[Fmpro] a new world odor

[Ted Peterson]

n Jan 27, 2008, at 4:43 PM, <bipcress at comcast.net> wrote:
> Ted, I can align myself with most of what you say. You mention  
> "When music became an academic enterprise, a lot of what made music  
> interesting left. What left was an immediacy to the culture. Some  
> of the works produced by academic composers are very good but there  
> are few who transcend the environment at the "school" they are  
> teaching." Those words flow directly from one of my core points!  
> Film composers can kick so much glorious ass because they have THE  
> Stage on which to perform.

John:

Well, cultural morons might be a little too heavy; but maybe not.  
Every time I go to music conferences or new music festivals, I get a  
renewed feeling that there are people who appreciate the adventurous.  
But, alas, the amount of experimentation is directly proportional to  
the number of academics present. The more academic composers, the  
lower the interest. This makes them as culturally moronic as anyone  
else. Who has made the inroads? Strange, it's always been the loner.  
Nicolas Slonimski was a good friend although he was much older than  
me. I named my son after him. He told me great stories of premieres  
of some well known composers and the music he performed and his  
opinion was pretty much the same. He thought Varese was the only  
"liberated" composer he had worked with.

But we are talking about the collaborative effort of music in film  
and like all collaborative efforts, the amount of creativity  
decreases. Depending on who is producing the movie, the creativity  
may take a huge hit.

One of the great films is "Ed Wood." Why? Because it talks about the  
process of making movies and the set up interview with Orson Wells  
was magnificent. More recently, "Simone" was as big a sendup of the  
movie making process as was "The Player."  In all cynicism, everyone  
knows how "The Business" works and those who fit and can survive in  
that business have the greatest success. However, if you are into  
emerging compositional processes or daring uses of film with music,  
major studios are not the place to look. There are simply too many  
layers of people who are looking to make a buck and cater to  
whomsoever they perceive to be their audience.

Are we cultural morons? Yes in the sense that we are not working in a  
way to further "a culture." In the film world, we are trying to  
enhance a good story with a sonic background. One thing we don't want  
is for the music to overpower the acting going on.

In "Ed Wood" Howard Shore wrote a fascinating percussion score. But  
if you watch "Plan 9 from Outer Space," you will be stuck at how  
similar the two scores are. So it looks like Shore took the general  
sound theme and made it better and more accessible. It is a  
subconscious homage to the composer of the "Plan 9. .." film; most  
audience has no idea that the two are associated.

I went and saw Caramine Coppola's score and production of the reissue  
of Abel Gantz's "Napeoleon." It was a through composed score for the  
silent and I would guess about 3500 people were in attendance. The  
score was terrible with all kind of themes from other composers and  
outright stolen sections from certain works over a hackneyed theme  
that to this day I cannot get out of my head. My friend and I counted  
how many times that theme was used over and over and over. It was  
well over 40 times. We were laughing so hard when it kept coming back  
that it became a joke with us and the people around us.

Listen to the "Star Wars" track and trace the number of times the  
main themes are played and where. Trace them through. I did this with  
a private student once and he quit taking lessons. He wrote me a nice  
note saying that he really learned a lot but that the "Star Wars"  
music was one of his favorite movie scores, that he used to play them  
on the piano all the time and now he couldn't bear to listen to them  
because he kept tracking the themes and started hating the music.

However, the music is really great for the film. There's no reason to  
hate it because you understand how it's put together. I would think  
that understanding how the composer thought about the use of themes  
and how they fit into the whole of the film made it better. I think  
the History Channel has a special where the impact of "Star Wars" is  
discussed and there are interviews with Williams about composing the  
score. He called it "bucolic music."

But yes we are cultural morons. One of the reasons is that there are  
no rules we can use that tell us we are defining culture. The world  
of Jungian archetypes is gone as far as we are concerned and as many  
people have said, "Anything goes."

Ted Peterson

On Jan 27, 2008, at 4:43 PM, <bipcress at comcast.net> wrote:

> Ted, I can align myself with most of what you say. You mention  
> "When music became an academic enterprise, a lot of what made music  
> interesting left. What left was an immediacy to the culture. Some  
> of the works produced by academic composers are very good but there  
> are few who transcend the environment at the "school" they are  
> teaching." Those words flow directly from one of my core points!  
> Film composers can kick so much glorious ass because they have THE  
> Stage on which to perform.