Soundtracks, orchestras and classical music

Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 5:12 pm Post subject:

It sounds a lot like poetry. I've never cared for poetry, and I don't think I have much patience for pure symphonic art.

The thing is, I love stories. Film music and musical theater are, unsurprisingly, what I listen to most. I believe there can be a lot of development of themes and such in those arenas, though as I write this off the cuff nothing occurs to me. (Perhaps what I talked about in my review of Little Shop of Horrors counts). I hope this doesn't make me a rube or a simpleton. But "pure" art, aside from my hatred of that four-letter-word, just doesn't do it for me.

Posted: Sun Oct 06, 2013 3:50 am Post subject:

I'm not educated in (classical) music at all, I'm not even playing any instruments or sing. Maybe that's also why I don't have any affinity with classical musical: I don't hear or understand the symphonic art of it. But I love film music!

In my view, film score has the purpose of enhancing the emotions that belong to a scene in the movie. Playing film score without the actual context can still bring over those emotions or (if I have seen the movie) relive the movie scene.

On the other hand, if we talk about 'film scores' it's about the music that we think is very good. The repetoire of John Williams or Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings comes to mind. But there are many scores that never make it to anyone's list. Who ever listened to the score of the movie 'Fire down below'? Although I've seen the movie (more than once), I never thought about looking up the score. In that perspective, film scores are more like pop music: some make it tox the top, others don't. Funny thing is, is that the rating of the movie does not necessarily rate the film score. 'King Arthur' comes to mind as the only reason I liked this movie was because of Hans Zimmer's music.

Game music (I'm typing this while Skyrim is playing on SST) is in my view something that has become more serious the past 5-10 years. I'm a real gamer, regularly spending over 20 hours a week gaming. What I've seen is that gaming has become a new source, next to movies, of telling complex stories. Sure, Mario had a story too (every good game has one), but the complexity and depth of stories like World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, the new Tomb Raider, Journey, Last of Us and upcoming Beyond: Two Souls is just stunning. Hell, I would even say that the quality of story-driven games in 2013 is better than the 2013 movie list. And that quality cannot be reached without being accompanied by amazing and emotional music.

I hate labeling, and especially trying to label film and game scores as 'classical' music, doesn't do it justice. If I had to label scores, I would say it is a separate style that has influences of other styles, like classical. But there are also plenty of other influences, like electronic and country.

That orchestra's are making a shift towards film and gaming score is not a bad thing in my opinion. I always have thought that the potential of orchestra's is being underused. I understand that the full potential of an orchestra lies in playing classical music, but it directed to an audience that can appreciate and understand the complexity and symphonic art of such music. And that audience group is not very big. I could start a very long discussion about whether we should subsidise orchestra's that play classical music only (but let's not do that), but in the end, I think that orchestra's need to wider their audience, especially reaching out to the more younger audience. Film and gaming scores are perfect means to do that.

Thanks for starting this topic Xalira!

Posted: Mon Oct 07, 2013 2:49 pm Post subject:

Yes, such concerts are certainly possible, though at least here, rare, especially among high level orchestras as opposed to student or community orchestras. But that is why I made the comparison between a Mozart opera and a Transformers score. I'm just going to make up some numbers here just for a rough illustration - let's say in a traditional opera, the music was 90% of the performance experience. Mix that of course with the fact that many in the audience are there to see a particular diva sing that music. But still, it is the performance of that music that is the experience. Compare that to MOST films of today, where the music could be said to be, I don't know, 25% of the experience along with visuals, sound effects, etc. Most music in most films today is much more in a support role than up front, especially compared to opera. Heck, I was shocked recently when I told someone I met that I do music for movies, and she had to stop and think about the fact that there even WAS music in movies. To most of the public, music is a very small part of the film experience, and most of the music is frankly made accordingly. So to pull music out of a film for concert performance is very different from pulling music out of an opera experience.