Taking Movie Music Seriously, Like It or Not

NYT April 22, 2001 Taking Movie Music Seriously, Like It or Not By DAVID SCHIFF

FOR two years in a row, the Academy Award for best film score has gone to a classical composer: first John Corigliano for 'The Red Violin,' then Tan Dun for 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.' While cynics claim that this is the film industry's way of advertising its high-art pretensions, Hollywood may really be ahead of New York in acknowledging that the opposition between film music and concert music is a phantom of the last century. Today the two styles constantly interact. John Williams's scores for George Lucas's 'Star Wars' movies and for Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws' and 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' which resurrected the symphonic style for film in the 70's, have also exerted a huge influence on the work of young concert composers. Philip Glass's music for 'Koyaanisqatsi' made Minimalism an essential component of any film composer's stylistic vocabulary.

Now the American Composers Orchestra is catching up with the Motion Picture Academy, presenting a 'Hollywood' concert this afternoon at Carnegie Hall that culminates a two-week series of small concerts and film screenings. The program, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, includes music for two camp classics, the Hollywood 'exposé' 'The Bad and the Beautiful' (David Raksin, composer) and Alfred Hitchcock's Freudian whodunit 'Spellbound' (Miklos Rozsa); the cult sci-fi thriller 'The Thing' (Dimitri Tiomkin); and Hitchcock's unavoidable 'Psycho' (Bernard Herrmann). Except for 'Psycho,' none of these is a pinnacle of cinematic art, but each score is a milestone in film music.

The orchestra's warm embrace of Hollywood may be a deceptive sign of a thaw in the longstanding cold war between the musical cultures of the two coasts. Last year, when Washington had other scandals to think about, a minor Beltway drama call it Kamengate erupted around a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra that included the premiere of Michael Kamen's 'New Moon in the Old Moon's Arms.' Mr. Kamen is a Juilliard- trained composer of many film scores, including 'Mr. Holland's Opus.' But for Philip Kennicott, the music critic of The Washington Post, he represents everything wrong with music today.

Mr. Kennicott dismissed Mr. Kamen's symphony as 'pretentious and pernicious tonal tripe . . . scored in the usual sodden and overripe Hollywood manner.' And he blasted the National Symphony for commissioning a 'well-remunerated Hollywood hack' who 'doesn't need to be dipping into the paltry amount that's available to composers of serious music.' Mr. Kennicott seemed to assume that commissions, like welfare payments, should be based on need. And he was nearly as harsh on works by non-Hollywood composers, criticizing Richard Danielpour's 'Voice of Remembrance' as 'a succession of familiar moods and feelings.' In other words, it sounded like film music.

Classical music is the ability of any music to transcend it's own genre. Movie music probably has to fit the visual. However, you could do Henry the Fifth with a soundtrack by the Clash and still have movie music. Probably one of Cage's 'silences' would be the hardest for an audience to understand.

Why not just say that movie music is a program music? The difficulties of program music as music are well known. The problem with these soft-core orchestra pieces that sound like film music is that they don't have a program, and the psyche of their composers isn't interesting enough to project content.