Notes in the Dark

Scott Eyman, the book editor for the Palm Beach Post, has written an amazing and serious article on the state of modern film music.  He interviews Lukas Kendall, but clearly has his own point of view.  And it's very gratifying to read the point of view of an arts critic who obviously likes film music, but does not have a hand in producing soundtrack CDs.  Eyman also names his top 12 film scores, obviously taking the long view.

File this one under "Crazy ideas." While settling in with my new computer and playing with various iTunes plugins, I came across this one, Jacket, which allows you to link any picture to a song and display it full-screen, with a little MTV-style track identifier at the bottom corner. Now, this isn't a radical new idea for an iTunes visualizer; but it's different in that most people want to display album covers with their songs. This visualizer lets you display any photo you want.

Since I own DVDs and CDs of many of the same film/scores, I thought, "Why not make screen caps from the movies corresponding with the score CD tracks, and display those fullscreen?" So I did just that, and when I was all done taking screen caps and matching them with the tracks, I played and enjoyed them for about fifteen minutes before another thought crossed my mind… "Gee, wouldn't it be cool if these pictures were moving?"

Why not? I mean, aside from the massive copyright violations it would entail, why not match score tracks to picture and play them as music videos on some sort of streaming channel? Kind of like mini iso-scores. Although it would be challenging (since many score CD tracks don't necessarily correspond to the finished film), the idea reminded me of the late-night "arts video" program that airs on my local public TV station, which I really love watching. (It plays video excerpts of ballet, dance, opera, classical concerts and so on.) Sort of like an MTV for film music.
Of course, in order to enjoy this you'd have to actually care about how music works to picture, rather than… album covers and collecting. So again, as I said, file it under "Crazy ideas." However, I sure would watch it.  In any case, I may take the screen caps I made for certain score albums, and make them available on this site as downloadable packages, so others can enjoy an approximation getting the film and music back together again.

Mikael Carlsson has passed along confirmation from the studio that Nick Hooper will indeed be scoring the next Harry Potter.

Pardon my snark, but the dismissive attitude that people had about news of this assignment (which should not have come as a shock) really bugged the crap out of me. "Oh, the studio will never agree…" "I'm sure his score will be thrown out…" Is it so hard for people to understand that maybe, just maybe, someone doesn't want to work with John Williams when they have their own composer? And that (gasp!) the studio might agree? What is the world coming to when we'll be forced to listen to and discuss more than the same five composers???

Sorry - I love it when the little guy gets a chance and it confounds the know-it-alls.

This "a capella" arrangement of the main title from Star Wars is amazing and hilarious. (It's actually just one guy sampling his own voice, but he's got considerable talent in recreating the whole orchestra… and with some style, as it's sometimes… not quite on key…)