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College instructors have traditionally dismissed -- and besmirched -- successful film composers.
There was a professor at my alma mater -- who actually taught the film scoring course -- and used to tell his students "John Williams only writes the theme. The orchestrator writes the actual score."
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I think it's also worth remembering that when Elfman started writing music, being "self-taught" didn't mean relying on computer software to fill in the gaps of a limited musical vocabulary - it meant literally teaching himself how to do all of the things that a professional education usually guides you through. There's a difference between being self-taught and refusing to be taught.
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More or less, yes. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. You can have all the education in the world, and still be a lousy film composer. Vice versa, you can have no education whatsoever, and be a master film composer.
Ah ... but whether one regards any composer as 'lousy' or being a maestro, there still exists the perspective that programme music (i.e. music that has a non-musical 'story') can only be 2nd rate music even at its best. Within certain classical music circles, the tone poem, opera ... and film music ... are considered 2nd tier music - music a level below such absolute musical forms as the symphony, string quartet, sonata, concerto, etc.
Not having read Mr. Rubenstein's initial critique of Danny Elfman, I nonetheless can understand the position that Rubenstein came from. Many composers of abstract music have no doubt experienced difficulties with music publishers in getting any given work published ... whilst music for films gets published quickly for performances (regardless of such music's quality).
Thus, Danny Elfman's Batman gets performed - even if one thinks it's garbage - while a manuscript for a serious work of art may lay for a long time in a desk drawer ...
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More or less, yes. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. You can have all the education in the world, and still be a lousy film composer. Vice versa, you can have no education whatsoever, and be a master film composer.
Ah ... but whether one regards any composer as 'lousy' or being a maestro, there still exists the perspective that programme music (i.e. music that has a non-musical 'story') can only be 2nd rate music even at its best. Within certain classical music circles, the tone poem, opera ... and film music ... are considered 2nd tier music - music a level below such absolute musical forms as the symphony, string quartet, sonata, concerto, etc.
Not having read Mr. Rubenstein's initial critique of Danny Elfman, I nonetheless can understand the position that Rubenstein came from. Many composers of abstract music have no doubt experienced difficulties with music publishers in getting any given work published ... whilst music for films gets published quickly for performances (regardless of such music's quality).
Thus, Danny Elfman's Batman gets performed - even if one thinks it's garbage - while a manuscript for a serious work of art may lay for a long time in a desk drawer ...
Just to be clear, the central debate here wasn't whether programme music or electronic music etc all are good or bad. Rubenstein's argument wasn't that Elfman's Batman was poor unsophisticated music that was clearly written by an untrained composer. His argument was that Elfman's Batman was so sophisticated that it would have been impossible for an untrained composer to write it (and therefore it must have been ghostwritten by somebody who did have training). Elfman didn't attract these controversies when he was doing pop scores like Wisdom and Midnight Run - he only started getting flack for his lack of training when he started writing traditional orchestral writing that, according to some members of the elite, an untrained composer like Elfman shouldn't be physically capable of producing.
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