The Sound of MusicWhat makes a film score score?
Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2001, at 9:00 PM ETNot only is Best Original Score one of the most overlooked Oscar categories; it's not even clear what the criteria are for judging it. Consider some of the most lauded scores: John Williams' famous heists from the classical repertoire (Star Wars, Superman); original compositions now being played on the concert stage (Bernard Hermann's chilling stabs from Psycho); or those written by a lauded classical composer expressly for the screen (last year's winner, John Corigliano's score to The Red Violin). Should we judge these pieces as independent compositions? Or by how well they support the story, helping characters and audiences tremble, weep, and celebrate?
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponI choose the latter. Film music isn't written to stand alone. Sure, certain composers—Aaron Copland and Erich Korngold, to name two—have produced scores so exquisite that they've entered the classical-music canon. But this isn't the motive for most movie-music composers. These guys have a job to do, just like the lead actor and the best boy grip.
This year, the nominees are Chocolat, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Gladiator, The Patriot, and Malèna. The music from Crouching Tiger should win by a mile. Tan Dun's tunes are both functionally narrative and artful; they add life to a story that, in its expert direction and choreography, almost doesn't desire a soundtrack (the slashing wuxia broadswords and sky-scampering chase scenes are so rhythmic they're practically a form of music themselves). Tan is an important new classical composer whose specialty is meshing Eastern folk tunes and Western-tradition symphonic style. Crouching Tiger's score is an expert fusion that—thanks in no small part to Yo-Yo Ma's deft cello-playing—spins one memorable musical thread with pitch-bending flavor into a dreamlike pattern. Listen to how he uses the modern cello to imitate indigenous Eastern instruments—the sparse use of vibrato, the wavering Zen-like motifs—above the background of a Romantically inspired orchestral string sound.
A distant second place is Rachel Portman's cutesy foray into "world music" for Chocolat. The CD opens with a direct steal from Django Reinhardt—jazz's most famous gypsy guitarist, whose music inspired Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown—and moves on to episodic tangos that work well for a movie organized like a children's storybook. The film even has its own incarnation of Django in Johnny Depp, who plays a pony-tailed Irish river rat with a penchant for a little swing jazz guitar himself. Portman's work may be imitative, but it's well-crafted. Note the way she paints an animated musical image of a traveler's spunk by using rhythmic, rainforest-y violin tunes that, amid hollow-flute bird calls, hop and twirl above syncopated, off-beat guitars.
Ennio Morricone's score to Malèna is disappointing, especially when you consider his résumé. In Cinema Paradiso, director Giuseppe Tornatore's last Italian coming-of-age hit, Morricone used idiomatic Italian-film-music tools—nostalgic, sensitive melodies played on a violin and a celesta—derived from great predecessors like Nino Rota, official composer for Frederico Fellini and of the music to Francis Ford Coppolla's The Godfather. Despite the music's pedigree, it had an appealingly childlike simplicity. Malèna's music is innocent and heartwarming as well, but the thickness of the orchestration and the cheesy repetition of a Disneyish theme waters down Morricone's style and robs it of any eccentricity.
Though it won the Golden Globe, Gladiator's music doesn't deserve the Oscar for two reasons: 1) It is credited to two composers—the famed Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard—while rumored to have been composed by more; and 2) it's stunningly uncreative. Grandiose orchestral utterances drag us unwillingly to carnage; drums beat us as if we are the victims ourselves. This score harks back to a time when movie music was strictly background for the story and didn't add anything to it.
Surprisingly enough, John Williams shouldn't win either. Over his career, he's been up for 39 Oscars, making him the most nominated living person today, but his music for The Patriot does little for the movie and for its audience. How many times will Aaron Copland's open-prairie-style harmonies under brash trumpet fanfares and diddling flutes indicate that we are indeed in America (or at least the 13 colonies)? You'd think such a skilled and highly paid film composer could have been a bit more creative.
This is why half of the Oscars' viewers probably flee for popcorn when the best score awards are doled out. If more composers like Tan Dun took to film music, maybe the category would be taken more seriously. For one thing, it's a great gig for new composers; their world doesn't offer much exposure, and films are a wonderfully stealthy way of bringing top-notch music to vast numbers of people. But sadly, a composer like Tan Dun risks serious scorn from the music establishment for playing to Hollywood's level. Only I'm not sure that Tan did—in fact, he might have brought Hollywood up to his.
The Slatest: Medvedev Targets Russia's "Colossal Drinking" Problem
The Perfect Gift for the Policy Wonk in Your Life
Wait, the Whig Party Is Making a Comeback?
The Copenhagen Climate Conference Is Really Freaking Out My 9-Year-Old
Is Health Care Reform Without a Public Option Better Than Nothing?
The Unspeakably Raunchy English Sex Clubs of the 18th Century
Reader Comments From The Fray:
While I agree that it is important that the composer support the story, it is also important that the composer not attempt to manipulate an audience. If one is paying attention to a film, one does not need the score to provide cues to tremble, to weep, or to celebrate. The purpose of the seemingly incessant score from The Color Purple, for example, seems to be to provide such cues.
The more a score attempts to support the story of a film, the more it calls attention to itself and the more predictable it is. It becomes a running commentary on the film with which it runs in parallel: "Now hear the strings--weeping is now appropriate." As if the story itself does not alone provide reason to weep. The mark of a good score is that the viewer is completely unaware of it. More often than not, however, the best a composer can do for a scene in a movie is nothing. Silence is sometimes the best score.
--Rodney Cupp
(To reply, click here.)
The author refers to Hans Zimmer's score for Gladiator as "stunningly uncreative". Whereas I can understand his frustration with Zimmer's phrasing or instrument use, I feel he's being a bit harsh. True the score of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon certainly does more in its subtlety than Gladiator's overbearing, however I must confess the visual appeal in CTHD makes one deaf to it score, whereas Zimmer's music refuses to be ignored. In the latter composer's defense, Lisa Gerrard's angelic vocals are a complement to what otherwise would be typical epic fare. I believe Zimmer has better music in him (Crimson Tide), but the audience has been deprived of it for quite some time.
--Anthony F. Ryba
(To reply, click here.)
(3/22)