This is one time I have to disagree with William (with due dread that he might pulverise his terminal in rage...)

If I say Herrmann for me is a great composer without contextualizing that statement in any way, then what adjective do I use for Puccini? Szymanowcki? Scriabin? Rachmaninov? And then what adjective do I use for Debussy, Ravel, Tchaikovsky? Following that, what adjective would I use for Brahms and Chopin? Then what would remain for Mozart and Bach?

Herrmann was both inspired and characteristic, as well as technically adept. These qualities alone already elevate Herrmann to a select group of composers, regardless of genre, and certainly above most clones of so-called 'serious' music (it's not the objective, it's the results that count).

I have heard most, if not all of the celebrated Herrmann film-music and I always marvel at it. I have only heard one concert work of his, very long ago, and I can't remember it at all. Quite a few people have told me that his concert music is not very impressive, however I have no opinion of my own. If I have to compare Hermann's great soundtracks - which many times can be listened to as pure music, to Prokofiev's output, I would be doing Herrmann a great disservice. I wouldn't know where to begin... Of course there are powerful offerings by Herrmann that I also would rather listen to than some Porkofiev, but that's about it. I won't write an essay today - Prokofiev's achievements and multifarious contributions to the art of music are well documented and easily accessible - but I will bring only one example up: The Hangover Square piano concerto, compared to any of Prokofiev's (or any of his first movements). Herrmann was given the opportunity to compose a concert work without restrictions (artistic or scenic - except the end had to be piano solo), and wrote a work, of which I happily own 2-3 interpretations, as it is good! But it would be like day and night if I have to entertain comparisons with Prokofiev's offerings in the same genre for so many reasons: Depth, breadth, inspiration, piano writing, harmony, rhythm, orhestration, etc. Galaxies apart, and that is not taking anything away from Herrmann who is very deservedly sitting on the high - just not that high - pedestal that his music justifiably afforded him.

That is why 'Perspective' is so important. I recently read on the Internet someone comparing Rolling Stones' contributions to popular music (you know, all genres), as equivalent to those of Justin Bieber. Now tell me again how narrow my field of vision is and about my 'straw' men; tell me how I am buried into the past (although I am young enough), how I refuse to appreciate and equate the quality of the minimal (brain-cell count) school of film-music, when I'm sure someone here - or on YouTube - will start comparing Hans' or Daft Punk's music to Prokofiev's.

Like a theatre composer said, "Would you call someone a novelist if he could neither read nor write?..."

First of all you need to hear more of Herrmann's work, such as "Echoes" his late string quartet which is a masterpiece fully the measure of anything Prokofiev wrote. 

Secondly, you are flatly wrong in this statement:

@Errikos said:

Herrmann was given the opportunity to compose a concert work without restrictions (artistic or scenic - except the end had to be piano solo

This is absolutely false.  The music he had to write was FOR A FILM - not freely composed  concert music in which he could do anything he liked.   Film music is aesthetically very similar to opera despite their conventional differences.  It is a intricately interwoven combination of two artforms which must be modified to fit together, just as opera is modified from its originary sources: theater and music.  One could just as inappropriately compare sections of Verdi's recitative to Beethoven's symhonic development and find Verdi inferior.   

I couldn't access 'Echoes'; I heard another work called 'Souvenirs de Voyage'; a pleasant enough salon piece, definitely Herrmann, but suffering from too much 3rd rate imitation of Ravel's language (de rigueur in Britain I suppose since Vaughn-Williams). However, I heard much of his 1st symphony and his Moby Dick cantata - both including massive Prokofievian passages by the way (as did a lot of the music of the period).

From what I heard in these large scale works, I can understand why Herrmann is mostly revered for his film-music, for that's where he was at his most original and characteristic - and I think I read somewhere how he actually preferred writing programmatic/to picture, rather than pure music. Be that as it may, these works (that I heard for the first time) certainly elevate Herrmann far above Williams or Goldsmith etc. as far as film composers go (I've heard their concert works, as well as Morricone's, Barry's, etc.), above Korngold, above Grofe, but nowhere near where Prokofiev (or Bartok, or Debussy, or Stravinsky, or Mahler, or Sibelius, etc.) reigned. And they don't have to. As far as the piano concerto goes, like you said, Herrmann was usually left to his own devices to write, and in this case he was not restricted by the script (in fact I think the killer-composer's character helped. I doubt Herrmann could have written a concerto for a 'jolly' composer).

Anyway, even his truly superb Psycho and Vertigo, are not Alexander Nevsky or Ivan the Terrible. But so what? I think it is counterproductive to compare the good with the great composers. I'd rather be learning from them, and focus my forum energies to effacing the ones that should never have dared consider becoming composers (not that they have).

I agree with you that Herrmann is unjustifiably neglected as a pure music composer while a lot of other twirps get multiple readings and recordings of puerile works. I certainly would love to have recordings of what I just heard on YouTube; I'll probably buy them, but the point is more of us should bother to discover them, and not restrict ourselves to Citizen Kane.

P.S.: O.K. Dietz, Moby Richard (hilarious![:D])

Is this a joke?  Are you serious? 

All of Alexander Nevsky is not worth  one cue from Vertigo.  Prokofiev's film scores are utterly obliterated in all aesthetically and musicologically measurable aspects by even minor scores by Herrmann.   Apparently you believe Eisenstein's laughable demonstations of how the semi-quavers correspond to the spears that are pointed upwards in the frame.  The single most glaring example in all of film and film music history of pretentious intellectualism being utterly unaware of what is going on in the fim - which is TOTAL BOREDOM AND ARTIFICIALITY.

If you need some help with Eisenstein and his absurdly overrated concepts of montage, see Sculpting in Time by Tarkovsky, a filmmaker who dwarfs Eisenstein.  And if you think that score is superior to Vertigo, you are either

1) Tone deaf or

2) a moron or

3) both.

I am getting a little tired of your arrogant qualified praise of Herrmann, which is something on the order of  "Oh yeah, he's a competent little guy.  Nothing like a real composer, but quite pleasant and... interesting. (As the Emperor said to Tchaikovsky after the premiere of Swan Lake).

You are simply a bigot against film music.  This has become quite clear.  You don't understand the elementary basis of it - an interplay of music and picture - and are incapable of seeing how that causes the music NOT to do everything that is done in the work, as in concert music.  You have a one-track mind that seeks to justify itself by putting things down it does not comprehend.

Instead of getting more irritated and insulting I will just add this - the basic concept of Errikos is "Look at all the great classical composers.  Now look at film composers.  The film composers are pathetic in comparison."

It is a fallacious argument for several reasons: first, as I stated before and was ignored, you cannot compare film music to pure concert music because it is an interplay with cinema, just as opera is an interplay between theater and music.  To say "Bernard Herrmann is not as good a Prokofiev" is ridiculous because Herrmann is doing something fundamentally different (except in the film scores in which Herrmann is vastly superior to Prokofiev).  Also ignored or not understood by this person is what I said about not being free to do anything one wants, as a concert composer is in fact free.  He thinks that because producers gave Herrmann license, well then he could write anything he wanted.  This shows total naivete about film music.  The music is to a large extent DICTATED by the film, and the composer is NOT free even if producers are allowing him freedom.  He is artistically intertwined with the film, and he knows this if he is a good film composer, and this is vastly different from a concert composer's music which is indeed absolutely free (as far as he is capable of being so).  Finally, there is a basic speciousness and actual fallacy in going through the entire century, finding the greatest composer, and then saying "Look how much better he is than those film composers."  The fact is, he is that much better than ALL COMPOSERS.   But Errikos is leaving out all the others because he wants to make a point of disparaging film composers in particular.  It is a perverse and pointless attitude.  Especially in light of the fact that film is a harshly commercial and demanding medium that rarely allows artistic work to be done at a high level.  Stravinsky didn't even write any film music beause of squabbling with deals, etc.  But great concert composers such as Vaughn Williams, Shostakovich and many others did, and without looking down upon the medium as being inferior.  Especially Korngold who was a truly great concert composer, and who viewed his film scores as his "operas without words." 

If you don't like film music, then just say so.  But don't try to elevate your own personal bias into an aesthetic principle.

@William said:

I am getting a little tired of your arrogant qualified praise of Herrmann, which is something on the order of  "Oh yeah, he's a competent little guy.  Nothing like a real composer, but quite pleasant and... interesting. (As the Emperor said to Tchaikovsky after the premiere of Swan Lake).

You are simply a bigot against film music.  This has become quite clear.  You don't understand the elementary basis of it - an interplay of music and picture - and are incapable of seeing how that causes the music NOT to do everything that is done in the work, as in concert music.  You have a one-track mind that seeks to justify itself by putting things down it does not comprehend.

Strongly disagree with this. Errikos never qualified Hermann as a "competent little guy, nothing like a real composer but interesting...". He emphasized more then once that in the domain of film music his best works are masterly. I am by no means a specialist, but what I know of Hermann stands so incomparably higher then anything I have heard from (American or European commercial) cinema in the last 20 years, that I can easily imagine he must belong to the echelon of the most inspired, original and technically proficient film composers ever. However, even his best work for cinema cannot stand comparison with a masterly work of autonomous concert music - which is, however, beside the point when judging the quality of his works by the standards they were supposed to fulfill.

I would like to emphasize that by a "masterly work" I don't understand only the works of the usual suspects - there are many composers of the past and present whose works are unjustifiably forgotten or severly neglected today. Germany alone has figures like Felix Draeseke, Heinrich von Herzogenberg or Josef Rheinberger (to mention just a few) many of whose best works would surely deserve the qualification of a "masterly work" by the same standard of compositional substance and skill one would apply to Brahms or Schumann. The best chamber works of Russians Sergei Taneyev (to mention just his monumental Piano Quintet) or Georgy Catoire should, in my opinion, also be considered to belong to the very apex of chamber music. I know of no piece of film music I could even begin to compare with their works in terms of its self-sufficient, autonomous compositional quality. This does in no way diminish their particular achievement - as film music pieces they can (and the best of them are)  much better suited to the purposes they were composed for then any great work of concert music.

The same applies to, let us say, dance music - are Osvaldo Pugliese's tangos inferior to Taneyev's Piano Quintet in terms of their autonomous compositional substance? Vastly so. Is Taneyev's Piano Quintett inferior to Pugliese's works as music to dance tango argentino to? Maybe even more then the other way around. But that's exactly the point - neither was ment to be written for the other's purpose or criteria, and by that criteria they are both flawed. By the criteria they were written for, however, both are masterly.

@Errikos said:

This is one time I have to disagree with William (with due dread that he might pulverise his terminal in rage...)

 

Wow Errikos, you hit that one right on the head! 

I came into this a little late so I didn't get a chance to read William's deleted posts but I'm guessing he was livid and probably throwing some insults.  I find it interesting that two forumites who are usualy dedicated allies in these little "debates" we have here in our forum are now on opposite sides.  It's almost like watching Mom and Dad have an argument.

@William, if Errikos is correct you must go through a lot of terminals considering your previous passionate posts on this and other threads.  I'm sure the sales clerks at the local Best Buy salavate everytime you walk through door.  "Should we just put this on your tab Mr. Kersten!" 

Back to the matter at hand,

Both William and Errikos have probably forgoten more about Herrmann and Prokofiev than I'll ever know so I won't go into some long dissertation analyzing the two composers' styles pretending like I know what I'm talking about.  Instead, from my limited knowledge, I will just make a simple comparison: Comparing Herrmann and Prokofiev is like comparing the fighting styles of two boxers where one boxer, Herrmann, has an arm, and perhaps even a leg, tied behind his back.  The arm and the leg tied behind the back represent the constraints, both artistic and business of the film industry, the medium that Herrmann composed for.  In a sense it's kind of hard to make a qualified analysis of both fighting styles when one boxer has an arm tied behind his back and is hopping up and down around the ring on one leg (and Herrmann would be in bad shape if this were an a$$ kicking contest wouldn't he).  I understand Herrmann composed concert music but I've never heard it before.  I also understand that Prokofiev scored some films but I don't think I'm familiar with those films.   

Not to turn this into yet another let's all praise Herrmann and bash Zimmer thread what I find so striking about Herrmann's music is that he was able to convey so much emotion with so little orchestration.  A lot of the things he did were so simple that I find myself asking, why didn't a simpleton like me think of that?  In that sense, I agree with William that Herrmann can in fact be put on the same pedestal as Prokofiev as a great composer to be remembered for the ages.

However, I think William may be oversimplifying Errikos's position on film music and this is where I part ways with William.  Considering the copious posts and threads that he's participated in condemning the crap film scores of today created by those charlatan "composters" practically screaming at the top of his keyboard I'm almost certain that Errikos feels that same passion about what is good film music and what is nonsense that William does.  If I were to start a "We Should All Want to Have Hanz Zimmer's Baby" thread I can only imagine the sparks that will fly from both William and Errikos.  In fact, I might just do that under another name as the responses would be very entertaining.  

Thanks Goran for making at least a couple of my points (saving me writing time), and Jasen as usual for the good humour. In fact, I had registered with VSL sometime in 2005 if I'm not mistaken, but wasn't an active forum member until a lot later. I used to read through it for technical information (see DG, Beat, etc. / the VSL team of course), and for entertainment (see Evans (remains unsurpassed even by my standards), William, Paul, Angelo, etc.). I don't know the precise point upon which I became the entertainment...

I came late to this as well, so I also missed the two coveted blank Dead S*** Scrolls, but most of the old guard would know by now that William is actually a violent, untreatable patient in the Montevista Hospital for Psychopaths in Nevada, in the Musical Dilettanti ward. Until recently he was confined to a heavily padded studio with Internet access, when a talented therapist discovered that he could be moved to a normal room if the walls and floor were completely covered with pictures of Bernard Herrmann. His experimental treatment consists of carefully timed, controlled, stimulating VSL forum sessions, where the levels of his hysteria are monitored, followed by relaxation sessions in the ad hoc shrine, where he listens to many a Herrmann track while mumbling insults and throwing darts at portraits of Prokofiev, Wagner, and other composers. However, his latest reaction to my posts must have made it to the top journals (if not the annals) of the discipline.

The points he made in those last few posts are so preposterously ignorant (Bill you do have a split personality), and so off the mark from what I said that I won't rebut, except to mention two brief points: a) I didn't pick Prokofiev as an example; he was the classical composer of choice by the man who wrote the article on which this post was based, and b) I wasn't the one to make those gauche comparisons between Herrmann and Prokofiev in the first place... I think as arrogant and outspoken as Herrmann was, he would have blushed.

P.S.: Goran's post is an example of the sad case of musical affairs. There are so many composers that have written really good music which we'll never hear - I could mention so many myself that would seem obscure to most here, while there are so many extolments and careful multiple listening sessions for so much that is really trite, it breaks my heart for I know how hard it is to be a proper composer for so many reasons, and all these people just disappear, practically unsung, while Fockers like the ones we see on those movie-DVD documentaries get to immortalize their great insights for all the Hobbits to pilgrimize....

I watched The Shining last night. Who wrote the music to that film? Anyone who gets that right deserves a drink.

 Wendy Carlos wrote the score which was ultimately little used by director Kubrick. He used pieces from Ligeti, Bartok etc.

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(film)#Music_and_soundtrack.

cheers!

Contemplating The Shining, Clockwork Orange, 2001, Eyes Wide Shut, one laments the absence of superb musical discernment and range which current directors/producers totally and utterly lack (save for a couple of exceptions).

@Errikos said:

P.S.: Goran's post is an example of the sad case of musical affairs. There are so many composers that have written really good music which we'll never hear - I could mention so many myself that would seem obscure to most here, while there are so many extolments and careful multiple listening sessions for so much that is really trite, it breaks my heart for I know how hard it is to be a proper composer for so many reasons, and all these people just disappear, practically unsung, while Fockers like the ones we see on those movie-DVD documentaries get to immortalize their great insights for all the Hobbits to pilgrimize....

Agree. The world is not a just place in this regard (well, neither is it in any other, for that matter...)

@weslldeckers said:

 Wendy Carlos wrote the score which was ultimately little used by director Kubrick. He used pieces from Ligeti, Bartok etc.

cheers!

Carlos wrote something that was probably mostly replaced in true Kubrick fashion. The point is - Bartok etc did not write music for The Shining. They just wrote music for themselves that was picked up for that film because Kubrick was an asshole when it came to music writing for his films.

Imagine how much better, just as an example, a Bernard Herrmann score would have worked in that film - specifically written and cut to scenes rather than just fitting in classical music segments, as with Bartok.

 If that had been done, a new work of art would have been created beyond Kubrick's The Shining (as opposed to Steven King's which as everyone who watched the TV movie he directly supervised knows is a pathetically feeble joke).  It would not necessarily have been more "effective" in film music terms (as the temp track pieces Kubrick went with were effectively used) but it would have risen to a higher artistic level such as  a Hitchcock film scored by Herrmann, or a Harryhausen film he did, or a very few others by other great composers.   In other words, creating the hybrid art form of cinema with original through-composed music scoring is OPTIONAL just like Shakespeare or Sophocles doing what they did was OPTIONAL.  It's called art.   And today, almost all producers OPT OUT. 

The problem with film goers and perhaps, more importantly today, film makers - is the bottom line is fast cash and to get that you need to appeal to the lowest common denominators in society today. That is to say, trailer trash. Or perhaps more explicitly, the most dangerous type of human on the planet - namely, persons with very low self esteem. The type of imbecile who thinks all women should quack like a fucking duck when talking on screen. The type of person who then goes out and  commits violence against real ducks - as we learn today on our local news. These people are a very easy sell and always have been. So you get more and more quite cynical film makers that have no trouble exploiting that while at the same time almost validating their inability to make a film through box office take. Film score writers also suffer from this same type of validation by thinking they can just either copy or simply have their cat walk up and down a keyboard using patch 42,  pressing record during any given scene.

Sadly, good television is better than films, and that is a poor state to be in.

There are many examples of different types of film and film music. There are films like The Shining and so on that ultimately fail under microscopic examination (even though it's a great film in that genre) because the director has a bug up his ass about film scores. Or you get say, a film like The Quick and the Dead, which is a very well done, technically good fun film, with music from Alan Silvestri's  favourite composers; including repeats of himself from his other films. It's great to look at, has good actors, is totally meaningless and is a great way to waste a couple of hours if you have nothing better to do. Nothing wrong with that film. 

But now you get films made by morons, made for morons - generally rom coms or what is supposed to be comedy genre. It's a cash in baby on a very low level and make no mistake about it. The number of trash films that have characters from comics or Viking throwbacks or Greek gods with a s h i t load of CGI seemingly grows exponentially and these film makers know the morons will eat it it up.

The education departments of schools around the world have done these film makers a huge service, along with facebook and twitter. They have developed an audience for their films. Not the other way round unfortunately.

Yes, quite, old boy.  It was Tarkovsky who stated that the audience can actually be TRAINED by filmmakers to be stupid.  Today's audiences have been trained to eat up cinematic pablum like overfeeding infants, and actually believe they are experts on film because they have eaten a lot of the pablum that was spoon fed to them by cine-nannies with MBAs.  When they are inadvertently exposed to a high-fiber black and white silent, or a vitamin-rich Bergman, or an Antonioni loaded with potassium and magnesium,  they instantly spit it out and begin bawling, red-faced and enraged, demanding more of the smooth starchy pablum their digestive systems are used to.

(To belabor a metaphor.)

Quite so. When I say television is better than films, this of course is a sweeping generalization. Why, here in the UK we have just witnessed the birth of a televisual feast called Camelot.

DON'T UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WATCH THIS!!!!

I saw just a few moments and immediately volunteered for a Bubonic plague trial being advertised in the local newspaper.

@PaulR said:

DON'T UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WATCH THIS!!!!

Thanks for the warning...

Another one to avoid musically:

X-Men the Prequel. More, and still more of the mind-numbing s/lame. As the soundtrack of a movie belongs to the studio, I don't understand why they still pay composters. Just pick one from an action/epic from 10 years ago and keep using it. 

T-H-E-R-E  A-R-E  N-O  D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-C-E-S

Note: If that wasn't enough, 4(!!!) people share credit for it; one on the opening cards, and 3 for "additional music" in the end credits.