Don Satz:

>Ever since I joined MCML, there has been an underlying issue of whether
>film music composers should be accorded classical music composer status,
>either through the style of their music or its quality.  It's a delicate
>issue, but one which can be discussed politely.

Look, all film music is, is incidental music, just like Mendelssohn, Grieg,
and Elgar used to write.  If you listen to complete scores of the latter,
you find the same little bits that start from nowhere and peter out into
nothing.  The one difference between the two is the lack, usually, in film
music of an extended entr'acte or intermezzo because there's no need to
cover a scene change or a dropped curtain.  Grieg, Mendelssohn, and Elgar
remade their incidental music into suites suitable for concert performance.
This has also happened for some film scores.  I agree that the two contexts
- film and concert hall - differ and that one is not always easily
translatable to the other.  The difference is NOT that classical composers
are inherently better than theater or film composers, but that their
functions differ.  Some of Williams's scores are better than others or
more successful in their concert form.  The only music from the Star Wars
trilogy I really thought much of was the ewok music.  On the other hand,
his scores for The Reivers, Dracula, and Close Encounters I thought quite
fine, both as film scores and as concert suites.

People complain about composers who make too much money, as if we can't get
out of our heads the picture of the pure-souled artist, the Muse's acolyte,
starving in his garret.  We conveniently forget about Beethoven, Brahms,
Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Richard Strauss.  I hear that Williams charges
$250,000 just to look at a movie, no guarantees he will do the score.  One
reason for this is that he's trying to discourage people from giving him
film work.  He's got all the money he needs and wants to compose on his own
agenda.  His scores conceived for concert hall are quite different from the
films.  I doubt anyone hearing the trumpet concerto would recognize it as
John Williams.  I'm not a great fan of the concert works, but I'm not a
great fan of a lot of composers.

As for stealing - just about every composer steals, even the ones on
Parnassus.  To be an artist is to be a thief on a grand scale.  The polite
words for it are "influence" and "homage."

Steve Schwartz