Film Scoring Redux – Observations on Film Music in the 21st CenturyBrad Hughes (Director, School of Music Production & Sound Design for Visual Media - Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA) // November 12, 2014
In February of 2011, at the Academy Awards ceremony honoring the best achievements in the art of motion pictures, the Oscar for Best Original Score was awarded to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, for their haunting, moody music score in director David Fincher’s film, ‘The Social Network’. Here is a list of the other film scores nominated that year, along with their composers and total box office revenues:
Inception – Hans Zimmer – $292,576,195
How to Train Your Dragon – John Powell – $217,581,231
The King’s Speech – Alexandre Desplat – $135,453,143
127 Hours – A.R. Rahman – $18,335,230
The Social Network Trent Reznor /Atticus Ross $96,962,694
This team has gone on to create music scores for the same director (David Fincher) for his other films, including ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’, and most recently, ‘Gone Girl’.
Reznor and Ross’s Oscar win signaled an aesthetic shift in what constitutes an effective music score in film, and also provides an interesting snapshot along the timeline of evolution in the art of film music. In my Film Music History course in the School of Music Production and Sound Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, we survey the entire history of music for film, and this moment was clearly a big shift from the scores that preceded it. We’ve come a long, long way since Austrian born composer Max Steiner crafted his monumental orchestral score for 1933’s ‘King Kong’– which successfully helped make Kong’s character more believable, utilizing low orchestration for strings, brass, and percussion to reflect his great size, weight and power. Steiner’s score is now considered a masterpiece, and was a major factor in creating the illusion for audiences of Kong as a massive, powerful monster, yet also a sympathetic character with a soul. The arc of Kong’s character takes on new depth via the score. The film was an undisputed success, commercially and artistically – largely due to Steiner’s score – and became the model on which future orchestral films scores would be built.
For most of the 20th century, film score has been largely characterized by European symphonic music, largely due to the fact that the early pioneers of this art form were European immigrant composers, trained in conservatories, whose compositional voice was the symphony orchestra. These early composers, like Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, and Miklos Rosza, brought a musical reflection of the emotion and characters in these stories, and gave them a big voice: there is no sound quite like the dramatic swell of an 80 piece orchestra in the climactic moment of a music cue. This musical tradition, of course, has its stylistic roots in opera, as well as in the Romantic period of western European concert music (roughly from about 1825 – 1915), when orchestral composers like Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner, Gustav Holst, and Maurice Ravel brought a new level of personal expression to their writing, giving full voice to the expressive power of the human spirit. In the evolution of symphonic concert music, the Romantic Era signaled a shift away from musical works that reflected universal themes – and were governed by a strict adherence to established forms – into a more personal, expressive music that reflected the individual feelings and emotions of the composer – rich soil indeed in which to grow the newly emerging art form of scoring a film – where reflecting emotion is a key component.
Other music styles began to emerge in film score later in the 20th century, like jazz, R&B, and eventually, electronic music, born out of the invention of analog synthesizers. The first analog synths were invented as far back as the 1920s and 1930s, using vacuum tube and electro-mechanical technologies. Bebe and Louis Barron famously used early synths to create the first all electronic film score in 1956 for The Forbidden Planet. But it was not until after the 1960s, when synths shifted to op-amp integrated circuits in a modular design, that synths became widespread and began to be used in all kinds of music production, as well as in some late 20th century film scores.
1979’s Apocalypse Now famously utilized five composers, all using Moog synthesizers, famously invented by the pioneering inventor Robert Moog. This was also the first film to be commercially released in the Dolby 5.1 surround sound format – and sound and music for movies never looked back.
The methodology and workflow of how films are scored is also changing. Music is generally the last element added to a film’s soundtrack. Traditionally, we watch a completed film in a spotting session, and establish where music will go and what kind of music we should have, etc., and then a composer will go off and, using these timing notes, write specific music cues for specific scenes in the film – all in a very linear format. What Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have done in the Fincher films is to write music away from the picture, and then these cues are edited into the film just before final mix. They are still writing with a direction, based on emotional cues given by the director, and they have watched the film to get a sense of context, but the traditional linear model is abandoned in favor of a more modular approach, where certain cues which may have been written for one scene may end up being used in another – provided of course, that the emotional resonance created by the synthesis of sound and image is working.
In 2013 the Oscar for Best Score went to Steven Price, for ‘Gravity’. The irony here is that Price was initially hired as an music editor for the project, but ended up crafting a score that reflects the recent blurring of the lines between ‘score’ and ‘sound design’. As Price himself stated in an interview from 2013: “I was asked to try and tonally represent things that would ordinarily be sound. You don’t hear an explosion in the film, but you might hear some pulsation in the music that reflects it.” (Huffington Post, 10/04/2013, Rosen)
The fact that the industry is awarding Best Score Oscars to music scores like ‘Gravity’, and ‘The Social Network’ in recent years seems to indicate that audiences tastes are shifting. It is certainly true that audiences are far more sophisticated now than ever before (my students always snicker when they see the early stop motion animated King Kong from 1933 pop up on the screen), but the most interesting question for me is, how does music work in conjunction with visual media to produce an emotional response in the viewer? There are a lot of factors in play here, of course, and they all influence whether a film is a success or not: screenplay, acting, costume design, set design, cinematography, direction, sound, music – all of these elements, if it’s working, combine into a cohesive experience for the viewer, where they are swept into a created world for an unforgettable experience. Music, however, is often the key element that elicits the emotional response from the viewer. What is the sound of joy? Of desperation or despair? Is it cellos? A swirling ambient synth pad? There is more than one right answer to those questions, and as the art form of film music continues its evolution, future composers will continue searching for that aesthetic resonance that all great art inspires.
Even When It Seems UnlikelyBaxter Robertson // September 24, 2014
I was listening to some “sports talk” this morning. The hosts were asking each otherif, as cynical veterans, there was still anybody they would be nervous or giddy about talking with or interviewing in that field of celebrity. It then occurred to me how times I’ve been able to thank or express my appreciation to people of whom I was a fan(and yes, I was nervous!):
Pat Paulsen(comedian/writer the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour): Had a drink with me in the darkened bar at the Ice House, Pasadena (1974).
Gary Wright(Dreamweaver): The late comic and friend Larry Beezer DRAGGED me back stage at the Roxy, LA, to meet Gary. Larry had just done an opening set. I was embarrassed but managed to get the compliment out. “Dream Weaver” was currently a huge hit. (1975)
Paul Atkinson, guitarist for the brit-invasion group, the Zombies. Told him I was as much influenced by his band as the Beatles, which was true. As head of A & R at RCA, West Coast, he had seen my band and heard my demo. Now he was signing me to my first major record deal. (1983)
Christine McVie(Fleetwood Mac): expressed my fandom for her while opening for her on a 22-city national tour. She helped me fine-tune my eye-liner application backstage in Portland, ME. (1984)
Steve Winwood: Expressed how much his playing and singing had influenced me as we had pints in a pub in Dublin, Ireland, with our mutual engineer/producer Tom Lord-Alge. (1987)
Bob Siebenberg, drummer for Supertramp: was brought in by him and mutual friend, Dennis O’Donnell as a singer on a few tracks of his solo album. Later did a gig with him and his son in Deadwood, S.Dakota. (1995)
Jerry Miller, guitarist for the seminal SF band, Moby Grape: told him my sister had turned me on to their great music. My band, the Cheeseballs, had performed just before his at the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. (1998)
Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent of the Zombies: stayed after their show at Café du Nord, SF, to have them sign their first album for me; told both of them what I had told their former bandmate, Atkinson, by this time deceased. Told Blunstone I had literally learned to sing from listening to their records. (2003)
These were people of whom I was a REAL fan, whose work had somehow sunk in with me. There was little else to say but “thanks”, but in some cases I was able to hold my own as a peer…if only for appearances!