Ray Bayles wrote:
>I think most movie scores and sound tracks are forgettable, John Williams,
>Rozsa, and others included. Good scores suit the movie quite well as
>background that an immeasurable enhance what you see on the screen. But
>very few stand up on their own, and almost none of them reach to my notion
>of classical music. Movie scores and musical sound tracks are forms of pop
>music. They have their place and I have a large number of such recordings
>in my collection. But I don't see how they deserve discussion on this
>list.
I take second place to no one in my disdain for pop music. Having said
that, I suppose, for the purpose of this discussion, that I'm going to
have to define the term, "pop music." For that, all I can do is quote the
Supreme Court Justice (Potter Stewart?) who, speaking of obscenity, said "I
know it when I see it." Or in this case hear it. Of course, each of us
define "it" differently, and off we go, around in circles. (I'll stop
here.)
In any case, I can do little more than say that I've heard the above said
about movie scores before, and I understand the sentiment. I just don't
agree with it when it comes to the best movie scores, i.e., the good ones
by people like Korngold, Herrmann, Rosza, and the others. These are like
operas without singing or ballets without dancing. Both opera and ballet
use music to advance the cause of a drama. Movies use music the same way.
They are, indeed, an extension of opera and ballet, and for precisely that
reason. Therefore, I fail to see why great music, i.e., classical, can be
written for an opera, a ballet, even as background for a narrator, e.g.,
Vaughan-Williams' "Oxford Elegy" and not for a movie. Is a film script any
more of a limiting factor to a composer than an opera libretto or ballet
choreography? It may seem so, but when you think of it, all these forms
exercise some form of restraint on compeers: they also supply stimulation.
Is Herrmann's Psyho score less valid because its composer was aroused by
visuals and script rather than lyrics or dance moves?
One possible objection (and not an entirely discountable one) is that when
you attend a movie, you are listening to recorded music. But given this is
a list where a high percentage of the discussions center on recordings, I'm
not sure we can really cite this as an objection.
In the end, the only real qualifier as to whether a movie score is
classical is the quality of the music. Great music has been written for
too many purposes--celebrations, coronations, etc.--for us to disallow that
written for movies because we consider movies popular entertainment (as if
some of these other purposes are not). Weren't Verdi operas considered
popular entertainment? Suppose cinema technology existed in Verdi's day,
and he wrote this exact same music, or similar music, for movies? I realize
this is hypothetical, and one can argue that he wouldn't have written
exactly the same music for a movie that he wrote for his operas--that it
would not be so shaped to arias--but suppose he had? What would be his
standing today?
What about Wagner? Wagner came close to being a movie composer, outlandish
as that may seem. He wrote operas with long involved librettos that were
hardly stocked with formal arias. There was some recitative, but a lot of
that writing was out and out dialogue that is commented on and colored by
orchestral music. (I think Wagner would have gone wild if he could have
written music for movies.) Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande is another opera
along these lines.
But operas are continuous music on stage and in the pit, you say. In
movies the music on stage is intermittent. Oops. There goes The Magic
Flute. And you know there are operas with many spoken parts.
What kills movie music now is that most movies are so commercial that the
music they use is often very poor. But keep in mind that a lot of operas
are very poor too. We just don't hear them. (We also don't hear some
great operas.) Not every opera was Otello, Tosca, and Lohengrin. In fact,
there is is this kind of filtering with movie music. There were a lot of
hacks around when Korngold, Rozsa, Herrmann etc. were writing. Most of
their music has been filtered out. But these great ones remain, and we're
getting to hear them now. They deserve to be heard and evaluated
seriously.
Roger Hecht
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