Sir Malcolm Arnold, R.I.P.

After 2004’s annus horribilis in which the film music world lost three greats (Goldsmith, Bernstein and Raksin), Arnold’s passing probably isn’t hugely newsworthy since he wasn’t working at all and apparently had senile dementia. But he certainly has to be one of the last, if not the last, of the great British film composers. Best known for Bridge on the River Kwai (although he wrote everything but the famous Col. Bogey March), but also for things like Inn of the Sixth Happiness and The Heroes of Telemark. And concert music, of course, as all British composers of his generation wrote.

The sad thing is that I doubt many fans will pause long enough from their heated conversations over the next CD box set release of [insert obscure film by major composer here] to notice the end of the era he represented. This is my cue to get my dismay about this sort of thing off my chest.

First, for the uninitiated: film music fandom is a really small world. Someone once estimated (with the help of sales figures from specialty labels) that there’s a core group of no more than 5,000 people worldwide, from Pakistan to Argentina to the U.S.A. (Six of whom, as the joke used to go, are women - but that’s not true any more.) It’s really one of the only music appreciation communities that is so small and so un-commercialized, that sometimes in order to join a good conversation or read a good magazine article, you need to be able to get by in a language other than English sometimes (and thank God for the Altavista translator…)

It used to be uncommercialized, and that’s the sad thing. When I got into it about 15 years ago, it was very much a hobbyist/collector thing, but people had a passion for talking about aesthetics and the mysteries of the industry and the old Hollywood stories, and of course, the music and the films. It was the sort of community where people made tapes for each other, and where you could trade an unpublished interview about Bernard Herrmann for a CD of music by Herrmann. I left the scene for about 5 years or so and when I returned, I honestly can’t much recognize “the place.” What happened was that a lot of unreleased music got licensed out to various labels, finally after being buried under LA freeways or whatever they used to do with the old masters; and boom, suddenly overnight everything has become about releases. Buying releases, planning releases, pestering the labels for hints about their next releases, bragging about the umpteen releases you just bought. Everything seems label-driven now, rather than driven by interest and curiosity about this strange and bewitching art form. It’s frightfully boring and incredibly sad. What happened to the music, man, the music?

Then again, I will never understand why some people have this driving need to have collections of stuff. 1000 CD’s you’re never going to listen to. Crazy.

But anyhow - farewell, Sir Malcolm. One more pip-pip has gone out of the music world’s cheery-o.