John Williams: Ten Best Scores

Some of the best music in the world is film music. It manages to take a life outside the film, whether we hum James Bond to conjure a suave take on gun-in-the-air infiltration, or whistle Indiana Jones while we flamboyantly throw spatulas like swords whilst cooking our meals (just me…); it often exists as music independent of it’s visuals. We quietly ‘ba-dum’ as if we were a manifestation of mobile double bass-shark hybrid when we strafe towards our friends, as if to evoke the same sense of fear that the audience feels in Jaws. I think we all take this music for granted, so I want you think about how many movies you can actually hum to yourself right now. The incredible thing is that at least 90% of what you come up with, when you put aside Pirates Of The Caribbean/Gladiator, Up, perhaps Toy Story and of course James Bond, will have been written by one man: John Williams.

If John Williams isn’t a household name then it’s our responsibility to make him one. Superman, Indiana Jones, Jaws, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Jurassic Park, Home Alone, Schindler’s List, Harry Potter, Star Wars (all six), E.T., and Saving Private Ryan – All by the same pen: The second most nominated man in history, recipient of the Olympic Order – the highest individual honour of the International Olympic Committee – Recipient of the National Medal Of Arts, the highest U.S individual honour for arts, presented by the President. When you Google him, the second entry as you type his name is ‘John Williams is the man’.

Yes, he is the man. He is my greatest inspiration as a composer and an international treasure to anybody who’s ever watched a film. So I’ve decided to make a ‘top ten’ list of John Williams’ best film scores. Here’s the thing though, the Internet is full of them – so I figured I’d try something a bit different with this…

I want to make a list that embodies the soundtracks that do the most for the picture; the ones that have the greatest music underneath the brilliant melodies, but above all, the music that has the greatest effect on the film and how we perceive it when we walk away: when we close our eyes and fill our heads with image and sound to remember what the film was like. You’ll see a lot of lists on the internet that look remarkably similar to each other, here’s one I came up with below.

1. Star Wars IV: A New Hope
2. Jaws
3. Indiana Jones
4. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
5. Jurassic Park
6. Superman
7. Saving Private Ryan
8. Schindler’s List
9. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
10. Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone (Sorcerer’s to the U.S market that presumably couldn’t understand what a philosopher was…) 

A good list – it’s the one I’d make if I were judging the score on how successful the film was. That’s why it’s so prevalent among all the John Williams’ top-tens out there. Some more inventive editions may include Hook or Star Wars Episode VI, but they really do look very similar nonetheless. My list might seem surprising at first, but just press play on the music I put beneath each number and I’m sure you’ll come round to my way of thinking – here are my favourite soundtracks by my favourite composer. In descending order, of course.

10. Minority Report

This soundtrack is in the minority (sorry) of Williams’ scores that I’ve seen that has received a bit of bad press – not that I can think of any reason why. It’s a great example of how John Williams can move into a more modern style of film-scoring quite effortlessly. The theme is unlike any that he’s written before, not melodic, but motivic. It’s short, snappy and repetitive, and it’s really what minority report is all about; it’s judders and stutters and keeps on you the edge the whole way through. To accomplish something so successfully with such a simple fragment is a testament to Williams’ prolific understanding of film music that can be easily overlooked in the sea of incredible melodies that cause people to cast him in a singular, albeit distinguished, light.

9. Stepmom

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in a list, I would bet that many people haven’t seen the film either, or just flicked channels when they came across it on TV as if it were something wishy-washy and dull. Watch it if you haven’t, you’ll be surprised. It’s heartbreaking and solemn, romantic and gripping, and without the music it would be nothing. The music portrays grief and love simultaneously almost throughout and is benevolent and emotional all by itself – but with the picture it’ll have you in tears. That’s why it’s up here for me, it’s so seamless that even watching at chance on a rainy day can catch you off guard an hour and a half in and make you well up. Not much film music can so easily impact upon the audience.

8. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

This is my childhood right here. And it’s one of the first films to really do it all: it’s childish, scary, mysterious, sad, joyous, serious and playful all in one sitting, and the same is true of the music. It still retains a cohesive identity from the scary and otherworldly opening up until the moment that E.T lifts the bike into the sky and we finally hear the melody that has been hinted at for the entire score before it. It’s the ultimate release of music, and my word, is the orchestration good! This is the auditory guide on how to do it if anybody is interested, and it’s almost continuous music. There’s also that little hint at Yoda that I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs… Genius.

7. Catch Me If You Can

People scorn Williams for all those enormous action-epics that he’s so famous for, so he comes up with something reminiscent of 40s jazz for Catch Me If You Can. It’s here because I don’t think there is anybody else out there who would have seen this music in this film – but it’s great. It’s exciting, full of suspense and humour, and in a strange way has that kind of office-fraud smirk to it all. The orchestration is always mocking and carefree, and when you think of the film you can’t help but feel the same way. When people ask what music does to a film you should ask them to watch this without the score: then they’ll know.

6. Jurassic Park

Knock Knock, it’s childhood here again. I was obsessed with dinosaurs because of this film: Until I was 16, I was unswayed on my ambition to become a palaeontologist, and would have been had it not been for the Music Technology A-level at my college and Michael Kamen’s score to Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. When Lord Richard Attenborough speaks ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park’ we literally cannot continue imagining the picture without Williams’ iconic theme rushing in like another line of dialogue. This is yet another one that we take for granted, that lives an equally rich life outside of the film and carries with it the unmistakable imagery of roaring Tyranosaurs and gargantuan Brachiosaurs. We all know the theme but I’d recommend getting the soundtrack and listening to ‘Hatching Baby Raptor’ as well; see if you’re not transported back to that incredible moment.

5. Hook

This is one of the most magical and manic scores ever written. I think it’s even easier to see with this type of film how much the music adds, without ever going over the top. The orchestration is again, incredible, but I really think in this case that it may just be one of the best examples of orchestration among all music. You may think a claim of that gravity doesn’t seem fitting for a kid’s film – but it’s this high on the list for more than that: it’s the melody that’s really transcendental. One of my all time favourites, it really is just magic to listen to and it serves the action perfectly whilst maintaining a boyish perspective and not becoming too epic or too serious.

4. Harry Potter

Anybody who’s grown up in the last 20 years grew up with J.K Rowling’s books, their films and John Williams’ themes. There are quite a few memorable melodies to pick from the three films that William’s scored, but it’s Hedwig’s theme that we all hum when we think of Harry Potter. I don’t specify a film here for a good reason, although William’s only penned three of the eight chapters, his music endured throughout them all. It is inescapably the image of Harry Potter and his world of witchcraft and wizardry, so much so that it was engrained in the scores of the 3 composers that took up the mantle afterwards. Even when they wanted to steer away and alter the theme to make something unique, it remained. Music that is that definitive to the identity of a film is what every composer dreams of writing and is the embodiment of what I spoke of earlier: music that has it’s own identity in popular culture. It could easily be on a par with the following entries.

3. Star Wars IV: A New Hope

It had to be here really, didn’t it? There’s no denying how great it is and how much it deserves to sit so highly on this list and everybody else’s. I’m sure there still a few of you out there yelling as to why it’s not right at the top – all I can say to you is that it was a very hard decision. The opening fanfare to Star Wars is one of the most famous and most appreciated pieces of film music of all time. Where Harry Potter may be the music of my generation, this is the music of another, and it has stood the test of time, engulfing everybody else’s hearts as the years go by. Wall-to-wall music again, and worth mentioning because it came at a time when film music was moving away from the giant and constant, melody lead orchestral tour de force that we’re quite happy with now. Film music had started in a similar, yet slightly more stratified way and had probably become quite boring until Williams’ slammed this into the faces of the audience, knocking something so prolific into them we haven’t been able to forget it for 35 years. He couldn’t really write a bad note after could he?

2. Jaws

This is the reason why Star Wars is third. It’s here for the same reasons but on a bigger scale. Where Star Wars is engrained into our society, Jaws is engrained into our psyche. ‘Da-num, da-num’ is an everyday thought to people that haven’t even seen the film, and where it makes an audience shudder in anticipatory fear in the cinema, it becomes a comedic cliché on how to define a scary moment in our lives outside of the darkened theatre. I don’t hear people saying ‘are you humming Dvořák’s 9^th?’ when I sneak up behind them, and if I did I might do to them what the shark in the films is famous for. The entire score to Jaws is another brilliant example of Williams’ understanding of how to make the most simple and convincing musical idea have the strongest possible impact upon a film; turning spectators into participators and leaving a remarkable mental and emotional image of a film that can be conjured with just two notes.

1. Memoirs Of A Geisha

I bet you’ve never seen that at number 1 before. Before you manifest any physical rage, I’d best tell you why it’s there for me. If you’ve read the book you may have an idea of just how beautiful this film and story is: well, Williams’ music is perfect. I don’t know how it could have been any better suited, any more emotional or better crafted. Again, a simple idea blossoms into something infinitely more compounding: Sayuri is the ‘Cello. She’s also being played by Yo-Yo Ma, who has to be, undisputed, the best cellist alive today. The soundtrack creates something that holds within it the purest form of innocence, with a deep and rapturous love that takes the audience far into third-person memoirs and pushes them around like a geisha learning to dance. It has taken me well over an hour to write this paragraph because I couldn’t play the soundtrack without being completely absorbed for what must be the 100^th time of listening. It’s worldly, another example of why we should never think of John Williams as ‘the action guy’ when it comes to scoring films. It’s worldly but it’s not cliché, it’s so well written for a delicate blend of western and eastern timbres that it surpasses all of our preconceptions about what a foreign culture sounds like; something Hollywood is all to well-known for accommodating. It takes us to a place where we become immersed in the culture; we desire what Sayuri desires and we feel what she feels. There’s a reason why, even against the pathetic etiquette Hollywood seems to have developed for not awarding John Williams awards for his nominations, that it won the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Grammy awards for best score in 2007. I don’t think I’ve heard a melody that works as well in 7/8 as it does in 4/4 before, let alone a melody as beautiful as the one that flows through this score. I would recommend that you listen to my last offering from this soundtrack, one of my favourite pieces of music, full stop. I hope it makes a convert out of you.

Now I’d like to quickly mention a couple of scores that didn’t make it into this top ten. John Williams has written so much great music that he’d make a top twenty hard to write, and we’re obviously missing Indiana Jones and Saving Private Ryan from this list, both incredible scores, particularly the latter. The Witches Of Eastwick and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind deserve special mentions as well for being scores that had huge impacts on the way people listen to, write and perceive film music, not to mention the effort on Star Wars Episode I, for bringing something new to an old horse and capturing another generation with it. Munich for it’s opening, The Terminal for it’s ingenuity and Born On The Fourth Of July for it’s sheer captivating and emotional movement.

Anything missing? ah, Schindler’s List. There’s a reason for that though…

Now, Williams’ score for Schindler’s List is amazing as a soundtrack CD, the themes, the performances and the care taken with orchestral balance are all breath-taking, but I have a bit of an issue with it when it comes to the film, which is why it doesn’t make the cut for me when it usually does quite well for others. Watching the film, I often feel that the music is extremely independent to the picture. I even struggle to imagine how it was conceived based on the image, on the action and on what seem like the evident on-screen emotions. If this were not somehow glued together with whatever it is that makes John Williams’ music incredible, I really don’t think it would work at all for the film; I certainly don’t think anybody else could have accomplished a score like it. That might be the only bad thing I ever say about John Williams’ music, and it’s not exactly like it’s a chink in the armour, it’s still great music. It just means that I don’t watch that film very often. He did win one of his few academy awards for it though, so maybe I’m just wrong about everything!

What do you think about Schindler’s List? And what’s the one score that really has to make it into your top ten?

There are so many more films I could and should list below just because they all have great music by Williams’ on them, instead, however, I’d like to leave you with a way to find them yourselves. If you don’t already own the CD, go and buy the 2-disc ‘John Williams – Greatest Hits 1969-1999’ album. It’s not expensive and there’s a lot of music for the money, a lot of great music that you’ll wonder how you ever did without. To finish off, I offer up this little trivial gem…

Another reason Stepmom gets into my top ten is because of the circumstances in which it was written; Patrick Doyle was originally selected to score the film, and did, but as is in Hollywood, the score (being the last thing that could be changed) was rejected. Williams was brought in at very short notice to write an entirely new score and bear the burden of fixing the film – he did more than fix it, he made it. To this day, he has only won 5 of his 47 Oscar nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: a travesty, don’t you agree?

Alex

Film Scores At Last: Casino Royale

Now, some of you out there may know me well enough to have heard me mention, update or complain about recent deadlines for my masters course at the Royal College of Music – and I remember saying, although it may a be a little later than expected, that I’d be writing reviews about film scores at some point… I think that now I’m done with the former for this academic year, it seems like a more than appropriate time to start on the latter; I can forget my own music for a little while and explore some of the film music that I enjoy.

So without further ado, I present to you, a film score review. Starting off with, as was tentatively hinted at in my previous post, Casino Royale.

I think that everybody who gets this far into the page can now start humming the 007 theme to themselves, right? It’s so iconic, it is James Bond; as much a part of the character himself as his love for Aston Martins and treating pretty young women badly. So what If I told you that it’s not really in Casino Royale – at times it’s hinted at, and yes, it makes a show at the very end of the film, but otherwise it’s somewhat absent – would those of you that haven’t watched Casino Royale in the last two weeks believe me?

Strange: very strange. Do you know what is in the film? Click below.

That, of course, is the obligatory opening title song that accompanies the usually unrelated opening visuals to a 007 picture, this time by Chris Cornell and the film’s composer David Arnold: You Know My Name. But it’s not just the opening titles and it’s not just another Bond song; that falling melody that guides ‘If you take a life, do you know what you’ll give’ is more than just an opening verse. It is the most pertinent melody for most of the soundtrack. It appears everywhere in the film, sometimes as just the violins imitating that first line, and sometimes where the whole verse is sung by the shifting instrumentation of a full orchestra. It actually still dazzles me that a catchy melody from (what I think, at least is) a very good song, let alone a Bond song, can integrate itself wholly into the film’s soundtrack without the audience ever realising.

Before I get on to showing you some of these examples, I should probably answer the question that you may have thought of originally: Why ditch the famous, established Bond Theme and use something new?

There is quite a simple and clever answer to this that lies in everything that Casino Royale depicts. A new, young, hasty and extremely green Bond is delivered to us as though there had not been twenty films of the same franchise preceding Daniel Craig’s casting. We have a film that starts without a 007, before Bond has accumulated all the experience that makes him that cold, calculated, womanising and suave killer we’ve all come to know. With no established character and the potential for something new, the old theme doesn’t seem quite right. It embodies all the things about the previous Bonds, all the things we already know and in some cases loathe. There’s a reason why it’s at the end of the film: that is when we have been with our refurbished Bond for a couple of hours and have all the information we need about his character. At the start, like Bond’s character it doesn’t exist. And why re-vamp a franchise with the same old parts, eh?

Aston Montenegro - Casino Royale Soundtrack

If you played the short track above you’ll hear the ghost of Chris Cornell’s voice hinted at in the opening harp figures, and then lavishly spread over the violins in the second half. I was thinking of making a medley of little moments where this melody makes an appearance but you’ll just have to trust me that it is everywhere, even smaller fragments and other melodies are variations on the same one. I do recommend that you buy the soundtrack for yourselves and have a listen. Getting into buying soundtracks is a great way to start expanding the kinds of music you listen to because they contain so many different types and genres (or emotions etc.). Don’t think for a second that they’re classical or contain any snobby preconceptions, they’re always interesting and engaging; and this is one of the best to start with.

As a side note, those of you that know me better know that the soundtracks I’ve purchased can, and often do, take on a second life: this is something you should definitely try. I like to take video games that don’t already have their own fantastic movie-esque soundtracks and start to synchronise some particularly epic music alongside the gameplay. One of my favourites is putting the score to The Dark Knight alongside Grand Theft Auto 4 while I drive down long strips of concrete dropping grenades from my windows that ingeniously explode on large hit points in the music. The pinnacle of this though is with a game that can be purchased on the Playstation Store for less that eight pounds sterling: Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars. Yes, it is what you think. The only way that the game could be described more beautifully would have been to add ‘playing football’ (or soccer to those over the pond) to the already lengthy acronym SARPBC. The Dark Knight works well here too, as does Angels and Demons, but it is the soundtrack to the The Matrix: Reloaded that makes the ultimate combination of epic and cars that defy gravity. You’ll have to find the score and not the soundtrack CD release as that contains only commercial tracks that vaguely (or do not) have a connection with the film. You could use the third Matrix soundtrack, but you’ll be rewarded for your efforts if you put the music to the Burly Brawl sequence alongside a game – I’m sure it’s on YouTube.

Now to get into the meat of it all, though, and talk about why this score is as good as I profess it to be. We could talk about the great tension throughout the film; we could talk about the atonal music that precedes Bond’s double-O-status promotion only to become more tonal when he quickly becomes more experienced; we could highlight the hints at Monty Norman’s original theme at the end of the first poker game in the Ocean Club or the fantastic use of rhythm and time signature changes throughout the film that seamlessly sit alongside erratic cinematography; we might discuss the dissonant harmony or that this Bond feature has a great integration of synthetic sound and percussion, notable in the scene where James sneaks into the surveillance room in the Ocean Club to surround himself in a Sony manufactured utopia. We could talk about all of the above, but I don’t think it’s necessary: with these reviews I really want all of you reading to be able to talk about film music in real terms and not be bullied by musical terminology. Having dissected this soundtrack I can assure you that a barrage of musical reasoning is behind everything that I have outlined; I think, though, that I have a better way of showing you the magic in this score. Press play on the video below and I’ll write my final natterings below it.

Miami International - Casino Royale Soundtrack

For me, this may just be the single greatest piece of film music that has ever graced an action sequence. The 12 minute long mammoth of a recording never gets boring; it maintains tension and suspense almost continuously and bridges what could be quick boring taxi-following-taxi scenes into a furious high octane, mobile fistfight where Bond attempts to stop a travelling bomb and assailant from destroying a very, very big aeroplane. It’s worth watching with the film after you know the music a little better, but I feel in essence that this one cue summarises everything I mentioned above. More so, its unlike any other bond score save for the part in the middle that has blaring trumpets and gongs to accompany that dinosaur of avian machinery, which could easily slip into Goldeneye. It’s synthetic, it’s harsh and edgy, visceral and erratic; somewhat like our new man in the series: Daniel Craig’s bond is much more like Ian Flemming’s original portrayal in the books – a cool, suave bastard. I think that’s what David Arnold has done here, made a cool, suave bastard of a soundtrack, something that elevated the Bond nexus and gave it a hard shove into the 21^st century. And for the composers in the back, I spoke with the orchestrator and conductor on this project, the fine man Nicholas Dodd, who told me in a roundabout way that Mr. Arnold had most of this done himself. For those of you that don’t know, some composers are very lazy and let their orchestrators (people that arrange musical parts for instruments and sections) take on a creative role that falls far outside of their responsibilities. It’s always worth remembering that any score is the labours and, in some cases, the interferences or more people than are evident.

This begs the question then, why wasn’t David Arnold selected to score the upcoming and eagerly anticipated Skyfall. While there may be simple or complex reasons for such a travesty, the bigger question for me is: why has perhaps the most iconic film series that carries with it the most responsibility of any sequel fallen to Thomas Newman, the man who we know best for American Beauty, Finding Nemo and Wall-e, whose music to the first in that triptych commonly graces pleas for aid and charitable donations?

Now, don’t take me for a hater… Thomas Newman is a fantastic composer who I could write an equal number of words about including a part about his enormous impact on the film music world, but the idea of him scoring a Bond film is somewhat of a foreign concept, a square peg that wouldn’t get into that circular hole no matter how much lubrication the film studio slathers on him. I’m hopeful, I’m optimistic, but deep down I’m a little scared. I’m sure Skyfall will be immense – but if it’s full of wobbling drones then I’ll be very disappointed. Nevertheless, whatever the outcome, we will certainly be waving goodbye to the ‘something special’ that would have ensued had David Arnold scored them all from now on. I hope he Googles himself and reads this, Casino Royale really is a masterpiece.

Alex

As is custom now, I have a little piece of interesting spiel about Monty Norman, the man who wrote the original James Bond theme. He was invited by a producer on Dr. No, Harry Saltzman to fly off to the Bahamas and soak up the flavour of the film before he wrote the music to it – along with a whopping £250 cheque and the option to get out of the project if he wanted. Monty wrote a few little songs for the film, and with them a slightly more Indian sounding version of the Bond theme, made of partial remnants from the score to one of his old stage-shows that didn’t do too well. In the end, it was decided that a commercial orchestrator was needed to bring that theme to life and a young John Barry got the job, making the definitive version of the music we can conjure so easily to mind today. £250 for the Bond theme – but he did get another job out of it, going on to write music with John Barry’s input for a film called Call Me Bwana. After weeks of working on the recordings in Pinewood studios, Monty realised that he still hadn’t signed any contract about payment, and so he called his producer Saltzman to right the issue. He was met with this response: ‘Monty, if you want to talk money, then we can’t do business!’ Charming, and something that interestingly enough is still felt today by composers – why we just don’t work for free, I don’t know… Suffice to say that he didn’t have any more dealings on Saltzman’s films.

And just to add salt to the wound, people, press and public opinion accused Monty of having bought the theme from a Jamaican for $100 and then claimed outright that John Barry had written the theme. Monty Norman has spent a large amount of his life defending his artistic integrity in the courtroom over the latter accusation; the latest case ending in 2001, almost forty years after the release of Dr. No.

All that trouble and two-hundred-and-fifty quid for the most famous film music theme of all time. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger… but I’d be pretty bitter. I can only hope he dealt with it like James Bond would have…

Step One: Order a martini, angrily refuse to specify whether it’s shaken or stirred.

Step Two: Have someone smash a giant knot into your nuts over and over again.

The Form of Film Music

Greetings all! As promised I have the second instalment of factual nourishment for you so that you can read my yet-to-be-written reviews with a little more insight into the theoretical and technical trickery of film music. Carrying on from last time, we’ll take a quick look at the aesthetics of film music, its form, some tenuous rules and the reasons why it hasn’t changed all that much in quite a long time. So let’s start off with an outrageous statement; Film music is the same as ‘Easy-Listening’ music.

Woah! Calm down there! I did warn you… Before those of you that enjoy film music take aim at me with your various smelly missiles, I will assure you that an explanation awaits below this formatting, and that I shall cowardly hide behind the fact that these are not my words. They belong to a well-known film and film music scholar (inside academic circles, at least; I’d vouch that if you haven’t read her books then you won’t know her name). She compares the two types of music under the premise that neither are intended to require the full attention of the listener. Claudia Gorbman, it seems, has a few things to say about my beloved craft.

Now, I don’t really agree that we need to be ‘lulled into being an untroublesome (less critical, less wary) social subject’ as Gobman suggests. I for one like being troublesome and critical towards film, don’t hate the player – hate the game, and all that. However, the idea of film music not requiring attention is completely necessary to a film, just as most of us don’t notice all the work that’s gone into designing a set in a scene; we just absorb it. Here it could be worth noting, likewise, that we don’t necessarily notice cinematography, yet we absorb it in a more attentive way than set design or costume for instance. I’d like to champion music as an art more than a craft in this respect. We all go in to a cinema with having seen images and heard music, and we’d probably notice if the music was awful. Audio is ubiquitous to film as much as the visuals, and one should never detract from the other. Nobody wants to see the nuts and bolts, they want to suspend their disbelief and slip into a film, so the music must do its job professionally and Gorbman has nicely set out a rough list of rules for it to adhere to. I’ve stuck it in below, skim over it and you’ll start to see where I’m getting at.

I.                ‘Invisibility’: The technical apparatus of nondiegetic film music must not be visible.

II.              ‘Inaudibility’: Music is not meant to be heard consciously. As such it should subordinate itself to dialogue, to visuals – i.e., to the primary vehicle of the narrative.

III.             Signifier of emotion : Soundtrack music may set specific moods and emphasize particular emotions suggested in the narrative, but first and foremost is a signifier of emotion itself.

IV.             Narrative cueing:

·       Referential / narrative: music gives referential and narrative cues, e.g., indicating point of view, supplying formal demarcations, and establishing setting and characters.

·       Connotative: music ‘interprets’ and ‘illustrates’ narrative events.

V.              Continuity: music provides formal and rhythmic continuity – between shots, in transitions between scenes, by filling ‘gaps’.

VI.             Unity: via repetition and variation of musical material and instrumentation, music aids in the construction of formal and narrative unity.

VII.           A given score may violate any of the principles above, providing the violation is at the service of the other principles

Now, some of the more studious of you may have heard to terms diegetic and non-diegetic before; Microsoft Word, it seems, has not. Armed with their definitions and the little list above, you have all the information you need to start looking at film music in a more objective way, so I’d best pen them out! Diegetic is simply music (or any sound for that matter) that exists within the narrative of a film, within the picture – the characters are aware of it. Therefore, non-diegetic is music outside of the narrative. The characters can’t hear it, but you can, and sometimes it will make you cry, make you shiver or jump, or feel a particular sense of blood-boiling anger towards Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile, with his stupid greasy hair and droopy lower lip that just barely prevents his tongue from rolling out onto the floor like a slobbery water slide that would only be appropriate for a few seconds of Robin Williams’ magical portrayal of The Genie in Aladdin.

A scene can be scored in a variety of different ways of course, some obviously more fitting than others, you probably don’t find the birdie song blasting in during romantic kissing scenes; it’s often a lush upward-moving, swelling string passage with a few cymbals on the embrace. That’s because that makes sense, it’s typical and it’s something we’re all comfortable with as an audience. But should we just accept that? I’d like to think that within the limitations excluding the ridiculous that there isn’t a right or wrong way to score a scene, save the laziest possible attempt. What matters with film music is the emotion that the combination of image and music generate and that’s probably the best way to start looking at movies for now. How might something be if it had different music, would it have the same impact on the audience? Look for the films that really get the most emotion across and you’ll find that the music is often the keystone.

There is one last thing I should mention, something called leitmotif. A leitmotif is a recurring theme in a piece of music, usually attributed to a character as is prevalent in Wagner’s operatic labours. In film, these motifs can range from long melodies attributed to Darth Vader in Star Wars to single notes, chords, or sounds that can personify anything as small as the spinning top in Inception, as big as The Matrix or as abstract as the feeling of vertigo in, yes, you guessed it, Vertigo. Although it’s not an essential ingredient for a film score, you’ll start to notice leitmotif in quite a lot of them. Using the same thematic ideas and textures gives the film a kind of cohesive identity that has an imprint on the audience and in some cases literally makes the film and the music inseparable; Jaws, for example or maybe thinking about Jurassic Park without ‘it’s a di-no-saur, it’s a di-no-saur, holy f-‘ going through you head.

I honestly hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this, and my previous post, and that you’ve taken something from it that makes you want to think about the music in the next film you watch. My aim with these two introductory blog articles was create something of an informal guide that you could reference in your early dives into film scores. They’ve been quite lengthy, but I think I’ve been as brief as I possibly could, hopefully splitting the difference enough to tempt you into reading about my thoughts on films and their music in future. I did lightly suggest exploring failures and successes in the last testament, however, I fear if I take up much more negative space then I’ll get in trouble with the Internet, so I’ll just tease you with my thoughts on a score of each that may cause some juicy suspicions. I might even write about them in not so long. Here they are in Internet friendly speak:

WIN: Casino Royale (David Arnold)                        FAIL: Knowing (Marco Beltrami)

Alex

I’ll leave you with something fun just in case you still aren’t sold on film music. Watch E.T. The Extra Terrestrial closely next time you get the chance. When the strange looking alien spots a trick-or-treater dressed as Yoda, you’ll be rewarded with a bit of the little green man’s theme from The Empire Strikes Back. Both films were of course penned by maestro John Williams, and it might interest you to know that he did the same in Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith as well, hinting at a theme from Harry Potter when a baby Luke Skywalker is dropped off by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Similar characters, Luke and Harry, don’t you think?

Williams you little scoundrel, you…

A Brief History Of Film Music

Right: lets get started. The whole reason for starting this blog about film music was to try and help those who aren’t musicians, composers or otherwise musically empathetic people to understand film music a little more than the man who sits next to them on the train talking about Trent Reznor’s impact on the observed universe. I’d love for you all to soon be able to tell good scores from bad scores and pick apart the relationships between music and picture in order to see why a scene has been crafted the way it has; and why you feel a certain emotion from it (or don’t…).

I think the best way to start off is to do a couple of short, summary-esque chapters on the history of film music, it’s forms and roles today and how it affects a scene. So without further ado, I present to you the shortest possible history of film music, direct from my fingertips. 

‘Read all about it!’

Music existed before films. It’s obvious right? But it has a significance that is easily overlooked. Music in the form of late-19^th-century and early-20^th-century operas and symphonies was pretty much all you had on offer before films (and recording technology), so it’s no surprise that the grandeur and voracity of the orchestra was first in mind for early filmmakers. They’d have to wait a little while to open the doors, though…

It would have been great if films had pit orchestras, but it might have been a bit costly. The solution was the well-known piano playing man who would literally improvise music to the earliest monochrome picture-shows. It soon became a necessity and players even started to make a craft for the art; extensive books of piano music for all the wondrous scenarios imaginable.

Page 5: Intimidation in the office. Turn to page 46 for Car Chase/Gun Fight! 
And in she walks, Page 22: The blonde who asks for cigarette and makes their jaws drop.

And so film music was born. All the solutions to all the motion-picture equations, neatly laid bare to tinker with. However, having sound on a film changed the game a little; recordings meant planning, not improvisation. So with a quick jump we move from recording bespoke piano scores to a yearning for Wagnerian characterisation alongside our moving images. With a few years of experimentation it seemed a group of Johnny Foreigners had developed a dab hand at the craft and the world saw Erich-Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Hans Salter, Franz Waxman and Alfred Newman (to name a few greats) grace films such as The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Gone With The Wind, Casablanca, The Son Of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. The late romantic sweeping melodies and ambitious harmony had made it’s way into the cinema and left itself for some of the names above to start coining certain types of sound for certain types of films. Steiner and Korngold were the late romantics, epic and sweeping. Hans Salter set the stones for the sound of suspense, Alfred Newman infused a little Jazz into his grand and lush scores and Waxman made a start on Film Noir, notably scoring some of Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest films.

Hitchcock comes in as quite a nice link on how present day film music has ended up how it is. He had one of the earliest famed director-composer relationships (not like that) with a man who’s name you really must remember after today, lest I give up all hope on the world – Bernard Herrmann.  Herrmann is quite possibly the greatest film composer to have lived: a complete arse, antisocial, distasteful, with genius that probably still wouldn’t be enough to get him a job today. I would bet that between Bernard Herrmann’s scores for thrillers, Ron Goodwin’s wartime greats and Alfred Newman’s penchant for everything else that we could trace all lineage of orchestral music in film down to a devilish thievery of their well-established elements.

If at this point I could recommend you watching one film to conjure a more tangible picture of this Old-Hollywood sound it would be Vertigo, a film by Alfred Hitchcock, score by Bernard Herrmann. Those of you that have already seen it, ten points to Gryffindor.

It is this kind of style that John Williams, the man behind all of the melodies that you can remember (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Superman, Harry Potter, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Jaws, Schindler’s List, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Home Alone, Memoirs Of A Geisha and Three American Olympic Games), started to build upon. If you can remember any other film score melodies other than Michael Giacchino’s Up (or other Williams scores) then I’ll be very impressed – unless you’re one of those cheaters that likes film music already to the unhealthy degree that I do, in which case I shalln’t be – because the man who makes the melodies is the last of the old style of pencil and paper composers who are afforded the luxury of locked pictures (completed films) and hearing their music for the first time at the helm of an 80-piece orchestra.

The pencil and paper has been traded for the computer based sequencer with realistic orchestral virtual instruments and synths, and the long and flowing melodies that modulate from one key to another have been swapped for small motifs, or motives: short fragments of melody such as Hans Zimmer’s incantation for Batman in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. When Vangelis composed, conducted, produced and performed his score for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner he ushered in a new era in film music with synthetic sound, all of which has sort of culminated in something of a Tron: Legacy world of music.

Now I’m rambling, so I’ll leave a gap underneath this cluster of black and white for you to rest your eyes. The next article will cover the aesthetics of today’s film music, its form and application, its successes and failures, and shall tie in very nicely where we’ve left off. After that, you’ll never have to read another word in your life! Actually, I’d hope that you would because I’ll keep writing reviews/discussions of film scores in slightly more digestible portions than this. For now I’ll thank all of you who actually got this far; good show, good show. Tata!

Alex

Oh I forgot, if I can contextualise anything I’ve written with a few films for suggested viewing and listening then here it is (and here they are):

Blade Runner (Vangelis)

E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (John Williams) (if you haven’t already seen it)

either Rain Man (Hans Zimmer) or Enemy Of The State (Harry Gregson-Williams and Trevor Rabin)

American Beauty (Thomas Newman)

Inception (Hans Zimmer)

That should sum up the brief history somewhat chronologically. And I know. I lied. But you’re the one that kept reading…

also on www.alexlamy.com with my music.