Don Satz:

>Could someone please explain to me the appeal that the John Williams film
>scores for those "larger than life" movies possesses? I hear nothing in
>them but the usual swashbuckling scores of yesteryear.  I had enough of
>that when I was growing up.

Well, if you don't mind more Korngold, they're quite good.  And the suites,
at any rate, hold their own.

>The minimalism of film scores has been an excellent trend.  It can add
>much to a good movie such as with American Beauty.  Still, take away the
>movie, and the music quickly loses all appeal; that's the basic problem
>with movie music.  Most of it can't stand on its own, and that's
>essentially why it irks me when the two are spoken of at the same time.

Ah, but on the other hand, there are quite a few that, with some judicious
editing, do stand on their own:  scores by Honegger, Milhaud, Korngold (the
Cello Concerto was a movie sequence), Herrmann, Rozsa, Waxman, Thomson,
Walton, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Vaughan Williams, Bernstein (Lennie and
Elmer), Shostakovich, Dello Joio, Morton Gould, Jerome Moross, and Copland.
There's nothing wrong with a movie score per se, any more than there's
something wrong with a suite from an opera or a ballet.

Granted, most movie music can't do this, because the composer works to a
certain method of composition - one that essentially describes the passing
moment only.  This is more or less the Max Steiner/Alfred Newman method,
which dominated Warner Bros., Fox, and MGM during the Thirties and Forties.
However, a symphonist like Korngold, who habitually thought in larger
structural terms, could produce scores with the kind of unity heard in,
say, a classical suite, if not a Straussian tone poem.  This was
essentially the film-music revolution of the Forties, which also opened up
the way for 20th-century musical language in film beyond the horror genre.

Granted, it's not Bach, but very little is.

Steve Schwartz