Song of the Day
DAY FOUR: All Insturmentals Week!
Music from Film Scores
Before I start let's deal with terminology. A film score and a film soundtrack are two different things but are often used interchangebly by even folks who know the difference:
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A film score is the original instrumental music composed to accentuate the the director's film. John William's score to Star Wars is one of the better known scores as is some of the instrumental music from the James Bond movies. There's a small group of composers that primarily write scores to films like Bernard Hermann, Ennio Morricone, John Barry and Angelo Badalamenti, but writing films scores is a vanishing profession because it's far more profitable for a movie producer to throw together 12-15 popular songs and use them in the film and only hire a composer to write the opening theme and the end credits music.
A film soundtrack may or may not include the score of a film and is usually a set of previously composed songs by notable musicians. Film sountracks often become best sellers because many of them are collections of popular songs that are woven into the film. Examples of soundtracks are the music from the movie The Big Chill with it's collection of Motown hits, or collection of traditional music on the soundtrack of Oh Brother Where Art Thou. Both of those soundtracks made a whole lot more money that the films the songs were used in.
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That distinction is important for both movie directors and fans of the cinema. From my perspective the decline of the movie and television score is a sad development. I will frequently view a bad film with a great soundtrack several times over because a composer of a good soundtrack can make a mediocre movie seem great.
Janet Leigh made the most perceptive comment on the power of a film score when she was asked about the nortorious shower scene in the 1959 movie
Psycho. Leigh said she watched the daily rushes of the shower scene with Hitchc0ck before Bernard Hermann had added the score and she wasn't impressed. The next night Hitchc0ck added Bernard Hermann's schreeching dissonant violins to the action on the screen and Leigh said she was frightened out of her wits and the effectiveness of Hermann's score even shocked Hitchc0ck himself. A powerful film score has a big impact on the perceptions of a film viewer and a soundtrack collection of music will never be quite as effective as a good original score.
My subject is the film score of original music, but the score is sometimes generically referred to as the "soundtrack" even by industry professionals. The practice using a collection of recycled popular songs as a soundtrack to a movie is relatively new. I'm not referring to the kind of soundtrack that collects popular hits, as soundtracks frequently do in this day and age. Are you confused?... so am I, but if I said I was going write about my favorite
film scores, some people would be wondering why I'm calling a soundtrack a score. The film's score is the (mostly) instrumental mood music that was writen as ambient music for a specific film, however some soundtracks aren't original scores of music but recycled pop songs which were never writen as part of a film score. The reason why recycle pop music is used in a movie, rather than a proper score is money... A good selling soundtrack can often net more money sales than box office recepts for a movie. And a producer and director can skim off a larger share of the royalty points soundtrack sales, if they don't commission a composer to write an original score for their movie project.
Here are three songs from three of my favorite film scores.
Gato Barbieri- The Last Tango in Paris (soundtrack) Barieri's soundtract to the 1972 Last Tango in Paris captured all of sensuality, passion and sexual conflict of Bertolucci' cinematic masterpiece. Barbieri uses elements of jazz, blues, Parisian musette music, and Agentinian tango music with straying off into cliched jazz fusion. The song called
Jeanne is the theme song of Jeanne (played by Maria Schneider) a beautiful young Parisienne femme fatale who encounters Paul (Marlon Brando), a mysterious American expatriate mourning his wife's recent suicide. Instantly drawn to each other, they have a stormy, passionate affair, in which they do not reveal their names to each other. As an experiment, Barbieri wrote musical score that frequently counterpointed the action on the screen, that is when there was a lot of action and activity, Barbieri played slow music and in the quiet introspective moments, Barbieri wrote frenetic music to accompany the screen action. Barbieri's use of counterpointing became widely imitated by soundtrack composers after
Last Tango in Paris.
Ennio Morricone- A Fistful of Dollars (soundtrack) Ennio Morricone developed highly distinctive trademark sound that defined Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and made him the most innovative of soundtrack composers. His best known song is the theme from
The Good, Bad and the Ugly and since most people are familiar with that song, I chose Morricone's
A Fistful of Dollars theme from the same spaghetti western era.
In
A Fistful of Dollars Morricone pulled out all the stops with his bag of musical tricks: a lonesome whistler, the sound of a bullwhip, kettle drums, a twangy guitar, ritualistic chanting, penny whistles, a fiddler, tolling church bells even elements of Gregorian chant that Morricone frequently incorporated into his epic spaghetti Western scores. The song is laden with shiny musical gimmicks that reach out and grab your attention.
Lalo Schifrin- The Dirty Harry (soundtrack) Strangely enough my thrid choice for soundtrack composer is also associated with Clint Eastwood's movies. Clint Eastwood is the most musically conscious director in Hollywood, a jazz pianist, and music collector. His epic film biographty of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker,
Bird (1998) is an unflinching portrait Bird's self destructive nature and is the most authenic biopic of a musician I've ever come across. Schifrin was Eastwood's musical collaborator of choice.
Argeninian Lalo Schifrin was frist noted for his noirish theme music for two television spy shows: Mission Impossible and the Man from UNCLE. Schifrin greatest accolades came from his for his brilliant jazz influenced score of the Steve McQueen movie Bullit. Schifrin became Clint Eastwood's composer of choice for all of the films he directed. Schifrin was one of the most prolific soundtrack composers of his era and he's still composing soundtracks, and conducting both a symphony and a jazz big band.
Scifrin's from Dirty Harry incorporates all of the great elements of jazz/funk fusion movement that came to the fore in the early 70s.
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Other Prominent Soundtrack Composers Worth Checking Out
John Barry- The composer of most of the James Bond film soundtracks.
Bernard Hermann- Alfred Hitchc0ck's longtime musical collaborator.
Angelo Badalamenti- Soundtrack composer for most of David Lynch's films and his television series Twin Peaks.
Yann Tierson- The brilliant French composers with roots in the post-punk movement and composer to the soundtrack to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's
Amelie from Montmarte (aka
Amelie) Tierson is currently my favorite neo-classical composer and his music is frequently compared to composers like Eric Satie, Fredric Chopin and Phillip Glass.