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This is great! Thank you for posting!
Lukas
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Author remark on TWOK: "The score is well loved by fans and critiques, despite the poor orchestral performance, which is under balanced and poorly executed."
I don't think this is the first time I've heard TWOK performance criticized, despite loving it myself. Does anyone want to elaborate on how the original soundtrack is perceived?
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Posted: |
Jul 8, 2015 - 10:02 AM
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By: |
KTK
(Member)
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Thank you for posting this, it was interesting and informative!
I do believe, using the Star Trek films as a case study, you have identified a trend in film scores away from harmonic and contrapuntal complexity towards a more ‘texture-based’ approach. My personal feeling is that a large number of more recent scores, collinear with this simplification, tend to be less interesting and memorable than many older scores.
You may be somewhat charitable by allowing that this trend might be a ‘streamlining’ consequence of compositional evolution. Maybe the curmudgeon in me is showing, but I tend to side more with your less optimistic musings that this may be due more to time and budget considerations, and dare I say it here at the risk of causing offense? Some of the newer composers may not be the same masters of the craft that their predecessors were, not had the same training perhaps, or simply not spawned at a time in the early Twentieth century when composition underwent rapid and radical experimentation (I’m thinking of the rise of serialism, pre-keyboard electronics, etc.), when the music of Stravinsky, Ligeti, Cage, Messiaen, Varese, Shostokovich and the like were lighting up the sky and influencing the older masters.
There are certainly cases where a more minimal, textural approach is perfectly appropriate to the material, but by focusing on the Star Trek films, you are looking at action-adventure films, and that places the analysis into a specific context. So many action cues these days are simply heavily reverberant percussion or a synthesizer pulse with a little ‘noodling’ over the top, which hardly impresses now that we’ve all become comfortable with the sounds that advanced electronics can create. If one compares this with the kinds of action cues Goldsmith and Williams have written (the asteroid belt chase music from ‘Empire Strikes Back’ leaps to mind), there’s no comparison.
It often feels like composers are luxuriating in the wonderful sound of a long digital-reverb tail on a percussive strike in place of harmonic/melodic development. Just my two cents at noon on a Wednesday during a work week. On a Friday I may have had provided a much more upbeat response. But in any case, a very interesting analysis.
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