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From the
music establishment’s point of view—musical directors,
managers and critics—concert halls and opera houses are
nothing more than museums. Large and well funded, they are
viewed by the establishment as mere galleries of music
history. And in a certain way they are right. Occasional
early-music festivals and twentieth-century programs aside,
the core musical offerings of concert and opera music remain
those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The reason
for this, however, is that the public does not view such
programming as historical. Music brochures, catalogues, and
recording sales consist overwhelmingly of eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century music, proving that concertgoers are
attending—happily and repeatedly—performances of music which
to them is still relevant and very contemporary in content.
It is now
forty years since the death of Sibelius, the last major
composer of the preceding century—and ninety years since the
“official death” of the Romantic style. Yet despite the
musical events of 1910 Vienna, with the introduction of free
atonality, modernism’s impact upon today’s audiences is
inaudible. New Music has failed. Romantic music remains the
top favorite of opera and concert goers. Ironically, this
same popular and enduring style (one the broader public
terms “classical”) is no longer written for them.
Unrelenting critical hostility from within the academy has
driven Romanticism away from serious consideration. Today it
survives only within the venue of musicologists, who are in
effect curators of the Romantic museum, or on the fringe
among those who compose in wistful privacy. There are no new
young Romantic composers being trained at Berkeley and
Julliard; in these environments, students declaring such
intentions are quietly if not literally shown the door. This
overall lack of acknowledgment is doubly ironic because the
Romantic style is still being practiced elsewhere, even
though we don’t hear about it from critics. And its
relevance is worth noting in the “living artist” sense of
the word contemporary as well.
Today,
the last venue for new original Romantic music is the medium
of film. In the glare of
Hollywood, continents away from the desert of academia, is a group
of composers without a manifesto, who write in critical
silence yet reach millions of appreciative listeners. Their
work is considered beneath art, their names are largely
unknown, and with rare exceptions, they offer no explicit
defense or philosophical perspective on their work. But
because of the inherent strengths of the Romantic
style—emotional range, drama, melodic depth, and
intellectual seriousness—the style and its practitioners
remain successful.
The chief
reason Romantic music can persist and even thrive in today’s
context is the fact of storytelling. Film making quite
literally is a child of nineteenth-century literature. And
film music has followed more or less in step with the
progress (and demise) of these two arts. Whether narrative
or documentary, film utilizes dramatic development, conflict
and resolution. When music rises to the level of a
successful Romantic film, and vice versa, the result is not
only a seamlessly integrated work of art but also a score
that frequently can stand alone and be appreciated for its
own Romantic quality. [Editor’s note: for more on musical
”plot” and its relation to literature, see “Thoughts on
Musical Characterization,” in ART Ideas, Volume Five,
Number One, 1998.]
In the
West, music has accompanied dramatic presentations since the
time of the ancient Greeks and has faithfully followed the
major literary movements throughout history. At the height
of Western drama in the Romantic nineteenth century, music
was not only integral to opera and ballet but also a feature
of non-musical theater as well. On stage, music opened and
closed scenes and underscored action and dialogue. Such
devices reached a high point in productions of Schiller and
Ibsen, whose incidental music survives today in the form of
concert suites. Then in fewer than twenty years, during the
twilight of Romanticism, the first experiments with “moving”
pictures began, and music all but passed out of dramatic
plays and moved into the new medium.
At first,
music performed more of a cosmetic than aesthetic purpose;
it masked the noise of early silent projection equipment.
But as time went on and film became increasingly narrative,
music became a presence on the set, assisting actors and
directors in rehearsal and during actual filming. By the
late 1910s and early 1920s, particularly after D. W.
Griffith, film makers discovered the interpretive powers of
music and frequently commissioned complete scores. This
created a new venue for composers, which was both a
continuation of Wagner’s music drama and the serious
melodrama (straight plays with music) of the preceding
decades. After the advent of sound, advancing recording
technologies and synchronization continued to make possible
both musical contributions of increasing length and
expressive depth.
Overall,
as a vehicle for Romantic-oriented composers, film
encouraged the evolution of a compositional style over time,
but one which remains within the framework of Wagner, Brahms
and Debussy. Unfortunately, there is little opportunity for
extensive stylistic or thematic development within a picture
itself or from picture to picture. Here the limitation is
the medium: the kinetic pace of a series of different shots
cut together interrupts the flow normally found in a concert
piece or a music drama. This, incidentally, is one of the
reasons why twentieth-century pointillistic techniques are
particularly effective in certain underscoring situations,
sometimes superior to long melodic lines. And much to the
horror of the cognoscenti, film music is virtually the only
forum in which the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg has
found a mass audience, well suited as they are in suggesting
a kind of lumbering brutality or nightmare panic.
Technically, the challenge to the film composer is to
underscore and suggest an emotional subtext, whatever it may
be, rather than striking false or melodramatic notes out of
balance with the action. The music must be adapted to the
film; it must be functional, and only secondarily can it be
considered as art in its own right. However, the element of
greatest interest to listeners and the most intriguing
possibility in film composition is what composers refer to
as “the big tune.” Certain films allow and even demand the
use of long, very defined musical lines. Outside of
educational and popular music, there is virtually no other
forum for composers to present this kind of melody. In
serious concert settings and as absolute music, it would not
be permitted unless it was in the form of deliberate
pastiche or “camp.” However, concert suites of film
music, often to the accompaniment of actual film footage,
are heard with increasing frequency. Such arrangements tend
to be from pictures with a grand scale sense of the heroic
or the tragic—further evidence of Romanticism’s ongoing
appeal.
Three
practical recommendations will make it easier to find “big
tunes” and other exceptional composition in film scores:
First and foremost, the film’s subject matter. A romantic
film like “The Miracle Worker” is conjoined to an equally
romantic score by Laurence Rosenthal. One could create a
list of films by subject and then review these scores for
promising work. Second, seeking out particularly strong
composer-director collaborations. In most cases music is the
last component of a film to be completed and approved, often
in weeks or days before its release. Films that include the
composer from the beginning are likely to achieve a level of
integration and musical inventiveness normally not possible
under the agonizing deadlines of commercial features. An
example of this working relationship is composer Alfred
Newman and director John Ford in “How Green Was My Valley.”
Another approach is the composer-driven score, that is to
say music of such distinctiveness as to be worth listening
to in its own right. Composers in this category include,
above all others, Bernard Herrmann—especially in “Vertigo”
and “North by Northwest”—as well as Nino Rota for “The
Godfather” and Jerry Goldsmith for “Star Trek—The Motion
Picture.”
Finally,
a film listener might seek out older names in the Romantic
European tradition: concert hall composers like Saint-Saens
and Gottschalk who wrote early film music, or Wolfgang
Korngold who began in opera and later succeeded in
Hollywood, or Miklos Rosa, another composer of distinction
spanning musical worlds.
Despite
the academic blockade, Romantic music continues to be
available outside the concert-hall-museum, though
regrettably, like its current practitioners, the future of
such music is unknown. Despite its enormous popularity,
unless a voice is raised in its defense, the Romantic style
may well fade from film in the same way it disappeared from
live performances. On the other hand, with a return to the
philosophy that made Romanticism possible in the first
place, the musical establishment might one day rediscover
emotional range, drama, melodic depth, and intellectual
seriousness—values readily available to us all over popcorn
at the Saturday matinee.
Jeff
Britting’s has composed incidental music for eleven stage
plays as well as the score for the Oscar-nominated
documentary, “Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life,” a project on which
he also served as Associate Producer. He is currently
Archivist for the Ayn Rand Institute and the author of
Ayn Rand, a
biography.
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