Notes in the Dark

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?