Book Review Knowing the Score
Knowing the Score: Film Composers Talk About the Art, Craft, Blood,
Sweat and Tears of Writing for Cinema ****
DAVID MORGAN
$14 - paperback, Harper Collins, 2000
313 pages
Knowing the Score compiles topics discussed by 16 of today's
film composers and also includes a brief "interview" with Varese Sarabande's
Robert Townson about the "art" and "business" of film scoring. In certain
sections of the book, author David Morgan takes an interesting approach
by organizing information as "panel discussions." This method works well
at times, but varying comments from different sources are too often presented
in a disjointed context -- this sometimes holds true even when the discussion
is with a single composer. There's one such section where Jerry Goldsmith
talks about Explorers -- from his comments one would think that
Jerry considered this to be one of his best scores. However, since we do
not know if this dialogue comes from a recent interview or from something
five or ten years ago, it's hard to know just how serious he was in the
first place. This could have been easily clarified by either footnoting
the information (or at least providing a year in parenthesis next to the
text). The Appendix does not sufficiently correct this problem.
The panel discussion format does have benefits. It's interesting to
hear what David Shire or Jerry Goldsmith have to say about a given topic,
and to have both their thoughts presented in the same section. But their
comments, taken out of context (from an interview either with Morgan, or
from another source), can be difficult to follow within the topic. The
most glaring instance comes in the section with Townson. In a discussion
of Alex North's score for 2001, Townson's words imply that he discussed
the recording of this score with Alex North in 1993 -- two years after
North had died (p. 279). On top of this, the recording sessions were in
January of 1993. My guess is that if this discussion took place it must
have been a decade earlier, but the text looks familiar to something I've
read regarding Goldsmith's and Townson's plans for recording the score.
Knowing the Score also devotes substantial sections to individual
composers and films. John Corigliano discusses his work on Altered States
and The Red Violin, while Elliot Goldenthal details his work on
The Butcher Boy and Titus. There is an interesting part chronicling
Alan Menken's career and the resurgence of film musicals. (It would have
been even better had the discussion of Doyle's work on Love's Labour's
Lost been integrated there -- this was a good chance to use the "panel"
method that Morgan uses elsewhere.) The "interview" with Philip Glass about
his work on Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi is decent but some
will find his explanations confusing. One gets a sense that he was being
purposely elusive or confusing. It's also difficult to tell if Morgan conducted
this interview. Either the interviewer did not understand compositional
techniques and did not pursue the questions that needed to be asked, or
these topics have been deleted by Morgan to keep the text from becoming
too technical. The section devoted specifically to Kundun is much
better than the sporadic Glass comments interspersed elsewhere in the book.
Other composers featured are: Elmer Bernstein, Carter Burwell, Elia
Cmiral, Mychael Danna, Patrick Doyle, Mark Isham, Michael Kamen, Basil
Poledouris, Jocelyn Pook and David Raksin. It's interesting is that big
names like James Horner and John Williams are missing from the work. The
absence of Williams is made more obvious by the "End Titles" section where
other composers repeatedly cite his music among the best in the industry.
Morgan's introduction states that Knowing the Score is meant
to offer an "appreciation of and inquisitive exploration into the art and
craft of film music." For the most part the book succeeds. It does not
match the scholarly quality that Schelle's The Score provides, but
it does collect a variety of worthwhile data. It provides a helpful index
that enables one to piece together the various composition topics, films
and composers discussed throughout. It's a shame that the hard work that
went in to compiling this information did not go into providing more footnotes
or even an annotated bibliography. A discography wouldn't have hurt either.
The bottom line is that Knowing the Score is an unspectacular
but economical peek into the world of film music composition -- I even
found myself pulling many of the albums out to re-listen after reading
several of the discussions. Still, this book tends to read like a piece
of semi-informed journalism intending to guide neo-phytes. With all of
the hard work that went in to compiling the data, the lack of scholarly
support within the writing and notes is unfortunate. -- Steven A.
Kennedy
The author can be reached at: stev4uth@hotmail.com
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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