I think John Williams has openly regretted "sticking too close to the temp track" on A New Hope.

You can hear the influence of the low strings motor rhythm on other parts of the soundtrack as well.

@lukeyphills said:

So its my last year at university and its time to write a dissertation. I'm thinking discussing the relationships between Stravinsky's 'Primitivism' style and modern film scores.

Chiming in with Brian, my immediate reaction to your question was that it fell into the category of "please do my homework for me", which I hope you didn't intend it to be.

However, my (slightly more considered) response is: "don't do that." 

In my opinion, writing a dissertation on the influence of Stravinsky on film music is a bit like writing a dissertation on the influence of Elvis Presley on popular music. I'm just not sure what you can say that hasn't already been said numerous times, and so I can't see a top-class dissertation coming out of it.  (I am assuming you want to write a top-class dissertation, right?)

In terms of your studies, what are you really passionate about? What are you curious to spend time digging away at, maybe to learn something original? Is it film music? Is it Stravinsky? Is it something else? 

(Listen to me, I've gone from chider to coach in four paragraphs, and short ones, at that.)

@William said:

Probably the reason this is somewhat difficult to respond to is that Stravinsky is imitated all the time, by concert composers, film composers who imitate others who imitated him, etc. etc. 

Some argue that Cliff Eidelman's score for "Star Trek VI" is heavily influenced by Stravinsky's 'The Firebird', perhaps because of the similarity of the opening bars' arrangement, although I think that Eidelman's score is wonderfully operatic in its own right. (Where else can you hear "To be or not to be" being sung in the original Klingon?)

Also, I think that Holst's "The Planets" could almost lay claim to being one of the works most adapted by film composers; it's practically a masterclass in dramatic orchestral writing.

Yes, Holst and I would add Vaughn Williams have had a huge influence.  I think fcw may have a point about this dissertation topic - it is huge and vague.  Though perhaps it can be done.  Thank goodness I am not doing it... 

Actually, dependent on the depth required, you could probably get a dissertation out of tracing the connections between Goldsmith's score for 'Star Trek: the Motion Picture' and various Vaughan Williams symphonies (such as 6 and 7, which Goldsmith admitted to listening to a lot while he was scoring ST:TMP).

@lukeyphills said:

S I'm thinking discussing the relationships between Stravinsky's 'Primitivism' style and modern film scores.

@fcw said:

"don't do that." 

The first time I agree to a statement of a forumite on this board.

However, if you wanna make some money with your thesis by selling it as fiction, this title emanates a good portion of mysterium:

"The First Man To Compare The Cheeks Of A Young Woman To A Rose Was Obviously A Poet; The First To Repeat It Was Possibly An Idiot"

.

 "Actually, dependent on the depth required, you could probably get a dissertation out of tracing the connections between Goldsmith's score for 'Star Trek: the Motion Picture' and various Vaughan Williams symphonies" - fcw

Yes, that was what I was thinking was the only way to do this in some meaningful manner - to severely limit it, as it is right now so vague a subject.  Pounding drums?  Dissonant, chaotic woodwinds?   Loud brass fanfares? Yeah, I guess Stravinsky had that influence. So did about a thousand other composers.   And then yes, since his music is good many composers imitated him.  Wow, that's a news flash.   I do think you need something more intricately detailed, such as what fcw mentioned.

By the way, that was a very good example - Star Trek The Motion Picture score has some serious  influences coming from Vaughn Williams, from the Seventh Symphony mainly. Also the Sixth Symphony.  I remember in particular a low pp unison horn line that is a very similar orchestrational effect in the context.   Though not stolen - the Goldsmith score is a great, spectacular work by a genius. There ought to be a whole thread just about that masterpiece - it has almost everything film music can do, to perfection.

Hey, looks like someone took my comment, about writing a thesis that traces connections betweeen ST:TMP and Vaughn Williams, seriously. Curiously, they managed to read the comment in 1986.

http://filmscoremonthly.com/daily/article.cfm/articleID/6484/

first, your title:

"how has Stravinsky influenced film music?"

is far off in the green, better would be:

"how film composer rip off anything and implying it in their functional movie soundtracks"

For a better understanding of a composer who created original music, and as support for your dissertation, you should understand Stravinsky first and then the copy cats. There is no originality in film soundtracks, it is all cliché, anti-cliché, idioms, snowclone and archetype. Film sound is purely functional music, similar to a TV-spot. I personally would not even call a film soundtrack music. And forgetthat word "Primitivism", that's musicologist nonsense, and none of Stravinky's music is perverse.

Read Stravinsky's transcribed Oxford lectures, I made a PDF for you:

Igor Stavinsky - Poetics of Music IN THE FORM OF SIX LESSONS [1942].pdf (6MB)|

http://www.sendspace.com/file/0djarz

.

I see the troglodytic lurker Clematide has re-surfaced from the Lovecraftian netherworld he sunk to after his ludicrous "How-to-do-all-dynamic-ranges-in twelve-steps" thread was mercifully dispatched into the cybernetic non-existence it richly deserved.

Stravinsky originally wanted to do film music but was rejected from a Hollywood studio gig and only then said film music was 'wallpaper."  Talk about sour grapes!  And yet you believe everything he said.  Like many other great artists he was a source of disinformation and distorted opinions concerning other artists  - which he didn't happen to be - and other arts  - that he did not do - like the  art of film music. 

well, filmcomposers "stole" from stravinsky... so what... stravinsky himself stole from other great composers... just an example: his idea of bitonality that is very explicitely elaborated in the rite of spring... he stole it from maurice ravel. but guess what: he made it his own. that is what a great composer does... he steals and makes it his own... stravinsky himself said: a good composer does not borrow, he steals.... there is nothing wrong with stealing or ripping off... it is in the way you do it. sure, there is a lot of bad filmmusic out there, maybe even the vast majority (just like in concert music, btw), but saying in general, that filmmusic ist just a huge rip-off, shows that you don´t know that much about the people who are being ripped off... go back to uni...

@ william: thanks for that post... it was one of the wittiest i´ve ever read here...

p.s.: the way you are dissing "functional" music is inherently stupid. stravinsky himself wrote a lot of functional music (i.e. ballets). opera music is also functional (many film composers do also steal from operas). actually you could say that opera is the predecessor of film in a way (200 years ago, star wars would have been an opera, not a movie!). it is just a different medium... there have been many bad operas in the last 400 years and there have been many bad filmscores in the past 80 years... but the best did and will survive... it has always been like that.

concerning your complaint about the lack of originality in filmscoring: do you know that there is not even one single original idea in the plays of shakespeare? all of his plays have been written before, more than 1000 years before his time, but noone wrote them like he did... there are also filmcomposers who can do a similar thing, but you will only find it if you are openminded enough...

well you two, from your responds I must assume that you are both hollywood movie soundtrack tinker

Insist upon yourself. Be original. You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for

Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven has exact borrowings from both The Rite and Symphony In C.

@Angelo Clematide said:

well you two, from your responds I must assume that you are both hollywood movie soundtrack tinker

Insist upon yourself. Be original. You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for

no, i am not. i compose contemporary music. the way you respond just shows that ignorance often goes along with arrogance. nobody is ever fully original. the great masters did copy from others like crazy. i already said: it is in the way you do it.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

I know that when you work to the specification of a client,  like forumite William does, that he does whatever the expectations are of the movie director and obeying to the common cliché, and not breaking out into new music - but I do not understand that you as contemporary composer can not take the freedom to compose whatever you like, meaning inventing new music nobody ever heard before

So it must be concluded from Clematide that all film music is unoriginal and all concert music is original.  The only problem with this amusing concept is you don't hear all the copycats of Berg, Webern or Stravinsky in the concert halls because they instantly disappear after one performance, but anything unoriginal written for film continues to be heard as long as the film is playing.

To come onto a forum filled with film composers and say film music is basically bad is insulting and doubly so because people in the early days of cinema used to look down on film music as being second rate.  After Herrmann, Korngold, Steiner, Goldsmith, De la Rue, Preisner,  etc. etc. etc. that became not only more difficult to do but actually a sign of either ignorance, envy or simple stupidity. 

That is an excellent point by aural about Shakespeare and absolutely true.  In fact his greatest play, Hamlet, was actually based on a fully written play by someone else that is now lost.   In folklore such as the medieval marchen, the quallity of a story was never defined by how original it was, but by how well it was told.  it is only in the modern age that originality became the end-all and sole purpose of art.  Today, to be original means MORE than to be good.  So if someone like Angelo Clematide creates a work of art by excreting on a musical keyboard in front of an audience he will be acclaimed as a brilliantly original creator.  BTW Angelo - you can use that idea, no problem.

Hey Angelo, welcome back from your slumber and all that jazz but please... I prevail upon you.  Don't       Piss       William       Off. 

Do you how long it took us (forum members) to put him back in good spirits after his last, er... "episode."  He gets down right nasty when he's pissed!

I understand you're just as passionate as the rest of us but, Angelo, if you continue to poke William with a stick then I would like to ask, is there anybody out there who would like to make a wager as to how long the moderator will allow this thread continue?  You know anytime Angelo's name comes up the moderator is sweating bullets with his/her finger on the "Shut This Thread The Hell Down" button. 

My wager is 10.  10 responses starting now.

Hey VSL, if I'm correct can I get a free copy of the Vienna Choir? 

jasensmith sez: ----> Hey Angelo, welcome back from your slumber and all that jazz but please... I prevail upon you. Don't Piss William Off.

I have absolutely no intention to "piss off" William, and Robert told me that he is a superior talented film composer, and I enjoiyed his underscoring of Prisoner of Azkaban very much, after a long time I felt that my investment for a cinema ticket was a good spending,

of course I was a little surprised by his response above with the capital letter with the great typography which was directed at an another forumite ---> but he is completly on the right track about my persona, except for Stravinsky for which I have no special relation nor any kind of admiration. I only missed a little the dynamics, 3D effect, visual ambience and digital colorist effect in his otherwise great post, so I changed this factors a little to enhance a more to the audience appealing typography and add it to my official CV:

 © William, 2010 May 1st

I see the troglodytic lurker Clematide has re-surfaced from the Lovecraftian netherworld he sunk to after his ludicrous "How-to-do-all-dynamic-ranges-in twelve-steps" thread was mercifully dispatched into the cybernetic non-existence it richly deserved.

BTW oh Magnificent Clematide, the Knower Of All Things Eurropean who let me know how little he knew compared to his vast reserve of enless knowledge - DO YOU KNOW WHO LOVECRAFT IS? Quick! Look it up on the internet and give me many references. For your information, I already have TWO COMPLETE ARKHAM HOUSE EDITIONS of everything he wrote, so don't bother.

For your information you pathetic blowhard Clematide, Stravinsky was FULL OF *** concerning film music, which HE ORIGINALLY WANTED TO DO BUT WAS REJECTED FROM A HOLLYWOOD STUDIO GIG AND AFTERWORD SAID FILM MUSIC IS WALLPAPER. Gee, what a shock! Talk about sour grapes! And yet you beleive everything he said. How very predictable.

So don't tire me with your pathetic little references to what this pyschotic (albiet talented) composer said. He like many other great artists was a source of disinformation and absurdly opinionated CRAP concerning other artists - which he didn't happen to be - and other arts - that he did not do - like the GREAT ART OF FILM MUSIC - YOU PATHETIC FOOL! - WHICH YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF IN YOUR INCOMPETENCE AND THEREFORE INSULT - JUST LIKE YOUR GOD STRAVINSKY, you wretched syccophantic slavering troglodyte gibbering incoherently at the nethermost pits of Hell.