On Tuesday, September 6, 2022 at 9:47:04 AM UTC-7, gggg gggg wrote:
On Tuesday, January 4, 2022 at 12:13:50 AM UTC-8, gggg gggg wrote:
On Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 6:50:15 AM UTC-10, William Sommerwerck wrote:
Are there any film scores, of the past, but more importantly
some newer ones, that you'd say have a higher quality than
the usual Hollywood fare? Equal in value as some classical
pieces?
The Hollywood film score has suffered a terrible decline over the past 20 years. The basic problem is that composers are largely writing "all music,
all the time" scores, with 75% or more of the running time musically backed.
This isn't new; that grand master of excess scoring, Max Steiner, was criticized for it during his life. * The first movie I remember with "too much" music was "Conehead the Barbiturate", scored by Basil Pouledoris. As I
walked out of the theater, a woman's comment to her boyfriend mirrored my own thoughts -- "I've never seen a movie with so much music."
The question is... Why?
Bernard Herrmann laid down a number of rules about film scoring. Only one of
them is invalid -- "The music should make an emotional connection between the audience and what's happening on the screen." -- but it helps us understand the current musical excess.
In my view, there are two broad schools of directing -- American and European. American directing has traditionally been in-your-face, with intense involvement with the story and characters. European directing has usually been cooler, with less-explicit involvement. ** For reasons I don't
understand, American directing has been moving in the direction of European,
with an increasingly cool and even "detached" approach. Martin Scorsese's work gives a good example: "The Departed" is a much less immediately involving film than "GoodFellas" (to the extent that Jack Nicholson's typically emphatic performance looks quite out of place), though they're separated by only 16 years.
(Y. upload):
"How Martin Scorsese Uses Music"
(Y. upload):
"The Music of Satyajit Ray"
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