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A brilliant composer like Copland didn't need the "outdoor life" to write in the Americana vein......Practically every composer in Hollywood from Friedhofer to Bernstein acknowledged that Copland was the creator of this sound. I love Bernstein's work, he's in my top five, and there IS an electricity to his western scores. But Copland came first. And again, any great composer doesn't need to live the lifestyle to write in that style. I'd say that Williams did pretty well creating an Asian sound for Memoirs of a Geisha without living in Japan.
P.S. One of my favorite early western scores of Bernstein's is Tin Star from 1957.....Every EB fan should get it!
Copland's grasp of Americana was also pretty researched, he travelled around a fair bit. It'd be clichéd to suggest the Wild West is the 'genuine' America. Elmer spent part of each year in England. I'm not sure how raising llamas is so very ethnic. I knew someone who raised guanacas in Ireland.
Copland didn't just evoke ... he tried to dig up a genuine 'spiritual' Americana. 'Billy the Kid' is almost Hindu. We come from 'The Open Prairie', our lives are a stage show, a gunfight, and we return to the 'Open Prairie'. And all that Appalachian/worker's/pioneer stuff .... he was from an era when social stuff was being shaped. Not that he'd talk about that. He apparently burst out laughing when Martha Graham tried to link their work to the collective unconscious, an idea Lenny Bernstein affected to embrace.
It's all in how deep it goes. A film score isn't usually deeper than its film. Unless Moross is involved!
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Dear Lacoq --
You got me. I knew I should have double-checked that Orchestra fact after I posted it, but it was so late, and I was so sleepy...
Thanks for setting my record straight. (And there's no truth to the rumor that when Previn arrived in GB to conduct, the London orchestra greeted hm with a chorus of, "You've Come a Long Way Since St. Louis.")
- PNJ
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Depends I guess on what is meant by "deeper." God knows we all know a zillion scores that are better than their movies, so why not deeper -- whatever that means?
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