m ignoring Alien Resurrection on all counts), the composers who have worked on it have been equally talented (Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and Elliot Goldenthal).  Given that Mr. Goldsmith has passed on, who should take his place to work with Scott?  Looking at recent collaborations, Marc Streitenfeld seems to be a likely candidate, or could he go back to working with Hans Zimmer?  Or maybe Harry Gregson-Williams, whom he worked with on Kingdom of Heaven?  But my question to you is, if you had your druthers (yes, I did just use that word), and barring the discovery of a lost Goldsmith score for a film not yet made, who would you pick to score the film?  I’m not sure who I’d choose, some of the recent sci-fi scores might point the way, maybe Bear McCreary?  Or maybe Clint Mansell, whom I mentioned earlier in this post, he is a fellow Brit after all, and a more electronic based score could really add a unique sound to the film.  

Well, that’s it for now.  I am trying to update as often as possible, but as I said before, this is a tough semester.  As always, I’ve extended an open invitation to you, the reader, to contact me with any entries you might want to write, including ones in the ever popular “Film Score Friday Top 5” series.  Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Leonard Rosenman

Yes, I’m still alive.  Sorry for the lack of activity, but such is life in grad school some semesters.

I’ve just recently purchased the Film Score Monthly release of Leonard Rosenman’s Cobweb score (see the previous entry of Herr Vogler’s excellent FSFT5 Avant-garde film score).  And listening to it has made me go back and think of what other scores of Rosenman that I know…which is only two.  His score for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (which is a great score, with the utterly creepy, atonal arrangements of hymns that the mutant humans sing to the bomb).  But listening to The Cobweb and also Edge of the City (which is also on the disc), and also given Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it is apparent that Rosenman is a film composer who did alot to bring 20th Century musical techniques to film after the heyday of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner scores in the ’30s and ’40s.

In the excellent liner notes for the Cobweb release, Jeff Bond (who writes alot of reviews and articles for FSM and some other books) writes on Rosenman’s difficulty in trying to maintain a career as a film composer and a concert composer.  He studied with names familar to most music students: Luigi Dallapicolla, Roger Sessions, and Arnold Schoenberg, and was an up and comer when James Dean (who he gave piano lessons to) recommended him to score East of Eden, the film that put Dean on the map.

But after Rosenman became established in the film world, he found it hard to get his concert/chamber music performed, an unfortunate state of affiars that still persists today for composers trying to do both (composers like Toru Takemitsu are the exception in being able to maintain active careers in both).  And while Rosenman didn’t have much impact in concert music, listening to these early scores of his, Cobweb was only his second film, it is dissapointing that more people don’t know his name.  Sure, those who study and listen to film music know his name and appreciate him, but can his importance, especially to film music using 20th Century techniques, really be underestimated?

I’ve also been working Jerry Goldsmith’s Planet of the Apes score, hoping to do a project on it in my Post-Tonal analysis class, and it’s hard to imagine that score coming about had Rosenman not set the precendent beforehand with Cobweb.

Sorry that there isn’t anything more substantial after my long silence, but that’s it for now.

FSFT5: Avant-Garde Film Scores

So in what will hopefully be one of many guest bloggers, Herr Vogler has given us this wonderful Film Score Friday List!

Dictionary.com defines “avant-garde” as: 

-adjective  

2. of or pertaining to the experimental treatment of artistic, musical, or literary material.

Beyond that, one’s definition of “avant-garde” is extremely subjective; my “normal” might be another’s “extreme”. For the purposes of this particular entry I want to set certain parameters that more-or-less define avant-garde scoring in narrative filmmaking in the following way (without trying to be overly rigorous):

 1. A score that utilizes experimental techniques in conjunction with traditional techniques throughout.

2. The use of avant-garde techniques is not self-conscious. It is a means toward the end of enhancing the narrative.

3. The reasons for using advanced or experimental techniques are because it could be no other way. The final film would almost be unimaginable with a different score. (Really an extension of #2).

With that in mind, I submit for your approval the following Top 5 avant-garde film score nominees:

 #5.) The Cobweb (Leonard Rosenman, 1955). More often written about than listened to, this score opened the door for avant-garde scoring in narrative films. The Cobweb was the first notable use in narrative film of the 12-tone technique as a unifying compositional device for an entire score. Rosenman has said in interview that the Piano Concerto, Op. 42 of Arnold Schoenberg (one of his teachers) was a major influence in writing the score.

 #4.) The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (David Shire, 1974). You’re probably thinking to yourself Seriously? Yep. Shire brings together big band-style writing centered around 12-tone organizational techniques. The score is jazzy, gritty, percussion-oriented and a snapshot of the composer’s idea of the “sound” of New York in the mid 1970s. The CD release from several years back was one of Film Score Monthly’s earliest releases. I believe it was Doug Adams who wrote up a terrific little companion essay in that month’s issue giving a basic explanation of 12-tone technique and how Shire used it in the film. For me the great thing about this score is that, beyond the grittiness of it, it has atmosphere to burn. This was well before atmosphere meant “keyboard drones” (which is another post).

 #3.) Altered States (John Corigliano, 1980). John Corigliano probably wouldn’t have developed certain aspects of his compositional technique had it not been for this film. He invented a number of techniques (many of which seem to be derived from the Polish avant-garde) including certain improvisatory/aleatoric techniques for creating a lot of orchestral activity. One of these techniques Corigliano refers to as “motion sonority”. In this technique two pitches (a fifth apart for example) are placed inside a box and the performers are told to improvise between those two pitches for a predetermined period of time (incidentally, many of his techniques were absorbed by his former student Elliot Goldenthal who has, over time, deployed them in his own creative ways. But that’s also another post. The music is highly theatrical (though quite lyrical at times, too) and measures up to the theatricality of the film itself and it’s difficult to imagine anything else with the film.

 #2.) The Matrix (Don Davis, 1999). There are plenty of examples of narrative film from the last 20 or so years with isolated cues that utilize minimalist techniques but The Matrix is the only example I can come up with (by a composer who makes their living primarily in film that is) that utilizes minimalist techniques to unify a score. But it’s much more than that, too. On the surface it seems to be a battle between post-1945 modernist writing (representing the Agents and the Matrix itself) and a postminimalist aesthetic (associated more with the protagonists) that the composer himself refers to as a postmodern aesthetic.

 #1.) Planet of the Apes (Jerry Goldsmith, 1968). Few composers wrote so many interesting scores in so many different genres as Jerry Goldsmith, but science-fiction is where his talent was truly allowed to shine. This is the crème-de-la-crème. Honestly I could have chosen any one of at least a dozen scores to fit the bill but this is the high-water mark for Goldsmith and the avant-garde. For Planet of the Apes Goldsmith combines together a quasi-serial-to-freely-atonal harmonic language and Bartókian percussiveness with (for its time) inventive orchestration techniques; wind players are instructed to blow air through their instruments while depressing keys without making traditional sounds; horn players are instructed to reverse their mouthpieces and play; strings and harp are all echoplexed from time to time and the percussion section is heavily augmented (no more famously than the metal mixing bowls utilized in “The Searchers” or the addition of the Brazilian cuica).

 Posted by Herr Vogler http://musicinventor.blogspot.com

“Ikiru” and the Sound of Silence

Hello dear readers.  I hope my abrupt departure has not caused anyone to go running to hills in fear that my life has been cut short by a “death panel” or some other such nonsense concocted by the Party Out of Power.  Sorry to drop in political commentary, but Kurosawa’s film Ikiru cannot help but make one think of the health care debate since it is about a man finding out he has only 6 moths to live and then trying to come to grips with his life and giving his remaining days meaning.  Granted, had this film taken place today, he might have had more time to live, but in the end, the question of the film is, “what has my life meant?”  But I’m not here to really discuss the film’s plot, but rather it’s sound and music…or rather, it’s lack.  One of the truly remarkable things about Kurosawa’s use of sound in this film is his manipulation of silence.

The first true silence occurs after our protagonist has received the news of his condition.  Kanji Watanabe (played beautifully by Takashi Shimura in one of his greatest roles), walks along a street but there is no sound.  As the scene continues, we realize that there isn’t just no sound indicating a quiet street, but literally no sound.  It is not until Watanabe takes a step into the street and is almost run down that the cacophony of the street comes screaming onto the audiotrack.  In many ways, this moment marks a structural break in the film, as it is this moment that Watanabe makes the decision that something has to change in his life.  Kurosawa uses similar aural cues in subsequent scenes to mark, literally, life-changing decisions of Watanabe’s (first the deafening sound of a train and then a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ – royalties paid to the estate of Patty and Mildred Hill? – in a restaurant).

But where Kurosawa’s use of silence is at its peak is in the last third of the film during the wake for Watanabe (yes, for the last 50 minutes of the film, the lead character is absent except for a photo and flashbacks).  To begin with, there is no underscoring for the wake scenes.  As recounted in Teruyo Nogami’s memoir, Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, composer Fumio Hayasaka had written music for the scene, but after viewing a rough cut with the score, Kurosawa decided that the music overwhelmed the sequences and ordered it cut out.  The resulting sequence does indeed incur most of it’s power precisely becuase there is no score that could have made it more sentimental by it’s presence.  Instead, the absence of music creates another aural hole which parallels many of the temporal holes that the plot’s construction creates (a hole most visibly obvious by the absence of Watanabe as a living person in the last third of the film).

Where the silence is most deafening is when, many times, in the transition from flashback to present, the flashback will end with a long shot of a slowly weakening Watanabe in silence, and that silence will continue for a beat into the present and then the people at the wake will resume talking.  It is almost as if Kurosawa left the silent beat prior to saying ‘action’ in the final cut of the film.  In the end, he created a hole in the audiotrack, one that heightens the absence of the character of Watanabe.

Stephen Prince in The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa comments on the temporal “ellipses” in the film’s plot – how Watanabe will be absent and we’ll learn of his absence though dialogue from his co-workers or family, or though the occasional narrator.  I believe that Kurosawa very consciously uses these aural gaps in the wake scene to much the same end, just as Watanabe’s phyiscal absence to his co-workers is as if he is already fading from this world, the aural absence of sound reminds us of the loss.  The large silence on the street is almost our theme: Watanabe is so shocked by the news of his illness that he feels as if death has already taken him, but he returns when the sound returns – shocking both him and the viewer.

Kurosawa is a master of manipulating sound in his films, something that is rarely commented on by critics.  Yes, they will mention things such as the street scene, but I have yet to see anyone provide a description as detailed as those given to his visual technique.  It is my hope to one day rectify this deficiency.