PRESENTS
FILM MUSIC
In this 100-page collectors’ edition, Gramophone’s expert writers explore music written for the cinema, and celebrate some of the
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PRESENTS...
FILM MUSIC
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Film music, as explored through the pages of Gramophone
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SHOSTAKOVICH, KORNGOLD AND COPLAND
Shostakovich, Korngold and Copland: three composers who stepped from the concert hall the cinema
Shostakovich, Korngold and Copland: three composers who stepped from the concert hall the cinema
John Williams with Anne-Sophie Mutter: his Second Violin Concerto, written for her, is his longest concerto yet
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THE GRAMOPHONE DEBATE
THE GRAMOPHONE DEBATE
When is film music
‘classical’?
Philip Glass and John Corigliano have both composed for film. In 2007 they met with Jed Distler in New York to discuss the links between music for the concert hall and the cinema
With film soundtracks promoted by recording companies’ classical divisions, and with the sweeping orchestral scores of the likes of John Williams, Hans Zimmer and from an earlier age Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein, debate continues to rage as to whether – or when – film music counts as classical. Philip Glass and John Corigliano are both regarded as classical composers first and foremost despite their work for the cinema. But both, as Jed Distler found out, find that the lines between classical and film music are by no means clear-cut. JD People often think about film and classical music as two different things. But isn’t there in fact a tenuous relationship between those two worlds? You have each, to different degrees, straddled both. PG Well, in the 20th century many so-called classical composers made their livings writing film music. Take the Russians, people like Shostakovich, Prokofiev. There has always been an attraction in film music; it’s the only place in our world where there is some actual money. JC And even in film music’s beginnings, you’ve got people like Korngold and Rosza, who originally were symphonic composers. But even after they wrote for film, they still created symphonic repertoire. PG Today film is what opera was formerly, it’s the popular art form of our time. Now John and I are both film composers and opera composers, and it may be easier for people who are experienced in theatre to work in films than for people who only work in concert music, because both theatre and films are about subject matter. JC I think also you can see the difference between concert music, theatre and film if you work in all three genres. You relate to the projects differently; it’s like a balancing act. When I write a symphonic piece, the orchestra, the conductor, and the soloist, no matter how famous or important they are, all try to express my artistic vision. When you write an opera, it’s in the middle. They sort of want to honour your vision, but the diva wants this, the director has his or her ideas, the stage designer wants such and such. When you get to film… PG (laughs) You’ve lost it completely and utterly! JC It’s the director who’s in charge and you’re supposed to write music that makes that director happy and the studio happy. JD I guess whomever pays the piper the most gets to call most of the tunes! But aside from who has more artistic control in a given situation, does it follow that the music is necessarily different? JC When you see a film, the music reflects what’s happening on the screen. The music comes out and in, for one minute in one sequence, or maybe six minutes and 22 seconds somewhere else. When you’re sitting in a concert hall on a wooden chair watching a bunch of people saw away at instruments, your entire concentration is only on the sound and that’s the difference. For example, I took themes from The Red Violin and used them for my Violin Concerto. There’s also the Suite for Violin and Strings, and those are about 25 minutes of music cues for the film sequenced together. To me, the suite is not as satisfying, because a lot of them are short cues, and they don’t build a structure abstractly that one can sit and listen to in the concert hall in the same way that the concerto does. PG You miss the expanse of time that you have in the concert hall. JC When I’m writing for the concert hall I’m thinking about shaping long arches or sustaining a 15- or 20-minute movement. When we’re writing film cues, we don’t think that way, because we
The music leaves you shaken, but stirred? James Bond soundtracks exemplify the film world’s big, flashy effects have to work within much shorter time limits that are given to us. PG Six minutes would be considered a long cue. Although when I’m working on a film score that’s also going to be a commercial recording, I plan ahead to see which cues I can combine. And then I’ll write transition pieces specifically for the recording that never will be in the film. JD Do you consciously adjust your style when you score films? JC I don’t like the word ‘style’ so much as ‘techniques’, because generally I think that the style of a composer is the unconscious choices that he makes, not the conscious ones. A film composer who takes whatever job he can get has to master techniques that are very, very varied, from pop music and jazz to symphonic idioms. Yet if you listen closely to their scores, you find that the film composer’s personality eventually comes out, because their signatures are not in moments that are highly stylised, but the little things: the way you jump to gramophone.co.uk
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SHOSTAKOVICH, KORNGOLD AND COPLAND
Special music for the SILVERSCREEN
Among the many concert hall composers seduced by cinema were Shostakovich, Korngold and Copland. Yet each of them brought an individual outlook and had very different experiences, argued Andrew Farach-Colton in this feature from 2011
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Dmitri Shostakovich declared the words that sit to the right of this paragraph in an article published in advance of the premiere of the silent picture New Babylon in March 1929. It was his first full-length film score and he was 23.
score’s coherence. To my ears, at least, New Babylon’s easy eclecticism looks forward to some of Shostakovich’s more enigmatic masterworks, including the Sixth, Ninth and Fifteenth symphonies.
‘It’s time to take cinema music in hand, to eliminate the bungling and the inartistic and to thoroughly
New Babylon was a total flop. The film’s expressionist imagery puzzled audiences, cinema orchestras struggled with the complicated music, and the synchronisation problems were nightmarish, given the unreliability of the technology. Yet Shostakovich appears to have been unfazed, and continued experimenting and pushing clean the Augean stable. The only way to do this is to
The young composer was already something of an industry veteran, however, for in order to help his family make ends meet, he’d spent a considerable portion of his later teenage years accompanying silent films on the piano in several of St Petersburg’s larger movie palaces (it was only following the spectacular success of his First Symphony in 1926 that he was able to quit that line of work, which he found gruelling and repetitive). In tandem with New Babylon’s directors Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg – founders of an experimental theatre group known as the Factory of the Eccentric Actor – Shostakovich boldly forged a new write special music’
–Dmitri Shostakovich boundaries in this new genre as the era of the silent film ended and the soundtrack was born.
relationship between sound and image. ‘In those years’, according to Kozintsev, ‘film music was used to strengthen the emotions of reality, or, to use current terminology, to illustrate the frame. We immediately came to an agreement with the composer that the music would be linked to the inner meaning and not to the external action.’
Perhaps because of the many years he’d spent working in the cinema as an accompanist, Shostakovich had a clear and immediate sense of music’s potential to function not merely as a narrative accessory but as a powerful tool to express psychological, spiritual or even philosophical signs and subtleties. ‘For example,’ the composer explained, ‘at the end of the second reel the important episode is the German cavalry’s advance on Paris, though the scene ends in an empty restaurant. Silence. But, in spite of the fact that the cavalry is no longer on screen, the music continues to remind the audience of the approaching threat.’
From the start, too, Shostakovich conceived of the film score as a cohesive entity rather than a patchwork quilt of cues, describing his music for New Babylon as maintaining an ‘unbroken symphonic tone throughout’. And, though he employs a broad stylistic coalition that includes raucous polkas, inebriated waltzes, acerbic quotations (most notably, from ‘La Marseillaise’) and bleak cantilenas, one marvels at the
There are spectacular moments in Alone (1931), including the scene at the end of the first reel, where an ethereal, Italianate chorus of crockery begs the heroine to stay in Leningrad. The Golden Mountains (1931) features an imposing fugue for organ and orchestra (unfortunately cut from the final version of the film). Shostakovich’s inventiveness was simultaneously aided by improvements in sound quality and hampered by politics, as Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet cinema. Following the composer’s fall from the government’s grace in 1936, writing music for films became a matter of survival, while experimentation was to be studiously avoided. Little music from this period is from Shostakovich’s top drawer. There are exceptions, however, like the charming,
rather Mahlerian score he provided for the cartoon The Tale of a Silly Little Mouse (1939).
It would be a decade after Stalin’s death before Shostakovich returned to the world of the cinema with real enthusiasm, providing music for a pair of Shakespearean films by his old friend Kozintsev: Hamlet (1964), composed soon after the Thirteenth Symphony; and King Lear (1971), written hard on the heels of the Fourteenth. Both scores are typical of the composer’s late style in their emotional starkness and structural concision, and are perfectly in tune with Koznitsev’s grimly granitic imagery. And, last but not least: Sofia Perovskaya (1968), produced to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, is far from Shakespeare, though it, too, inspired what’s arguably Shostakovich’s most hauntingly atmospheric, profoundly eloquent film score.
em inebriated waltzes, acerbic quotations (most notably, from ‘La Marseillaise’) and bleak cantilenas, one marvels at the what’s arguab profoundly eloquent film score.
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JOHN WILLIAMS’S CONCERTOS
Close Encounters INTHECONCERTHALL Andrew Farach-Colton earlier this year explored the concertos of John Williams, talking to conductor Leonard Slatkin, as well as to cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter about works newly written and newly revised
Let me tell you a story,’ Leonard Slatkin says. ‘As the year 2000 was approaching, I received a request to do an interview with Time magazine. They were looking for people to talk about the most important figures in their fields in the 20th century. I said, “Sure,” and one question they asked was who I thought was the most influential composer of the last hundred years. Without missing a beat, I answered, “John Williams.” “No, no, no,” they said. “We don’t mean that. We’re talking about Stravinsky or Schoenberg.” So I said, “Look, can you name seven people on the planet who haven’t heard something by John Williams?”’
Slatkin’s anecdote made me laugh in part because it comes so very close to the truth. And yet I know why Time’s journalists were protesting. It wasn’t to deny Williams’s blockbuster success, but rather to separate his work as a film composer from the sacrosanct canon of classical music. It’s a story almost as old as cinema itself, as any fan of Korngold or Herrmann can tell you. Some will argue that Korngold and Herrmann were classical composers first, and worked in Hollywood only to support their families; and they might be surprised to discover that Williams’s story isn’t so different after all. His initial background was in jazz, it’s true. His father was a drummer who worked with the inventively zany bandleader Raymond Scott, and by all accounts John Jnr’s talent as a jazz pianist put him in the prodigy category. Yet classical music was an early interest, too, and he studied composition with Castelnuovo-Tedesco while at university in Los Angeles. Then, after service in the US Air Force, he went to Juilliard. ‘Even when he first started writing for TV in the late ’50s and early ’60s,’ Slatkin says, ‘John was simultaneously writing what we would traditionally call classical music.’ Slatkin’s parents – brilliant classically trained musicians who founded the Hollywood String Quartet – made their living playing in studio orchestras, so the entire Slatkin family knew Johnny Williams (as he called himself then) from the very outset of his career.
One can hear Williams’s jazz expertise and his penchant for stylistic intermixing in a Prelude and Fugue he wrote in 1965 for Stan Kenton’s Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra. In the Fugue, the brass and gramophone.co.uk
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THE GRAMOPHONE DEBATE
THE GRAMOPHONE DEBATE
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So one of the interesting things about being a concert composer working in JD That just proves how elements of your style have permeated the und today, just as
So one of the interesting things about being a concert composer working in film is that we can get into larger areas of technique that we generally don’t work in. JD So it stands to reason that your film scoring experiences might inform how you write for the concert hall. JC Oh, sure. For example, when I was working on the Ken Russell film Altered States, I had these 9- and 10-minute
JD That just proves how elements of your style have permeated the ‘Hollywood’ sound today, just as Rachmaninov did in movies of the ’30s and ’40s. PG Actually, my harmonic language usually is more adventurous in my film scores than in my concert music. It’s much more dissonant. I’m more liable to sound like other people who write modern music. JD Is that because most people accept dissonance more readily in a cinematic scenes with no words, and I had to write a lot of busy music, but didn’t want to use millions of notes. So I took simple symbols that you use for what I call ‘motion sonorities’ like trills and tremolos, and, for about a week, developed my own versions of them … I’d give a symbol, say, to a section of cellos, to make them play agitatedly, between certain notes as fast as possible. And eventually I brought these context? Listeners who couldn’t sit through Schoenberg’s Second Chamber Symphony in concert wouldn’t have trouble if it was the soundtrack to Attack of the Killer Tone Rows? PG Absolutely. After all, wasn’t it John Williams who made Stravinsky a popular idiom? JD In fact, many people nowadays first experience orchestral music not through Beethoven, not through Mozart, but a note, the way you gravitate to certain harmonic ideas, the way you do things instinctively. That’s style.
JD related the story of being asked by some film-makers to compose the score to an airline video. Having heard him give a piano recital which included some of his own compositions, they gave him a VHS cassette with ‘images of trees and flowers, all underscored by the sappiest new age music’. Assuming he was to follow that model, he wrote a trio of bland tunes and one that was more harmonically complex for his own enjoyment. They wanted the complex piece, saying it was more true to his own voice. Personal style, suggested JD, was clearly not dead in the visual world. PG expanded … PG What I learnt from studying with Nadia Boulanger was that personal style was a special case of technique, the predilection one has to voice chords or manipulate instrumentation in certain ways. But this predilection lies within a larger framework of technique, and I tell young composers that without learning technique, they’ll never have a style.
techniques into my concert music. JD A friend of mine was listening to the original soundtrack to a James Bond film, and was swept away by the big crescendos and percussion effects, all happening so fast, which is the nature of short cues. Does this follow that composers who mainly write for film would find it a challenge to deal with symphonic forms and larger scales of time? PG Not that many of them have the opportunity. People who are exclusively film composers usually don’t get concert hall commissions.
JC I think there’s a prejudice that creeps into this matter. When someone primarily is a film composer, and then composes for the concert hall, certain critics will point out how that composer is limited in what he or she can do. But when a classical composer comes into a film, we tend to be treated very well. PG It’s a lot easier to make your reputation in the straight music world first, and then walk into the entertainment business if you can. But there’s another side to that. It took years before people in the film world (I’m talking about mainstream, commercial films) were convinced that I could actually write film scores, long after I had been writing them. For example, a couple of composers who had been hired to do The Hours were fired for some reason. The producer was going around Hollywood asking, ‘can anyone around write music like Philip Glass?’ And someone said, ‘well why don’t you call him up?’ Which he did, eventually. But it doesn’t occur to these people to go to the source!
John Williams … JC … who uses more French horns than any symphony orchestra can ever afford… PG … more than Wagner! JD Will audiences who respond to John Williams use that as a steppingstone into starting to appreciate concert music? JC Well, the sounds of an orchestra might provide this kind of bridge. But there’s a very great difference between listening to something without any words, story or picture, and a piece of music that’s basically accompaniment to words and pictures. PG But John, in The Red Violin, you used music to articulate the film’s structure, and I tried to do that too in The Hours. This is something not generally done. And I’m sure you’ve heard some people in Hollywood say that this is not ‘real’ film music, that it violates some unwritten law that film music must be decorative. Yet we’ve seen how music has the potential to articulate and formulate the structural emotional point of view of the film. That’s a great contribution that we, and I mean the larger ‘we’ of concert, opera and ballet composers, have brought to the film world, and it’s an important one.
Jed Distler is a critic for Gramophone, composer,
pianist and teacher Philip Glass is one of the world’s best-known composers and has had success with both classical and film music John Corigliano, like Glass, is a leading composer also known for film scores such as The Red Violin
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