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Posted: |
Oct 11, 2014 - 11:34 PM
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By: |
joan hue
(Member)
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While reading a current Jonathon Broxton review, I found one part particularly insightful and worthy of discussion. He is reviewing Reznor and Ross’s Gone Girl. He mentions that, of course, a score should “work in the film,” but then Jon posits another question. To quote Jon:
“But here’s the thing; to me, the absolute bare minimum standard a film score must attain is ‘working in the film’. 99% of all film scores ever written ‘work in the film’ on some level, and so at this point my next question is “what else does it do?”
The greatest film composers all wrote film scores which worked in their films, but also took audiences on a JOURNEY. They were storytellers, almost as much as the director and screenwriter were. They were able to convey complex emotions to the audience – either overtly, in direct response to the images on the screen, or covertly, playing to the subtext or the hidden meaning of a scene. They were able to make the audience feel for the characters they were watching, and empathize with whatever situation the characters were in: love, exhilaration, danger, sadness, loss, freedom. And then they were able to pour years of musicality into their work, using interesting and intelligent compositional techniques to make their music satisfying on an intellectual level as well as an emotional one, guiding the audience through what may be difficult narrative ideas with structured thematic design, and recurring motifs, whether they be melodic or textural.”
(I’m taking Jon’s “Journey” idea out of context so please note his full review here.) http://moviemusicuk.us/2014/10/06/gone-girl-trent-reznor-and-atticus-ross/
I guess my question is do you agree that good film music takes us on a journey?
For me, his ideas work. I’ve been on a two day journey with Goldsmith’s Lonely Are The Brave.
The whole score has strong bones and a kind of architectural structure. At first I see a cowboy having some fun and visiting old friends. Slowly the music portrays his ever evolving loneliness and isolation as he becomes more alienated by modern times. The music then crescendos into an exciting albeit tragic ending. What a trip.
The script, actors, and visuals in Gone Girl took me on a journey, but I can’t say I was ever moved forward by the music.
And please note, Jon referred to “textural” scores. I take that to mean that ambient textures, dissonance and other non-thematic music can lead us on a voyage.
I’d rather have my gums scraped than listen to Goldsmith’s Alien score, but after watching the movie a gazillion times, I again sense that this composer paved a road for me to follow along with the narrative. He had a cold almost silent score in the early parts of the movie when the explorers naively land on a barren planet. His score slowly evokes tension and finally outright horror as events unfold. Point A to point Z. The complete narrative, from beginning to end, is not just visually portrayed; it is also MUSICALLY ARTICULATED.
Simply having music create a mood like a sense of dread isn’t enough for me. Let the music take me, along with the narrative, on an auditory journey or expedition. Such discoveries!
Your thoughts?
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I love a journey a score can take, like "Conan the Barbarian", but for me all scores don't have to go on a journey. They do, however, even if not a journey, have to have something that passes for an open and something that passes for a closing cue. Otherwise the score has got to have that certain something that draws you to it without the aforementioned traits.
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Posted: |
Oct 12, 2014 - 2:54 AM
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By: |
Thor
(Member)
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Good topic! Classic Joan. 
I'm going to presume that we're talking about soundtrack ALBUMS here, since music in films has a very specific purpose that isn't always as personal and 'abstract' as when we listen to music on our own (film being a representational medium while music is largely non-representational, to use semiotic terms).
So with that in mind -- yes, it's great when a soundtrack album takes you on a journey with a clearcut narrative. It doesn't have to be the film's journey or narrative, but some form of conceptual idea, like they do with electronic music albums or prog rock albums or programmatic classical music. If the music has some form of thematic design, for example, we can create our own narratives in our heads. Or if it's structured like a sonata (home-away-home again), which is particularly common in music from the western hemisphere.
HOWEVER....and it's a big however....I can get equal amount of pleasure from listening to a textural/mood-based album. Sometimes, it's just about putting you in a state of mind and soak up the atmosphere within. Great examples of this, for me, is BLADE RUNNER (Vangelis), PRISONERS (Johansson) or a lot of what Clint Mansell and Cliff Martinez are doing. In this case, it's not so much the journey, but the singular place and its properties. There's still development, but of a different kind.
In cognitive and psychoanalytical theory, one often delineates between emotions and moods based on how 'object-centered' our attention is. We attribute emotions to objects, while moods doesn't necessarily need that. And emotions usually have shorter duration than moods. Of course, one can segue back and forth between the two -- a mood can trigger an emotion and vice versa. Applied to this discussion, one can say the journey is a more emotional thing -- the objects being, for example, various events in the narrative -- while the singular place relies on a combination of aural elements that put you in a certain state of mind.
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I guess my question is do you agree that good film music takes us on a journey?
Scores that "takes us on a journey" are scores that can stand on their own.
So yes, I perfectly agree.
Great scores are those which have enough craftmanship and intellect behind them to be able to stand on their own and keep a listener's interest all the way.
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Posted: |
Oct 12, 2014 - 9:05 AM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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They were able to convey complex emotions to the audience – either overtly, in direct response to the images on the screen, or covertly, playing to the subtext or the hidden meaning of a scene.
Hey joan, this sounds an awful like the gist of the "capture or create" thread from way back when. Gonna havta dig into the hard copy archives.
Q: If the album is in film-specific order, is this a plus? Is the journey more successful? or at the least, worthy of some kind of greater respect??
Always looking to credit and give even more credit (where it's due) to the composer(s)...
So with that in mind -- yes, it's great when a soundtrack album takes you on a journey with a clearcut narrative. It doesn't have to be the film's journey or narrative, but some form of conceptual idea, like they do with electronic music albums or prog rock albums or programmatic classical music. If the music has some form of thematic design, for example, we can create our own narratives in our heads. Or if it's structured like a sonata (home-away-home again), which is particularly common in music from the western hemisphere.
Oh I know we've touched that one too. Argh, longevity at a website sure can be a frustrating thing when the memory just ain't as sharp as it once was, grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
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Posted: |
Oct 12, 2014 - 9:55 AM
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By: |
Tall Guy
(Member)
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I guess my question is do you agree that good film music takes us on a journey?
...
I’ve been on a two day journey with Goldsmith’s Lonely Are The Brave.
The whole score has strong bones and a kind of architectural structure. At first I see a cowboy having some fun and visiting old friends. Slowly the music portrays his ever evolving loneliness and isolation as he becomes more alienated by modern times. The music then crescendos into an exciting albeit tragic ending. What a trip.
The script, actors, and visuals in Gone Girl took me on a journey, but I can’t say I was ever moved forward by the music.
...
Simply having music create a mood like a sense of dread isn’t enough for me. Let the music take me, along with the narrative, on an auditory journey or expedition. Such discoveries!
Your thoughts?
Hi Joan
I articulated some of my thoughts on this in my post of 6th September in the thread asking if Goldsmith fans are the most insecure -
My favourite composers take you on a journey, after which you're somewhere other than where you started. Chronologically Beethoven is the earliest to do that for me. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Sibelius, Nielsen are variously later exponents of that.
I don't see the point by and large in music that gets you to do a little dance and then sits you back down right where you were before. Like 99% of pop music and most actual classical music of my acquaintance. No matter how pretty it is
Film scores are ideally suited for this, most easily realised perhaps in "theme and variation" scores where a strong theme follows the travails of the hero, undergoing changes as the story unfolds and leading to a (generally) happy conclusion after a build up and release of tension.
But it's not only T&V scores that can do this, as long as there's SOME continuity, in orchestration for example (as in John Barry's early Bond, scores which commonly include several themes but can be instantly placed in its own film). Even that isn't always required. There may be little continuity in the musical choices that Quentin Tarantino makes, but I can get the sense of a journey from the disc of Kill Bill, especially vol 1.
Morricone's westerns have a strong sense of journey - right now I can't think of a better example than A Fistful of Dynamite (Duck You Sucker), where you hardly need the track titles to imagine a story. GBU, Once..West and The Big Gundown do much the same job despite the many themes.
In my view, very few film scores approach the profound journey that a Shostakovich symphony can take you on, but of course this is very subjective. I have CDs by The Moody Blues and Sparks that also have that feeling, the components of which are all songs. It helps I should think if a film score roughly follows the chronology of the film, but sympathetic shuffling of the tracks can surely achieve a similar result.
TG
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Posted: |
Oct 12, 2014 - 10:00 AM
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By: |
bobbengan
(Member)
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This is a GREAT topic/thread.
While indeed not EVERY score needs to adhere to this principal, I think it's safe to say the ones that will survive in antiquity - at least on their musical merits - adhere to this truth.
Indeed CONAN is a great example. KRULL. BEN HUR. STAR WARS. Plenty, plenty more.
This is the argument I make among my non-film score friends when defending why I find film music so compelling on its own. It's an EVOCATION. It's a tone poem, an opera without words. It's a musical portrait of a hero, a task, a great narrative. Love, loss, pain, terror, exhilaration, triumph - It's all there, a greek chorus for the cinematic vernacular.
Sometimes the music is a better extrapolation of the narrative than the accompanying film - KING KONG LIVES or LAWNMOWER MAN 2 anyone...?
It's this thematic, story-oriented, tapestried approach to film scoring that I love so, so dearly.
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