WSJ Article about current film music scene

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Eric W.
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WSJ Article about current film music scene

#1 Post by Eric W. »

If you read the article off their page that's ideal because it has videos, pictures, hyperlinks, etc.

As is, I'll copy and paste the article here because you may need a sub to see it:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/film-compo ... 1497455242

Eric W.
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Re: WSJ Article about current film music scene

#2 Post by Eric W. »

Text of article:

Film Composers Step Into the Spotlight

Brian Tyler (‘The Mummy’) and Hans Zimmer (‘Dunkirk’) are celebrated in a coming documentary and are performing before huge audiences



By Don Steinberg
June 14, 2017 11:47 a.m. ET



When “The Mummy” opened Friday, Brian Tyler, who composed the movie’s music, performed his usual ritual. He headed to cinemas around Los Angeles to observe audiences. When screenings of the Tom Cruise action film let out, he lingered in the multiplex, taking extra time on the escalator and in the rest room to hear whether anyone was unconsciously humming his music.

“I’ll wash my hands for a long time,” says Mr. Tyler, who has composed music for four Hollywood films coming out this year. “I was happy to hear some people leaving the theater humming the theme.”

It’s getting harder for Mr. Tyler and some of his colleagues to stay under the radar. Film composers are stepping into the spotlight in a new documentary, “Score,” which opens June 16. The movie celebrates the storytelling ability and emotional power of a film’s score—the original music composed to complement scenes in a non-musical film, rather than pop-music tracks a director might insert.



Composers such as Mr. Tyler, who is featured in “Score,” also are taking rock-star turns in concerts. In May, he conducted a 75-piece orchestra and 60-person choir, performing music from “The Mummy” and his other films for an arena audience of 15,000 in Krakow, Poland. He also performed some of his original electronic music, under his alter-ego name Madsonik, at a dance club in San Diego.


Another movie maestro in the documentary is Hans Zimmer, who has scored more than a hundred films from “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1989 to the coming “Dunkirk.” Mr. Zimmer rocked the Coachella music festival in April, playing electric guitar with a backing orchestra and kicking off a global tour that this month has him filling arenas across Europe. He returns to the U.S. in July for his first North American concert series. “People are realizing that film music can stand on its own two feet,” Mr. Zimmer says. “There’s a sense of storytelling in the music. It’s not necessarily the story you saw on the screen. You can make your own movie in your head.”

The documentary reveals the film-music creation process, practitioners, and history. It explores the impact of Bernard Herrmann’s screeching violins in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” John Barry’s “James Bond” theme, Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western sound, and Thomas Newman’s ethereal score for “American Beauty.” There is footage of John Williams and Steven Spielberg working on music for “E.T.” as well as Mr. Spielberg’s reaction to Mr. Williams’s two-note motif for the “Jaws” shark. Initially, the director thought it was a joke.



Movie music is all about manipulating the audience. “The whole purpose of your job as a film composer is to be the emotional voice of what the director wants in the scene,” Mr. Tyler says. “It’s the wordless narrative, so you try to jump into their head as much as possible. “ Director James Cameron (”Titanic” and “Avatar”) says in the documentary that a composer “has to act almost like a therapist” to extract a director’s feelings.

Live movie-score performances, sometimes accompanied by films, have become a summertime staple. The Harry Potter Film Concert series hits cities across North America this summer. “Titanic Live” continues its world tour, and the New York Philharmonic plays a “Star Wars” Film Concert Series in September. Orchestras regularly perform John Williams’s music (including “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Jurassic Park”), with the 76-year-old composer stepping in at times as conductor.



For composers, moving between films and other work keeps ideas cross-pollinating. Mason Bates is composer-in-residence at Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His classical symphonies tend to tell stories. For the 100th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s birth in May, he composed a piece that integrated JFK’s moon-shot speech into a symphonic work about American exploration. His first opera, “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, ” premieres in Santa Fe this summer. Director Gus Van Sant heard a recording Mr. Bates did with the San Francisco Symphony and asked him to try his hand at scoring the film “The Sea of Trees,” which premiered at Cannes in 2015. Working on movie music that’s tied so closely to dramatic narrative “allows one to think more theatrically” about other music, Mr. Bates says.

Today’s arena performances might not surprise film composers who started out in the rock world. Danny Elfman graduated from the band Oingo Boingo to score films including “Good Will Hunting” and “Silver Linings Playbook.” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails won an Oscar for composing the score of “The Social Network” with Atticus Ross.


But the arena-size crowds still astonish some composers. “Outside of John Williams doing his big concerts—and he’s kind of always the exception to the rule—I don’t think any of us thought that this was possible,” Mr. Tyler says.

Mr. Zimmer has some rock roots. He played synthesizer and appeared in the video of the 1979 Buggles song “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which launched MTV. This month he and Buggles frontman Trevor Horn, with a 60-piece orchestra, performed the song live for the first time in decades in Frankfurt. Mr. Zimmer has been joined on tour by Nile Marr, son of The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. His light show is done by Marc Brickman, lighting designer for Pink Floyd.

“I’m so not the rock-star type,” Mr. Zimmer says. “I’ve surrounded myself with people who really know how to do it.”



Brian Tyler:

on film: Tyler’s scores include “The Mummy,” “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Now You See Me”

on stage: Gives wild electronica concerts as his alter-ego “Madsonik.” In Krakow, Poland, Mr. Tyler recently conducted a symphony orchestra, playing his film compositions. He plans more U.S. performances of both kinds this year.


Hans Zimmer


on film: Scores include “Rain Man,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Inception” and “The Dark Knight.” He won an Oscar for “The Lion King.”

on stage: After rocking out at the Coachella festival in April, Mr. Zimmer launched a global tour that will take him across North America beginning in July.



Mason Bates

on film: Scored Gus Van Sant’s drama “The Sea of Trees.”

on stage: Mr. Bates in April performed his modern symphony “Alternative Energy” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.



Trent Reznor

on film: Won an Oscar, with Atticus Ross, for composing the music for “The Social Network” (2010). They also co-scored “Patriots Day,” “Gone Girl” and other films.

on stage: Mr. Reznor’s industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails plays music festivals this summer.

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AndyDursin
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Re: WSJ Article about current film music scene

#3 Post by AndyDursin »

Thanks for posting Eric with the paywall.

A PR agency handling this documentary sent me materials on it...I think it's sad because the program doesn't match reality, and that's film music as we know is no longer as prominent, important, or vital to these films. It's become a generic wall of noise that takes little talent to produce -- there are some good composers still working, but they are handcuffed by the format. And then there are others who just produce an assembly line of music as indistinguishable from one film to the next.

A really good doc would've demonstrated how a film might've been scored through the decades -- compared to the approach employed by today. Instead it just sounds like (and I haven't seen it) a self-serving, cheerleading kind of thing about the industry, not really diving into where it stands creatively in 2017. If I'm wrong, forgive me, but that's not the sense I got.

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Paul MacLean
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Re: WSJ Article about current film music scene

#4 Post by Paul MacLean »

AndyDursin wrote:A really good doc would've demonstrated how a film might've been scored through the decades -- compared to the approach employed by today. Instead it just sounds like (and I haven't seen it) a self-serving, cheerleading kind of thing about the industry, not really diving into where it stands creatively in 2017. If I'm wrong, forgive me, but that's not the sense I got.

Film composers were derided for decades -- Korngold was hailed as "the new Mozart" in his youth, only to be branded a "Hollywood hack" and shut-out of classical music circles after working in films. Ironically, film music is finally respected as an art form today -- at a time when artistry and originality in the medium is at an all-time low.

When was the last time you heard a score that was truly iconic, and added as much to a film as scores like Ben-Hur, Psycho, Blade Runner or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone?

Scores today are modeled on temptracks drawn from previous scores which were modeled on temptracks, which were modeled on previous scores modeled on temptracks, etc., etc.

And what I find infuriating is the number of people over who vehemently defend these formulaic soundtracks, and would rather die than believe that the awful electric guitar -- oh, sorry, electric cello (which sounds exactly like an electric guitar) -- in Wonder Woman isn't as classic a "theme" as any ever written.

I'm sure most of you have seen this, but this "fan trailer" (made a decade ago) continues to affirm what is missing from so much film scoring over the past 15 years...



Ironically, Hans Zimmer was actually a session performer on Walker's score!
Last edited by Paul MacLean on Sun Sep 17, 2017 4:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Monterey Jack
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Re: WSJ Article about current film music scene

#5 Post by Monterey Jack »

Paul MacLean wrote:When was the last time you heard a score that was truly iconic, and added as much to a film as did the scores for The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, Ben-Hur, Psycho, Goldfinger, Chinatown, Superman, Blade Runner, Edward Scissorhands, Last of the Mohicans, Apollo 13, The Red Violin or Williams' Harry Potters?

Scores today are modeled on temptracks drawn from previous scores...
One of these scores is not like the others / one of these scores is just not the same... :wink:

Agreed with everything else you said, Paul...it's bitterly ironic, in an era where movies have MORE music per minute than any decade since probably the 1940's, that so little of it adds anything to the overall experience of the movies they accompany other than adding additional noise to the already-punishing sound design schemes of modern blockbusters. I mean, Lukas and the crew were bitching about this 25 years ago in the pages of FSM, but at least then, the music that was "loud and everywhere" was MUSIC, not just a white noise machine designed to drown out whatever other blockbuster is playing in the next theater room over. :? And the hell of it is, today's moviegoers either don't notice the music at all, or else don't even think it's bland...they like it, and spend $30 on a 2-disc vinyl release of Batman V Superman so they can rock out to that horrible Wonder Woman thrash guitar "theme". :shock:

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AndyDursin
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Re: WSJ Article about current film music scene

#6 Post by AndyDursin »

We all bitched about it, and really the seeds for "the decline" had been planted for where we are today. Overscoring certainly seemed to be a thing back in the 90s, and you can chart it along with the downward trend in movies themselves. I looked over a roster of "Summer Blockbusters" from the time I was in college on, and man, things started going downhill back then. Yeah, true, 20 years ago, things were not "as bad," but they had already started to go south. It's one reason why I have no interest in the kinds of soundtracks LLL is putting out -- expanding lengthy albums that were too long, many times, to begin with.

I mean, I started exclusively reviewing movies at that time for a reason...the future for film music was looking grim even in 1997.

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Re: WSJ Article about current film music scene

#7 Post by John Johnson »

According to the makers of Score: A Film Music Documentary, the Blu-ray/DVD release is scheduled for release in September.
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Paul MacLean
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Re: WSJ Article about current film music scene

#8 Post by Paul MacLean »

Monterey Jack wrote:
One of these scores is not like the others / one of these scores is just not the same... :wink:
Yup, that about sums it up!

AndyDursin wrote:I looked over a roster of "Summer Blockbusters" from the time I was in college on, and man, things started going downhill back then. Yeah, true, 20 years ago, things were not "as bad," but they had already started to go south.
The 90s did have a few gems -- like Horner's Braveheart, Apollo 13 and Zorro. In fact I'd say Horner was arguably the "composer of the decade". Barry wrote some of his best work as well -- Dances With Wolves, The Specialist and The Scarlet Letter. I was also a big fan of the (sadly still-unreleased) Devil in A Blue Dress. I enjoyed Jarre's A Walk in the Clouds and Shadow of the Wolf. Jurassic Park and The Lost World were maybe not John Williams' most engaging albums, but they had their moments, and of course Williams ended the decade with a bang in The Phantom Menace.

But overall the 90s wasn't on a par with the 80s. I felt Goldsmith was "kicking back" a bit, and writing more simplistically (plus he did all those comedies -- and comedy was never his forté). Even his Star Trek scores weren't as strong as Star Trek: The Motion Picture or Star Trek V. And of course Hans Zimmer / Media Ventures was starting to take over.

The last score which really "blew me away" was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- and that was 16 years ago.

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