I definitely resonated in agreement upon reading your earlier posts on this topic. Though I did not acknowledge your posts directly, I didn't mean to come off as though I was ignoring them. On the points where we agree, I imagined a thoughtful reader would see my comments as echos adding support to (not plaster over) what you had said earlier. Anyway, I'm sorry for not acknowledging you directly.
Of William's earlier points, the one I most agree with is that a film's score is generally a piece of a whole work of art. As such, 'good' scores that manage to enhance the film experience may also remain emotionally potent as concert music, or they may not function apart from the film. A flip-side to that notion is that it may be difficult to assess the quality of a score when the movie it was made for doesn't quite work. For me, this was the case with Christopher Nolan's Inception. I went in to that movie really wanting to like it. But I just didn't feel engaged. Now, was Zimmer's score helping or hurting that experience? Could Zimmer's startling noises have sounded more appealing if the rest of movie was somehow different? I don't know. I like to imagine that if we were to ask Nolan and Zimmer for their thoughts on this they might tell us that they don't know what went wrong as far as my experience. They might tell us that they are simply trying to make their parts the best way they know how and in the end sometimes they come together and make a magical experience and other times they fall short. To me failure, even total public failure, is just part of creative work (particularly in collaborative efforts such as all films are). I personally don't fault anybody (let alone relegate them to 'chimp' status) for trying something that doesn't quite work.
To quote the great philosopher Joeseph Ramone: "What can you do-o-o?"
As for Bach, right now I am studying the Brandenburg Concerti measure-by-astonishing-measure. The more I study Bach's compositions the more deeply I understand and respect Bach's immortality as master of unparalleled symmetry and consonance amid complexity. But I also understand that (like every artist) Bach's music is influenced greatly by the time in which he lived. In Bach's time musical instruments were just coming into their standard forms. There was no ability to record performances, let alone manipulate a performance's timbral properties after the fact. Notes-on-paper was the only way one's music could be immortalized and under such circumstances the type of polyphonic ingenuity defined by Bach was perhaps a composer's primary means of establishing a personal style. While we can still be amazed by Bach's music today, and even incorporate elements of the Baroque into what we do as composers in 2012, I'm merely recognizing that the keen arrangement of notes-on-paper is no longer the only means to musical immortality. We now have music that exists as a recorded (and digitally-sculpted) performance. I don't see any reason to deride composers who embrace these new developments in sound and are skillfully carving their import to music.
My question to you is this: What do you gain by imagining the work of one composer 'OBLITERATING' the works of another composer? I see a lot of good reasons for appreciating both for whatever each has to offer. Is there somehow not enough room in the mind for both? In my mind there is.
Noldar:
I don't think you have to subscribe to any bizarre world views or even consider anything philosophical in order to find some useful nuggets within my response to your question. You asked why more recent film scores don't seem as good as older ones. My answer is that maybe we can find some criteria by which these newer film scores ARE succeeding. I also suggested that this criteria may lie outside traditional composition (perhaps in the realm of digital audio and its gift of unprecedented timbral manipulations). Agreed, that turns the tables on your original question a bit. But in the age of Google we rely on community NOT to provide direct answers to questions, but to provide the kind of help a search engine never could: help that allows us to reformulate our questions in ways that allow us all to reach a deeper understanding together.
In a subsequent post you offered the idea that people care more about CGI and just don't care about the music in films as much, leading film producers to cut corners at the expense of film music. I don't think this could be true. If that were, what explains the competitive nature of the business? If people truly don't care who does the music or what it sounds like, why pay guys like Zimmer top dollar? Why does every theater in the world (and many a home theater) continue investing billions of dollars each year in more dynamic, more precise, 360-degree sound reproduction systems?
I think a more reasonable explanation is that people are fascinated by advancements in the aural experience in exactly the same way as they are fascinated by advancements in the visual experience. As all these possibilities keep expanding, composes are going to continue to try new and different techniques. But we are so privileged that we DON'T even have to choose whether we want to experience giant robots from space backed up by super subwoofers that can reproduce 4Hz - OR - a moody drama (from any time or place in history) that may employ anything from a small chamber ensemble on up - OR - any of the great older films scored by Korngold, Herrmann, Williams or any of the other great composers. We can enjoy one Friday night, another Saturday night and yet another Sunday afternoon. I just don't see how we've LOST anything. If there is anything regrettable about our situation it is that there is already so much great art in existence that, even if we only stuck to the absolute masterworks, the time it would take to experience them all exceeds our lifetime and every year the list just gets longer.
What I find fascinating is the person who manages to look at all this (truly an embarrassment of artistic riches) and insists that (perhaps because they aren't ALL masterworks) that it's all going wrong. Again I just have to reiterate and stress this: We have access to so much more great art than we have time on this Earth to appreciate. Millions of artists across the globe are devoting each day, some their entire lives, trying so hard to add new works to that great heap. What more do you... What more could anyone possibly want?