[Fmpro] catagories/vocabulary

[andrew feazelle]

Thanks John,

........and thanks for listing all those good tv shows from days past, that had nice live and well written scores - that was a lot of info - i did catch the Twilight Zone the other day............ 

Good 'ol Korngold sought refuge in film music, when his concert stuff was deemed too melodic/romantic for the time (looking back, that famous modern symphony he wrote sounds like it fits in pretty well to the time, but i'm no music history scholar).  Now where does one go if they're style of writing (melodic/romanctic) is increasingly being seen as outdated in the film music world (and your not famous enough to get attached to some high production period movie)?  

And speaking of period movies (and please excuse the flight of ideas), good 'ol Dario Marinelli (or whatever his names is) from Pride and Predjudice and Atonement seems to be lowering the standard for period movie scores - don't get me wrong, i liked his scores well enough, but they are quite light, new age sounding, and devoid of any grand romantic depth (perhaps one exception may be the scene in Atonement, where the steadycam follows the guys around on the beach for so many minutes (all one shot)). 

We could be getting into a new generation of A list directors, raised on pop music, with very little classical appreciation or education, who's idea of orchestral writing is music with out many drum loops or rock beats.  I fear they many not be able to tell a difference between "Marinelli type" composers and "Elmer Bernstien type" composers.  That inability to discriminate between high quality writing, versus so-so writing with a pro orchestrator making the music acceptable, could possibly contribute to the overpopulation of so called music composers in the industry, which eventually will kill off the next generations of Korngolds, Bernsteins, Goldsmiths etc.....(or at least dilute the number of truely brilliant men able to support themselves by their writing).  

Ok, i have one more cue to mix........then i'm going on vacation, so i'll see you guys in a few weeks..............

A Fez  




------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 27
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 01:34:05 -0400
From: <bipcress at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [Fmpro] catagories/vocabulary
To: <fmpro at nxport.com>
Message-ID: <009c01c8c084$71fe81e0$7fb53d47 at gargantua>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original

"My theory is that there are so many textural composers out there that 
couldn't write a melody to save their lives, that they've created a low 
musical standard in which others must pull themselves down to, to sound 
contemporary."  -  Something tells me, Andrew, that with the above words of 
wisdom you have pointed me in the right direction as regards an effective 
analysis of just how/why film music went into the toilet starting in the 
80s. "Textural composers" - so those are the bastards I need to wish dead! I 
tend to think of them as the "droning, moaning, noisy, fragmented, aimlessly 
meandering and meaningless composers". - JohnB