Last issue, we began this series discussing the topic of how film music has changed over the years. My interviews with four composers – Joel Goldsmith, John Scott, Ken Wannberg and Don Davis – had yielded the general opinion that the art was suffering, not benefiting, from technological changes. Faster post production meant less time to write a score, theatres rarely offered state-of-the-art sound systems, and the industry in general seemed to be run by people without a clue as to music’s potential in film beyond CD sales.

After publication, I mailed copies out to acquaintances and friends in the business, hoping to solicit responses and create a dialogue both in support or against what was expressed. I wanted this column to be a forum, supplying answers to how and why the industry treats film music as it does. While some composers simply agreed with the opinions expressed, Richard Band was the first person to point out that he had an opposing view to some of my notions. I had been familiar with Richard’s work since his 1978 debut film “Laserblast” and admired his abilities at producing some exceptional scores on sometimes the most minimal budgets. Last year, he asked me to write some notes for his promotional CD, “Film Music Over the Years”, and I jumped at the chance. It’s therefore appropriate that he should get the chance to give the first response.

“I read the article several times and it’s not that I disagree with everything these guys are saying,” he told me. “To begin with, I don’t think that there’s any one single answer to this. Worse or better, I would imagine everybody would have a somewhat different opinion.

“I think, years ago, it was a different era. Composers came up through the rank sin the studio system. There was more time to create a score from the simple standpoint that a composer in those days was expected to be his own orchestrator, arranger, and things of that sort. What has happened over the years, because of the advent of time constraints, is that scores are being done more rapidly now. This isn’t to say that didn’t happen now and again back then. In a sense, what has been forced into the business, is the splitting off of the various duties. That’s why most composers have an orchestrator, an arranger, an editor, so forth and so on. They have a crew of people to take off the time constraints, to put out a score in three, four weeks, or whatever it is. That’s part of it right there.”

There were exceptions in the old days. Though, the only other on-screen credit usually was “Musical Direction”, like a Lionel Newman, who was the head of the studio music department and would conduct the scores. For the most part, that’s how things have changed. They’ve been split up. The composer today has responsibilities that the composer of yesterday didn’t have. With the advent of electronics, one has to be somewhat of a technician, a recording engineer, a whole bunch of different things on top of being a composer. There’s a lot of diverse issues today that people didn’t have to address years ago.

“If you go back to the question, ‘Is film music today changing for the better or worse’ than it was years ago, that’s hard to say. At the start, you had a lot of great European composers come over to become film composers. They were composers in their own right before they got into film. Korngold, Steiner, so forth and so on. That’s a whole other area. People today are bred to be film composers before being ‘composers’ onto another medium. That’s also a big difference. In yesteryear, you had some great composers. If you look back at today, forty years from now, people will respond, not to the expertise within the music, but its function within the film. I think that has changed a great deal.

“Forty years ago, films were, dramatically, very different, and the function of music was very different. It wasn’t unusual to find scoring throughout a whole film. Today, you ‘spot’ films. You're trying to be economic because music is now more select. Your films today are based on reality, I'm not saying science-fiction is a real thing, but the dramatic way in which films are being played is, what I describe as, ‘realism within drama.” A lot of films of yesteryear were specifically made to not be real, except for some so-called ‘life dramas.” So, the basic function of music has changed as well.”

While music did become a team effort in the ‘B’ movies of the 1950s, where several composers would work on segments of a film, the contemporary film composer has evolved into the captain of the ship. Music was now often the result of a team effort rather than the work of an individual. I then asked Richard if he felt that part of this change in the industry was the result of musicians specializing in film scoring from the start of their education. Perhaps this explained why many contemporary scores were not as melodious as the ones produced in the golden age. Had the role of composer changed?

“Years ago,” he replied, “doctors used to train to become General Practitioners. It was somewhat unheard of, until later in their careers, that they would ever venture out into a specialty. Today, people go to a medical school to study to become an orthopedic doctor, a heart surgeon, etc. They get into specialties immediately. That didn’t exist years ago to the degree that it exists now. Film composition isn’t too different. You have people who are being bred, literally within the business, who know nothing other than film scoring, even though they’ve had some sort of a musical education. In my opinion, music education has fallen way behind in the last ten or fifteen years. For the most part, it’s generally a disaster when it comes to really learning how to compose, orchestrate, and function in the music business. If you want to be a performer in a symphony orchestra, or a soloist, conservatories are geared very well for that. They’re not the place for real composition like they were in the 1930s and 40s where they were just burgeoning with people. That was, however, the way the whole art world was in Europe then. Look at Paris, all the great artists were there at that time. An incredible amount of work was being produced in Europe.”

Richard agreed that there are exceptions to the rule. “I think you're always going to be able to pick out certain composers who have made a great mark on film music. John Williams will go down as the person who made an incredible impact on contemporary film music in the late 1970s because he brought back the orchestra. For almost twenty years, people had forgotten about the goddamn orchestra!

“Historically, when jazz came into film scoring in the 1950s with films like ‘On the Waterfront’, you had some incredible stuff. ‘West Side Story’ was probably the best score ever written. You can go back in history and find certain things that have made a big, big splash. There are people who would differ with me but, in my opinion, the ’60s and most of the ’70s were a throwaway, musically. Generally, you had pretty crappy, pop culture-types of scores. You can look back and see what has lasted because it is timeless and what is dated.”

That was a good point. As the second generation of film composers moved in in the late 1950s, European-style scoring was replaced by a new wave of American composers like Alex North and the composer of the two scores Richard Band cited, Leonard Bernstein. Films had started to take on a new look and sound.

However, as marketing took control, and films started to appeal to the more desirable money spending young audience, film scores became more pop-oriented, and the orchestra was replaced by the rock combo. Films became a reflection of current events and the jazz/rock score, which had once a powerful impact, became nothing more than background noise. Music’s dramatic influence would now be hit or miss on film, relegated to serving a more ‘useful’ purpose as a record album sales tool.

Richard drew another analogy for me to explain why a comparison was unfair. “Years ago, boxers like Max Schmelling fought without gloves. How can you compare him to a fighter like Muhammad Ali years later? The playing field isn’t even the same to judge them on. One fought without gloves and one didn’t have a limitation on rounds. Does it truly mean Ali was a stronger, better fighter because he could go fifty, sixty rounds? Not necessarily. So, if Max Steiner had eight or nine weeks to compose, arrange and orchestrate a score all by himself, does it necessarily make him, or that score, better than something Tommy Newman does in four or five weeks with help from an orchestrator or whatever? The playing field is different and the dramatic demands are different.

“There's a saying that ‘luck is a residue of design.’ Who knows if it’s luck or design, but Tommy’s been fortunate enough to get a lot of wonderful movies. He hasn’t been pigeon-holed, or had a situation as described in your last column, where he might have been asked to give a Johnny Williams or Jerry Goldsmith-type score. I think people go to him when they want to add something fresh or unique to their film and they’re not scared of doing something different. When he’s allowed to do what he thinks best, he really shines. There’s no question he’s one of the best composers to come out in the last fifteen, twenty years. Listen to ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. That stands up against anything his family wrote generations ago.”

Certainly his uncle, Alfred Newman, was responsible for many classic and highly-regarded film scores. While a work like ‘The Player’ would never have fit a film made during the elder’s generation, no one can deny Thomas Newman’s work is just as effective as Alfred Newman’s music for “How Green was My Valley”, “The Robe”, or any of his other classics.

“Absolutely,” Richard agreed, but he then pointed out “That’s why your initial question may be inappropriate. The dictates were different forty years ago. We can all look back on the golden days of Hollywood and say it was great to have all that time to write. Certainly, composers today have never had it so bad in that sense. The time constraints are the worst. The demands and understanding are the worst. The respect for composition has gone down to the level of a fucking grip or gaffer. Is that the result of composers not being as good as they once were? No, I don’t think that’s the case. Maybe it’s because the film business today is run by people who are not film makers. Maybe that’s a better indicator from an artistic standpoint why things have gotten worse.”

So, we agreed on that point, that perhaps the film composer’s greatest enemy is that the people in charge really don’t, or can’t, understand what is really involved in the ‘art’ of filmmaking beyond the limits of creative accounting.

Perhaps of all the composers I know, Richard has benefited most from the explosion of the direct-to-video market. While many composers working in the field relied solely on synthesizers, creating scores that sounded like they were created by just banging away at the keyboard, Richard strained to deliver large-sounding scores by combining electronics and conventional acoustical instruments. I asked him if he thought his efforts suffered on the small screen, where ordinary television speakers couldn’t produce the dynamic movie theatre experience.

“I suppose that my approach comes from a more formal musical background. In my first ten years of scoring, I never did anything with electronics. All my earlier stuff is orchestral. I think of all of these gadgets as an extension to an orchestra. Therefore, my thinking is still orchestral. I guess I’m much more traditional than, say, a rock ’n’ roll composer, who has a much different way of envisioning. Like you said, some people sit down and like to look for interesting sounds or just improvise. Since I was forced into electronics by economics, I have no trepidation about doing one, the other, or a combination thereof.

“I was always annoyed by those scores years ago that combined electronics and orchestra, sounding like oil and vinegar. They never mixed. I spend a lot of the last eight or nine years trying to solve that, creating a balance; let’s call it a ‘true salad dressing’, where everything makes sense unto itself, whether it’s acoustical or electronic.

“To be totally honest, I’ve gotten a better shake on the smaller medium than the larger. You pointed out last issue that, even in Hollywood, theatres don’t have the best sound system. It’s amazing what with all these Dolby SR and digital theaters, perhaps in one out of every ten times I go to the movies, I can actually hear the music. Since stereo came into film, I think people haven’t known how to mix properly in stereo. The result has been a lot of bad mixes where music has gotten the shaft. It’s interesting, don’t you think, that when we had mono, music sounded better overall? People had many years to learn how to mix sound properly and put it on a little optical track. With six or eight tracks, people have generally made a mess of things. I think I’ve gotten a better deal on the small screen because of the limitations.

“You want to talk about another thing that’s different? Years ago, music was the true defining dimension, the third dimension in a two-dimension medium. In the past fifteen years, sound effects have tried to take that place, which is why you have sound effects played up to such an absurd degree. I’ve never heard someone going out of the theatre with an emotional tear from a gunshot or from some loud foley. It was always some particular melody and/or scene. Sound effects have gone nuts. If it’s not the biggest-sounding explosion you’ve ever heard, then it’s a throwaway. Every explosion now has to be an ‘Italian Explosion’. Every slap in the face has to sound like Muhammad Ali giving the most vicious fight.”

I began to think about all those Sergio Leone ‘spaghetti westerns’ with their absurdly unreal sound effects. While Leon valued the power of Ennio Morricone’s accompanying scores, most of today’s action films (“Die Hard with a Vengeance”, for example) seem to almost forget they even have music. Richard was right; the people in charge were favoring sound effects in this race to create a new film ‘realism’. Sound designs have become more dense, but shouldn’t the increase in audio tracks create better sound, or are the people really mixing the sound unable to do what an earlier generation did in mono sound? There has always been an ongoing battle between those who see film as an art form and those who think of it as a business. Even John Scott, who writes some of the most beautiful orchestral scores, told me he believes that film scoring is really an industry. Musical composition for its own sake is the art. If that’s true, do we as fans and critics of the medium expect too much?