To Compose a Story

By Dan Hobgood

Author's Note: This last among the entries I initially planned to submit is, essentially, a mini-biography about film composer Jerry Goldsmith. Anyone familiar with other essays I have written will no doubt notice some familiar passages from those works -- which were included so as to help this article seem both as comprehensive and as accessible as possible. Most of you are surely aware of many of the details about Goldsmith's life and career that I discuss, and I regret that this essay will strike some as seeming redundant and/or elementary in certain ways. Again, though, I wanted this piece be as thorough as I could make it; it simply was not complete without some of the more pedestrian and relatively well-known material that I include. Let me assure my seasoned reader that this entry is not merely comprised of mundane or recycled subject matter. My critical analysis of music in film in this article is perhaps more extensive and intensive than in any other work I have submitted to FSM. I hope you like it!

"Take a good listen to any of Jerry's scores, and you will be taken on a journey." i
-Director Steve Miner

"Perhaps Jerry Goldsmith's greatest talent is his ability to tell a story with music alone." ii
-Daniel Schweiger, Soundtrack Editor of Venice Magazine

Introduction

Since the silent era, music has accompanied the typical, Hollywood-style motion picture in some way, shape, or form. Yet, few filmgoers really contemplate this aural component of cinema, and those that do rarely appreciate it for more than its perceived aesthetic value. What exactly should the role of film music be? Generally speaking, how should it sound and operate? Composer Jerry Goldsmith's approach to the craft serves to illustrate the way in which music should be structured and function in this predominant film type.

Born on February 10, 1929 in Pasadena, California, Jerry Goldsmith is widely regarded as Hollywood's pre-eminent musical craftsman. He grew up in Los Angeles and originally intended to be a concert hall composer -- but worried that the type of music he liked to write was inappropriate for that type of setting. While still in his youth, however, Goldsmith became fascinated with the art of film music. In 1945 he viewed Spellbound and instantly fell in love with both Miklos Rozsa's Academy Award-winning score and the star of the film, Ingrid Bergman. Within a decade, Rozsa was instructing Goldsmith in graduate school courses at the University of Southern California. (The Hungarian-born composer later remarked that he had a hunch Goldsmith was "very special."iii)

Goldsmith began his career at CBS, not as a composer, conductor, or arranger, but as a typist. The young USC graduate begged his superiors for a musical assignment and eventually received some scoring opportunities. Soon thereafter, CBS began to commission Goldsmith to compose at a furious rate working as a musical director for radio and television dramas. In this stage of his career Goldsmith learned how to write scores very quickly, faced with constant deadlines for these weekly programs.

The composer scored his first feature, Black Patch (a film noteworthy in hindsight only for the fact that it was Goldsmith's first silver screen effort), in 1957. Within five years, Alfred Newman, renowned film composer and the director of Twentieth-Century Fox's music department, was recommending Jerry Goldsmith to legendary directors such as John Huston and Otto Preminger for their films.

Goldsmith earned his first Academy Award nomination in 1962 for Huston's Freud. Since then he has earned many more nominations, including nods for scores such as A Patch of Blue, Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, The Boys from Brazil, Poltergeist, Under Fire, Hoosiers, Basic Instinct, L.A. Confidential and Mulan. The composer won his only Oscar for the terrifying score he wrote for the 1976 feature The Omen, directed by Richard Donner and starring Gregory Peck. In addition, the Academy nominated Goldsmith for the Oscar for "Best Original Song" for his theme for the film, "Ave Satani."

Goldsmith never ceased to work in television despite his success composing for the silver screen. To date, Goldsmith has won five Emmy Awards for his work, most recently being honored for his majestic theme for the series Star Trek: Voyager. Goldsmith has also received various industry awards, such as The Max Steiner Lifetime Achievement Award in 1982. Most notably, in 1995, Variety honored the composer with the inaugural American Music Legend Award, praising his enormous contribution to films and to American music in general.

Even now, after five decades, Jerry Goldsmith remains at the forefront of his profession. He has produced approximately 200 feature film scores and written an astonishing amount of material for television and radio. At the time of his seventieth birthday in February 1999, he was still the most prolific composer in Hollywood, scoring between five and seven pictures in one year at a time. Included among film music critics showering Goldsmith with praise is David Hirsch, who proclaims that the composer is "the acknowledged master of the genre."iv Continuing, Hirsch asserts, "While John Williams gets the public accolades, it is Goldsmith who is carefully watched by his industry peers. He sets the standards [that] are constantly emulated."v Additionally, industry critic David Wishart offers the following appraisal in his liner notes for a 1998 compilation album of Goldsmith's works:

 
For forty years Jerry Goldsmith has maintained his enviable position within his chosen profession; his predominance maintained not merely via a keen dramatic sensibility and matchless facility for experiment and inventiveness -- but by an ability to always be contemporary, to be able to keep abreast of constantly evolving musical trends, to consistently be the composer of the moment. Ultimately Jerry Goldsmith will be remembered as the composer of the Era, the greatest exponent of one of the Century's most extraordinary art forms.vi

The Goldsmith Approach

What really distinguishes Jerry Goldsmith from the film composers that came before him and illustrates his enormous impact in the industry is his groundbreaking film music theory/approach. Before the craftsman's rise to prominence, film scoring in its initial decades, both organizationally and musically, overwhelmingly resembled the works of 19th century opera composer Richard Wagner. Mostly this was because almost all of the early film composers were individuals who immigrated to the United States in the first quarter of the 20th century from Europe, where Wagner was extremely popular.

In his operas, Wagner liked to write distinct musical gestures to represent various characters, places, things, emotions, etc; Wagner called these themes "leitmotifs." Max Steiner, the first major musical collaborator in Hollywood, adopted this approach in composing his scores, which include Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945). Steiner was arguably the most important composer of what is referred to as Hollywood's "Golden Age," and, during the 1930's and 1940's, almost every score was written in the Wagnerian tradition.

 Despite this, though, the "leitmotif" approach to film scoring is rather imperfect, and Wagnerian-styled scores were then and still are incoherent, generally speaking. There are at least several significant, categorically unique flaws with the approach. The first of these is contextual in nature. Wagner made "leitmotif" popular for opera, but opera is very different from film -- most of all perhaps with regard to the issue of music. In opera, music functions and appears much differently than it (inherently) does in a typical film soundtrack. Music is the center of attention in opera. The orchestra and conductor are visible to an audience. The characters on stage are aware of them -- and even sing to their tune. Additionally, music in opera, for the most part, is not intermittent. Music(al underscore) in film, in contrast, is non-diegetic (outside of the story space). It, the conductor, and orchestra are all off-screen and out of mind for the characters in a picture. For an audience, meanwhile, these three elements only occupy the back of the mind. Hence, music's place in opera cannot and should not be simulated in films like Mildred Pierce and Casablanca.

A second complaint one could levy against the "leitmotif" approach to film scoring relates to its dramatic application as underscore. The "leitmotif" style requires too much from its listener...and not even towards the right end(s). In order for one truly to begin to understand the music in a leitmotivic score fully, he has to have recognized all of the distinct musical associations. If an individual attempts to do this with, for example, the Star Wars scores, he is no doubt diverting almost all of his attention from the story/narrative the music is supposed to supplement. A listener must concentrate too much attention on one component of the film, which hampers his attempt to ponder the story and how other elements of production contribute to telling it. Yet, while a leitmotif score's music in and of itself is too diverse and intangible, it is generally rather redundant as a communicative component in a film. Leitmotivic scores by nature are bound (or expected to be bound) to the visual image. When a person, place, or thing represented musically receives attention in the script and/or dialogue, its respective "leitmotif" is supposed to appear in the score. This significantly restricts what a composer can do, forcing him to mimic and regurgitate information provided to his audience in some other form. There is little room for him to incorporate any degree of connotation because of the extent to which the scoring approach calls upon him to make (gratuitous) denotations. Thus, dramatically speaking, leitmotivic scores are at once too complicated in one manner and overly simple and limited in another.

Lastly, the "leitmotif" approach to film scoring is flawed because, given the temper of narrative film, it is irrational. As Paul Andrew MacLean implies, a leitmotivic film score is one in which many elements within a picture are represented by distinct, unrelated themes; naturally, a work of this kind has the effect of separating such elements from one another musically.vii But, unlike a leitmotivic score, the typical Hollywood film is a series of relationships. Instead of emphasizing isolation, it stresses interaction, with the story serving as a sort of facilitator by bringing everything within a production together. "Leitmotifs" simply fail to illustrate the coherence of narrative films and, moreover, do not consistently reflect upon the overall perspective or point-of-view within them.

In his theory, Goldsmith tried to compensate for the shortcomings in the Golden Age style, and his scoring method -- in regard to how he organizes music for storytelling purposes -- could not be any more different from that of Max Steiner or Erich Korngold. A quarter of a century ago, author Roy M. Prendergast recorded Goldsmith as having said that he sees any given score he writes "as a total piece and not just a series of sequences."viii "Everything is developed from one piece of material," Goldsmith claimed, also indicating that the "most important thing" for him in relation to his practice was that "everything develops out of the initial organic material."ix The composer questioned, "If the music has no form, no foundation -- no basis from where it came -- then why is it there in the first place?"x Furthermore, the Hollywood veteran, in his audio commentary track for the Hollow Man Special Edition DVD, explains, "[There should] not [be] a lot of isolated music [in film scores]. [Rather, all of the music should be] related."xi The composer reasserts, "[Everything should be] part of the same architecture, [and, musically speaking,] things [should] come out of it."xii It is obviously apparent that Goldsmith believes a film score should be coherently structured.

Goldsmith's linear style is in essence one of infusion as opposed to diffusion, and this is what separates him from several other prominent Golden Age and late-Golden Age composers in the film industry as well. Bernard Herrmann, while disliking "leitmotifs," still supplied a great many of his efforts with a variety of almost entirely unique (and non-melodic) themes. Herrmann approved of unity, but chose to implement it primarily by the way in which he used a certain combination of instruments (such as an only-strings ensemble for Psycho). Meanwhile, Alex North's scores, although praiseworthy for offering intelligent commentary about films' narratives, tended to be relatively eclectic. Last but not least, David Raksin and Miklos Rozsa both experimented with what they called the "monothematic" approach during the Golden Age [in scoring Laura (1944) and Spellbound (1945), respectively], but neither ever advocated or consistently applied an infusionist approach the way the latter composer's student later would.xiii

Also in contrast to (most) Golden Age composers, Goldsmith, known and renowned for his judicious spotting, theorizes that he should include as little music as possible in a film. The veteran composer believes that music will have the greatest impact if it appears only when absolutely necessary. Something he detests about the film scoring process in recent years is the fact that filmmakers now make pictures in a way that demands a composer provide virtually ceaseless underscore. The Academy Award winner is nostalgic for the era in which a half-hour of music was sufficient for films like Chinatown, A Patch of Blue or even the 171-minute long Patton.xiv

While, overall, Goldsmith's theory represents a diversion from the Golden Age style, the two approaches are not entirely dissimilar. Like predecessors such as Steiner and Korngold, the composer uses melody as the foundational building block in his scores. This is because he believes it is crucial for a film composer to write a score by gearing it towards his listener. In an interview with former NBC reporter Jim Brown in 1998, the composer stressed that film music needs to be "accessible."xv What Goldsmith means by this word is that film music needs to be especially graspable to a picture's audience -- more so than stand-alone music has to be -- because visually-predisposed filmgoers can only afford to listen with, as film composer Bernard Herrmann supposedly noted, "half an ear." Additionally, in explaining the process of writing a score, the Academy Award winner describes how he finds it necessary to try to write music that will have his listeners "hooked."xvi Goldsmith's enthusiasm for accessibility indicates that he thinks music should help a film resonate as strongly as possible with those experiencing it. In addition to the fact that it is particularly manipulative and variable, tonality-based music is most comprehensible for a film-going audience. This is why the California native claims that "...the greatest device of all [in film music is] the simple, straightforward melody."xvii

To Be Concluded Next Wednesday...

i Miner, Steve. Liner notes to compact disc release of Jerry Goldsmith's Forever Young. Big Screen Records, 1992.
ii Schweiger, Daniel. Liner notes to compact disc release of Jerry Goldsmith's Outland and Capricorn One. GNP Crescendo Records, 1993.
iii Film Music Masters: Jerry Goldsmith. Produced by Fred Karlin. 1994.
iv Fred Karlin's Internet Homepage. http://www.gr8music.com/Karlin%2C_Fred/karlin.html. Accessed January 2002.
v Ibid.
vi Wishart, David. Liner notes to compact disc release of The Omen: The Essential Jerry Goldsmith Film Music Collection. Silva Screen Records, 1998.
vii MacLean, Paul Andrew. Liner notes to compact disc release of Jerry Goldsmith's score Legend. Silva Screen Records, 1992.
viii Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music -- A Neglected Art. W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1977. 158.
ix Ibid 158.
x Ibid 159.
xi Goldsmith, Jerry. Commentary on the isolated music score audio track included in the special edition DVD presentation of Hollow Man. Columbia Pictures, 2001.
xii Ibid.
xiii Prendergast 63.
xiv Goldsmith, Jerry. Interview. America Online. July 11, 1995.
xv Goldsmith, Jerry. Interview. The Today Show. October 4, 1998.
xvi Karlin, Fred. Listening to Movies -- The Film Lover's Guide to Film Music. Schirmer Books: New York, 1994. 275.
xvii Thomas, Tony. Film Score: The View from the Podium. A.S. Barnes and Company: New York, 1979. 228.

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