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| More Wisdom Bites the Dust? |
| Posted By: Michael Barrett on June 29, 2009 - 9:00 PM |
When I read interviews with Golden Age composers, it seems they always repeat this homily about their craft: "The background score is supposed to support the movie without calling attention to itself. The moment the audience notices the music, that means it's bad and not doing its job properly."
I'm sorry I can't cite any specific quotes, but you know I'm not making this up. This bit of wisdom is still repeated today. It's the basic thing everybody supposedly knows about film music. It's practically the definition of the form.
And it's a crock, isn't it?
If we take this standard seriously, then it's easy to name some of the worst scores in film history: Bernard Herrmann's work for Hitchcock, John Williams' for Spielberg, Ennio Morricone's for Leone, John Barry's for the James Bond films, Elmer Bernstein's "Magnificent Seven," Jerry Goldsmith's "Patton" or "The Omen," Michael Nyman's "The Piano," Henry Mancini's work for Blake Edwards, Nino Rota's for Fellini and "The Godfather," and Prokofiev's work for Eisenstein. My word, don't they jump right out at you.
And who let that guy Anton Karas into the room to write "The Third Man"? P.U.!
By this "you shouldn't notice it" standard, some of the most mediocre hackwork must be top-drawer stuff. Indeed, the most forgettable must be utter genius.
Isn't it funny, then, that whenever one of those articles rolls around where somebody names the top 10 or 100 scores, like the recent one in Entertainment Weekly, it consists of work so famous and recognizable that even non-score fans can hum the themes, and even if they've never seen the picture? Isn't it odd how those terribly noticeable soundtracks are the commercial bestsellers, the Oscar winners, the canonized classics, the much-copied inspirations?
Several years ago, I read one such article in which composers picked their favorite soundtracks. Somebody picked Morricone's "The Mission." I'm sorry I can't recall who it was or in what magazine, but I didn't realize I'd be citing it years later. Anyway, he said something to this effect: "Of course, you could argue it's the worst score in history because it totally overwhelms the movie, but f--- that, it's brilliant."
This person acknowledged the tension between the received wisdom about his craft and the actuality of great soundtracks, and he wisely dismissed the question in favor of the music.
When you really think about it, the essential noticeability of music even applies to the use of pre-existing pop and classical music in place of a new score. Nobody ever notices "The Blue Danube" in "2001," eh? Those radio classics in "American Graffiti" were chosen for their unobtrusiveness, right? Actually, music is used because you're supposed to notice it!
So, is this just another example of a trite-and-truism that everyone repeats like a mantra and believes because they've heard it before, so that familiarity stands in for reality and the repetition replaces thought? That certainly applies to most of the cliches and pronouncements we deliver on a daily basis. If you really want to know what we think and how we live, just listen to what pours out of our mouths most of the time and then assume the opposite.
But before we take this age-old saw out with the trash, let's inquire into its source. The notion of "you're not supposed to notice the music" hardly evolved out of the theatrical tradition of opera, still less the concert tradition. It couldn't have been part of conventional wisdom during the silent era, when composed or improvised scores were the only thing you could hear. So it must be unique to talkies and it must have originated right in the center of Hollywood during the studio era, and it must have been a rule (or at least a polite illusion) formulated and more or less enforced by the front office: the producers who dictated how things were going to work on a picture.
There's a famous anecdote, which I hope isn't apocryphal, of Bette Davis demanding to know of the director of DARK VICTORY, "Just who is going up those stairs to die, me or Max Steiner?" Surely this touches on a sensitive territoriality, on who deserves the credit. Surely the directors and actors and producers and everyone else knew that music was crucial, and perhaps secretly felt it was their most powerful ingredient, more than all the sets and tracking shots and key lights and powerful close-ups they could muster. Perhaps they realized that music is, after all, the art most like film. Did they suspect that in the future, one could regard everything else in the film as supporting the music rather than the vice being versa?
Perhaps they all secretly resented the point, that this art could trump all their efforts, and it became a conscious policy to criticize any composer who outshone those efforts by "calling attention to the music"--which means, after all, that the music was better than the rest of it.
(I think a similar psychology is going on when people complain that certain actors get "hammy", which is almost exclusively applied to the greatest actors--Welles, Laughton, Brando, Olivier. I think this is the inevitable by-product of that handful of actors who cannot help working at a level that shows up the mediocrity around them, when in fact their context isn't good enough to match them. So it's their fault for being hams, which is often really an excessive subtlety. But as usual, I digress.)
So anyway, this "rule" was drummed into the studio composers and they duly repeated it in interviews, even though they won Oscars for breaking it, and it's still repeated today as the basis of the art. And perhaps indeed the majority of scores weren't written to be noticed and aren't worth our notice, but I submit that this doesn't really mean they've done a good job, any more than we'd say a movie we haven't noticed has done its job well of being a movie.
I realize there's some difference between what that mythical character, the ordinary viewer, notices and what connoisseurs notice, but there doesn't seem to be much question among those scores widely recognized as great and influential. Maybe we don't notice the good scores, but the great scores are the ones everybody notices, and how. |
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