Knowing the Score: Author Response

Author David Morgan e-mailed Steve Kennedy after his book review of Knowing the Scorewas posted on the FSM site. (This was not a letter to the editor, but a response directly to Mr. Kennedy.) It's presented here for clarification and entertainment purposes:

"Thank you for your review of my book Knowing the Score...and for giving it 4 stars.

Just to clarify your point re: footnotes, my publisher dislikes with a passion footnotes at the bottom of pages (on the assumption the book would appear too scholarly and impede the reader), thus the few footnotes I managed to get in were pretty unusual. Translating Latin does work as an excuse!

Regarding annotation...about 95% of the material in the book was from my own interviews with each of the composers and not data taken from other sources or other contexts. I interviewed everyone.

You're right that Glass was seemingly being purposefully elusive, or at least dismissive of his cinema work. He seems to feel he has more to offer the concert hall/opera stage, and that concert and opera media offer him more in return. But his film work is still important enough to warrant discussion, which I tried to convince him of (and which I don't believe I succeeded at!).

As far as inclusion, the choices of whom to interview (out of the many film composers who could have conceivably been deemed worthy of inclusion) were mine alone, based on my own preferences for their body of work and/or specific films. If a composer is not found in these pages, it's either because he/she was not available to be interviewed (for scheduling or other reasons), or because I chose not to pursue him/her. And there were admittedly a few disappointments in arranging interviews. I won't expand upon that out of courtesy to them, but I feel the book does give a broad enough picture of the vast spectrum of work being done in this field.

I purposely did not include a discography because (a) scores go in and out of print, (b) they change label/issue numbers, and (c) better re-recordings or "special editions" may be issued, so those lists can be out-of-date before the book even comes back from the printer.

Yes, you caught a glaring typo (the only one I might add!) with the "1993" meeting between Townson and North. No matter how many times one reads and rereads, something is bound to slip by, even with the vast resources of HarperCollins at hand, and I'm sad to say I didn't catch that before you did. Mea culpa!

Again, thanks.
Best wishes,
David Morgan"

Steve Kennedy replies:

"I wrote David Morgan after receiving this e-mail and thanked him for the additional comments he provided. It's a sign of the times that publishers sell their reading public short. In a current cultural history by the great philosopher Jacques Barzun, even he had to come up with a more unique way of providing resource information. No doubt for similar reasons. There are so few good current books on film music that writers like David are still trying to blaze the way for writing about this field.

Just trying to find this book in a local Barnes & Nobles and a Borders was a chore. So look in the Film Studies section, general music section, popular music section, etc. Bottom line, add this to your book shelf and listen to the music (and view the films too) as you read this book.

S. Kennedy"

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