Notes in the Dark

It isn’t just my imagination: Olympic figure skaters are relying less and less on film scores these days. A decade ago, you couldn’t sit through a competition without hearing a lot of stuff by Jerry Goldsmith, Thomas Newman, James Horner, Alan Menken, and especially Randy Edelman.  But it seems that skating fashion has moved on and now the skaters rely more than ever on old classical stalwarts (Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Clair de Lune) and on original music pieces.

However, some film scores remain skating warhorses, such as Morricone’s The Mission. Read more here.

Another thing that surprises me about the state of film score conversation is how directors feel about film music. These are the people who ultimately call the shots — or, sometimes don’t call the shots when they should be — and yet their attitudes and motivations regarding film music remain largely a mystery. And when they do get talked about, it’s always in the context of a director-composer partnership. Maybe once in a while the director ought to get the sole attention.

My favorite director happens to be Peter Weir (at least, he consistently produces films that I really like). He is one of the few mainstream directors who actually almost never uses commissioned music (he has used Jarre for this or that on occasion, but not lately). Weir may make film music purists’ teeth grit over his use of pre-existing material, even pre-existing film scores (Powaqqatsi in The Truman Show, for instance), but it’s clear that he feels strongly about the use of music and, well, wants what he wants when he wants it. We often forget that the use of commissioned music, by a single composer, is not a rule but a tradition and that, but for the successful films worked on by talented Golden Age composers, the way Weir works could very well have become the norm. (Not counting the sales-driven songtrack approach.)

Directors like Weir already know what they like; there are other directors whose tastes and approach seems to be evolving. Kenneth Branagh is currently working on a film version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a type of project which almost seemed inevitable for him. It’s been clear for a long time that what Branagh has really, in his heart of hearts, wanted to do is to make cinema out of music — which explains a lot of why he has always been attracted to Shakespearean verse, Patrick Doyle’s scores with singing in them, and finally a Shakespearean musical (Love’s Labours Lost), and now this.

It seems to me that some of the most frustrating jobs for composers must be when a director doesn’t understand his own self and perhaps doesn’t want a relationship with the composer at all. In that case, when a director discovers he really would rather stick with the pop song he fell in love with in the first place, it should be a cause for rejoicing if they don’t commission a score again.

I heard a little bit of this, by Mark Thomas, on Mikael Carlsson’s show. It sounded so unlike a family film about a loyal little dog who lays piteously on his dead master’s grave, that either this score must be very bad or very interesting. I’m not really into the kind of Celtic obviousness this score seems to be selling, but I’ll have to put this on my “to-listen” list.

Yet another reimagining of a legendary English figure, but this one worked a lot better than Robin and Marian: Holmes and Watson hook up with Sigmund Freud in Vienna for detox and subsequent high adventure. Scored by John Addison, who was then coming to the end of his big-screen career (although he continued to work in TV for many years).

The score is terrific, but gets off to an uncertain start. The movie tries to at first strike a tone between cerebralness and almost-camp, and not only does Addison’s score seem to be mixed rather loud, but he seems to re-use the same suspenseful flourish at the end of every other scene for the first 20 minutes or so. The score soon settles down and figures out what it wants to be (as does the film) - a not-so-campy adventure, with the appropriate Straussian pastiches and romantic theme for the embattled (drugged-out) heroine. Still, Addison gets a gift for any composer — a rather lengthy sequence with no dialogue where Holmes hallucinates through his cocaine withdrawal. This part of the film actually comes out pretty well (if overlong), but there are one or two other scenes that are just plain silly (killer Lippizaner stallions, plus a train chase that goes on much too long) and Addison’s score sometimes just gets drawn into it and sounds… well, silly. (As does Robert Duvall’s alleged English accent.)

There was one fine detail in the score which I noticed that was a nice touch. Periodically, we see an unexplained flashback to Sherlock Holmes’ childhood which has underscore that is always finished with a single tap of a triangle. Then about 2/3 of the way through the film, Addison abandons this for the subsequent flashbacks. Just a tiny detail, but I was sort of like, “Aw, where’s the triangle?”

Last evening on TCM’s “Thirty-One Days of Oscar” was Olivier’s Hamlet. I have this on video but haven’t watched it in years, so I caught the very end of the movie so I could enjoy Walton’s glorious score. British concert composers seem to have a bad reputation for not being terribly good film scorers (as in, the music’s great but the scoring isn’t), but I can’t see/hear where that was justified with Walton. In fact his score helped the movie immeasurably (as it did Henry V, of course). Olivier’s movie is surprisingly snappy, but that’s because he cut and pasted the text all over the place. Oddly enough the last scenes seem almost devoid of tension - I just recently rewatched the BBC Hamlet (with Derek Jacobi) and even though that didn’t have any music at all, that production has such tension in it. (And don’t get me started on Eileen Herlie as Olivier’s mom — yarite.)

On the other end of the cutting-and-pasting spectrum is Branagh’s Hamlet which has been missing in action for lo these past ten years. It’s hard to find the VHS any more, and it’s not out on DVD, although one is in the works — see here — and apparently many extra goodies are being planned. First it was supposed to come out in 2006, then 2008, and now it’s back to 2006 again. May we hope for an iso-score, or at least an interview about the music? Granted, it’s not considered Doyle’s top work, but the reaction to the bright/heroic tone of the score seemed unreasonably negative by some critics and it would be nice to hear Branagh and/or Doyle comment on their approach.

Recently I came across an entire scholarly article which a guy named John Dunn wrote about music for Hamlet films (Walton, Shostakovich, Doyle and Morricone), so if you are for some reason a Hamlet film music devotee, eat your heart out.

The Chicago Tribune has a nice big article today about how iTunes is in some ways a shot in the arm for the soundtrack business (depends on how you look at it, I suppose).

The Hollywood Reporter’s film blog passes along an insider report that Spielberg’s projected Lincoln movie is not a go for filming and is now “up in the air.” Looks like John Williams’ dance card for late ‘06 is a bit freer than most people have anticipated…

When/if this film ever does get completed, much as I enjoy Williams’ score for The Patriot, I expect… no, demand… that a score for Lincoln not sound anything like Copland — or worse, the accompaniment to Disneyland’s animatronic show.

I’m not usually au courant on happenings in the business of film and TV music (obviously, because I’m not a composer), but Billboard recently reported on a bitter dispute between European composers and TV producers who demand up to 50% of the publishing rights to the music, regardless of whether the composer already is with a  publishing company.  Hence, the formation of the European Federation of Film Composers and Audiovisual Music. A quote:

David Ferguson recalls being asked in 1999 to work on a major U.K. TV film. “I said no to signing the clause,” he says. “The [TV company's] publisher told me if I didn’t ‘behave sensibly,’ the producer would be given a list of eight composers who would.” Ferguson signed.

Musimagen member José Nieto, an award-winning composer, says he has not been offered TV work since 1992, when he refused to sign the 50% clause. “The contracts are absurd and aberrant, but I have been lucky outside TV,” says Nieto, who is published by Paris-based Amplitude.

So if you wonder why some guys don’t seem to be working (you know, on TV projects that might produce CDs you might want to hear), this is some of what is going on.

The big news today is that James Horner is off DePalma’s The Black Dahlia, and Mark Isham is on. Within 24 hours, this item of information will be reproduced and linked to on every film score website and forum known to man. It remains unclear if the new FSM Online for February will be available by then, however…

I’m not sure if FSM Online is going to survive into the Internet age, although I will keep supporting it for now; magazines - or more specifically, magazine publishing models - do not translate well into the portal-dominated Internet “publishing market.” It’s all about generating daily, or at the very least weekly, content. Websurfers are insatiable. And interestingly it seems like the news all comes from the same press releases these days. What a difference from ten years ago when access to information about what was going on in the film scoring world, was very hard to come by.

On the other hand, some things about film score news haven’t changed — the segregation between Hollywood-based news sources and ones that have a toe in the European scoring world, unfortunately, continues. Again it’s still all about who’s in what very small circle.

Update: Some rather welcome news from Film Music Radio, in the form of their announcement that Mikael Carlsson will now exclusively provide news for them, in addition to hosting his own weekly program, “The Red Carpet.”  Even better, the news will be sent every 2 weeks by e-mail, which I have eagerly signed up for.

I have no idea what this movie is, and I’m not very familiar with Dario Marianelli, which is why I’m currently listening to this not-to-be-released score at the French website Cinezik, with their cool little Radioblog app. Why? Because it’s there, dammit.

Excuse me as I walk down memory lane again… but in the early days of film music on the Internet, I had hoped that this is how it would evolve - with more sounds and interactivity. Oddly enough we have only gotten stuff like podcasts in the last year, which doesn’t make sense because anyone could have made audio commentary recordings 10 years ago.

Getting back to the Marianelli music, I don’t think anyone would run out and buy this if it were on CD, unless it was differently edited together. It’s very much “background music,” save maybe the fourth cue, “Un apres-midi avec Simon,” which is pleasant in a very low-key way, and “La voie ferree.” On second thought, maybe this music isn’t best heard coming from a computer speaker.