Minions take over film scoring

[Monterey Jack]

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... m1ufWbS7Co

[AndyDursin]

It's the sad state of film scoring. No matter who takes credit for it, nearly all of it is useless in 2022.

[Monterey Jack]

There's MORE music per minute in modern day movies and TV than at any point since the Golden Age of the 1940s and 50s, and yet none of it "sticks" to one's ear in any memorable way...it's all just a wash of surging chord changes and "chugga-chugga" string ostinatos that go nowhere. Remember when an action cue in a movie could not be transported to another part of the movie without feeling out of place? You couldn't take, say, the "Basket Chase" music from Raiders and plant it into the Desert Chase sequence, because it'd stick out like a sore thumb. Yet take any random three-minute stretch of, say, Tenet, plop it into any other part of the movie, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

[AndyDursin]

So interchangeable, movies are scored like they are 2 hour trailers and sometimes paced as frenetically.

It also speaks to the level of corporate control on these movies...and the worst part is there's not even a score to compel me to invest in emotionally. I could watch a bad movie from the 1980s and yet it still might have been worthwhile because it had a good score in it. There's no such pleasure to be drawn today from something that's unremarkable...it's just worthless.

[Eric W.]

Truth. Good article.

“I can COUNT THE NUMBER of mainstream Hollywood composers that I KNOW write all their music themselves ON ONE HAND.”

The perfect summary that's simply worsened over time.

[Paul MacLean]

It's sad because there are a lot of composers that did outstanding work in the past -- who are still around and able to work -- but no one will hire them.

All we get today are "mood ambiences" -- which take no skill to create and can be whipped-up in minutes. And yet, thanks both to software (and the fact that the composer isn't expected -- or wanted -- to create any themes) these guys still don't have the time to get the job done, so they farm it out to to others?

In the early 1990s, I remember hearing scores by Horner, Kamen, Fenton, Jones, etc. and thinking -- naively it turns out -- the future is in good hands.

[Monterey Jack]

Are there 12-year-olds today who rush out to buy (er, download) the latest interchangeable MCU soundtrack the way we did for movies back in the 70s, 80s and even the 90s? Name the last hummable character theme in a superhero or action/adventure movie.

There's a guy on Twitter who chides me whenever I complain about the wretched state of film music to note that "Not every score needs to have a dorky melody you can hum!" Well, what's the point of having "music" in a movie if there's absolutely nothing...musical about it? Even wildly atonal film music of the past still felt like something that was actually written out by proper musicians. Goldsmith's Planet Of The Apes isn't exactly a score you can whistle along to, yet it's fascinating, arresting music that -- more than any other aspect of the movie -- makes you honestly believe you're on another planet. When the apes first appear on horseback, and Goldsmith hits you with the howl of the ram's horn, it makes that moment...it cuts through the confusion of the primitive humans getting rounded up by their unseen adversaries and immediately galvanizes the audience's attention. Name a film scoring moment akin to that in recent memory. There are no clever uses of unusual instrumentation, no counterpoint, no melodies, it's nothing but a drone that's loud in the loud parts and quiet in the quiet parts, with maybe a solo cello sneaking through the soupy sound mix for the "emotional" parts. Think about how heartbreaking the scene in Superman: The Movie is, when Brando's Jor-El says his goodbye speech to his infant son, so eloquently scored by Williams, and compare it to this from Man Of Steel:



It comes across as SO flat and affectless, despite good acting from Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer as baby Kal-El's parents. And it's entirely due to Zimmer's worthless "music" adding nothing to the experience.

[jkholm]

Truth. Good article.

“I can COUNT THE NUMBER of mainstream Hollywood composers that I KNOW write all their music themselves ON ONE HAND.”

The perfect summary that's simply worsened over time.

Who do you think those five composers are, besides Williams?

I agree with what Lukas wrote on the FSM board regarding this article:

I don’t love contemporary film music the way I did even in the 1990s—in fact, I don’t even like it. I kind of can’t stand most of it. There are all sorts of aesthetic reasons why—but it’s quite likely a major reason that it’s simply not “written” anymore.

It’s neither composed by hand, nor by a single artist. It’s by a small army of anonymous musicians operating software doing musical sound design—then, under larger budgeted situations, re-recorded in whole or part by an orchestra.

Contemporary film music not being written by hand is a huge factor. I am not a composer but I can tell when listening to certain composers how much work went into a piece. I own several sheet music pieces by Williams and even the best of those piano reductions can't match the orchestral versions. A lot of that has to do with how detailed the orchestrations are. Whereas something like the Pirates of the Caribbean theme can be reduced to a melody on top and bass/rhythm on bottom, Williams adds so much to his pieces. There's those woodwind flourishes that end many phrases, the pulsating brass rhythms and all those added touches that make his scores so memorable.

There's also the lack of a teacher-student paradigm. Williams and Goldsmith apprenticed under the great Golden Age composers. The Golden Age composers learned from the European classical tradition. What do we have now? Hans Zimmer teaching young composers how to program synths to come up with cool sounds. That's no substitute for melody, counterpoint and harmony.

[AndyDursin]

That's also a great point. It's a whole flux of factors but it's also that the way movies are made, and who is making them, also doesn't allow any of these composers -- who may not even have talent -- to do anything other than copycat the same "sound" that permeates all these films. There's so little to distinguish between one of these scores to another, and HOW the music is used is all the same. Film music today does less than comment specifically on a moment -- with thematic material -- than it does provide a "wall of sound" approach that spoonfeeds the audience every second on how they should think and feel. It's just tiresome.


Again, this is why when someone goes "but the 70s and 80s had bad movies too" -- yes but even the bad ones then WERE SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING than anything made today. You'd usually have a REAL SCORE there. You'd have a director taking a chance. Maybe they'd misfire -- but the results had some artistic component absent from 99% of studio product churned out in 2022.

And like Lukas, I also feel this started in the 90s. Ironically within a few years of FSM starting, that's when the downward trend began for both movies and movie scoring. I've long felt if FSM hadn't started when it did, it wouldn't have existed if it was 1994 or whenever.

[Paul MacLean]

Even wildly atonal film music of the past still felt like something that was actually written out by proper musicians. Goldsmith's Planet Of The Apes isn't exactly a score you can whistle along to, yet it's fascinating, arresting music that -- more than any other aspect of the movie -- makes you honestly believe you're on another planet.

Agreed. I think Altered States is one of the most arresting scores ever written, and I personally find it quite listenable away from the film -- and sixty-billion times more interesting than anything in an MCU movie.

Truth. Good article.

“I can COUNT THE NUMBER of mainstream Hollywood composers that I KNOW write all their music themselves ON ONE HAND.”

The perfect summary that's simply worsened over time.

Who do you think those five composers are, besides Williams?

Howard Shore is by all accounts one of them. Broughton probably writes by hand. I would not be surprised if Randy Newman still writes by hand. I don't know who else. John Corigliano also writes by hand, tho he hasn't done a film in years.

I do think that the method of composing directly onto the keyboard can work -- Vangelis composes this way. But as much as I love Blade Runner, there is nothing in that score with the complexity of, say, "The Quiditch Match".

Composing on the keyboard takes less time of course, and with Zimmer's introduction of Media Ventures / Remote Control, he unleashed a legion of composers who, like him, "write" directly onto the keyboard -- and filmmakers now expect a much faster turnaround. Compounding this is Zimmer's process of speeding things up even more, with one or more "assistants" composing the score. Of course, nearly every composer -- even Williams and Goldsmith -- had to enlist ghostwriters to supply a one or two cues on rare occasions when time was short. But thanks to Zimmer, the "team effort" is now the norm.

Perhaps worst of all, composing in real time allows the filmmakers to stand over the composer's shoulder and literally micromanage every note as it is created.

Not all composers however -- even when composing on the keyboard -- create in this stream-of-consciousness way. Composition software can also work like a "word processor", which displays the staves on-screen and allows the composer to "type" the music. And while this takes less time than using a paper and pencil, it is still slower than creating the music by playing and composing simultaneously, and thus not always an option.

On top of all this is the proliferation of A-list directors who don't want themes at all -- Mendes, Nolan, Cameron, probably Villeneuve, etc. -- and younger, or lower-tier B and C-list directors who have no ear and just emulate anything an A-list director does.


"The composer without the ability to orchestrate is without some essential tools...One can admire a providentially given gift, but what you respect is someone who has all of it: the natural talent it all sits on, but also all the tools and technical expertise to bring it forward." -- John Williams

[mkaroly]

Would Thomas Newman be another one? Danny Elfman?

Great quote by Williams!

[jkholm]

Would Thomas Newman be another one? Danny Elfman?

Great quote by Williams!

I was wondering if Thomas Newman writes all his own music. He's got a pretty distinctive voice. I have no idea how hard it would be for a ghost-writer to imitate him.

[Paul MacLean]

Would Thomas Newman be another one? Danny Elfman?

Great quote by Williams!

I was wondering if Thomas Newman writes all his own music. He's got a pretty distinctive voice. I have no idea how hard it would be for a ghost-writer to imitate him.

I'd guess he probably does. He doesn't seem to have as heavy a workload as others. Tho his dad had a whole staff of ghostwriters at Fox!

But even with someone like John Williams, ghosting is a rarity. In fact I only know of a few examples -- Randy Newman wrote a cue for Hook, and it's rumored that Fred Steiner wrote the film version of the Sand Barge cue in Return of the Jedi. But in both cases, each composer was just cutting and pasting music Williams had already written.

It also would not surprise me if Williams simply scribbled on his sketch "insert bars 32-43 of 'Here They Come' when Lando flies into Death Star tunnel" rather than writing it out.

I was actually listening to an interview with Conrad Pope the other night on The Legacy of John Williams, where he revealed that a good deal of Kamen's Prince of Thieves was co-written by others. But again, that wasn't typical of Kamen's process (he only had three weeks to write that score).

It's a really interesting interview, and worth a listen...

https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/201 ... interview/

[mkaroly]

After reading that article, I think it was pretty telling that Zimmer says he "tries" to give credit to others. Says it all right there as far as his legacy goes in my book.