“Professional orchestras are in trouble” says Michael Kamen, a movie composer who wrote the scores for “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and the upcoming Francis Ford Coppola film “Jack”.
“The new stuff they play tends to be theoretically interesting, perhaps, but resonates in the intellectual realm only. Symphonic film music, on the other hand, still connects emotionally. Even standing on its own, it can draw people into the concert halls. That’s why concert presenters are turning to us Hollywood composers more and more often.”
Indeed, concert impresarios, hip to the mass appeal of movie music, are increasingly likely these days to feature Hollywood names and titles in their programming – a trend that has provoked indignant outcries from classical purists. In June, the Juilliard-educated Kamen performed some of his greatest movie hits in a sold-out concert with the Seattle Symphony.
Kamen is at the forefront of a new wave of talented and open-minded young American composers who want to move freely between the concert hall and the Hollywood soundstage. Just as movie music is experiencing a renaissance of rich orchestral writing, starting with “Batman” (1989, Danny Elfman) and continuing with the scores of such films as last year’s “Braveheart” (courtesy of James Horner), the academic mainstream is slowly veering away from atonal orthodoxy to the kind of robust eclecticism that often undergirds noteworthy movie soundtracks.
Many composers at the start of their careers now jump at the chance to write for the movies. Gustavo Leone and Ilya Levinson are two who have crossed over to an arena shunned by their mentors, Ralph Shapey and John Eaton, at the University of Chicago, a bastion of avant-garde formalists.
“It’s very hard work,” says Levinson. “And I find myself asking, ‘What would Mozart have done? I’d like to believe that if he were writing now, he’d make a great movie composer.”
“It’s another venue for your music, another way to get to an audience,” explains Leone, who now teaches at Columbia College. “For me, academia has been very limiting and oppressive. Yet despite strong resistance in some quarters, having written film music is now considered a plus in applying for jobs.”
In Hollywood, another A-list composer, Randy Edelman, whose credits include “The Mask” and “Dragonheart”, is packaging his music for “Gettysburg” into a suite to be unveiled later this year by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mark Mancina, who scored the hyperkinetic “Speed” and the elegiac “Moll Flanders”, is yearning to stretch more boundaries. “That’s what I’ve worked for all my life, to be a well-rounded composer. Why shouldn’t I write piano sonatas?” says Mancina, who received a classical education from a California conservatory.
Similar questions, of course, have been raised by generations of composers who made their living from the movies. In the ’30s and ’40s, Erich Korngold, a Viennese émigré who became Warner Bros.’ ace house composer for swashbucklers, wrote serious operas on the side. For much of his brilliant career, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite composer (“Vertigo”, “North by Northwest”, “Psycho”), used to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in programs that featured his non-movie works. But Korngold, Herrmann, and other classical trained, meticulous craftsmen – Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, Max Steiner – had to combat the scorn and envy of the East Coast establishment.
“The film, as Europe has proved, is an art form capable of using to advantage the best composers. The film as produced by the American industry has never been able to show any composer at his best,” harrumphed the critic and composer Virgil Thompson in a 1949 review of Aaron Copland’s score for “The Red Pony”.
Thomson, himself the provider of an atmospheric symphonic background for the 1936 agit-prop documentary “The Plough That Broke the Plains”, was thumbing his nose at Hollywood’s crass, commercial ways, which strait-jacketed “classical” composers while rewarding them financially, making them “salesmen of soul states in which they do not believe.”
Lackey or Artist?
Even these days, many dismiss movie music’s claim as an art form. “It takes second place to the movie itself; it doesn’t determine the narrative motion,” says Eaton, who has toured as a jazz pianist and is considered a pioneer of synthesizer music.
“It’s background sound effects at best. Any comparison to opera is wrong. Opera also has a visual narrative component but it’s a bona fide musical form. The sole function of the librettist, unlike that of the scriptwriter, is to serve the composer. Although writing movie music is no mean feat, the movie composer is only a little better than a lackey.”
Not so, counters Edelman. “True, with film you’re locked into a format, but the basis of the music is no less serious or challenging,” he says. “You have to pay attention to structure and tempo. You need to have very good instincts about what style to pick. The best among us command an astonishing knowledge of musical traditions and idioms.”
Kamen agrees. “A score has to be designed with a sense of scope followed all the way through,” he explains. “Unlike the inflexible academic crowd, we can draw from around five centuries of repertoire, classical and otherwise. Ultimately, though, we should produce a score that matches or compensates for the narrative logic.”
Kamen formed one of the first rock-classical fusion groups in the country while studying at the Juilliard in the early ’70s and penned hit songs for the likes of Bryan Adams, who sang the theme tunes in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” and “Don Juan de Marco”. He prefers to use the orchestral palette with “splashes of rock ‘n’ roll”. It’s a skill he has demonstrated in his Concerto for Saxophone for David Sanborn and Concerto for Guitar for Eric Clapton.
Mancina, too, sees the best movie music as not having much to do with the “cut-and-paste approach”. “It takes a lot more imagination and sophistication than that to sustain musical ideas in a feature film,” he says.
For the level of sophistication Mancina speaks of, a classical education – which teachers the niceties of harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration – is almost required.
When “classical” composed have turned to film scores, they have a built-in advantage. Think of the inventive, richly nuanced, fresh-sounding music from “Henry V” (1945, William Walton), “On the Waterfront” (1954, Leonard Bernstein) and “Altered States” (1980, John Corigliano).
It’s an advantage local composers Leone and Levinson are ready to exploit. “My strong suit is the theories I learned at the U. of C.,” says Levinson, whose keen interests in movie music stems from his childhood in Russia, where elite directors and composers have always collaborated productively. “I can write fast and cleanly, tailoring harmonic ideas to the structure of the film.”
He provided thematic musical material for this year’s PBS documentary “Shtetl”, and now is working with the same director, Hyde Park-based Marian Marzynski, on a docudrama about the Americanization of a Japanese cinematography student.
“I learned not to interfere with dialogue and when to put in soft music and how to come up with two seconds of music that conveys a lot of emotion,” he says.
An Integral Part of Film
Leone, too, feels a creative urge to compose for this seminal hybrid art form. “I realize that musical ideas [in a film] may not be the most important thing,” he says, “but a composer’s contribution should not be ignored. Can you imagine ‘Star Wars’ without sound? It’d be flat.
“In writing concert music… I can follow my ideas, yet I’m restricted by the form of a sextet and the prevailing fashion, in a way. With movie music, I can afford to be emotional and expressive and use everything in my bag of tricks. For sci-fi music, I can even be atonal and chromatic.”
For Leone and Levinson and their peers fresh out of the academic factory, Elliot Goldenthal, the highly touted crossover Golden Boy of the moment, serves as a shining model.
A New York native who studied at the Manhattan School of Music under Aaron Copland and Corigliano, Goldenthal burst out onto the movie scene only 6 years ago with the quirky score for “Drugstore Cowboy”. Since then, in quick succession, he garnered an Oscar nomination for “Interview with the Vampire” and a Grammy nomination for “Batman Forever”. He has teamed up with director Joel Schumacher again for John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill”. Other plum assignments that have come his way are two of Hollywood’s upcoming blockbusters (Neil Jordan’s Irish epic “Michael Collins” and “Batman and Robin”).
Goldenthal, 41, who spent years eking out a living as a theater and dance composer, is not at all a fan of academia.
“It’s one of the worst environments for a composer,” he contends. “It has all these cliques and labels. Charles Wuorinen controls New York; Milton Babbitt has Princeton. These academics take their turfs – minimalism, neoromanticism and other crackpot categories – then subdivide further and analyze. In dissecting, they kill the simple joy of music. To escape this kind of tyranny, I found refuge elsewhere.”
He holds up the protean Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who wrote music for some of that country’s greatest filmmakers and other artists, as a paragon for his generation.
From Copland, Goldenthal says he learned that it was a composer’s imperative to collaborate with other artists, to venture into other media, to write for the masses.
“Aaron was all for populism,” he says. “He felt music should get out there and he… loved the cinema. He admired Shostakovich for writing prolifically for Soviet movies of all sorts. So he wrote direct and honest music for the movies and the radio – despite the tremendous snobbishness from his colleagues.”
On the other hand, Goldenthal is aware of the pitfalls of working for Hollywood. “You can end up a prostitute,” he says. “However, I was so used to being poor for at least 35 years, I can be choosy about whom I sleep with.” (A top Hollywood composer can command $500,000 per picture.)
Goldenthal is prized for his ability to defy clichés and introduce novel instrumental sounds. For a hallucination scene in “Drugstore Cowboy”, you’d expect “something druggy”, he says, “but I set it to the didgeridoo doing African and Asian loops, loops of repeated breathing over a tabla. My director and producer didn’t understand it at first but it worked. For ‘Alien 3’ I borrowed from the gestures of musique concrete, the European avant-garde movement, to assemble the spooky sound track.”
Mancina, too, likes to work with unfamiliar sounds. For “Moll Flanders” he used the kora, an Irish plucked string instrument, to lend an Irish feel to a film whose director “didn’t want period”. What’s of the utmost importance in movie music, he says, is “to reinforce the story, to enhance its emotions and to come up with a melody that stays on the mind.”
John Williams (“Jaws”, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, “Star Wars”) is an acknowledged master at that. Williams has received a record 23 Academy Award nominations since 1969. In “Schindler’s List” (1993) – for which he won his latest Oscar – the doleful violin tune speaks volumes.
“That’s something really sublime,” marvels Edelman. “A nostalgic melody that communicated to a vast audience. Only a few of us have reached that level. Nino Rota perhaps, Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann, certainly. Who’s the next great one?”
The bet is on the new wave.