Mail Bag Barry

Only one letter today, but with a response from yours truly...I was taken to task, so I'll rise to the challenge. I hope.

FSM 6:9 was full of surprises. Two stand out for me. First, the image of Miklos Rozsa playing poker with cronies named Newman, Waxman, Steiner, and Tiomkin and then jokingly cribbing one of their melodies ("Invasion of the Score Man"). A more unlikely scenario for the aloof, Hollywood-hating Rozsa is difficult to imagine. Has anybody checked the source of this story that "Miklos Rozsa used to tell"? He never told it to me or anybody of my acquaintance.

Previously the biggest surprise I ever had from FSM was the column (date???) wherein Lukas Kendall named his own favorite composer. After careful and admiring consideration of such giants as Goldsmith, Herrmann, and Rozsa, he settled on...John Barry! I was flabbergasted, having long considered Barry to be a relatively minor talent. But serious opinions demand consideration. Ever since, I've been trying to keep my eyes and ears open toward a reappraisal. (No great light has shone upon me yet, but there's always hope.)

Perhaps Lukas will have more to say about Barry someday. I'll certainly look for such an article. In the meantime, an incidental reference in a 6:9 record review has me puzzled. Of The Lion in Winter we are told, "It's lovely music, miles apart from traditional historical epic scores by North and Rozsa, which are also excellent, but more ornate and layered. In Barry's simpler approach there's less distance between the gesture and the intended dramatic result, but his music is no less powerful." Huh? Why should Barry's "simplicity of form" be a virtue? Cleopatra and Ben-Hur had a vivid, gut-wrenching effect on me and many other young people when we first saw the films some forty years ago. Today these scores continue to reveal new facets at each rehearing. That's what I've always wanted from great music. I've nothing against simplicity of form. The movies often demand it. But the greatest composers are the ones who transcend mere simplicity to give the movie more than it needs. Lukas Kendall or John Barry may be onto something here, but I honestly don't understand what it's supposed to be.

I think the Rozsa reference was in John Takis's Ronald Stein article -- I don't have it in front of me and I'll let John respond at a later time. Maybe he was just being cute.

I don't recall when I named my favorite composer as John Barry. I have five top-favorite film composers: Barry, Morricone, Williams, Goldsmith and Herrmann. I can't rank them in any order. Beyond that I can provide a list of 10 to 15 to 25 other favorites, which I won't do right now because I'll surely forget someone.

If John Fitzpatrick or anyone else does not warm to Barry's music, nothing I write will change his mind. But let me compare the situation to what kind of art one likes. If you like only the paintings of the great masters (representational), and hate abstract art, I won't change your mind about that either.

I think in film music, too, various composers can be classified along lines of artistic movements. Surely the great composers of the Golden Age, writing in a 19th century symphonic idiom, are the equivalent of the traditional, formal foundations of any art form. It's been written that following these composers, many movements in art music found their way into film, whether it be impressionist, American, or posttonal.

Where things break down is where we move beyond "modern" music in films -- say, a score like Planet of the Apes by Goldsmith -- into the "postmodern." (It may be too late in the evening for me to explain this without sounding like a jerk.) Postmodern does not mean literally "after-modern," and it does not refer solely to formal guidelines. Rather, postmodernism is an artistic movement which calls into question the perceptions of the viewer. (I hope that is an adequate definition for these purposes.) There are the famous examples of a urinal being exhibited as sculpture, or the Campbell soup can, or the painting of a smoking pipe with the title (in French) "This is not a pipe." (Confounded? The title is correct. It is NOT a pipe. It is a picture of one!) It is anything that juxtaposes worlds or uses "quotes" (this is the real idiot definition) to reveal the nature of their construction.

I think of the five favorite composers I listed, Williams and Goldsmith can be classifed almost entirely as composers who, while using many experimental techniques, tend NOT to embrace postmodernism in their scores -- mainly because their films are not of this nature. Then again, Goldsmith's Mr. Baseball score may be the most adventurous thing he has ever done (with the silly stadium rally song), and Williams's blockbuster scores embrace pastiche to the point where many people regard them as nothing if not postmodern.

Herrmann, Barry and Morricone, however, are each, to me, genres unto themselves. Herrmann, with his obsessive repetitions, used a type of proto-minimalism to create an entirely new style of movie music. He would write an obsessive little cell and after a while, listening to it, you were befuddled what to make of this tiny little thing being repeated over and over. Morricone, in addition to the eclectic and imaginative types of music he has written, has applied them against picture in completely original ways. He's a separate world of his own creation. That's an essay for another day.

Which leaves Barry, about whom Mr. Fitzpatrick would like to be enlightened. The comment in question was made when I was reviewing The Lion in Winter (a film I still have not seen -- I just like the music) and was taken by the difference in Barry's approach to an historical film vs. the approach of composers like Rozsa and North. I'm not trying to argue that one style is better than the other, or more profound for listeners. But I will say this: those great Golden Age composers scored movies that were much more stylized than the more naturalistic pictures of the '60s and '70s which Barry tackled. Partly this is convention, partly technology, partly cultural (what filmmakers were allowed to depict).

Let me reduce it to this: Rozsa and North might try to tell a picture with one thousand words (the complexity of their themes and orchestrations). And they'd be great at it. Barry might try to do it with less than one hundred (which is why his style completely befuddles many collectors, who think it is slow and boring). But he would pick the RIGHT one hundred, and in the process of stripping away those (to him) "unnecessary" notes, he might come closer to getting to the "truth" of the matter. Because, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Remember that two-note Ligeti piano piece which everyone chuckled at in Eyes Wide Shut? That was what Ligeti was trying to express about communist Eastern Europe (I think! don't hold me to that), and what attracked Kubrick to use the piece in his movie.

Barry, by slowing down his style, and stripping it to the bare essentials, has created a genre of movie music where very simple gestures become very powerful, because they are so primal. I think that's my point.

OK, good night, I've failed.

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com