I'm sorry to report that we are not a dying breed and we are not special.
I think that's a bit of an overly-all-encompassing response.
I don't know what Solium meant by "dying breed" but I do believe film score fans are a bit of a dying breed because history and in-depth analysis is devalued in society at present. There's a very interesting book called "The Death Of Expertise" which goes over this and I think touches upon the reality that our data-driven, machine-thinking society of cranking out content inherently disconnects us from the past.
The best mini-barometer I can think of is most Youtube videos that contain authoritative information from reputable sources (Nova, NASA, PBS, etc.) are algorithmically buried below the same information shared by non-experts who are just people that glossed over a wikipedia article and are regurgitating facts.
Similar with music - once Disney bought Lucasfilm and ran Star Wars through their content mill, so many articles would crop up about "did you know these facts about the making of Star Wars?" "Did you know John Williams uses these things called leitmotifs?"
What we end up with in the content-mill culture is people who haven't put the time in to learn a subject just regurgitating the past. But what is required is actual stewardship of historical information to give it continuity.
In that sense I do see most of us as being representative of that stewardship, ie. people who care deeply about film scores and study them and connect that information with other stewards of the past to maintain continuity for future stewards. Do you really think in 50 years there is another Mike Matessino waiting to emerge? Mike and people like him were born out of societies that valued history, but currently that's slipping away.
So we on these boards may not be the actual people preserving film score history, but we do represent what I think is a rationally-concluded diminishing breed of people who care deeply about past-present-future simultaneously.
Specialness isn't even part of the discussion, that's more of a life philosophy. Saying no to that is a glass half-empty outlook on life and I think what is more accurate and useful to life is the glass half-full approach that we are all unique with individual gifts in our moment in time and it's up to us to figure out what those are and put them to productive use.
The other thing we’re not considering is that film, score pages show up in Google searches, and you’ve got outsiders, who may be taking a look at these pages because they’re searching for something contemporary. It’s not indicative of the make up of the board members.
You mean the same older film score fans who only like to listen to the stuff they heard when they were kids or coming of age in some bygone era?
I see what you're getting at but I bet many modern score fans are only interested in Zimmer scores or Elfman scores, maybe Zimmer and Elfman but not a whole lot more. Just as an example.
Whereas I imagine someone who loves Williams, also loves Goldsmith, Peter Bernstein, Georges Delerue, Miklós Rózsa. Older score fans have a broader interest in film music.
You mean the same older film score fans who only like to listen to the stuff they heard when they were kids or coming of age in some bygone era?
I see what you're getting at but I bet many modern score fans are only interested in Zimmer scores or Elfman scores, maybe Zimmer and Elfman but not a whole lot more. Just as an example.
Whereas I imagine someone who loves Williams, also loves Goldsmith, Peter Bernstein, Georges Delerue, Miklós Rózsa. Older score fans have a broader interest in film music.
Moving beyond age, I think it's about artistry and there is a clear line in the sand about artistry. The reality is that the current industry model doesn't support a high degree of artistry and creativity, save for a few outliers. Art, like society, is not always a linear progression.
What I'm referring to is different from whether people like something either or whether they see the "art" or not. That's the part where we say "art is opinion".
I'm talking about clearly measurable historical contexts, where does a particular work fit and does it do anything to advance or explore the art form?
A lot of the ambient soundscapes we hear now in film scores are covering ground already explored by people like Brian Eno or Pauline Oliveros in the 1980s or really any experimental artist from the 1950s-onward. What I hear now is mostly derivative, and that's measurably how the industry is built at the moment. Current film scores don't repurpose these techniques and approaches in some new way or push the art form anywhere. What's worse is that, like mentioned before, there is a complete lack of historical awareness so contemporaneous works get praised for being "new" and "unique" when it's obvious to people who actually care deeply about music where stuff is coming from.
This is from 1989 and rivals anything in "Dune" IMO or put it this way, "Dune" doesn't do anything that this doesn't already do:
This isn't far off, and is from 1983:
Nor is this, and it's from 1982:
The point is that people don't listen to "older" stuff from a "bygone era", people listen to the sources to learn from the best. People that actually listen to music can appreciate a wide range of music and should, for the sake of the artform, be critical of works that copy and mimic without citing sources or moving the artform forward.
John Williams didn't crank out copies of Walton and Holst and dump it onto the public, he carefully studied and learned from the best sources possible and pushed their contributions to the artform forward to arguably create the standard by which the classical symphonic form could be modernized for film scores. Imagine if people had told him to ignore all that classic crap from that "bygone era"...
When I was in my teens (late 60s/early 70s) my film music interests were on Barry, Goldsmith, Schifrin, Q Jones, Stanley Myers, Mancini, Morricone, Jarre, and others who basically emerged in the 60s. My taste was not met with much enthusiasm whenever I encountered an older film music fan, who generally dissed Barry and the others in favor of Rozsa, Newman, and the rest.
This attitude also extended to other types of music I liked. Many of the jazz critics of the day hated it and longed for the Miles Davis of Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue.
I told myself back then: Don't be like this when I get old.
Within a couple of years my tastes grew to include Rozsa, North, Walton, Waxman, Hermann, and others from that era--and older jazz.
So now, I try to keep an open mind regarding the younger composers. I really do. More often that not I'm disappointed, but I keep listening and try to remember my teenage self. And in the same way I eventually accepted the golden age composers, maybe some some younger fans will discover the music that was written before they were born.
When I was in my teens (late 60s/early 70s) my film music interests were on Barry, Goldsmith, Schifrin, Q Jones, Stanley Myers, Mancini, Morricone, Jarre, and others who basically emerged in the 60s. My taste was not met with much enthusiasm whenever I encountered an older film music fan, who generally dissed Barry and the others in favor of Rozsa, Newman, and the rest.
This attitude also extended to other types of music I liked. Many of the jazz critics of the day hated it and longed for the Miles Davis of Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue.
I told myself back then: Don't be like this when I get old.
Within a couple of years my tastes grew to include Rozsa, North, Walton, Waxman, Hermann, and others from that era--and older jazz.
So now, I try to keep an open mind regarding the younger composers. I really do. More often that not I'm disappointed, but I keep listening and try to remember my teenage self. And in the same way I eventually accepted the golden age composers, maybe some some younger fans will discover the music that was written before they were born.
That's an interesting perspective! I guess the question for you is whether at the time you actively disliked Rozsa, North, etc. or you just didn't yet know about them?
Shouldn't this resurrected thread be called "Too YOUNG For the FSM Board" given the distinct isolated codger "get off my lawn" attitude here?
I'm actually wondering what people's perspectives are here - like are people actively bothered by those who like new composers? Does it make a difference how young the person is? What about being bothered by people who like old composers? Does the person's age make a difference?
I'm entering into my later 30s right now (turning 37 on the Thursday, April 20th!) and without a doubt: John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Alan Silvestri, Hans Zimmer, and Danny Elfman were the men who caught my attention with the scores they created for films that I was watching. But when I got into buying the scores as soundtrack albums (tapes and CDs at this time of my life, late 90s) I was collecting everything and a lot of love and credit I give to Lukas Kendall and this site and its resources and users. And Peter Kelly's MovieMusicdotcom. I have met so many great folks here and other outlets of soundtrack-ing online. And have been exposed to a lot because of those people. But I also took a lot of chances buying music at the stores. I bought a lot of great things and a lot of shit. I sold about 98% of my CD collection years ago.
Digital gives us a lot of options today. And it is a different avenue of exposing yourself to music of all kinds. Do generations younger than myself see that benefit? Maybe not, simply because they don't know what it was like before that. They don't have those same experiences which we did. But, then again, we don't have the experiences as them. I'm sure there are plenty of bright young music listeners dabbling in this hobby and discovered film music both old and new. But the onus is on them and they have the resources so why not give them the benefit of the doubt, I say.
I still listen to new film music as often as I can. While the sound of Hollywood has gone in a predictable direction, often times there are diamonds to be found. But it was the same experience as when I was buying countless CDs decades ago. I bought a lot of shitty music because there has always been shitty music.
Somewhere around here I posted a quote from Zimmer in the late 90s where he was saying 98% of film scores are trash:
"Within any year I see 90--no, maybe 98--percent horrible stuff and two percent quality"
That's only one man's opinion and I don't know if this is historically the case, but I do think the current state of the industry squashes creativity more than in the past. But again, there have always been composers that make just-passable scores for both good movies and not-so good movies.
While it may indeed be true that the landscape of film for a current generation is not geared towards caring about stuff from the past, your point that there ARE people in the current generation who do is a good point. Film scores have always been a niche so maybe a few new fans is really all that is needed to keep it going.
