These days I wonder who is right. Is Kozzin right telling us that the situation with classical music is great? Somehow I am left to wonder when our newspaper rarely ever mentions classical music, and with the exception of one writer, the commentary seems written for the musically uninformed...I know...they are supposed to sell papers...and what was our classical radio station is now classical wall paper...I know, they have to sell memberships...and our local NPR station no longer broadcasts classical music...I know, they need to raise money (and when I was a kid living in the New York area we had 6 stations that would play classical music---and at least two of them were commercial stations)...and we have only one local record store that sells any classical music...I know, there isn't much of a market for it...and most of our local arts organizations don't program much of anything written after 1920...I know, they need to sell tickets...but even that isn't helping... So how come Kozzin thinks we are doing just fine? And then, what is considered classical music these days..."Bond?" With those thoughts in mind, I leave you with the article below... The death of memorable movie music By Scott Eyman <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Palm Beach Post Books Editor Sunday, May 28, 2006 Let's not even talk about Psycho or Gone With the Wind or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Star Wars - the epochal scores full of splendid thunder and daring musical choices that defined film music for widely varying generations. Composers like Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann aren't coming back anytime soon. More to the point, where are the Young Turks who can replace Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Ennio Morricone, or, for that matter, John "He-can't-last-forever-it-just-seems-that-way" Williams? Admittedly, music is the most subjective art; people can argue about the worth of a painter, but everybody agrees that the base line of quality is whether an artist can actually draw. With music, the process is more ambiguous, because a score that can work splendidly in a movie - Herrmann's score for Psycho, for instance - might not stand alone as program music. Some scores are both: Everyone always has reflexively genuflected toward Sergei Prokofiev's scores, and maybe Aaron Copland's, but that's rank concert hall snobbery; I'd put Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Bernstein's To Kill a Mockingbird and Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire up against any of them. The field isn't completely bare, but there aren't many big trees standing. Every once in a while, Randy Newman will write a score of beautiful Americana that skates perilously close to Copland parody and carries no relation whatsoever to his snarky songs; Patrick Doyle continues to do good work, from Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare films to Harry Potter, even if there aren't a lot of good movies that call for it; Danny Elfman only seems to work for Tim Burton, but he almost always writes good scores, even if he has only produced one with the density of a masterpiece: Edward Scissorhands. What so many modern movies feature as music is a tuneless, thin, watercolor wash - musical doodling. It's wallpaper music, music without a profile. I defy anybody to whistle a theme from any of the Lord of the Rings movies, which is precisely the kind of moviemaking that demands a great score. Even the occasional modern movie that summons some primal force, such as the recent King Kong, labors beneath a James Newton Howard score that's thin gruel - not terrible, not inappropriate, but pallid compared to the force of the images. It's not worth comparing it to Steiner's original; it can't even be compared to John Barry's score for the execrable 1976 remake. (It's entirely possible, of course, that director Peter Jackson just has a tin ear for music.) What's missing in modern movies isn't art direction, sound effects, or, God knows, special effects. It's emotion, which often comes from the musical score providing a second voice, telling you something that the writers and actors often can't... or won't. There's an apposite story told by David Arnold, the English composer for the past couple of James Bond films, among many others. He was scoring Godzilla and was told, "Oh, we'll need music here." Arnold was confused. "Wait a minute," he said, "we're in the streets of New York, its raining, we've got Godzilla's footsteps, his breathing, there are screams from the people below, the sound of cars crashing, explosions - he's crushing cars and pushing over buildings, being attacked by helicopters, so we've got rotors, missiles, bullets as well as small-arms and tanks rumbling in from the street. ... What on earth is the music supposed to do?" The answer came promptly: "Make it exciting." "I'm so sick of music where there's nothing to it," says George Feltenstein, a Warner Bros. vice president. "What we're hearing represents a continuing cultural wearing away of the arts in society in general. This is a culture where Andrew Lloyd Webber is taken seriously as a composer, so it shouldn't be any surprise that we're gradually losing musical theater or good film scores." The question is whether this is a top-down problem, or a bottom-up problem; in other words, are we suffering from a paucity of talent, or is the problem systemic, within the studios? Lukas Kendall is the founder of Film Score Monthly and has produced dozens of soundtrack CDs. He seems to come down on the institutional side of the problem, as well as pointing out that "some of this is like arguing about the best rock band ever. A lot of it is a matter of taste, and some of it is beyond objective qualities. That said, the old stuff is better." Kendall points to the studio's habit of providing temporary scores for films that are then handed off to composers. The temp scores are basically mix tapes derived from existing scores - Morricone's score for The Mission shows up all the time - which the composer is subliminally expected to mimic. The tyranny of the temp track naturally leads to faded copies of other people's primary inspiration. "In the studio era," says Kendall, "movies were not cut so quickly, and their atmosphere was less explicit; there was a different aesthetic. And they had composers whose skill set involved how to write music, whereas today the skill set is a need to be good with people, and be a good music producer, which is different than being a composer." Kendall points out that most modern composers spend most of their time trying to get the job, and that social skills are at least as important as musical skills. "They don't know how to write a melody, and have to have someone else orchestrate. So it ends up being well-produced hackwork by people who are charismatic politicians as much as musicians." Another issue is the wildly varied styles of movie music in use today, which demands versatility. A composer has to be conversant with techno, reggae, hip-hop, you name it. Before, it was always a given that a score would be symphonic and basically derived from a 19th-century model, so a composer could spend his life getting deeper into that. Today, people don't know how to write a 19th-century model. From the point of view of a film and TV composer, these are closer to the worst of times than they are the best of times. Listen to Neil Brand, an English film and television composer: "To begin with, the rise of the 'epic fantasy' film has led to classy-sounding scores which contain no discernible themes, except love themes, partially because action doesn't allow for much thematic emphasis but also because writing tunes is hard. It's much easier to find a fast-moving groove which allows you to hit your cuts and, with a few orchestral colors changed here and there, chunter on for the requisite 20 minutes or so. As films have gotten longer, so have the challenges to the time-poor composer become greater. "Also, the technology has come on a lot. Computers have made scoring a linear, timecode-driven process, where the very idea of a composer working outside the box, or even - gasp! - without the film running in front of them, is almost unthinkable. Erich Wolfgang Korngold (The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk) worked to picture initially but then he would go away and develop an operatic soundtrack which, seemingly by chance, exactly matched the to and fro of the film. If the composer starts with the picture and never moves away from it during composing, his music will never breathe more deeply than the film." Finally, there's the time element, always a problem because the composer is the last person to work on the film - James Newton Howard's score for Peter Jackson's King Kong was written in the three weeks before the film opened and, unfortunately, sounded like it. "Post-production time is tighter than ever," says Neil Brand. "Most current Hollywood directors don't want to spend time deep in conversation with their composers - they just want it done on time, under budget and to a standard that won't embarrass them." Kendall, for one, thinks that the art will survive in spite of the barren nature of the recent craft being displayed. "There will be people who show up who are talented. Just as there's no accounting for taste, there's no accounting for talent - it just happens," Kendall says. "I remember one time in a film theory class in college, we were watching something and looking at the cutting. I raised my hand and asked if it wasn't true that modern movies had too many close-ups. And the professor thought for a moment and said, 'That may be true, but I try not to beat up on historical change.' " Karl