Score - A Film Music Documentary + Score - A Film Music Documentary... The Interviews

The Winds Of Score

Score - A Film Music Documentary
USA 2016 Directed by Matt Schrader
Epicleff Media Blu Ray Zone A

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Score - A Film Music Documentary
The Interviews - Educational Edition
by Matt Schrader
Createspace
ISBN: 978-1974367412
A NUTS4R2 TWO-IN-ONE REVIEW

“… the really simple brass ‘brahms’ of Inception. Now, when Chris (Nolan) and I did those, they were a story point, an absolute story point. They were in the script. And then they sort of became ubiquitous, in a funny way, in trailer music. People were just sort of using them as transitional pieces. So the idea that they actually tell a story got lost. They’re just a sound effect. So their meaning got distorted and so there’s a sort of misuse of that.”
Hans Zimmer.


Score - A Film Music Documentary is something I didn’t think I’d get to see over here. I’d just assumed it would be one of those films that didn’t get a UK release and would sink without a trace with no other venue to watch it on other than the slight possibility of a dodgy download somewhere. However, I was very pleased to find that there is this Blu Ray release in the US (it’s also been released in the UK but only as a DVD release for some strange reason). I was also surprised to learn that there is an accompanying educational edition, book companion to the film with full length transcripts of the many interviews conducted for this... about 90% of which doesn’t seem to have actually made it into the film so, actually, it’s a very valuable resource independent of the actual documentary itself. I was delighted to be presented with this on my 50th birthday by a friend earlier in the year, before I even knew this tome existed.

There is also, as it happens, a release of Ryan Taubert’s score for this film but, alas, it’s only available as an electronic download and not as a proper CD edition so I probably won’t get to hear it away from the movie. I really do fail to see how a movie about film scores would ignore a segment of the fan base for such things and not release it in a high quality presentation on the best available media. I guess it says something about the studios who control these properties that they’re a little out of touch, I guess.

So, anyway, this really is not a bad documentary and, although it deals primarily with the state of scoring or the film industry now, it’s actually quite unique in its own way because it interviews a lot of the ‘now’ composers who are the ‘new guard’ including some of my absolute favourites like Bear McCreary, Brian Tyler Hans Zimmer and Marco Beltrami. I mean, there’s a whole host of names in here and chances are that, even if movie music isn’t your thing, you’ve heard at least a few scores by each of the many interviewees here. And it was certainly nice to finally be able to put faces to the names I have adorning the, literally thousands, of film score discs I have lining every wall and alcove of my immediate environment.

Although it’s been said by some people that the film only deals with modern scoring from the 1960s and onwards, I think that’s a little unfair as the documentary is only an hour and a half long (personally, I would have liked it to be at least four hours) and there are some deliberate nods to many of the composers who have made landmark scores in the past. Admittedly, there are less golden age composers than I thought would have made the grade (where are Korngold and Tiomkin?) but the film does acknowledge certain aspects of the past with dedicated segments to composers such as Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams although, of those, the only one still living, Johnny Williams, is not actually interviewed for this movie. That being said, I’m kind of glad that the overall focus of this one is a little slanted to modern composers and their methods/practices because, frankly, we’ve already seen a lot of the other stuff countless times... I think interviews with people like Christopher Young, Junkie XL and the great Hans Zimmer are far more valuable at the moment.

The movie opens with... I think it was Marco Beltrami... demonstrating a dying piano way up on a deserted hill which is connected to a studio by loads of wires which react to the wind. So the wind and environment are helping create the musical texture and, as he says, the notes travel through the wire faster than the wind carries them so you kind of hear the echo of the notes first. This is a great opening hook to start the film off with. It then shows the importance of score by using snippets of the Rocky films under Bill Conti’s famous ‘getting stronger’ theme and really gets the message home for an audience who are perhaps unused to contemplating such things (although whether any of them would sit still for a movie about film scores is anybody’s guess).

The documentary has a number of interview snippets with various composers, mostly new guys although there are some people like Quincy Jones also added into the mix and it’s an extremely valuable bunch of excerpts for the modern film score afficionado, it has to be said. There are also numerous, valuable clips of the various composers either conducting or overseeing the recordings of the films from various scoring sessions, which makes for some interesting watching. Especially when they show the cues being performed in one half of the screen and the accompanying visuals for such movies as Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (scored by Joe Kraemer) and Casino Royale (scored by David Arnold) in the other half.

It’s also nice that you have legends like Hans Zimmer and his contemporaries paying their respects and expressing their admiration of some of the past ‘greats’ of film score composers such as John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. It’s just nice to see that the importance of these people is so well appreciated still. Plus, a good visual representation of how leitmotif works, as seen when notes of recurring motifs are highlighted during sections of Howard Shore’s score to The Fellowship Of The Ring.

There are also some very interesting choices of interviewee such as a music psychologist, Siu-Lan Tan, who talks about the way music effects us. How music can be delivered directly into the specific reward centre of the brain, the same place where sensations such as chocolate and sex are processed (ha, I knew it). Actually, I found her the most fascinating of the subjects in a way and I am now on a mission to seek out and read her books about this specific subject.

It’s also nice that there’s a lot of fun stuff in here too and if you want to see Bear McCreary rocking the Hurdy Gurdy and talking about the history of the instrument and why he used it on the TV show Black Sails, this is the place to do that. Indeed, a longer take of him playing the instrument and talking about it is one of the very nice extras accompanying the film on the Blu Ray and DVD release of Score - A Film Music Documentary.

The book, Score - A Film Music Documentary: The Interviews, is available separately and, rather than just reiterating all the great stuff found in the movie, it actually gives you way more information when it comes to each composer and their attitude and approach to the art and craft of scoring. There are a couple of slight niggles with this volume though.

One is found in the very first words of the first chapter. Each chapter comprises an interview with a specific composer and starts off by listing a few of the scores they are known for plus a list of awards, nominations and other musical affiliations but I was quite annoyed to see that the first score listed for David Arnold was for Independence Day - Resurgence, the sequel to a film Arnold actually did write the score for. Alas, as I’m sure most fans of film music will be able to tell you, the score for this sequel was actually by Thomas Wander and Howard Kloser. Now, I don’t know if maybe Arnold did actually do some work on this and his score was rejected but I’m guessing that this would surely have been known before this book went to print. So, yeah, that’s a problem. When the same kind of error occurs later in the book for Tom Holkenborg, it’s at least understandable as I think the book may have already been published before he was taken off of Justice League and Danny Elfman took over scoring duties on that one.

The other slight problem I have with this book is the amount of typos. There are absolutely loads of sentences which start off with a lower case letter dotted around the book. At least, I hope these are typos and not some bizarre attempt to change the way English grammar works, at any rate.

In spite of all that though, the volume is something which I think most film score junkies will appreciate. It’s true there are some things you expect certain composers to talk about... so included in David Arnold’s section is his enthusiasm for using Monty Norman’s James Bond theme at various points in a Bond movie and director James Cameron talks about the importance of the temp score and working with James Horner. However, there’s also a lot of stuff which people may find less familiar and it’s in these words by the people in the front line that you gain the real knowledge from.

For instance, Quincy Jones starts off talking about how hard it was to be a black composer in 1960s Hollywood. But it’s interesting to learn how he'd make a conscious effort to get away from representational music (what we would call ‘Mickey Mousing’) and to score something more in touch with mood and feeling/setting (something which Bernard Herrmann used to do, I believe). Similarly, the composing team of Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Atticus Ross talk about completely coming at the score from a soundscape kind of sensibility to ensure that each section is appropriate for the mood and tone of a picture and scene. Being an admirer of their score for the US version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I found their interview section very refreshing and informative.

It’s also interesting to read about the contradictions between composers talking about their work too. Some think the sole job of the score is to just illustrate what’s already on the screen but others, such as Hans Zimmer, more correctly talk about the music enhancing rather than supporting the film. Filling in bits to give the audience emotional direction, for example.

Another interesting point is when the great Bear McCreary makes a really good case for why composers have to use orchestrators and why it’s actually, in the long run, more preferable to the lifestyle than doing it on your own. It’s something I’ve never been quite comfortable with in terms of the artistry of the profession but Bear more than justifies this practice here. He also talks about how you should put the directors in a very comfortable state of mind and connect with them to have the most productive dialogue in the first place.

On the other hand another of my favourite modern film score composers, Brian Tyler, is not a fan of letting what he writes go to orchestrators and mixers and, although he kinda admits it’s a necessity, he will sometimes go and remix it all again afterwords anyway. He also cherishes the imperfections of timing and performance because that's how the music feels "alive and original" which is nice. When you see a concert I’ve always been conscious that this is the only way you will ever see it performed exactly a certain way... no repeats, it’s always going to sound different every time. It’s interesting to see Tyler celebrating this natural phenomenon as being extremely beneficial to the final performance recording of the art form.

And then there’s Garry Marshall. Now, it could be that I was reading his section with the wrong tone but he seemed to come across, at least to me, as either a complete nutter or a total idiot. For example, if he wants a sequence in a film to seem like something is important... he’ll just put in a song by U2. I don’t know, maybe he’s just got a really great sense of humour and I was reading it incorrectly but... yeah... if I were a composer I might have second thoughts about collaborating with him on the strength of his words here, that’s for sure.

However, the book is, as I said, a really useful and insightful tome, in spite of the occasional piece of misinformation and rampant typos . An excellent companion piece to Score - A Film Music Documentary. If you’re a fan of the art of motion picture music then chances are you would have already seen/read this one or added it to your list. If not, then you really should and both the book and the film are certainly good for people who have no idea about the art and want to get up to speed. I’m really happy to have both the Blu Ray and the paperback and these get a big, raised conductor’s baton thumbs up from me. They’re certainly noteworthy.

You can read my review of a Hans Zimmer concert here and a review of a Brian Tyler concert here.

John Williams' Film Music

Readers Of The Lost Art

John Williams' Film Music: Jaws', 'Star Wars', 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' and the Return of the Classical Hollywood Music Style by Emilio Audissino 
University of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 978-0299297343

Hmmm. I’ve been putting off writing this up for a while after I read the book in question because... well, it’s not that great. It’s quite well written but it fails, I think, in its intent and in possibly deciding what the target audience for a book with this title would maybe require from... well... a book with this title.

And what about that appalling title, eh?

I honestly can’t bring myself to type something with such a blatant disregard for the rules of English grammar on this blog. There’s a picture of it above if you want to see what the publishers have horrendously let the book go out titled as... it’s the whole Bridget Jones’s Diary debacle again. Honestly, Lynn Truss wrote a book partially inspired by seeing that stupid version of the BJD title... which should of course be Bridget Jones’ Diary, as a word ending in ‘s’ as a possessive doesn’t have an additional ‘s’ after the apostrophe... as I hope my readership knows. It took me a while to get around to reading this book because, well, every time I went near the cover my blood started boiling all over again and I had to walk off and leave it where it was.

Anyway, appalling grammar aside, along with its obvious disproof that this is, in fact, the only book on John Williams in English (because... well the bloody title isn’t in English, that’s for sure)... we have a fairly skillfully written book which, according to the author in his introduction, started life as a much longer thesis he wrote which he then “de-academicised” for commercial publication... although I’d personally argue that claim... and stripped down to something more pertinent to the title. Again, though, I’m not sure just how pertinent the content is to the main title. If you include the entire subject title, even, it still seems a little off to me.

For starters, it’s not until the 69 page mark that you get any real mention of John Williams. The opening of the book mainly deals with what the author refers to in the title as the Classic Hollywood Music Style and, while he goes at great lengths to explain what that is via a kind of potted history of soundtrack composition before Williams arrived on the scene, I have to say that this stuff wasn’t the reason I picked the book up. I say “potted history” not as a derogatory term, by the way, but merely as a short hand to remind readers that the history of film music is a rich and varied topic and the short amount of pages given it here would never be able to do it proper justice, although Audissino does remarkably well in terms of putting some of the basic information across in such a short space.

However, there are two things wrong with this opening, as far as I’m concerned.

Number one being that I’m really not sure that what Audissino concludes is the Classic Hollywood Music Style is consistent with what other people may define it as. Sure, he hits the obvious “usual suspects” like Korngold and Steiner but, it has to be said, the specific honing in on a particular and specific way of writing scores, filled with Mickey Mousing etc (the phrase coined for when music illustrates and synchs to onscreen movement and action), actually doesn’t do any of the composers he puts under and outside this umbrella any favours in defining something which we’re all going to agree is typical of such an umbrella term as Classic Hollywood Music Style in the first place. It completely ignores the diversity and range of all film composers, for one thing, and the rigidity of his definition means that a lot of classic Hollywood scores from, say, the 1930s to the 1950s, that we may all think of as such, would not fit in with Mr. Audissino’s straitjacketing of his terms. Of course, some of his readers and the composers in question might feel that it does but, unless I completely misunderstood it (always a possibility), then I found the term much less useful than the author obviously did and somewhat alienating in a way. I think part of the issue might stem from applying rigid classical music definitions to a spin off of motion picture art which also has to perform certain functional duties as part of its musical DNA.

The other thing is, like a lot of the audience for this book (I suspect), we’re not here for a lesson on the history of film music. Most of us probably already know this stuff and were looking for more personal, or even musical, information specifically about John Williams. If we’d have wanted a history of film music we would have bought that book (I know I did, years ago... got a couple of okayish ones) and, though the writer's summation is professional and concise, I feel that if you wanted to write that more generalised introduction taking up almost a quarter of the book (when you take the notes and other bits out), then you maybe shouldn’t have called your book John Williams’ Film Music... or even the grammatical tragedy of a title that it's currently marketed under.

Now, after approximately 69 pages, he does get to John Williams but, since I know practically nothing about the composers private life, I was kinda hoping to learn more about him. The biographical details are here to an extent but... not so much. I still don’t remember if he’s married, got kids etc... other than what I’ve learned from programmes bought going to some of his concerts years ago (on the odd occasions he came to England to perform in concert). If the writer does mention little snippets like these, they are usually throw away items rather than telling us anything of the history of the relationships etc that Williams has made over the course of his life, it seems to me.

The bonus is, or would be, of course, that the rest of the book is dedicated to a critical analysis of John Williams’ writing style and work technique. And it kinda is, I guess, but most of the scores I was interested in were either barely mentioned, not mentioned at all or deemed unimportant or inappropriate to the objective of the book to be dealt with at any length. What we have is three chapters dedicated to the work on Jaws (although much less detail than I would have imagined), the first of the Star Wars films (again, surprisingly little compared to what I thought could have been kulled from a study of the music in this film) and Raiders Of The Lost Ark... the last being a fairly overlong section but more in keeping with what I would have thought would have been written to fulfil the title of a book which even included the name of the film in its subtitle. What a shame the author didn’t feel like maybe analysing three less “box office bait” scores in Williams’ oeuvre. Personally I would have liked to know more about his work on, say, The Fury or Dracula or, my favourite Williams score, Images. Bit of a missed opportunity I feel... in some ways. How about 20 or 30 pages on each of his films and then releasing it as a multi volume work? That might have been more interesting, methinks.

However, the last section I mentioned was, I have to say, the best of the lot for me because the writer expounded a theory, or arrived at a conclusion perhaps would be a better way to say it, about one of the elements of the leitmotif in Raiders Of The Lost Ark that I had never thought about before... and he’s absolutely right and I actually learned something here, so that’s all good. What it is I learned from Audissino is this...

Marion’s Theme from Raiders Of The Lost Ark is not a theme specifically for Marion.

What? You what? Shock horror is probably the reaction you are having to that statement now (as was I when I was reading this)... but thinking about it he’s right.

What he has to say about it is that the theme as used in the movie is not a theme which is used whenever Marion is on screen. Think about it. It only comes into play when Indiana Jones is either with Marion on screen or he’s thinking about her (such as in the aftermath of the exploding truck about half way through the movie). It doesn’t represent Marion at all... it represents what Marion means to Indiana Jones. It’s kind of acting like a “male-gaze” equivalent of the leitmotif... it’s all about Indy and his feelings... not about Marion. And as I went through the music in the picture in my head... I realised that the writer is right. Not only that but, although I’m not as familiar with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as I am with Raiders Of The Lost Ark, I’m pretty sure that the usage of Marion’s Theme in that one, perhaps due to the very nature of keeping her identity as a surprise and then the fact that pretty much all her scenes are with Indy, means that the logic of that particular piece of music follows through in its use on the fourth film too... so that’s pretty cool. I love it when I learn something good from a book and this was a bit of an eye... err... ear opener, to be honest.

That being said, the book was mostly a disappointment for me because the bits I came for, and which I felt were implied by the title, were just not there for me and, instead, I got well written but very general stuff which you would think the target audience for a book like this would already know about before specialising in a specific composer. It is, however, extremely well written so, if you are a complete novice in terms of the legacy of the great Hollywood composers then I think you might well benefit from picking up this tome... although, I believe there are some more thorough ones on the Market at present. As it is, though, my hunt for a book about John Williams’ life and a full study of his music is still on my 'to find' list... as I suspect it is for a lot of other movie music fans. This book isn’t it... but it certainly whets the appetite for further studies.

NUTS4R2 @ FilmsOnWax

Hi there,

Just a quick shout out to some of my off site articles on film music, a subject I love but am less confident when it comes to writing about it. The FilmsOnWax links have all now been added to my music section in the clickable Index near the top right of this page. Just click on ther and scroll on down past the Books and Films before coming to the Music section, just before the TV Shows and Miscellaneous Articles sections.

Alternatively, you can click on the titles below to take you straight to the articles. I hope you like them all and give FilmsOnWax your support...

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