The sound of music

Film Comment, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Gavin Smith

In recent years I've been struck by the glut of mediocre-to-bad movie scores, and the degree to which movie music has weighed down contemporary filmmaking, marring good films and sinking middling ones. I've lost count of how many films--particularly the American ones--from the past five years would have been immeasurably improved by either belier scores or no score at all. (It seems to me that much of the best contemporary cinema from around the world either does without music altogether or uses it only sparingly.) I don't mean to imply that there isn't still great work being done--Neil Young's score for Dead Man and Elmer Bernstein's for Far from Heaven, to name two examples only, offer dramatic evidence to the contrary. In the right hands, music remains a vital part of the cinematic experience.

Nonetheless, to put it bluntly, too many contemporary movie composers turn in banal, reductive, and heavy-handed work, diminishing what's onscreen by indicating what the characters are feeling, dictating the audience's emotional response to what they're watching, or simply overwhelming viewers and beating them senseless. Movie music too often seems the enemy of ambiguity, nuance, complexity, and, ultimately, emotion. It seems to me that things started going downhill in the Eighties, when the synthesizer and the jukebox song score were widely adopted by Hollywood, thus sidelining the expertise of veteran movie composers. After all, the fish rots from the head down--in this case, directors, producers, and studio suits.

Music has not always been a blight on the cinematic landscape. On the contrary; it's traditionally been one of the filmmaker's most powerful tools, a skeleton key that can unlock the viewer's imagination. With notable exceptions (particularly the work of scholar and theorist Royal Brown), the art of the score has been largely overlooked in theory and criticism. All the same, the past 70 years of the form constitutes a rich secret history of the movies.

And so we're very pleased to be fulfilling yet another of our long-held ambitions by publishing a special midsection devoted to this neglected art. Midsection author John Caps has single-handedly attempted the impossible: a selection and commentary on 101 movie music milestones and artistic bests, presented in chronological order; from the craning of sound right up to the present day. A tall order, full of subjective choices and biases, even given that the selection has been restricted to American and English-language films. (We'll return to consider the foreign-language movie score same time next year.)

Many of the recognized classics are represented in this highly selective mini-history, and on one level "Soundtracks 101" is an ideal introduction for readers new to the world of movie music. On the other hand, we can also guarantee that the soundtrack buffs among you will he surprised by certain inclusions and taken aback by certain omissions, so please feel free to write and tell us what or who we've left out. We look forward to your responses.

Gavin Smith

Editor

editor@filmlinc.com