Just a side note to Christopher Webber's excellent reply to me:

>>I doubt whether most composers are particularly moral beings while they
>>are composing.  There's too much else they have to worry about.
>
>Really? Most of the ones I've come across have been acutely moral
>beings where their art was concerned, sometimes even to their own cost.
>Pragmatism is of course the highest virtue; but there is a little word,
>"integrity", which is particularly precious to most artists - at least
>to those imaginative spirits who keep on striving to create something
>worthwhile in today's less than auspicious cultural circumstances.

The only composer I know who's gone so far as to make a public issue
of his "integrity" is Elliot Carter, who at least once stormed out of a
concert before a piece of his was actually played, mostly, I suspect, to
demonstrate that he had integrity.  Personally, I don't care whether he has
it or not.  The music is enough for me.  But, you're right, there are some
composers like Carter and certainly Benjamin Lees and Babbitt (to name
three very different musicians) who are concerned for their originality
as composers.

I suppose I should distinguish between the composer and the listener.
As a listener, the only thing I have before me is the work.  In general,
I don't know enough about the composer to judge motives, and such knowledge
is unnecessary to me to judge a work.  John Tesh, I would imagine, is
probably extremely sincere about what he does.

As to "personality," I could point to a lot of composers who have no
readily-identifiable musical personality, and yet I wouldn't call them
hacks either.  Moreover, I know you've made this point yourself, but I'd
like to repeat it:  movie music, like any incidental music, translated
"straight" to a concert setting is always unsatisfactory.  Some work must
be done to join the fragments - the normal "units" of incidental music -
into a convincing whole.  Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, Grieg's
Peer Gynt, Copland's Red Pony and Our Town, and Walton's Shakespeare scores
all had to be substantially recast, fortunately by the genius composers
themselves, before they became convincing concert pieces.

Finally, about the "Psycho" shower scene - you're wrong.  I can't say
any fairer than that.  It's almost *all* music, as is most of the movie.
Try watching with the sound turned off.  It's the music that gooses you
throughout.  The rather tame pictures merely illustrate.  Or so it seems
to me.

Steve Schwartz