svonkampen -

If PaulR is going to bring up Bottyland, there is very little else we can do...

svon,

The tragic thing is - he actually IS sober. 

"Put your money where your mouth is, you bloated windbag"  

Now you are talking.  This is how to deal with limeys.  Don't ever let your guard down or they will colonize you.

Scores today sound closer to Herrmann than Williams to me, but everyone wants to be Williams. Seems like SVK is being smart going back to a classic minimalist film composer as long as he updates the style. Which he's obviously able to do.Myself, I keep buying and downloading Williams scores like an idiot. 

Try to imagine SVKs string tension with some taiko behind it and you're hearing todays style, only done with much more drama. 

I think it is great that svonkampen has done these, because as he said it is study of a master.  

Concerning other composers I agree that scores are imitating Herrmann a lot, but usually without the artistry.  He essentially created a minimalist art utterly by himself, in an extremely original fashion, by going against the grain which - when he started on Citizen Kane (how is that for your first film? - the movie generally considered the greatest film ever made) - was basically the Max Steiner-Erich Korngold-Franz Waxman-Leitmotif style, derived from Wagner's operatic style. It was good in the hands of those composers, but Herrmann showed that the leitmotif was not essential, but simply a choice the composer could make if he wanted. Before his music, it was considered absolutely necessary as a way of unifying a filmscore (if such a thing were to be attempted on a sufficiently "serious" film production).  Herrmann then proceeded to develop it into a brilliantly self-contained style of his own in which recurring motifs were developed in a more symphonic and less operatic way. He derived much of his own harmonic style from Rachmaninoff (as in Isle of the Dead), Debussy and Holst - late Romantic-Early Modern orchestral tradition, with extremely vivid orchestration that rivals the greatest classical composers.  In fact, I think he is the greatest orchestrator of all film composers or pure film arranger/orchestrators.  You will occasionally hear something completely off-the-wall he did not only for a big film production but in some of his TV scoring - such as one Alfred Hitchcock Presents I remember in which he did the entire score FOR BASSOON ENSEMBLE ALONE.  And it was absolutely perfect for the picture. Or the instrumentation for "Journey to the Center of the Earth" for twelve harps, five organs, brass and percussion. Or the score for"King of the Khyber Rifles" for massive percussion ensemble, or "The Twisted Nerve" using a whistler soloist, or "Sisters" using analog synth, strings and percussion, or... etc., etc., etc.

He is now being almost universally imitated, particularly in his use of "dark" parallel minor harmonies,  heavy low brass and winds, and recurring motifs.  Unfortunately, they are always the same harmonies, and the motifs are not developed in other composers' scores in the powerful, imaginative way Herrmann himself did.  Except in a few, such as Danny Elfman who is probably the best of the American Herrmann-influenced composers. I was very disappointed by the Batman Begins score, which seemed boring and droning to me compared to the fabulous Elfman score in the original Batman.  Though it was obviously in the Herrmann mold. 

 Sorry to go on but it is a fun subject to talk about...

I disagree with that as a fundamental principle!  If you used that logic, well then no music is needed at all.  So just because there is a lot going on visually doesn't mean music has to be boring.  Lord of the Rings for example is a complete contradiction.  Quite complex music with the most visually complex film ever made. 

though it's nice to hear from you vibrato!

Also, the first Batman in fact - very spectacular with a huge amount going on visually, and a very involved music score that counterpointed it perfectly.

I think we actually agree on this in that I think you are right in how sometimes just a chord or two is far more effective than an entire fussy, complicated Richard Strauss-like score.  I remember a really bad score by the otherwise great Max Steiner, in which the music was going on and on doing all this stuff of its own, and the film didn't need any of it.  But then on the other hand you have Steiner's score to the original King Kong which is fantastically good and half-creates the film.

Luis Bunuel felt that music was not needed at all in movies and was just a crutch for bad filmmaking.  Of course his films were radically strange.  It is appropriate you brought up Tarkovsky and his Sculpting in Time (which is one of the best books ever written about cinema) in that he used music extremely sparingly.  Part of this comes from a desire on the part of the filmmaker to NOT tell the audience what to feel.  In other words, to allow the film to create whatever they feel, without being manipulated by the addition of music which is after all a separate art form from cinema.  

On the other hand again, you have Herrmann himself who stated that people cannot watch movies without music. They become dry and dead.  I don't think I would go that far, because at times a lack of music can  allow a film to become almost documentary-like, and more real-seeming.  Though I tend to agree with Herrmann that without music film starts to become extremely lacking in feeling.  Think of the famous example of Psycho - Hitchcock wanted no music in the shower scene, and Herrmann ignored him and wrote the most famous film music of all.

A very interesting recent book - The Power of Movies written not by a film theorist but by a philosopher who happens to like movies, establishes the basic concept that film-watching is like dreaming.  And as often happens in dreams, there is an emotion present that is not generated by the scene, but is simply there along with it.  In film, this same "emotion out of nowhere" is accomplished  by music.  

I like that idea of Goldsmith.  Though of course the actors would tell you it's the actor's job, the cinematographer would tell you it's the cinematographer's job, etc.  I remember however reading the back of the original Planet of the Apes LP record, which had a statement by Charleton Heston, who said that actors usually dislike film composers intruding on their territory. But Jerry Goldsmith, according to Moses, did not.

Hey speaking of Moses and Chuck ("from my cold dead hands") Heston, there is a great score - The Ten Commandments.  By Elmer Bernstein. Has anyone heard that isolated from the overblown turgid Biblical potboiler it is shackled to? It is a great piece of music.  Actually recorded in stereo in its first release for LP in the 50s, which was almost unheard of in those days for a soundtrack.