Karl Miller wrote:

>I do wonder about calling film scores classical music.  While I would
>guess that most of us on this list think of Grieg's Peer Gynt as classical
>music, many would not lump film music in with classical music.  I would
>have problem doing that with much of what I have heard, but what if we
>thought of things like Korngold's Incidental Music for the film...vs.
>Grieg's Incidental Music for the play...

Certainly; film music has a very close functional resemblance to incidental
theater music, and ballet music, which have very legitimate CM rights. And
what about Handel's Water and Fire Music? I'm sure that he and many other
composers of centuries past would have written film scores.

Of course, what keeps a lot of film music from being ranked very high as
"classical" music is that it is usually written in bits and pieces, timed
to the fraction of a second to fit specific scenes, and that it is usually
very subordinate to the film itself, merely providing some underlining of
the mood. Therefore, it is not very distinguished when heard by itself. But
there have been some great practitioners of the art, including Korngold.
And I often enjoy listening to Walton's Henry V, "A Musical Scenario after
Shakespeare,"  which is, granted, not the best Walton, but nothing to sniff
at. (RTE Concert Orchestra under Andrew Penny, with Michael Sheen and Anton
Lesser doing a bit of old Will's words, on Naxos 8.553343).

>For me, much of what is labeled "classical music" isn't.  No, I don't mean
>to bring up that discussion again, but...perhaps a different context might
>help.  My wife likes Country and Western Music.  She said that much of
>what is marketed today as Country and Western Music, isn't C & W from her
>perspective.  Is it marketing, or the evolution of the form of expression
>or, what I believe, coming from my perspective, an evolution born out of
>desire to capture market share.

I can excoriate the evil capitalist system with the best of them when I'm
in the mood, but let's not pretend that "market share" was entirely foreign
to the minds of the great masters of the past. They also wrote for specific
audiences who furnished their bread money, and had to keep those audiences'
preferences in mind to a certain extent. What made them great was that,
while doing so, they also were able to write for the ages.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]