bobfily

This made me angry

This made me angry

Interesting thread on Twitter by Joe Kramer explaining the state of film scoring right now.
 
 
"This is a sad truth for everyone trying to make it in show business - it is virtually impossible for people who are neither born into money or born into the business.  And it IS a business - money is the bottom line.  As one very successful producer recently told me "Joe, no one gives a shit about your art".  I can count the number of mainstream Hollywood composers that I KNOW write all their music themselves on one hand, John Williams being the most famous example.  Everyone else is a team leader, a figurehead for a team of composers who are getting no credit, very little money, and no job security.  None of us have any job security anyway.  One of my closest friends made a deal behind my back that swindled me out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and then dumped me for a Zimling and this was after assuring me that working for him/her was the same as having a "savings bond". In 2010, having scored "The Way of The Gun" and close to 40 TV movies for the Hallmark Channel, I was so broke I had to sell my CDs and DVDs to feed my son. This is not a pity-party for me.  This is just a reality check for people who dream of scoring movies in Hollywood: It is a cutthroat community of people who are in the business to get rich and famous.  Writing music of any quality is secondary to that ultimate goal. And keep in mind, being an artist is not a civil right - no one owes me anything, even the ex-friend who swindled me.  Making art is a hobby, and if we can manage to make some money from it, so much the better. I promise to always do my best to write all the music in anything I score myself, and if I don't, to properly credit the people who co-write with me (i.e. to the film in a meaningful way.  These promises have definitely impeded progress in my career - I haven't scored a single mainstream Hollywood movie since 'Rogue Nation'.  But I also haven't ripped anyone off, or swindled my friends, or presented a false impression. I promise not to hire an 'assistant' who is really a ghost-writer.  I promise to do my best not to just copy the temp, but to contribute of myself to directors, producers, or studio execs.  To the OP, Nadia, thank you for sharing your story.  There are a lot of hard truths that need to be shown to those who hope to join this business.  I think often of a quote once heard, spoken by one of the cinema's greatest composers:  "I got into this business to make a living.  Now people get into it to make a killing."  In closing, let me reiterate, this is not whining - this is a tough business, and it's not for the faint of heart to undertake. It can be wonderfully rewarding, but it is also impossibly challenging.  I hope it can evolve to a community that helps each other rather than competes with each other”.

A music critic and author Henry Pleasants (1910-2000) wrote a very interesting book back in 1955, titled The Agony of Modern Music. Wikipedia describes this book as "a polemical attack on the direction taken by much of twentieth-century music and an argument in favor of jazz as the "true" master music of the time".
 
Some quotes from it seem to go in hand with the study of Williams' work.
 
On Wagner:
"The purely musical basis of Wagner's popularity is something contemporary composers of opera have never perceived. They have held to this method and discarded his manner, not recognizing that what was valid and vital in Wagner was precisely his manner, including particularily the excesses and extravagances the contemporary composer so heartily despises".---page 157
 
"The contemporary composer's error has been, not in failing to take up where Wagner and Strauss left off, but in failing to understand what Wagner had been. They were influenced by his theories and his method, and ignored the obvious musical reasons for his success. They neglected to note that the essential musical nature of opera had not been changed, least of all by Wagner, and that in the opera house, as in the concert hall, vocal melody, or an instrumental substitute for it, is the alpha and omega of music".---page 158
 
"Wagner was a musician, a composer in spite of himself. He achieved success and immortality in the theater just as Bellini and Meyerbeer and Verdi did---by writing hit tunes".---page 157
 
On Verdi:
"The composer, the student of music, the sophisticated listener, may think of Otello as being superior to Aida, and of Falstaff as being superior to Otello. But as pure music Aida is superior to both of them. The composers turned to Otello and Falstaff to inf out what it was that Verdi was driving at. They found something very much akin to the Wagnerian concept of integrated music-drama, free of Wagner's Germanic trappings. What they failed to understand was that even Verdi could be wrong, or at least go too far. Verdi's destination was Aida. He had developed a considerable momentum in getting there, and in Otello and Falstaff he overshot the objective. He did not come to grief. He had too much stability for that. But his successors foundered in rapid succession.
It is easy to understand, at this distance, the temptation Otello and Falstaff represented. They offered more excitement and pleasure. The pace is faster, the action more direct and, in the case of Otello, more violent and shocking. The form is less conventional. The set piece has almost vanished. There are some in Otello, although less numerous and less conspicuous than in Aida. There are very few in Falstaff. In other words, they represented, when superficially examined, and from the point of view of the time, a liberation from the operatic conventions, a step toward real music-drama, a closer approximation than Wagner was able to achieve of a complete jelling of the various arts involved in opera.
Such appreciation was correct enough, but the conclusions drawn from it were as mistaken as those drawn from the similar appreciation of Wagner, and hardly less disastrous, although easier to forgive. Verdi was the more honest progressive of the tow, or at least the more consistent, and his results were more convincing. Wagner's visions were a bit ridiculous. Verdi's never were. He had as good a sense of the theater as Wagner, and a more consicous understanding of the essentially musical nature of opera. Thus it was easy to believe that Otello and Falstaff owed their success and the high esteem in which they were held to what was new in them rather than to what was told.
This was true as far as the critics and the initiated public were concerned. But it was not the new that kept the operas in the repertoire. It was what still survived of the earlier Verdi".
 
Critics may praise as they will the declamatory style of Otello. But what keeps it in the repertoire is the opening chorus, the Drinking Song, the first act duet, the Credo, the Iago-Otello duet at the close of the second act, the great choral scene and Otello's monologue at the end of the third act, and Desdemona's arias in the fourth. There are fewer such melodic excursions in Falstaff, which is why Falstaff is less often in the repertoire than Otello.
 
Contemporary composers would have done better had they not dismissed the fact that Aida is still more popular than either Otello and Falstaff and always will be. Their error was in listening to the critics rather than to the box office.
 
About this even Verdi, for whom the box-office was never an institution to be taken lightly, may have been deceived. By the time Otello was produced he had achieved a position in the hearts of his countrymen and others where failure would have been next to impossible. But the fact was that Verdi, along with the main stream of music, had moved away from his popular base. He, too, had been seduced by the lure of a music that would be more than song.
This is the tragedy of European music in miniature. In aspiring to more than song its composers denied those very lyric faculties of music which prompt people to express themselves musically and which make the musical expression of others intelligible. Preoccupied with harmony and instrumentation, they forgot that the musician's primary purpose in life is to sing".----pages 159-161
 
Other statements:
"If he tries to write musically he ends, like Krenek twenty years ago, in a no-man's land between serious and popular music, or like Menotti today, somewhere between the present and Puccini. Or he finds, as did Weill, that he can compete succesfully with the really popular composers, and does so. In either case he ceases to be taken seriously as a serious composer".---page 165
 
"Music still lives in the theater. It probably always will. But it lives in the theater today, in America, at least, in the music of Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers, Porter, Schwartz, and Berlin. Their shows have never been fully recognized as opera. But is not what a thing is called that counts. It is what it is. If opera is the extension of the theater in song, then these shows are opears, regardless of the spoken dialogue and regardless of who does the orchestration. By the same definition most modern opera is not".---page 165
 
"The significant musical fact of this century is not atonality, nor neo-classicism, nor neo-primitivism. These are techniques derived, not from a popular music requirement, but from the inability of the composer to express himself musically. Their purpose is not to satisfy a musical impulse but to disguise the absence of one. The only musical fact of real significance is the new music for which there is a demand".---page 166
 
"A strong style, like a strong current, absorbs every inferior stream that crosses its path. The proof of strength lies in the fact of absorption".---page 170
 
"The executive glory of Western music is the symphony orchestra"---page 137
 
Williams was 18 years old when this book came out. I wonder if he read it. I think the name of Pleasants might have been known to him, considering that: "Following the end of the war, from 1945 to 1955, Pleasants contributed articles on European musical events to The New York Times. He also wrote regularly for Opera Quarterly, was London editor for the magazine Stereo Review, and for 30 years, beginning in 1967, was the London music critic for the International Herald Tribune."