... what's on the page when you do a piano reduction. This means, you just have every note there without the colour, without the sound of the instruments. Just the DNA of the music, melody, harmony, rhythm. If you are trained in sight reading on the piano or reading music from sheets this really is very enlightening.
Almost every page of Williams is full of musical bits of information connected to each other.
For example, in Superman Returns Suite there is almost nothing complex, a poor player can easily play it and think it. Also Giacchino's Star Trek is pretty simple by that standard. Zimmer's Man of Steel track DNA, which showed up on the other thread, there is virtually no substance at all on the paper.
Maybe it is not the best criteria and there a lot of exceptions of course, but I feel it is showing a lot. Piano reductions in the golden age are full of primary musical substance, of Williams still today. But most of the composers music today, there is actually nothing on the page. You could just improvise what is there on the page in a piano reduction. I wonder what composers do all the time, you need a week for 100 minutes of the DNA quality, not more, if you are a trained composer.
I wonder what composers do all the time, you need a week for 100 minutes of the DNA quality, not more, if you are a trained composer.
I am a trained composer. I need a LOT more than a week to compose 100 minutes of ANYTHING of quality (even if it's just one monophonic instrument with no harmony at all). Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your final sentence (reads more like an outright declaration), but as written it comes across as ludicrously out-of-touch with reality to me.
By your reasoning, every trained composer out there, assuming 3 weeks of vacation a year, should be capable of outputting 4900 minutes of high quality well-crafted music in a year. That is more than 80 hours of "quality" music. And that is an insane expectation of productivity (and that's just the nuts-and-bolts... there's still the issue of how any human can have the creativity and artistic inspiration so abundant and ceaseless as to generate so many musical ideas in such a short period of time without just repeating themselves over and over in the first place).
I agree that there is a whole lot of film music out there that doesn't really hold up as highly interesting or well-crafted when analyzed, and I agree that music of a certain level of substance and quality will generally translate very well to a coherent and interesting 2-staff reduction, but to jump from there to your final assertion is just crazy. In my (trained) opinion, of course.
... what's on the page when you do a piano reduction. This means, you just have every note there without the colour, without the sound of the instruments. Just the DNA of the music, melody, harmony, rhythm. If you are trained in sight reading on the piano or reading music from sheets this really is very enlightening.
Almost every page of Williams is full of musical bits of information connected to each other.
For example, in Superman Returns Suite there is almost nothing complex, a poor player can easily play it and think it. Also Giacchino's Star Trek is pretty simple by that standard. Zimmer's Man of Steel track DNA is virtually no substance at all on the paper.
Maybe it is not the best criteria and there a lot of exceptions of course, but I feel it is showing a lot. Piano reductions in the golden age are full of primary musical substance, of Williams still today. But most of the composers music today, there is actually nothing on the page. You could just improvise what is there on the page in a piano reduction. I wonder what composers do all the time, you need a week for 100 minutes of the DNA quality, not more, if you are a trained composer.
I don't necessarily disagree, but it's easy to confuse quantity/complexity with quality. The piano reduction for four hands of Shostakovich's 4th symphony is truly magnificent, and shows the beauty of the internal architecture. On the other hand, do the same with a 1960s John Barry score and it might look a bit thin on the page - but how misleading would that be?
As a criterion, the piano reduction might be persuasive, but there are other things that make a high quality piece of music.
I wonder what composers do all the time, you need a week for 100 minutes of the DNA quality, not more, if you are a trained composer.
I am a trained composer. I need a LOT more than a week to compose 100 minutes of ANYTHING of quality (even if it's just one monophonic instrument with no harmony at all). Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your final sentence (reads more like an outright declaration), but as written it comes across as ludicrously out-of-touch with reality to me.
By your reasoning, every trained composer out there, assuming 3 weeks of vacation a year, should be capable of outputting 4900 minutes of high quality well-crafted music in a year. That is more than 80 hours of "quality" music. And that is an insane expectation of productivity (and that's just the nuts-and-bolts... there's still the issue of how any human can have the creativity and artistic inspiration so abundant and ceaseless as to generate so many musical ideas in such a short period of time without just repeating themselves over and over in the first place).
I agree that there is a whole lot of film music out there that doesn't really hold up as highly interesting or well-crafted when analyzed, and I agree that music of a certain level of substance and quality will generally translate very well to a coherent and interesting 2-staff reduction, but to jump from there to your final assertion is just crazy. In my (trained) opinion, of course.
Oh, you did get me wrong. I am a trained composer myself I was refererring to that track called DNA in Man of Steel and similar tracks. Those are like 3 minutes and I could generate that in half a day. Maybe I exagdrated a bit, but the where filmscoring went today is reallly not a hard job to accomplish... To come up with something sophisticated of course takes a lot of time My output is very very smal and I know some of the masters of the past also composed not a lot of music, like Anton Webern, whose entire ouevre fits on 3 CDs!
Well, I said it is A criteria, not the only one and I said it cannot be applied reasonably all the time. There are aspects of instrumenfations, of sounddesign etc which are just not really included in piano reduction.
Anyway, the piano reduction 2 hand or 4 hands shows a lot of musical content much more naked. Ottman's Superman Returns or Valkyrie or some of Zimmer's Man of steel excerpts there is virtually nothing on the page and the this just demonstrates how redundant and dull the music is. And yes, 100 minutes of that in a week (maybe two with sketching out) is not impossible. I am speaking of the 90 percent-delivered-as-a-job-film-music
EDIT:
Go ahead, get some piano sheet music which is transcribing accurately or do them by yourself and play that, and then compare the music in terms what you can listen to when the entire orchestra/synths play and in terms of what you listen and read on a piano. If you did that, you'll maybe understand a bit more what I mean. I thought about that for years also playing symphonies by dvorak, brahms, bruckner etc., and I think it is a very good compass to give clues about how much musical substance is there.
Oh, you did get me wrong. I am a trained composer myself I was refererring to that track called DNA in Man of Steel and similar tracks. Those are like 3 minutes and I could generate that in half a day. Maybe I exagdrated a bit, but the where filmscoring went today is reallly not a hard job to accomplish... To come up with something sophisticated of course takes a lot of time My output is very very smal and I know some of the masters of the past also composed not a lot of music, like Anton Webern, whose entire ouevre fits on 3 CDs!
OK, I'm glad you clarified, and I'm happy to be corrected. I thought you were talking about the "musical DNA" (melody, rhythm, pitch, harmonies, tempo, etc.) of what one finds in a decent piano reduction of a quality film score. I haven't heard the Man of Steel DNA cue, so I guess I missed your whole final point.
If I understand you right, you're saying that someone composing at a level like that of the DNA cue could produce 100 minutes of that in a week? Maybe not literally 100 minutes, but that it could be cranked out at a crazy pace with little effort?
As I said, I haven't heard it- but if you're right there must be pretty much nothing there! (Which I realize is probably your whole point).
Oh, you did get me wrong. I am a trained composer myself I was refererring to that track called DNA in Man of Steel and similar tracks. Those are like 3 minutes and I could generate that in half a day. Maybe I exagdrated a bit, but the where filmscoring went today is reallly not a hard job to accomplish... To come up with something sophisticated of course takes a lot of time My output is very very smal and I know some of the masters of the past also composed not a lot of music, like Anton Webern, whose entire ouevre fits on 3 CDs!
OK, I'm glad you clarified, and I'm happy to be corrected. I thought you were talking about the "musical DNA" (melody, rhythm, pitch, harmonies, tempo, etc.) of what one finds in a decent piano reduction of a quality film score. I haven't heard the Man of Steel DNA cue, so I guess I missed your whole final point.
If I understand you right, you're saying that someone composing at a level like that of the DNA cue could p roduce 100 minutes of that in a week? Maybe not literally 100 minutes, but that it could be cranked out at a crazy pace with little effort?
As I said, I haven't heard it- but if you're right there must be pretty much nothing there! (Which I realize is probably your whole point).
There is a link in the Man of Steel thread. Maybe two weeks I think you and me, we could compose that DNA track in one hour....
You know, I feel it is really simple and the first thing you'll find when composing when I can literally write everything on a sheet of paper while listening and feel it is boring... Sometimes I can do it and think it is fascinating, because those are the right few notes, but this time it is ultra-generic
Couldn't disagree more...there is only one "criteria for quality of musical substance"...at a very fundamental level:
"What Does It Communicate?"
That's it.
How complex something knits together and how this translates to a piano is not a measurement of substance, it's an indication of how good the arranger is (I've heard a couple of cracking arrangements of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" in my time).
Couldn't disagree more...there is only one "criteria for quality of musical substance"...at a very fundamental level:
"What Does It Communicate?"
That's it.
Of course there is nothing to say against any opinion. As someone just listening and enjoying in the end it is all about taste.
Your criteria is not a contradiction to mine.
But for people dealing with music also professionally there are probably some criteria to put feeling about music in words. And thinking of the primary musical parameters a piano score is very revealing.
Of course you need to be able to read such a score very quickly and have experience with written music.
Yes, there is so much "empty" film music out there. And for someone like me who's taken the time to study/learn music composition as well as the craft of scoring for film, it's maddening to see guys skip all that prep/knowledge/training, get the big-time gigs anyway, and manage to thereafter be seen by filmmakers as legitimate composers despite mostly just kinda acting/playing/pretending to be one in the first place. I'm talking about moments such as when Santolalla's BABEL score is voted by an entire film academy as the very best film music for the entire year, or when the RZA is viewed as a great choice to be a film composer (I'll never forget when film music journalist Jon Burlingame was talking to me and some other young composers earlier on the same day he was supposed to interview RZA about the KILL BILL score, and he literally had no idea what he was going to ask or talk about. He couldn't believe that this rapper with no film scoring training or experience was supposed to be interviewed seriously as a film composer, and what he'd be able to write about it), and so on and so forth.
BUT, with that said...
Constraints/expectations on film composers these days are just insane. Outside of rare situations, composers aren't really given much (any) time/space to think, plan, and compose. They are often having to compose for "moving targets" (scenes that will inevitably be re-edited, or are missing all visual effects and CGI, which may again change the timing and edit, or they will be told to do one thing by one person and then instructed otherwise by someone else (or, sometimes, even the same person who gave them the instruction in the first place). They are expected to generate ridiculous amounts of music in tiny amounts of time, all while juggling things like staying up on technology, working with huge teams (orchestrators, mixers, engineers, editors, copyists/librarians, contractors, musicians, agents, directors, producers, music supervisors, publishers, etc.), managing their own business (employees, assistants, etc.), and finding their next employment (contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of composers' work is not found/obtained by agents). They are expected to sound like a million dollars on a five-dollar budget. And it's just assumed by filmmakers that this is possible, and that virtually all composers are limitlessly talented.
Given all of that, I'm sometimes amazed that anyone is ever able to produce anything of quality for film/TV. I understand why there is so much "empty" music- sometimes it's because it's the only way to get anything produced at all; it's sheer survival. And when I hear scores or cues that aren't very good, I don't necessarily see it as indicative of the composer's true capabilities, as I have no idea what kind of challenges/obstacles the composer was having to deal with. For all I know, he may have written something magnificent, but was then directed to strip everything away into a "drums-only" mix which was then added to the film before a scene changed anyway and his new mix got chopped up and re-inserted by an editor. Or maybe he was trying to interpret different sets of instructions from his director/producer/filmmakers/employers (and where none of said instructions really made musical/dramatic sense in the first place). It's no wonder that most film scores (and most films, for that matter), kinda stink.
I guess I'm just saying that rather than expecting all film music to be of decent quality, I instead revel in the moments when this crazy system does produce something memorable, interesting, and of high quality. Because given what film composers have to deal with, it's just incredible that anything like that ever gets written and recorded. That's also why I'm just in awe of the "masters" who have consistently produced such high quality work over and over, across so many projects over so much time. Bravo!
Kinda off-topic of Mike's original discussion, but the thread got me thinking about this.
Nice to read your comment's but don't feel so down about it, Still year after year decade after decade there is plenty of fine music we love , be it from the 30's 40's 50's 60's 70's 80's 90' and yes now. I don't think with anything in life you can expect to get a good thing everytime or a great thing more then maybe 1 out of 50. It is of course just an opinion anyway,but like lost films, I mean what is the big deal. one could not get to see 10% of all the films made that are not lost. It does not bother me in any era, how much stuff is maybe not good, as long as there is plenty of stuff that is good for the rest of my life, That is all that really matters and with film themes or film scores that goes into the thousand's. For example, if I saw a teenager who started to like film music.There is enough for one's lifetime to hear good music from films[1930-till present and beyond.In reality that is all that matters, there no need to get upset because BOWERY BOYS films made in the 40's except for the main theme does not offer much.Or that many of the youth films out of the 50's didn't offer much. Or the hundreds of KARATE films release in theatres in the 70's didn't offer much. the sex youth comedies of the 80's didn't offer much. on and on. So what, it is what is good that matters,In short there has been hundreds of thousands of films made over the years, thousands had good music and maybe thousands didn't ANYWAY WHO THE HELL COULD HAVE TIME TO HEAR EVERYTHING IF EVERY FILM DID HAVE A GREAT SCORE, THIS IS SILLY TO ME.Also I think we are for the most part talking about mega big Hollywood action films. what about all the films worldwide. Not quite the same story?
Constraints/expectations on film composers these days are just insane. Outside of rare situations, composers aren't really given much (any) time/space to think, plan, and compose. They are often having to compose for "moving targets" (scenes that will inevitably be re-edited, or are missing all visual effects and CGI, which may again change the timing and edit, or they will be told to do one thing by one person and then instructed otherwise by someone else (or, sometimes, even the same person who gave them the instruction in the first place). They are expected to generate ridiculous amounts of music in tiny amounts of time, all while juggling things like staying up on technology, working with huge teams (orchestrators, mixers, engineers, editors, copyists/librarians, contractors, musicians, agents, directors, producers, music supervisors, publishers, etc.), managing their own business (employees, assistants, etc.), and finding their next employment (contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of composers' work is not found/obtained by agents). They are expected to sound like a million dollars on a five-dollar budget. And it's just assumed by filmmakers that this is possible, and that virtually all composers are limitlessly talented.
Given all of that, I'm sometimes amazed that anyone is ever able to produce anything of quality for film/TV. I understand why there is so much "empty" music- sometimes it's because it's the only way to get anything produced at all; it's sheer survival. And when I hear scores or cues that aren't very good, I don't necessarily see it as indicative of the composer's true capabilities, as I have no idea what kind of challenges/obstacles the composer was having to deal with. For all I know, he may have written something magnificent, but was then directed to strip everything away into a "drums-only" mix which was then added to the film before a scene changed anyway and his new mix got chopped up and re-inserted by an editor. Or maybe he was trying to interpret different sets of instructions from his director/producer/filmmakers/employers (and where none of said instructions really made musical/dramatic sense in the first place). It's no wonder that most film scores (and most films, for that matter), kinda stink.
I guess I'm just saying that rather than expecting all film music to be of decent quality, I instead revel in the moments when this crazy system does produce something memorable, interesting, and of high quality. Because given what film composers have to deal with, it's just incredible that anything like that ever gets written and recorded. That's also why I'm just in awe of the "masters" who have consistently produced such high quality work over and over, across so many projects over so much time. Bravo!
Kinda off-topic of Mike's original discussion, but the thread got me thinking about this.
very very interesting thoughts. You are right absolutely, it is better to just be happy when something inspired was allowed to happen. You know, I sort of get a little bit sad when even projects with time and dedication for the music like Man of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness don't unfold their musical potential nowadays. To the former: most of the samples and the full track called DNA is nothing more than musical redundant material, with that team you described you can come up with most of the material available so far in a single day. For mapping out and planning to tailoring the score to the pictures you'd need much more time of course, but just to generate that generic music, you don't need more, you actually don't need a composer, just someone to decide which sounds to use offered by midi device.
And to Into Darkness: It's not bad, but it is not a symphonic film score forming a whole, just an assembly of cues which drowns in the sound mix. And that is as good as a film score can get today I think. Brillant moments in it, but not forming a whole.
But as you said, it is better to be happy when there is suddenly coming something inspired, even if it is just a cue or a small moment. In my opinion, enjoying film scores today became sort of being happy with few musical moments. A lot of the great scores in the past years have fantastic highlights, but they are not connected to each other as in the good old days, where a film score was great as a whole, of course also with more redundant moments, but basically forming an organic entity.
Dan the man, I think this is getting worse in the last 20 years and I was refering to symphonic film scoring. In the 80ties and 90ties there was more musical substance in the scores, definitely. You can for example see that when you make piano reductions and play them And in the Golden Age there was a lot more musical substance in the scores.
Of course as someone pointed out, in a score of a composer whose style is decidedly more based on melodic simplicity, more orientated on simple vocabular, like John Barry, it is a bit different concerning piano reduction. But also then you'll see more of a horizontal development in the piano score, as you can also hear.
As I said there are exceptions, but still, the piano reductions can clearly demonstrate how much musical substance and musical complexity is in the music. If it is very simple in terms of the amount of musical information and the music communicates nevertheless, it is often somehow in a unusual and very inspired way, like with Barry often. If it is simple and it is like it was a thousand times before, it is just dull like with a lot of other composers I don't name. And in the end of the day, it is also just a matter of taste if it communicates, so that question is not as easy to catch as the question of the musical substance, slightly another perspection.
I disagree with the premise, since I think instrumentation, ornamentation etc. are crucial aspects of music making. If a piece of music is built around a textural approach, that's how it should be judged, not by what it could have been if you strip away all of that self-same texture. It would be like judging an apple for not being an orange.
That being said, I sometimes find it intriguing when certain songs or tracks are stripped down to their mere basics. I'm reminded of the solo tour that Roger Hodgson (of Supertramp) had a couple of years ago. He had arranged all of his songs for solo piano and voice only (with occasional sax accompaniment), and they had an immediate rawness to them and seemed to be appreciated for that.
Here are some videos of the song "The Logical Song" to illustrate.
well, again, I said "A" criteria is... that implies it can be one criteria among many others, and it is not valid for every situation.
Your examples, Thor, argue very much for my point!
There is a point of view saying orchestration and sound is kind of a medium to transport the primary musical information which is often said to comprise melody (including counterpoint), harmony and rhythm. I don't think this is entirely correct, at least since the late romantic period the parameter sound emancipated itself from a mere medium to become something crucial also, but still, there is a lot of truth to that old point of view still in particular when you apply it to more traditional european art music and everything which came out of it basically.
I think it is not possible to really understand what I was trying to hint at when you are not able to read music and not trained in musical skills. It is about the traditional craftsmenship-technical aspects of composing, not about music design. That's also my point. Thor, with the technical means (which are available today) aka computers and midi etc. you could generate a track like Zimmer's DNA from Man of Steel. So tradionally speaking, there is not much substance in it when you break it down to the notes.
A comparison - which is in some aspects a poor one still like every comparison with music - might be a car. In the traditional composition you could say there is kind of the engine things, the bones, the traditional musical essence. A lot of composers still think that is crucial. For John Williams for example, this is crucial. And there is the autobody, the cover. In the masterworks you can't separate between the two really, but still there is a lot of musical substance when you just look at the engine part.
I rather think it's a matter of MODE than criteria. Melody, rhythm and harmony are basic in a certain MODE of music, but not necessarily that important in another (rhythm and harmony are, incidentally, often important in more textural pieces too).
It's like with film. In mainstream Hollywood films, a story or narrative is the most important aspects around which most tools are centered. However, film as a medium is able to do so much more than just storytelling. The combination of audio and visuals is a powerful mechanism that can create more independent, 'arty' fare that relies more on the power of combination than to organize the visuals and sound to create storylines.
I rather think it's a matter of MODE than criteria. Melody, rhythm and harmony are basic in a certain MODE of music, but not necessarily that important in another (rhythm and harmony are, incidentally, often important in more textural pieces too).
It's like with film. In mainstream Hollywood films, a story or narrative is the most important aspects around which most tools are centered. However, film as a medium is able to do so much more than just storytelling. The combination of audio and visuals is a powerful mechanism that can create more independent, 'arty' fare that relies more on the power of combination than to organize the visuals and sound to create storylines.
no, I slightly edited my post, maybe it is more solid now? However, I am afraid you can't get that point when you are not able to read and make music. Of course someone who is able to understand a certain language by ear without being able to speak it and to read it can have opinions about that language, but to really analyse the structures behind it and try to evaluate it in certain ways I'd say you need also to be able to read it and to speak it by yourself. Again a poor comparison.
don't get me wrong - (good) musical substance is not the same as good music. Again a comparison, with food: You can cook a very easy meal with only a few ingredients and it can be very good. Again a poor comparison.
It is impossible to really break down what good music is - though there are some ideas you can empiric-ly derive from the (now) great masterworks within the frame of a certain cultural landscape - what do they have in common? Speaking of the central european music from 1700 to 1900: They all have high quality musical substance in a reduced piano score in common (again: certainly there are a few exceptions).
So there is some correlation in traditonal music between quality of musical substance in a piano score and "time-proofed good music", but it is not the same. Anyway, while you can't really break down what is good, you can break down the amount and quality of musical substance to a certain degree if you are trained and experienced in musical language.
Anyway, while you can't really break down what is good,
Loving this thread - some great points in it...but I disagree with this sentence - absolutely you can break down what is good - it's fundamental to the nature of music...you can break down what is good by asking yourself...."Does it make me feel?".
It's one of the reasons - as a working musician for 30 years (ish), as well as conductor, arranger (occasionally) and composer (rarely) - I abhor the whole nature of musical snobbery...it completely misses the point about what music is at a very basic level. I don't give a toss if Mozart's Symphony number 40 "possesses Grecian lightness and grace", or is "a work of passion, violence, and grief" (thanks, Wikipedia) for example - what I care about is whether or not it actually communicates to me (which in this case it does).
I don't love Williams' "Superman" Main Title because "The opening march provides the title character with a noble persona of galactic proportions, its simplistic octave-loving major key progressions serving the dose of superhero elixir that has, to some degree, worn badly with audiences through the years due to the brightness of its own light." (Filmtracks - a good review I think, btw)...that's not why it's "Good".....it's "Good" because it makes my spine tingle and makes me want to shout "F*CK YEAH!!!!!!!!" every single damn time I hear it...
