Notes in the Dark

This post is cribbed from Mikael Carlsson's recent posting on FILMUS-L. I hope he doesn't mind my reprinting it here (especially since he no longer has a blog of his own). Mikael suggests the following:

BENJAMIN WALLFISCH
I can reveal to you that my label will release Benjamin Wallfisch's
first feature film score, for the Danish film "Dear Wendy" on April
18, on iTunes. He is the most brilliant young composer I have come
across in recent time, and I am particularly blown away by his
concert music. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate any
samples online, so you'll have to wait until my album comes out - or
go and rent the DVD of "Dear Wendy". You can read more about Benjamin
at http://imgartists.com/?page=artist&id=7&c=2 and
http://www.air-edel.co.uk/roster/bwallfisch.htm#artist_top. Some of
you might recognise Benjamin's name from one of your recent
soundtrack booklets - he is also the orchestrator and conductor of
Dario Marianelli's recent scores, including Brothers Grimm, Pride and
Prejudice and V for Vendetta.

JOHN KAEFER - http://www.composerjohn.com/
Another young composer who I discovered through his concert music. I
was particularly impressed by his work "Mosaic"
(http://www.composerjohn.com/music/orchestra/mosaic.html) and the
brief but exciting "Fracture"
(http://www.composerjohn.com/music/orchestra/fracture.html).
He has only written a few low budget film scores, but he is very
promising. I don't think that you will be able to get hold of any of
his music at this point, though. But check out the samples of his
concert music on his web site.

CEIRI TORJUSSEN - http://www.ceiri.com/
Welsh composer who has worked as an orchestrator and assistant to
Marco Beltrami. Another one who has done some very exciting concert
music. You can find a wealth of samples on his web site. Be sure to
listen to his concert music, that's where his talent really shines
(check out "Blodeuwedd" and " ). In terms of film credits, he has
only done a few thing on his own so far: Funky Monkey and Dracula
III: The Legacy. He's got several interesting things in the pipeline,
though.

SCOTT GLASGOW - www.scottglasgowmusic.com/
Exciting composer who has worked for Ed Shearmur, Chris Young and
Elia Cmiral among others. On his own, he has scored Chasing Ghosts
and the recent Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. Both are very cool,
highly dramatic orchestral scores. Go to
http://www.scottglasgowmusic.com/SGMusic.htm and you will find a lot
of great samples of his music! And… I begin to see a pattern here:
the guy also writes for the concert hall!

EDWIN WENDLER - http://www.edwinwendler.com/
I first came across him when Film Music Magazine sent out a double CD
promo featuring works by various up and coming composers. He had
written a Rozsa-esque adventure piece that I found very rewarding. He
deserves to get some real gigs, but so far his only feature film
score is a low budget thing called Home: The Horror Story. That's a
very funny score, on the other hand. Elfman-wacky, sort of. There are
four samples of Edwin's music at
http://home.earthlink.net/~edwinwendler/music.html. "Consolatio" is a
really beautiful classical, uplifting choral/orchestral piece.

JEFF GRACE - http://www.tummomusic.com
Here is another composer I'm actually going to release music by.
Jeff's score for the low budget horror film The Roost, including a
small suite from his latest score for another horror film (Joshua),
will be available on MovieScore Media soon. Jeff has worked as an
assistant to Howard Shore, including all the Lord of the Rings
scores, and he shows a lot of promise. Has a knack for
experimentation and avant garde techniques. Visit
http://www.tummomusic.com/demo.htm to listen to his demo tracks - I
think he's great!

CHRISTOPHER TIN - http://www.christophertin.com
Promising youngster who has been working on scores by Joel McNeely,
Hans Zimmer and John Ottman. Christopher's orchestral writing is
quite striking, check out his samples at
http://www.christophertin.com/samples.html. He recently wrote the
score for computer game Civilization 4, but haven't done any solo
feature film scores yet.

H. SCOTT SALINAS - http://www.salinasmusic.com/
As you probably know, he is one of the past winners of the TCM
competition, and he's currently getting a lot of scoring assignments.
He co-composed the score for Edison and wrote new music for the
silents The Red Lily and The Squaw Man. Check out the samples on his
web site - several of those tracks are very impressive. The end
credits music from Edison is really original, for instance (the final
30 seconds has a wonderful Goldsmith feel). Very promising composer.

CHRISTOPHER SLASKI - http://www.christopherslaski.com/
A brilliant composer who divides his time between work in Spain and
the UK. He wrote the music for a Spanish film called "Semen: Una
historia de amor" (don't laugh) and also "The Piano Tuner of
Earthquakes" and "Beyond the Sea" (Kevin Spacey's film). He's got a
very personal, orchestral style. He wrote a brilliant concert work,
"Frank Lloyd Wright Suite" too. There are some samples on his web
site, but they were a bit difficult to find. You will have to click
on the different titles in his resume, and sometimes they are linked
to a page with samples, sometimes they go directly to imdb.

ALEX HEFFES - http://www.alexheffes.com
UK composer who actually has a few albums out already - very
beautiful romantic score for Dear Frankie and a highly entertaining
comedy score for Patrole Officer - check them out. You can listen to
sample tracks on his web site. Alex has a terrific timing. I will
release one of his recent scores on MovieScore Media in May: Vet Hard
(aka Too Fat, Too Furious), a hilarious action comedy score. I think
you will enjoy it!

CHRIS TILTON - http://www.christilton.com
Those of you who are familiar with Michael Giacchino obviously knows
this guy. Thanks to his music for Mercenaries, Black and Alias: The
Game he already has a fan base. Check out the huge selection of
samples on his web site - http://www.christilton.com/music.htm.

GEORGE SHAW - http://www.georgeshawmusic.com/
Check out his orchestral music on the sample page:
http://www.georgeshawmusic.com/ - and enjoy! George has a wonderful
"classic film music" style. He has orchestrated stuff for John
Ottman, David Kitay and, incidentally, Scott Glasgow (see above). His
own scores include horror film Marcus and The Kidnapping of Ingrid
Bettancourt.

RICHARD JACQUES - http://www.richardjacques.co.uk
British composer who blew me away with his score for the computer
game Headhunter a couple of years ago. He has also written the music
for the Starship Troopers game and it's a big, wonderful orchestral
score filled with all of the excitement you would expect from such a
title. You can listen to several of his compositions at
http://www.richardjacques.co.uk/downloads.html - he has not done many
film scores yet, though.

EVAN EVANS - http://www.evanevans.org/
Yep, the son of legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans! He's got a cool
web site with a wealth of material on film music - this is a very
passionate guy! He's a very versatile composer who has written some
cool horror music (Killers and Hunting Humans, the latter pretty
Herrmann-esque). I wasn't able to find any samples on his web site
though…

MARCUS SJÖWALL - http://www.sjowallmusic.com
Just breaking into the business, the winner of last year's TCM
competition. Has been working with composer Steve Edwards. The music
he wrote for Souls for Sale, the TCM silent, was absolutely brilliant
- a very fresh sound. A few samples of his previous works are
available http://www.sjowallmusic.com/index.htm

This is one of those CDs which has been on my curiosity list seemingly forever. Literally, I have wanted to check this out for over a decade. The only other music by Gowers I am familiar with is his wonderful violin suite on the Birthday for My Grandmother CD, but I was aware of the high reputation of both this British TV series and the score for a long time. Ever since I saw The Seven Per Cent Solution recently, I’ve been in a Sherlock Holmes sort of mood. So I finally took the plunge and obtained a copy.

It was well worth the wait (as I’m sure everyone already knew except me). This is utterly perfect Victorian music; and, as someone put it to me recently, “It IS Holmes.” Naturally, as Holmes is an amateur violinist, the violin figures heavily throughout the various selections culled from almost a dozen different Holmes TV-movies and episodes for Granada Television, most strongly in the classy and urgent main theme and in the romantic “Irene Adler.”

But it’s not all just chamber music; there is a haunting choral “Libera Me” and the full orchestral treatment for many of the cues, including the taut, stunning “River Chase.” (Warning: don’t turn up the sound too loud on this one, as the score is, uh, dynamic as well.) The truly beautiful theme for “Elsie Cubitt” is one of those perfect pieces that leave you unsure if it’s original music by Gowers or if it’s some classic traditional tune that he’s adapted. (Unfortunately, the liner notes, although full of relevant quotes from Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, aren’t very helpful when it comes to the actual music and don’t even include track times).

Gowers’ music has to be the definitive word on this literary character, not to mention one of the pinnacles of the impressive tradition of British television music. (It’s funny to hear everyone getting all excited about LOST as “groundbreaking” TV music, when the Brits have enjoyed outstanding small-screen scores for years…) Highly recommended.

Two interviews with great guys who are still around and ready to work if anyone wants them: Scoremagacine interviews John Scott, and BSO Spirit talks to David Shire.

Ellen was a naughty girl. She listened to the Cinematic Sound three-hour show full of unreleased Michael Giacchino goodies… and now she has her very own copy of said goodies. Naughty. (And she is amazed at how much things change, and yet how much they stay the same… it’s like sitting by your radio with a tape recorder, all over again.)

My favorite of these Giacchino pieces is the 10-minute suite of ride music for Disney’s Space Mountain (which is in the Incredibles mode, but much fruitier. Incidentally, I’ve also fallen for the very cheesy, spacey game music for Metroid Prime, which is by… uh… some Japanese guy.) Game music is something I never really followed until now, but since I am interested in Giacchino, I have to be interested in it now.

It seems to me that a modern-day film music purist could look down on game music: it’s really modern-day “program music.” You could say that it’s an easy, lucrative job for a composer, and that composing some grand, generic symphonic suite for a generic game (or ride) situation is just not as much an art form as the highly collaborative, tricky art of composing for film drama or comedy. So ironically, concert composers of the Golden Age could look down on film composers for having to base their music on films; while today, the art form of film music is so advanced and storied that conceivably you could look down on the game composers for doing what sometimes concert composers used to do.

Don’t get me wrong - a lot of game music is spectacular. There is some excellent stuff being written. But at the same time, as someone who loves film music and all that is interwoven with a good score, there is sort of an easy, empty quality, a lack of completeness… in the sense of a tone poem vs. an opera. The tone poem is beautiful, but it’s just not the same.

More reminiscences on Herrmann by Mrs. Kaufman, wife of session violinist Louis Kaufman…

Benny had a marvelous enthusiasm for music, it was sort of a catholic taste that was all-encompassing somehow. One time we were in New York with him, and he wanted all the musicians, the string players to stand up. He’d read someplace that Von Bulow had asked the orchestra - had the orchestra stand up, the violins, the violas, everybody except the cellos. And the musicians were outraged. They said no, we don’t want to stand up. And he said, “Oh please, come on let’s try, let’s see if it makes any difference in the sound.” And finally they stood up and they played something and it was almost like transformation - one couldn’t believe with what - well, more expressivity, more enthusiasm, they didn’t realize that they thought they were just playing the same way, but when they stood up, they played better. And then of course he couldn’t get them to do that very long. They sat down and they went back to the regular performance. But he would get ideas from all sorts of obscure books that he would find.

Is it just me, or have things…changed?

When I first discovered that there was a whole community of soundtrack fans out there, many many years ago, and that we could actually converse through outlets like FSM and the Internet, it seemed to me that there was a lot more passion and interest in discussing… the music. The composers. Films. I went away from the scene for a while (work, personal commitments, etc) and came back to find that things seem much changed after several years of heroic work by various outfits to turn out a lot more much-sought-after recordings. Short and perhaps not too sweet: Film score discussion these days seems to be all about buying things.

Perhaps soundtrack geeks always just wanted to buy as much as possible, I don’t know; perhaps the wide-ranging discussions were just ways to shoot the shit while waiting for the next Holy Grail. But I don’t think it’s just my imagination that fans are consumers now more than ever. I hear someone talking about “the next LOTR 3-CD set” and I wonder if they’re kidding - I seriously don’t know. (And 3 CDs of LOTR? 3 CDs of anything, for 10 hours of music or what not? To paraphrase Rita Rudner, “I don’t even want to listen to anything good for 10 hours…”)

Because my rented DVD of Harry Potter has to go back tomorrow, I decided to geek out with it. This was sort of inspired by a discussion thread over at Intrada, where people reminisced about the good old days when you had to find ingenious ways to tape music off the television without your nagging mom’s voice ruining that main title you dearly wanted. (One guy revealed how he would hook his reel-to-reel up at the drive-in!)

So I decided to do a DIY iso-score for Harry Potter (just one sequence which seemed to me to be scored particularly well). Yes, I sat there for about a half hour just cueing up the DVD and cueing up the tape (it took a while) to get the full, dialogue-free, SFX-free effect of having a poor man’s home theater. I think in this manner you can get a tremendous insight into the music and a composer’s thinking, and certainly a heightened appreciation for a score. I’d like to do this again with a lot of other films, come to think of it. And leave the DVD counter and CD track timings behind for posterity in case some other soundtrack geek, somewhere, wanted to try the same thing someday. But do people even do these kind of “stupid soundtrack tricks” any more?

I got issue 48/49 in the mail today; all I can say is, Wow. Much improved from several years when I saw it last. MFTM, in my mind, is the magazine you want to go to if you care more about the art of film music than you do about collecting. (Not that there’s anything wrong with collecting, but I’m just not that into it.) Every composer interview (except Laurence Rosenthal’s, I think) has a corresponding interview with the director they’re currently working with. Like I said, wow.

Here’s an interview with Hong Kong-based composer Peter Kam about the improving standards of film music in Chinese productions.

Now it’s time for me to weigh in on last year’s #1 conversation starter. I admit I’m at a huge disadvantage with the Potter films… I haven’t read the books, and I’m just not that into the movies. I’m probably the only Doyle aficionado who felt just casually interested that he’d gotten this assignment. It seemed a foregone conclusion to me that, as they were switching directors all the time, and the films were being made in Britain, eventually he’d wind up doing at least one of the films. (Not to mention that the series is now executive produced by David Barron, who has a longstanding involvement with Kenneth Branagh’s films.) And so it proved.

I had only seen the first two movies, and I still haven’t seen Azkaban (although I have heard the score), but I knew enough about the plots of the books and a general gist of the characters to think I didn’t need a refresher course before renting the film. However, with Goblet of Fire, it’s clear that if you haven’t already read the books at this late juncture, the screenwriter is not going to do you any special favors. So if you are like me and aren’t deeply invested in the Potter universe, you’re going to spend a lot of time in the first half of the film going “Huh? Where are they going now? Who are these characters arriving?”

Like the film, Doyle’s score is absolutely all business. There is little time (and perhaps little inclination on Doyle’s part) to do anything but make the briefest of references to Williams’ main theme, which disappointed more than a few Potter film fans and Williams fans, who complained the score didn’t evoke much magic. However, there really isn’t a whole lot of magic being evoked in the film, either (do we actually learn any new spells?) and there’s very little of the “Wow look at this!” factor in the story itself. (When something wondrous actually does happen - as with the arrival of the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students, or the mermaid song in the bath - Doyle rises to the occasion in his own style.) But the movie is basically about taking what we have already seen and learned in the previous three films and putting it (and Harry of course) through the grim wringer.

Personally, as someone relatively unfamiliar with the Potter world, I could have benefited from Doyle’s score doing something more to take me in hand as a viewer from the start and get me in a Potter sort of mood. His score doesn’t do that, but it does come to the fore with tremendous effectiveness in the film’s closing half hour, creating a most un-Williams-like impression that signals, as Harry says, that “everything will be different now.” Regardless of who scores the next Potter film, this movie threw down a gauntlet for the series and there really can’t be any going back - dramatically or musically. (Can Williams get really, really dark? I am not so sure, but I’m sure he would enjoy the challenge.)

On a side note, I noticed that during the Oscar ceremony, during the reading of Goblet of Fire’s single nomination, the orchestra chose to play Doyle’s “Hogwarts March” instead of one of Williams’ themes from the film. I thought that was a nice nod to Doyle, and I’ll bet the orchestra was glad to play something perky and different from the usual sweeping themes they had to play for other nominated films.

The Guardian has a big retrospective article on Krysztof Kieslowski and talks briefly to Zbigniew Preisner.

According to Preisner, Kieslowski’s use of music as an element of the story came from a gradual process of discovery. “To start with,” the composer said, “Krzysztof didn’t really know what he wanted from the music. He used it because it was the way that you used music, and somebody had to write it. On the other hand, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do something different with film music. From that moment, he trusted music more and more. By the time we got to Véronique and Blue, the music was almost the centre of the spectrum.”

Speaking of Preisner, recently I re-compiled a list of L.A. Film Critics Award winners, hopefully to demonstrate how they may actually be worth taking more seriously than the score Oscars. Yeah, I admit I’m fond of LAFCA’s awards because they keep picking scores I happen to be very very fond of (Far From Heaven, A Little Princess, Ed Wood, and The Incredibles among them) and they honor popular composers as well as the obscure. (Horner’s Titanic was the runner-up score for their award in 1997.)

Preisner won the award for three years in a row in the early 90s (for a total of seven different scores), which may or may not have been someone’s enthusiastic overkill of admiration for Kieslowski (and by overflow, Preisner). But again, I was bemused by some of the response I got to this list - namely that any critic who would choose something by Preisner over Schindler’s List clearly was an effete snob. (But ever since the most recent Academy Awards, I have been wondering who the real snobs are…?)