I get what he’s saying about the fragmentary nature of film compositions. And serving an industry will inevitably have a certain meat grinder aspect to it that constrains artistic freedom.
I think even run-of-the-mill film music serves an important purpose of adding gravity to a scene. But when you have a master at work, it can be a somewhat bittersweet experience that leaves you craving for something you cannot have.
To take Williams as an example, in The Force Awakens, I thought Rey’s theme was hauntingly beautiful, but you’re only left with a glimpse of it. Where a film takes its music from a symphony, you can go listen to the latter afterwards to get your fix. I suppose that’s analogous to how a film adapted from a book leaves you the option to read the latter if you’re looking for more of the narrative?
But history is full of run-of-the-mill music written in a meat grinder way. You take someone like Joseph Haydn working at what essentially amounted to a symphony mill, churning out one after another. Most of this type of music doesn’t last the test of time, and there are plenty of forgotten composers. Will Williams be among them? I seriously doubt it, though only time will tell.
I don’t think Williams is saying anything wrong but I disagree with him.
Let’s look at this a different way. Copyright aside, what if I opened an art gallery which presented still frames from cinema. Would that not be a valid exploitation of the medium? I think people love cinematography and it holds up as its own art… And so does film score
I think that analogy works well in his defence though. The “medium” you are expressing would be photography, and I think it would be very likely to be photography of much lower quality than that taken by dedicated still photographers. That’s a natural consequence of the fact that each individual frame is not being composed for the purpose of viewing in isolation, but to be viewed for one twenty-fourth of a second as part of a moving, dynamic film production, along with an audio soundtrack of dialogue, music, and foley.
I think the gallery you describe can still fit with what he’s saying, whether either of us agree with him. I would say that the gallery is not an expression of film as a medium since you’re removing the fundamental components of time and motion from it. It becomes an expression of photography made with unconventional methods, I think.
In the same way that an excellent film score does not necessarily stand alone as an excellent piece of music, a frame from a movie could be absolutely perfect in its role as part of a shot but uninteresting by itself in isolation. The score wasn’t intended to go without the film, just like the frame wasn’t intended to go without the rest of the shot. Maybe they do turn out to be interesting by themselves but it’s at least partly a coincidence if it happens
Just the idea that film music has the same place in the concert hall as the best music in the canon is a mistaken notion, I think
I actually completely agree with Williams completely here. I’ve never liked concerts that feature music outside of its intended context. I don’t like when a single movement of a symphony is performed absent the whole symphony. I don’t like a mish-mash of arias from different operas. And I don’t care for film music concerts.
But that does not, in my opinion, make film music an inferior art form. It just makes it different. A single track from the soundtrack of a film score is not great art, but a film, in its totality, can be great art, and the contribution a soundtrack plays to that art cannot be overstated. It can uplift the film from the merely great to the sublime. And no living composer even comes close to the quality of John Williams.
I have to disagree. I went to see HIM in the early 2000s, with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He played all music from his various film features. I loved it, along with those I went with. I guess he didn’t! 😂
HIM, the Finnish rock band?
Agreed. In a film, the music is supportive but in a concert hall it is appreciated alone. In the early 80s I was a big Star Wars fan, but at a concert when the orchestra played the main theme it just felt out of place.
Dang, TIL Wojciech Kilar died in 2013. Anyway, Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman give Williams some good competition.
One thing that flips this on its head in a great way is films in concert. Where they screen the whole film on a projector, with a live orchestra playing the soundtrack. I’ve seen Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in concert this way, and it’s a pretty great experience.
Except that they used the pre-recorded soundtrack for the Mos Eisley cantina music, which was a little disappointing. Understandable from a logistics perspective, but a little disappointing.
Hans Zimmer is, IMO, not as bad per se as his detractors make him out to be, but he is responsible for kicking off or at least popularising the style that has ruined film music over the last two decades. Producing, rather than composing a score, using samples rather than sheet music and real musicians (even if those samples later get converted into sheet music for real musicians to imitate). That, plus the ouroboros nature where today’s films use temp tracks of other film music (in contrast with Star Wars, which had temp tracks of the likes of Holst and Stravinsky), has led to the Zimmer-esque style of tremolo strings, brass chords, and big percussive hits, with comparatively little of the great thematic development and transformation that made Williams’ scores so great. I think the fact that recent films have done callbacks to Elfman’s Batman theme and Williams’ Superman theme are very fun nostalgia-bait, but are disappointing musically.
i guess he never heard John Williams scores.
Williams: Steve, you need a better composer for this film.
Spielberg: I know, but they’re all dead.
Buh. Buh Buh Buh Buh buuuuh bum bum bum bum
Dum dum dum, dum da-dum dum da-dum
Didn’t mind cashing the checks.
He’d hardly be the only person doing good work at a job that isn’t quite their ideal dream career
