I ain't no academic, if I do hang about those circles these days. I spent over a quarter century of my adult life, trying to write and record commercial music, after another ten as a jazz and blues player. This week, I am feeling very overwhelmed by what it means to read, think and write well. There are many examples of people who are really good at this in my blog roll (including Alex Ross, Jonathan and Phil at Dial M, Phil Tagg, Bill Rosar and Greg Sandow). While I was spending hours trying to carve the wave form envelope of a kick drum with gates and compressors, create ambient realities with delays and reverbs, adjust harmonic content with equalizers and resynthesis, synchronizing thin strips of iron oxide coated plastic, two inches wide, traveling at 30 inches per second, with many other moving devices at sub-frame accuracy (that is one second divided by thirty, divided by eighty), while I was trying to write songs that kicked and media scores that clicked, they were reading and writing and thinking. The depth of the thinking in a recording studio can be summed up as "does it feel good to you?", which I must admit has been a pretty good catchall for my life. For the last four years I have, instead, been looking for clues to the emotional functioning of contemporary music/image synchrony, which has thrown me in with these academic lions.
My search has made me a fan of Max Steiner, who is greatly discounted by the musical wing of the film music experts, mainly for his penchant for "Mickey-Mousing". This is a pejorative term to these people, although I think of it as the first and most basic of filmic characteristics music can have. When the term came into use, in the thirties, it referred to a very specific form of synchronization found in animated films, but the dogmatic thinking of these music people who have flooded into film music in the last twenty years (with no practical experience in the field of film music to temper their superciliousness), has equated the term to any level of synchronized accents (their disdain in spite of the empirical findings by Scott Lipscomb). The same dogmatic thinking accepts, at face value, the Adorno/Eisler (I almost typed Eisner!?) extra-film musical deliberation that film music is best in counterpoint to the narrative (huh? is all I can utter). Even an "expert" like Jon Burlingame, can exhibit such intense academic, paternalistic blather as to label this kind of film scoring as more "mature".
It makes me want to pitch a cream pie in his face (I can write these things... these kind of experts do not believe in doing any research outside of their already knighted experts, and otherwise, no film music academics read my blog)(now is that bait, or the truth?).
In my recent survey of the Sword & sandal genre (aka peplums), those films from roughly between the late forties and early sixties which were epics based in mythological and biblical stories, I found Helen of Troy (1956)was scored by my hero, Max Steiner. Yet I put it on, gingerly, not sure if I was ready for yet another. Thankfully, this one had an overall difference, shot with Italian design and crews and a cast of truly pretty, dubbed Europeans (including a very young Bridget Bardot in a minor role).
This genre is a great study for film music, as almost all the big composers had taken a wack at them (a short list, Alfred Newman, and with Bernard Hermann, Miklós Rózsa (Mikey Rose), Dimitri Tiomkin, Elmer Bernstein, Victor Young, Alex North etc. etc.) and they all have similar scenes; action, love, grandeur among giant buildings, and primitive religions with their attendant ecstasy. Twenty six years after his start in Hollywood, twenty three after King Kong made him the go to guy, seventeen years after Casablanca and Gone With The Wind, Steiner's music seems a little lost in these long big shots. Watch King Kong, it keeps moving, but these guys spent millions on the sets and thousands of extras, they are going to let the shot roll on. Curiously, inspite of a DVD extra, a short film from the time, showing how the sound department came up with some of the sounds used, the film is light in its sound production. The mixers often choose to leave the sound to the music, which can be a dream for a composer, a chance to write something that will be heard. Steiner doesn't really step up to this opportunity. The WB orchestra sounds great, in a strange hard panned stereo. The orchestrations are good with the fellow who picked up the slack when Hugo Friedhofer's composing career took off, Murray Cutter. But compared to the grand and intricate work of Rózsa, Steiner's music seems like it is pointing the way to today's film music styles. It is more simple and repetitive then the others of the time, resorting to some tried and true harmonic formulas that are almost Steiner cliché. The score works well, it just doesn't take off into the starring role that it seems to have been offered, and this was a guy who bridged Mahler to Hollywood. In any case, it seems I am going to have to look closer at this score, and try to find specific examples of this style that matches some cues from more recent S &S, like Alexander (2004).
My search has made me a fan of Max Steiner, who is greatly discounted by the musical wing of the film music experts, mainly for his penchant for "Mickey-Mousing". This is a pejorative term to these people, although I think of it as the first and most basic of filmic characteristics music can have. When the term came into use, in the thirties, it referred to a very specific form of synchronization found in animated films, but the dogmatic thinking of these music people who have flooded into film music in the last twenty years (with no practical experience in the field of film music to temper their superciliousness), has equated the term to any level of synchronized accents (their disdain in spite of the empirical findings by Scott Lipscomb). The same dogmatic thinking accepts, at face value, the Adorno/Eisler (I almost typed Eisner!?) extra-film musical deliberation that film music is best in counterpoint to the narrative (huh? is all I can utter). Even an "expert" like Jon Burlingame, can exhibit such intense academic, paternalistic blather as to label this kind of film scoring as more "mature".
It makes me want to pitch a cream pie in his face (I can write these things... these kind of experts do not believe in doing any research outside of their already knighted experts, and otherwise, no film music academics read my blog)(now is that bait, or the truth?).In my recent survey of the Sword & sandal genre (aka peplums), those films from roughly between the late forties and early sixties which were epics based in mythological and biblical stories, I found Helen of Troy (1956)was scored by my hero, Max Steiner. Yet I put it on, gingerly, not sure if I was ready for yet another. Thankfully, this one had an overall difference, shot with Italian design and crews and a cast of truly pretty, dubbed Europeans (including a very young Bridget Bardot in a minor role).
This genre is a great study for film music, as almost all the big composers had taken a wack at them (a short list, Alfred Newman, and with Bernard Hermann, Miklós Rózsa (Mikey Rose), Dimitri Tiomkin, Elmer Bernstein, Victor Young, Alex North etc. etc.) and they all have similar scenes; action, love, grandeur among giant buildings, and primitive religions with their attendant ecstasy. Twenty six years after his start in Hollywood, twenty three after King Kong made him the go to guy, seventeen years after Casablanca and Gone With The Wind, Steiner's music seems a little lost in these long big shots. Watch King Kong, it keeps moving, but these guys spent millions on the sets and thousands of extras, they are going to let the shot roll on. Curiously, inspite of a DVD extra, a short film from the time, showing how the sound department came up with some of the sounds used, the film is light in its sound production. The mixers often choose to leave the sound to the music, which can be a dream for a composer, a chance to write something that will be heard. Steiner doesn't really step up to this opportunity. The WB orchestra sounds great, in a strange hard panned stereo. The orchestrations are good with the fellow who picked up the slack when Hugo Friedhofer's composing career took off, Murray Cutter. But compared to the grand and intricate work of Rózsa, Steiner's music seems like it is pointing the way to today's film music styles. It is more simple and repetitive then the others of the time, resorting to some tried and true harmonic formulas that are almost Steiner cliché. The score works well, it just doesn't take off into the starring role that it seems to have been offered, and this was a guy who bridged Mahler to Hollywood. In any case, it seems I am going to have to look closer at this score, and try to find specific examples of this style that matches some cues from more recent S &S, like Alexander (2004).
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