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Has Dissonance in Film Music Become Domesticated and Commodified?


Sharkissimo

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An interesting essay called Scoring Incredible Futures: Science Fiction Screen Music, and ‘Post-Modernism’ as Romantic Epiphany, from a professor at the University of Surrey (Jeremy Barham). Relates to what King Mark's topic about a certain musical cliche in trailer music.

Barham argues that (at the time he wrote the essay - presumably mid 2000s) - sci-fi film music has become commodified by the powers of Hollywood, and the blue prints for this were laid out in Gottfried Huppert's score for Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS.

I wonder what he'd make of INCEPTION and GRAVITY?

An extract:

The film which at first sight would seem to challenge most forcefully the aesthetic framework set up by Metropolis is is Forbidden Planet (1956). Its entirely electronic ‘score’ by Louis and Bebe Barron, the first of its kind in Hollywood, is credited as‘electronic tonalities’ and was composed at a time when the electronic music of Stockhausen and Eimert was in its infancy. Functioning both as music and sound effect track, it was clearly designed to sound alien and futuristic.

For instance, it is increasingly aligned both with references to the astounding relics of a long-dead but highly advanced civilization and, in the latter half of the film, with the monstrous emanations unwittingly created from the main character’s subconscious mind with the help of the aliens’ unimaginably sophisticated technology. Yet at one point the score shifts effortlessly from this non-diegetic function into diegetic mode when an ancient recording of the creatures’ music is played, which has been clearly contextualized in the dialogue as an alien artefact of great value and wonder.
The ease of this slippage is facilitated by the largely non-dramatic nature of the score as a whole,which as both music and sound effect maintains a flexible and discreet distance from the emotional contours of the narrative. Despite Leydon’s claims and even the efforts of the composers themselves, this music, through its contemporaneous strangeness,seems to be for the most part conspicuously separate from the middle-American, patriarchal 1950s approach to human relationships depicted in the film, and to act as a repository of certain concerns about new technological growth characteristic of post-war Western culture—developing from lack of understanding and naïve wonderment at its benefits beyond those already harnessed by humankind, through fear and distrust of its potential, to a final rejection of its evil and uncontrollable superhuman power (the planet is set to self-destruct by the departing astronauts). There is a tension between its abstract, largely non-threatening ‘coffee-percolator’ sound world, which briefly intensifies into a louder, throbbing siren-like noise—sometimes ambiguously diegetic in origin — for moments of dramatic pressure (the only concession to the prevailing aesthetic), and the all-too-threatening real prospect of the amoral use of technology which seems to be the story’s message.

If this sound world has since become the clichéd symbol of an old-fashioned future, the film should nevertheless be commended for resisting the temptation to provide a counterpoising sentimental‘human’ element in its scoring, particularly in light of the underlying narrative’s all-too-neat closure, which through this resistance is curiously lent an open-ended, distanced, mythic quality. Largely because of this single-mindedness,

Forbidden Planet set itself apart from conventional Hollywood practice, and in genre terms provided a foretaste of what would happen in a mere handful of later science fiction films which, in differing narrative and cultural contexts,refused to compromise in their aesthetics of musical underscoring. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, few films resisted the handed-down aesthetic framework: Fahrenheit 451 (1966) resorted to Vertigo-like wistful romanticism by Herrmann for references to humanistic literary heritage; Fantastic Voyage (1966) backtracked to a Waltonesque expanded tonality by Rosenman for the concluding scene of escape; Goldsmith veered between quaint pastoralism (for rural settings), the virtuosic avant-garde writing of his early years, some electronic sonorities (for dystopian futures and moments of threat) both within and between the differing timeframes of The Illustrated Man (1969); Silent Running (1972) called on Schickele’s eco-folksong sung by Joan Baez for images of the last remaining forested biosphere floating in space; Logan’s Run (1976) ended in diatonic triumphalism by Goldsmith for the final emergence to new life outside the domes; and audience response to Alien (1979) led to the replacement of Goldsmith’s already quite consolatory score with Howard Hanson’s Symphony no. 2 (‘the Romantic’) for the closing credits. By contrast, as if to pay homage to Baconian utopian ideas, Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) employed the same dense vocal clusters of the ‘Kyrie’ of Ligeti’s Requiem for the tense, sonically painful and potentially dangerous discovery and examination of the black monolith, and the astronaut’s final transcendent journey towards re-birth, revealing an integrated aesthetics of identity between dystopian agony and utopian ecstasy perhaps surprising in a film that otherwise thematizes stark audio-visual polyphony.

Within entirely different narrative contexts, at least the first two of the simian film franchise, Planet of the Apes (1968, Goldsmith) and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970, Rosenman) similarly maintained their harsh, post-Varèsian rhythmic, melodic and harmonic idiom throughout, opting to end with silent closing credits for their down-beat endings,as did the similarly scored The Andromeda Strain (1971, Mellé) which resists romantic apotheosis despite having a reasonably upbeat, if mildly admonitory ending questioning the response to future biological threats. Here, silence is perceived as the only appropriate way of resisting the lure of the ideal, in the face of the horribly real or the so nearly apocalyptic.

By this stage it is clear not only that a nucleus of ‘avant-garde’ musical techniques primarily centring on intense dissonance was becoming a commodified emblem of all kinds of on-screen negativity (personal, social, technological, dramatic and narrative), but also that (at least
Anglo-American) consumer appetite for unresolved, mystical or pessimistic narrative closure was waning. As if to mirror this and a wider cultural malaise with such musical idioms (and no doubt in deference to market forces and the film’s deep immersion in the values of contemporary middle America) the last vestiges of creative boldness were perhaps to be found in the quasi-Ligeti sonorities of the early parts of John Williams’s Close Encounters score (1977), particularly in scenes of alien abduction. However, in allegiance with—or perhaps propelling—emerging cultural norms and expectations, these were essentially nullified during the course of the film whose final scenes of wonderment and sentimentality revealed that we did not need to be afraid of the aliens after all, for they too live in a diatonic world, complete with Kodaly hand signals.

Matching old-fashioned adventure narratives, Star Wars (1977) along with many of its weak imitators such as The Black Hole (1979), Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and The Last Starfighter (1984), marked a return to Golden-Era heroic Hollywood scoring often with ramped-up rhythmic propulsion, while in more recent times potentially thought-provoking science fiction repertoire such as Total Recall (1990), Event Horizon (1997), Impostor (2002), The Time Machine (2002), Minority Report (2002) and Serenity (2005) are scored in standard, though entirely expert, ways indistinguishable from that of other thriller, adventure or mystery genres: namely with a post-1977 orchestral lingua franca comprising a mildly extended tonal language with mediant and modal shifts, ubiquitous Lydian 4ths, quasi militaristic overtones (heavy brass fanfare material rooted in much earlier scores such as Bliss’s and Stevens’s) or neo-romantic sentimentality (Gattaca (1997), Contact (1997), A.I. (2001), parts of Twelve Monkeys (1995)) as well as varied combinations of plentiful orchestral stingers, rapid crescendi on isolated, now-commodified, cluster-like pitch aggregates, sweeping horn melodies, pounding beats, multiple percussion, and tensioned upper string writing.

In line with increasing commercialization of formulaic narrative closure, it is as if the dissonance and the excessive timbral stridency were needed to play their part in the same way that audiences of melodramatic pantomime feel cheated unless they have a villain to jeer at, and from whom they now they are comfortably protected, on the way towards predictable resolution of the Manichean human drama.

As studio executives and producers are no doubt aware, ‘extremely radical departures in musical style risk alienating audiences’,and that simply will not do. The drive for commercial success ensures that ‘the music used in SF cinema overwhelmingly draws on recognizable and well-known conventions and associations’. The domesticating of avant-gardes, dissonance, and textural overload within an overarching reactionary aesthetics which defines these things as ultimately assimilable and controllable pockets of commodified radicalness demonstrates the power of the market place and imperial Hollywood culture to place limits on creativity.

Also:

Even scores that tap highly effectively into the metallic, synthesized sound aesthetic of the post-apocalyptic industrial or corporate wasteland, such as those of the Terminator films, cannot resist lapses into romanticism within their overwhelmingly aggressive, pulse -, stinger - and cluster-orientated sonics: witness the turn to lyrical melody at the death of Kyle Reese towards the end of The Terminator (1984) and in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) the brief romantic interlude for a sequence of mother - son reconciliation. It is also interesting that the longer a franchise goes on, and 14 the more that original artistic teams are diluted or replaced, the more likely it is that, in line with narrative and visual content, its scoring gravitates towards idiomatic standardization. Terminator 3 : Rise of the Machines (2003), for example, largely eschews the bleak dystopian industrial aesthetic of its predecessors in favour of a humanized thriller format with familiar romanticized orchestral scoring; the quite innovative pastiches of desolate Bartok and Debussy in Alien (notwithstanding the capitulatory ending), were replaced with militaristic thriller clichés in Aliens (1986), quasi-religious wordless choruses in Alien 3 (1992), and Huppertz-like high-string and diminished-7th horror/tension formulae (along with the usual orchestral hits and rapid crescendo) in various scenes of Alien Resurrection (1997). As high-octane, aggressive and striking as Don Davis’s scoring of The Matrix (1999) is, it too nevertheless calls on the Huppertz legacy both idiomatically (signature high-pitched swirling chromatic string and woodwind textures) and aesthetically (‘avant-garde’ dissonance and clusters for tension, violence and scenes of devastation set against nineteenth-century tonality of almost Wagnerian grandeur, and/or Lydian 4ths, for monumental vistas, philosophizing about human freedom, Neo’s ‘resurrection’ and romance between characters). These elements and this classic scoring paradigm are consolidated and enhanced in the subsequent films of the Matrix franchise , particularly the recourse to heavenly choruses for moments of transcendent (CGI - enabled) action , and lush romanticism for human death scenes and supposed triumph at the narrative conclusion of the trilogy.

http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/763160/3/Scoring%20Incredible%20Futures%20.pdf

:stir:

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Well, I read all of that, but I'm sort of at a loss for words how to follow up or start a conversation.

Audiences have become acclimated to a certain level of musical complexity, which in theory is a good thing as it should make them open to exploring modern art music, and from there, all the rest. But I do wonder if without the imagery to justify the sound, many would shake their heads with disapproval.

As for whether composers are strangled creatively by studio demands based on what they believe audiences want... well, yeah, they are.

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the simple answer is yes. As most film scores are chasing, to some degree, temps, composers have to pay attention to choices that directors, editors, and anyone else sufficiently high up the food chain have made. Sometimes it's the composers own work ( goldsmith famously decided that the director, and editor was wrong in wanting a creepy dissonant score and went with romantic....only to see the director pick the editors choices instead. Also pop music style progressions are the norm now...so dissonance doesnt really fit........god I hope it comes back. Interesting to see Ligeti's requiem re-apear in Godzilla. Cant help thinking if Desplat had written it they would have tossed it !..

t

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It's living large in horror films...from SCREAM onwards those fucking clusters and aleatoric screechings were all over mainstream Hollywood films. But try to sell someone a Jerry Fielding-Penderecki or Schönberg inspired piece for a 'serious' movie like GONE GIRL....and gone you are faster a than melting snow cone in hell.

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i find the odd cluster and screeching are just used like a preset now. Mash the keyboard with your but cheeks , kinda way. True carefully plotted dissonant writing has gone.

this wouldn't happen today .

we would get this instead;

and that is really because Hollywood don't want the former. It's not being used in temps, it's considered old fashioned.

this is considered avant garde now:

t

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True carefully plotted dissonant writing has gone.

Thanks (or rather "due") to Star Wars.

Alternate version? How was the original version?

Not a preset.

BTW, suddenly the thread's title is no longer tied to the content of the quoted excerpt.

Alex

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i find the odd cluster and screeching are just used like a preset now. Mash the keyboard with your but cheeks , kinda way. True carefully plotted dissonant writing has gone.

this wouldn't happen today .

we would get this instead;

and that is really because Hollywood don't want the former. It's not being used in temps, it's considered old fashioned.

this is considered avant garde now:

t

This is a very good point about the so called "commodification" of dissonance. There are now standardized methods for achieving certain effects, rather than anything creative and experimental. Looking at a Bryan Tyler score is surprisingly advanced in its methods, but then you realize they're the same methods being used all over to the same familiar boring effect.

You don't get Goldsmith or Williams or even Horner "wildness" anymore. You get a preset from a sample library labeled "chaos".

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True carefully plotted dissonant writing has gone.

Thanks (or rather "due") to Star Wars.

The author of this essay believes one of the culprits is Stanley Kubrick's (temp) score for THE SHINING.

Check it out if you have time, Alex (only 39 pages).

In the light of these observations, The Shining could be said to represent something of a watershed moment in film history: both a point of departure which signalled the imminent cementing of post-war avant-garde musical repertoire and styles as standard means of underscoring a plethora of evils in future compositional practice, and a point of closure at which such music forever lost the opportunity of gaining wider signifying potentiality within public consciousness.

http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/678962/1/fulltext.pdf

Alternate version? How was the original version?

Not that different, IIRC.

BTW, suddenly the thread's title is no longer tied to the content of the quoted excerpt.

How so? If anything it's more tied to the quoted excerpt than the original 'Is Sci-Fi Music Dead' title, which is a much broader question. Barham talks about dissonance being commodified and appropriated - I decided to use that in the title.

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Kubrick was bizarrely clueless when it came to music. He had taste but totally failed to see how in the right hands it could further a narrative. 2001 is a testament on how to find choice music for specific scenes but add no sonic arc to the story.

t

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Agree with TGP.

I really like North's score as an autonomous work, but it would not have worked for Kubrick's vision of the film.

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I respectfully disagree. Possibly my favourite film and I do love the music but there is a task it fails at and that is helping to tell the story. Perhaps that's impossible as a its a very complicated tale. But there are no musical developments at all. Just a collection of beautiful synchronisations . Yes the blue danube works wonders with the space station. Lux Aeterna fits perfectly with the moon shuttle. Katchachrian's achingly desolate adagio is so perfect for Pooles aimless jog . But no story...more a collection . As north lamented how on earth could he compete !....

t

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I think the genius of it is precisely that it avoids any kind of development. Just static musical associations. I don't believe a typical musical narrative was called for and would in fact have shattered the impact of the film.

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well..we will never know. It's an art film for sure....almost like a lose collection of the best music videos ever made...with a thin storyline tying them together . I agree that North's score wouldn't have worked. But i don't think Kubrick's approach was deliberate. I think he was just far more interested in the filming . None of his movies have good scores in my opinion . Still...............a truly amazing movie

t

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Well the choice of music reflects the film itself, which was never really about narrative. Sometimes atmosphere bears more weight and significance then narrative storytelling itself, and that's what 2001 is all about. It's a collection of various set-pieces tied in together with recurring motives, and the music reflects that. You have different collections of visuals which creates specific moments attuned to specific pieces of music. In that sense, the music does the job brilliantly.

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all true.....and on that level it does work.......and yet there was a story. If you read the book, a very clear one, that kubrick in his own superb way chose to blur...for the sake of the visual aspect of the film . But I suspect you are right ....if he had told the story in a clearer way ..and the music did play more of a supporting role...we might not of enjoyed it quite so much.

t

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Nooooo Kubrick did not blur anything. The film and novel came into being simultaneously between him and Clarke with each putting their own mark on their respective specialty.

If anything, Clarke un-blurred. ;)

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well...it was originally a short story. By Clark written some time before ( 16 years ). If you read Clark's The lost worlds of 2001 you'll see how much Kubrick did blur.....deliberately....and Clark understood. and let him......

for instance the whole saga of HAL...which was a glorious red herring...and as Clark points out was factually incorrect in the film, as when Bowman turns him off...up starts a videotape explaining the mission...and refers to the fact that HAL new about the monolith all along......and yet in 201O....( a pale comparison ) Floyd's character clearly states that " i didn't instruct anyone to tell HAL about the monolith ! ". A belated attempt to clear up the story. Lot's of footage got left out ( about an hour ).......god knows if it would have been any clearer....

still love it though

t

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The Sentinel was only a starting point, only detailing the discovery of an artifact on the moon. The story we know as 2001 originated between the minds of Kubrick and Clarke. Clarke spun it into his own brand of novel and Kubrick into an impressionistic film, though both also had a hand in the other. Both are very fine works but decidedly different.
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Whew! Grade 26 on a Flesch-Kinkaid readability test! Anyway, here's my two cents:

I believe that there is still a place in conventional sci-fi films for the application of avante-garde electronic music or even unconventional, atonal and aleatoric music. However, with the increased expections from audiences for originality in conveying epic sci-fi stories on screen, studio executives are of the increasing opinion that the "place" for such music in the film market is becoming increasingly smaller. If I had to visualize the audience pool, film music, and studio executives as a Venn Diagram, the tiny area in the center where all three circles overlap would be where such avante-garde music resides; i.e. such music is for a niche audience. As such, avante-garde music is taking up less and less of a film score in sci-fi films as more of a business decision and less to do with a decision made by the composer.

So yes, I agree with the author's conclusion: that the choice to include dissonant music in sci-fi movies, even in a narrative context, is becoming more of an economic choice than an artistic one, especially in light of the trend for big studios to mount increasingly larger big-budget sci-fi movies that need to return their investment or risk failure.

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The thing is, "dissonance" is being used as such a generic template these days. As many have pointed out above, it's not so much the matter of lacking dissonance as it is the matter of the lack of experimentation. The kind of dissonance you heard the Polish (a la Penderecki) do has become the stock sound for horror films. It's like every horror film has the same variation of slashing, piano crashes, plucking, etc, as if they're all just VSToptions to pick from on a computer (which I'm sure there are programs for). There are only a few composers who take that approach as an art form of its own, and that may be because the changing attitudes of the medium don't encourage upcoming composers to explore that field more.

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The thing is, "dissonance" is being used as such a generic template these days. As many have pointed out above, it's not so much the matter of lacking dissonance as it is the matter of the lack of experimentation. The kind of dissonance you heard the Polish (a la Penderecki) do has become the stock sound for horror films. It's like every horror film has the same variation of slashing, piano crashes, plucking, etc, as if they're all just VSToptions to pick from on a computer (which I'm sure there are programs for). There are only a few composers who take that approach as an art form of its own, and that may be because the changing attitudes of the medium don't encourage upcoming composers to explore that field more.

And don't forget those scratching violins building up to a crescendi and cutting off before the predictable jump scare.

Funny that you should mention VST plugins. East West Quantum Leap software (I own their CCC2 harddrive) has the exact plugin I just described.

But yes, making such music is becoming more of a passive experience than an exploratory experience thanks to VST plugins and temp tracks.

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Hitting a single key for "chaotic" brass is nowhere near as fun as playing in six separate aleatoric horn parts.

Indeed! But people prefer convenience over the fun of writing these days :(

Question: when you try and emulate aleatory in your mock ups, do you just superimpose variations of the passage you're working on (ex. like six different variations of the same six notes played on top of each other)?

And yeah mnac, you're right. Sharky once posted a really cool VST program that had some really neat Goldenthal-esque sounds to it. But it's no fun if you're just working with presets...

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Well I play in every part of my mockups in real time, no step by step note entry for me. So when it comes to aleatory in anything but strings, I play it exactly as the real players would. As yet there are no VIs that let you control each individual string player, so for aleatoric string parts I have to fake it and just approximate the sound of 12 violists playing independently or whatever the effect is.

I'll try and throw together some brass examples.

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And yeah mnac, you're right. Sharky once posted a really cool VST program that had some really neat Goldenthal-sequel sounds to it. But it's no fun if you're just working with presets...

I agree. What was the name of the program?

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http://www.jwfan.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=24237&p=1034071

Totally unrelated - when I was looking through topics I've started I came across this one... the quoting craze of spring 2014, I'm disappointed this one got locked before it gained momentum.

http://www.jwfan.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=24362&hl=

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Thanks for the link.

The samples sound nice and clean, but I find myself drifting toward Hollywood Brass Virtual Instruments from EWQL, especially their trumpet and french horn samples.

Just... beautiful...

All together now:

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EastWest and in fact most big name libraries just sound too characterless to my ears. I've spent a lot of time putting together my virtual orchestra in such a way that avoids sounding like everything you hear in trailers and reality TV shows.

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I thought that LOTR mockup was lousy to be honest. Little expression, no nuance.

 

Anyone tried Spitfire's Albion?

 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eyLDTvAePGo?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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I can't stand Hollywood Brass...or most of the EWQL samples. Way too trailer-like in sound.

I have CineStrings, which I'm really liking the sound of. Of course, I'm just a beginner when it comes to DAW stuff, so I may not be making the most of it, but I'm learning.

CineBrass sounds decent too.

And the Spitfire library sounds quite good Sharky!

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I found EWQL software to my liking because I use it strictly for mock-ups. I really do like their samples.

I'm not of the opinion that when a carpenter makes a bad book shelf that the blame lies with the tools.

To me, the ultimate purpose of sound libraries is a means for the composer to give an idea of what their piece will sound like before a live orchestra plays it.

Certainly not an end in and of itself (unless you're not a big-name composer yet and are strictly working with DAW).

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I wasn't suggesting that Storm Choir was an inferior choral VST program.

I was simply remarking upon the difficulty of capturing the human voice in a VST program.

...

Though if you had to push me for a suitable choral VST program, I would go up with Philharmonilk or Symphonic Virtual Choir.

Both are expensive, but totally worth it, especially with SVC's Word-Builder extension.

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Three responses to the excerpts Sharky posted:

1) Since Hollywood is profit-driven, it works by a kind of natural selection - whatever happens to be successful becomes widespread. And the music in film is no exception. Styles associated with successful films will inevitably be imitated and propagated. That's just the nature of the business. Barham, the article's author, seems to forget, or actively ignore, this point.

2) Barham also states that franchises tend to become more "standardized" the longer they continue, but does not mention that the very franchise he heaps scorn on - Star Wars - actually becomes more modern with each film. Music like that of "The Magic Tree" in Empire, or "Luke Confronts the Emperor" from Jedi become a more common sound in the latter two films, especially Jedi. Then there are the prequels, which rely even more heavily on a modernist style of writing that sounds quite different from the original trilogy.

3) Davis' score for The Matrix sounds like Huppertz' score for Metropolis? Um... no.

I could be more sympathetic if his argument was well constructed, but from what I understand here, the pieces just don't fit together.

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If I may add to what you have said:

1) And there's nothing wrong with film-making being a business first. Art and commerce have historically gotten along with each other. However, it takes an especially creative musical mind to create an original score that will become associated with that film and nothing else. Sadly, for the most part (in your words), "Styles associated with successful films will inevitably be imitated and propagated." I swear, if I hear another horror film score with scratching violins sul ponti or sul tasto with a rapid crescendi to a cutoff...

2) Not to mention that there's nothing wrong with stepping back and saying "Hey, everyone. Remember a good old-fashioned simple story? Why don't we make one of those?" Mainstream sci-fi movies of the 60s and 70s like 2001 and The Andromeda Strain were heavy to watch. Hence we got Star Wars: an epic space adventure about a group of rebels toppling a powerful galactic empire in the vein of Flash Gordon, only more serious and less campy. Of course, this isn't to say that those films weren't elevated by their respective scores.

3) Wherever did he get the idea in the first place that the two scores were even remotely similar?

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Remember a good old-fashioned simple story?

Yes, 2001: A Space Odyssey. So simple that there's almost no story to speak of. People tend to miss that one of Kubrick's major goals was to make a visually immersive movie. It's only when you're hoping for lots of story that it becomes 'difficult' or "heavy" to watch.

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3) Yeah, it's odd how he seems pretty musically literate in some cases ('mediant and modal shifts, ubiquitous Lydian 4ths' or 'cluster-like pitch aggregates') but cloth-eared in others - like Ludwig says, comparing THE MATRIX to METROPOLIS or even ALIEN: RESURRECTION to METROPOLIS (I don't recall any diminished-7ths in the Frizzell score, but plenty of clusters, aleatoricism (which Barham never once mentions), polytonality and quartal harmony. Also, reducing Goldenthal's ALIEN 3 to 'quasi-religious wordless choruses' (a tiny fraction of the score) is not only ignorant but insulting. Did he watch the first minute and a half and give up?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Remember a good old-fashioned simple story?

Yes, 2001: A Space Odyssey. So simple that there's almost no story to speak of. People tend to miss that one of Kubrick's major goals was to make a visually immersive movie. It's only when you're hoping for lots of story that it becomes 'difficult' or "heavy" to watch.

I love 2001 and think it is the greatest science fiction film of all time and having a complex story. It is an excellent story (based on reading the book) but the movie is almost the impression of the story in the book. Generally speaking, Arthur C. Clarke's story has a clear narrative and Kubrick's version is enigmatic.

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