Regarding the John Williams is a better composer than Jerry Goldsmith postulate (strictly musically speaking ignoring merits as far as film.) I think the opposite is true and obviously so. Williams is the traditionalist here with a very straightforward harmonic language. I don't know if I've ever strained much trying to understand what he was doing musically (as much as I may or may not have admired it.) Goldsmith has baffled me too many times to count. And I'm not alone because he has never been copied successfully. Williams has never written anything like Alien or Freud or Planet Of The Apes or Coma etc. These are not triadic harmonies (the hallmark of Williams music.)

I beg to differ and ad that I have never heard this suggested by anyone. David Raksin presented excerpts from the history of film music on KUSC which featured everyone from Steiner to Goldsmith. Williams was not even included on the program. This was a radio program which was about the music on it's own and spoken of in musical terms. Raksin would not of left anyone with superior compositional ability off the program.

This is not to disparage the immensely gifted John Williams who has been both criticized out of petty jealously and out of honest objective observation. But to simply say he in no way has ever had the chops of Jerry Goldsmith.

Dave Connor

@mathis said:

To be honest, my last statement was meant more ironically.

But anyway, interesting points of course. But I´m really surprised that you think Glass is the inventor of minimalism. I see Glass as a clever guy jumping on the train of real inventors like Terry Riley or Steve Reich. They are the ones who invented minimalism as a very strong and radical reaction to the European, especially French and German New Music (with capitals). I see Glass as the one who saw the commercial potential in these ideas but definetly not as an innovator.

I don't think of him as the inventor of minimalism. But he is an innovator. Thomas Edison may have invented the light bulb, but there were plenty of innovations in the same field since ... xeon bulbs, led, lcd, arc lights, etc. Anyway, innovator does not mean inventor here Mathis. Two different words.

Dave,

I'm not quite sure I understand. Are you saying John Williams is not as much of a composer because he is less original? Is that basically it?

[*-)]:

Evan Evans

I'm sorry Dave but I must disagree with your charge about Williams. Listen to his score for Sleepers. The main theme is built on 4ths, and the melody goes through a number of chromatic changes that take it out of a central key centre.

Or let us take something more contemporary like "Jazz Autographs" from The Terminal. There are some great substitutions in that track. I don't think Williams has ever present any of his themes in stripped down basic triadic form. Maybe Jurassic Park or some kiddy fare like that, but to discredit Williams without knowing his entire canon is a little narrow-minded. Have you heard IMAGES or CLose Encounters of the Third Kind? Most of the latter is texture based but somehow every forgets this and always remembers the last 10 minutes of overtly Romantic styled music.

For me, I can lift a Goldsmith theme within 20 minutes of hearing it. But then again, I have a really decent relative pitch. Williams' themes aren't to hard either but he composes/orchestrates vertically, moreso than Goldmsith who composed linearly- and he himself admitted this in a 1984 Keyboard magazine interview. And toward the late '90's, Goldsmith had settled into a very basic compositional form. Almost homophonic. John Barry has done away with most of his up-tempo writing in the same manner. Why do you think Brad Bird hired Michael Giacchino for THe Incredibles? Because Barry no longer writes like the John Barry of the '60's.

Anyhow, I love Goldsmith's music, but I'd have to say that I find it more challenging to try to lift Williams' music and represent it fully (melody and harmony) than Goldsmith, Planet of the Apes not withstanding.

Someone who I find wrote incredibley complex harmonic music was Alex North. I love his scores to 2001, Dragonslayer, Spartacus, even his underrated and sadly unreleased score to Good Morning Viet nam. What a lovely adagio he wrote for that. Sad, reflective, and the harmonies even evoke the time period that the film takes place in. Ahhh, I miss Mr. North.

Yes, Alex North is probably the most advanced musically of all of these composers. We discussed his great unused "2001" score on another thread.

That's true that John Barry doesn't write in his 60s style, but how could any person do that? It would be remaining frozen in time. Anyway he evolved far beyond that and became probably the best melodist of all film composers.

I don´t agree that harmonic (or any music theoretical) complexity makes for better music.

Well, to my ears, yes, that is the main criteria. But my backbround is in jazz so my ears like to hear extensions upon the basic chords (7ths, 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, etc.). But I don't think I'd declare that simpler music is necessarily bad. I think I'd be close-minded if I didn't listen and accept all types of music.

My Goldsmith comment wasn't to disparage his style of music to elevate Williams. Ultimately, even with all of our music knowledge on this board, what we listen to is basic preference. Objective analysis such as orchestration technique or harmonic language use can help to clarify our points but, as we've seen, there are even subjective debates about that.

I would like to retract my comment about Goldsmith being a more triadic composer. In his final years, he did seem to eschew the complexiy that was the hallmark of his style in the '60's, '70's and even early '80's. I think 1990's Total Recall was the last truly virtuosic score he wrote. For some reason that seemed to be a turning point for him, wherein he realised that writing "the equivelant of a Bruckner Symphony" didn't really matter in the end because of all the sound effects he had to compete with.

Williams always seemed less sensitive about how his music worked with the picture. In the '70's, you'd get these amazingly vibrant, colorful, big Romantic-styled symphonic scores that played so well on CD because they stood out like a sore thumb. Ironically, I think Williams has become a better "film composer" but somewhat diminished as a music composer. A lot of his scores nowadays (Harry Potter3 and parts of The Terminal) seem endemic to the film and are hard to enjoy out of the narrative context.

Which leads me BACK to the original topic on this post- Giacchino's Incredibles score is so much fun to listen to in and out of the film because it's very melodic but also has some great use of motives too. And who doesn't love that final Incredits where he uses that ascending 4 note motif in a 5/4 time signature? Damn that stuff sizzles! I also enjoy the drumming which harkens back to the days prior to drum machines where there would be dynamic fills, flams, accents, rolls, whatever, to compliment the music. Man, I hope this brings back a '70's renaissance.

I also have to disagree very strongly that simple harmony results in simple music.

OK, I will start to generalize now, too, since it´s a phenomenon I often recognize with people having a good education in one discipline. As soon as you (one) have aquired a really nice, well crafted and expensive hammer your eyes will automatically start looking out exclusively for nails which you possibly could hammer in.
So as soon as people learned all this great stuff about harmony and eartraining and counterpoint they will start judging music with exactly these criteria they put so much effort in to master. In the end the effect of the education is not widening the mind but limiting it to certain aspects. I think this is sad.

It´s actually very interesting to have this discussion at the same time with a discussion about minimalism, which is widely suspected as simple music. The material might be simple, however the cognition of an early Reich piece can be of amazing complexity.

B.t.w., Evan, OK, understood the differenciation between inventor and innovator. But still I have doubts calling Glass an innovator. I would prefer calling him an exploiter.

And, to close this with a personal preference, I´m not very fond of all these complex Jazz harmonies, simply because they reduce the amount of complexity in terms of contrast. The more you add additionals the more similar will be the perception of two chords.
But I´m not so concerned about harmony anyway.

But I totally agree about the fun listening to the incredibles score.

These are really interesting comments on complexity, mathis.

I think a point that deserves to be added to this discussion is that of the temporal arrangement of harmony. Because whether the chords, or harmonic structures (or whatever you want to call them), are complex in and of themselves really means very little to me. What concerns me is how they are arranged in time. This is where I find the vast majority of contemporary music, whether written for the concert hall or cinema, to be dreadfully dull. I don't think that two alternate spellings of a twelve-note chord following one another in succession are necessarily any more complex than a perfect cadence, except perhaps acoustically...
Maybe what I mean to say is that there's a difference between complexity and complication(?)

In "tonal" works, or works using functional harmony, I think the least sufficiently explored area is that of harmonic rhythm. In non-tonal works it's the fear of cadential gestures arising from the inherent narrowness implied by the task of trying to avoid functional relations between adjacent harmonic structures. In the former, every question seems to be answered with a "yes", while in the latter the same question must be answered with a "no" (if that makes any sense). But I think that in both cases the solution lies in the way a composers extends harmony over time. This, to me, is one of the most difficult aspects of composition. And I think the problem is being felt in all walks of musical life, from hip-hop to "high art" (very much in quotes). Not coincidentally, the result seems to have become a rejuvinated interest in drone. I hear drone everywhere, lately, and it's really quite exciting to me! Mind you, I don't think it's a solution, so much as an escape, but it is interesting that this form, which is perhaps the oldest of musical structures, has made such a triumphant return. Anyway, my position is that harmonic progression ("chord progression") needs a *serious* revision, or perhaps a serious visionary, to make it a productive form for contemporary expression again.

Evan. I hear what you're saying about "it not being about the music". This was also the case with much of what Cage did... Conceptual Art was big at the time, so it makes sense that there would be extra-musical interests and ideas involved. But, at least with Glass, it's the above ideas around harmony that render his music painfully dull to me... it's not the repetition, or any simplistic notion of complexity. The harmony, it's temporal structure as a sequence of chords, is totally banal, to me. And I understand that this is part of the (original) point, but I think that "point" only had power in the time that it was first made. Today, it's lost its relevance, and it needs something more -- something strictly musical to rejuvinate its power. I mean, I love a good deal of contemporary "electronica", and find it much more interesting, though it is largely drone-based, and tends to have a focus on colour, not harmony or melody. This music could even be said to be formally inspired by Glass, though i would argue that its form is tied much more closely to its mode of production (synthesis, software sequencing programs, etc.), than to the work of any particular school of composition.

Anyway, that's enough from me...

J.

The greatest harmonic complexity ever achieved was at the very end of the post Romantic era, when perceived harmonic structure and movement were being pushed to the ultimate limits by late Mahler and early Schoenberg. Even though an harmonic analysis of later works could reveal theoretical complexities beyond these, they are not heard. In fact, most modern music that is more "complex" is perceived in a very simple way, because the prior language has been discarded. And of course there was an extreme reaction against the increasing complexity of late 19th - early 20th century music, which gave birth to neo-classicism.

So anyway I agree completely with Mathis's statement that greater complexity does not result in better music. On the other hand pure simplicity does not either. I didn't earlier mean to reject all of minimalism, and Mathis is correct in pointing out how Glass has co-opted Reich and Riley and other far more artistic minimalists for one simple reason - money.

Also JBM has a point in mentioning how much of modern music is an attempt at avoidance. Almost desperate at times, in attempting to avoid straying anywhere near the deadly precipice of...


TONALITY

@mathis said:

B.t.w., Evan, OK, understood the differenciation between inventor and innovator. But still I have doubts calling Glass an innovator. I would prefer calling him an exploiter.

Ok, but I put Apple computer right in there with him as an expoiter then. Those jerks. All leeching off the concept of the transistor.

Evan Evans

@jbm said:

Evan. I hear what you're saying about "it not being about the music". This was also the case with much of what Cage did... Conceptual Art was big at the time, so it makes sense that there would be extra-musical interests and ideas involved. But, at least with Glass, it's the above ideas around harmony that render his music painfully dull to me...

Have you heard more than a few hundred works of his? I DON'T THINK SO. You sound like someone who thinks Farhenheit 9/11 is the worst most evil movie ever made AND HAVEN'T EVEN SEEN IT. Lol.

Look, just because you don't like Glass, doesn't mean you know he hasn't written anything that A: You would LIKE, and B: Would Blow Your Mind. I understand where everyone is coming from because most of his music is terribly horrid, ESPECIALLY to people who understand music (which is a handicap in my opinion, that I do not have), but like I said, in there are some gems, and in those gems are some things that are beyond masterpieces, they are beyond our time, and awestriking. Everyone dog has his day, and Philip Glass has hit some real strides historically, even if it is from a few selections of virtually unknown works of his. But, they are there.

Evan Evans

@dcoscina said:

Williams' themes aren't to hard either but he composes/orchestrates vertically

Oh my god! Are you serious? You cannot compose vertically. Period. The more vertical one is, the less composing they are doing, just by sheer logic alone.

Anyone who thinks that working vertically is a step in the right direction is 100% thinking the wrong way about composition. I find this comes from jazz heads and "harmonists" especially. One thing that my own father was doing with his music was writing multi-melodically. Very few people know that about him. But he DEPLORED vertical thinking. When he played he had multiple melodic lines moving in contrast with each other.

Good lord, I take such offense at any linking of composing to the vertical. Composing is NOT about the vertical. It's all about the horizontal. Melody and chords, does not make one an orchestral composer. Even if you orchestrate your melody and chords for orchestra, you still have not done ORCHESTRAL COMPOSING, you've just done songwriting and put some color on it (ie: John Williams).

Anyway, I ama bit flustered from this comment as you can tell, and I cannot even get my head straight cause I am a wee bit tired. I'l like to intelligently debate this, but it didn't quite come out that way, and I kind of LOST MY TRAIN OF THOUGHT. ROFL. Whew am I tired.

[:)]

Evan Evans

@mathis said:

The more you add additionals the more similar will be the perception of two chords.

Absolutely. That is it in a nutshell. Well said Mathis. That is truly one of the simplest and hardest things to master in composition. If you give a new composer the full orchestra, they are going to use it all way to much. It'll be tiresome on the ears, intellectual, and forced. Jerry Goldsmith in his later years ... well, just check out a score like HOLLOW MAN or BASIC INSTINCT. In it you'll find someone who uses the full orchestra reservedly, even for huge stretches of film, and then he leaps at you like a flock of peacocks. Weird analogy, but if you saw a bunch of peacocks running towards you I think you'd be afraid both of the grandness and the complexity of what was approaching, and that's the same with jerry. BTW, if you haven't experienced a peacock charging at you, you haven't experienced life yet! [:D]

Evan Evans

@Another User said:

Ok, but I put Apple computer right in there with him as an expoiter then. Those jerks. All leeching off the concept of the transistor.

Well, this analogy doesn´t work. Apple computers and transistors are like Steve Reich and a marimba wood bar.


Please be more specific about Glass masterpieces. I´m really curious now.

@evanevans said:

Oh my god! Are you serious? You cannot compose vertically. Period. The more vertical one is, the less composing they are doing, just by sheer logic alone.

Oh come now Evan, it's not all that bad. What I meant is that some people achieve harmony through building lines upon lines. Others have an overall harmonic scheme that they fit their counterpoint into. I compose with the latter in mind. I feel that the harmonic framework is the skeleton of a diatonic piece I'm writing and thus I need to know where it's going. Like taking a road map along for a trip.

Yes, this does stem from being involved with jazz. Sorry if that goes against your compositional beliefs but that's how I do things.

Evan,

Quite right, I haven't heard "more than a few hundred works" by Glass! But I doubt I've heard that many works by any composer. The point is that the works I have heard have showed essentially the same banality, and in the same area: harmony. So it's just logical, as you would likely say, for me to assume that this is his greatest weakness. In my small (probably insignificant) opinion, his works are less than interesting harmonically. That's it. And this is, unfortunately, a staggering weakness. If I were to try to state it as plainly as possible, it seems to me he's thought of everything except THAT. And the point about Farhenheit 9/11 is just silly -- it doesn't even stand as a sane analogy. You're only attempting to insult me now... with little success, I might add. Give me a specific work demonstrating his mind-boggling brilliance, and an intelligent appraisal of what I'm missing (not just a psychophantic monologue) and I'll try again. I must admit, though, that most of my irritation has been caused by his more recent works, like the violin concerto. These have shown an almost embarassing formal/harmonic blandness...
Also, don't be so pedantic about "vertical" and "horizontal" composition. You know what dcoscina meant... (or at least you should, with your level of knowledge)... again, it seems you're just being kind of rude.

Willam. That's a good point about harmonic complexity at the end of the Romantic era. What about today? What possibilities do we have? Any thoughts on my other points about harmony and time, or about drone? Please, let's not make this another trivial battle of tonality versus non-tonality (I won't use the term atonality, since it makes absolutely no sense). As I said before, neither seems to provide a sufficient solution in and of itself. There's a little fascist in every functional cadence, just as there is a monomania behind the endless pattern of avoidance you mentioned. But is there a middle-ground? It's interesting, to me, that very little has been said about the function of harmony, formally, over time -- it was the basis for 18th and 19th century form, but since then little has been done to bring *that* idea forward. Certainly, the abandonment of tonality altogether is not (was not?) the answer. But what has been done to move tonality itself forward, at least as it relates to larger harmonic structures, or even to the smaller, more immediately perceptible ones?

Perhaps tying things back into the earlier discussion, it seems to me that jazz has done the most to move functional harmony forward in the 20th century. So what can we do now? Personally, I try to mix and mess with both tonality and non-tonality. One time I may try to subvert the tonal drive by temporally postponing harmonic resolutions, sometimes to the extent that the resolution is skipped altogether. Whereas another time I may work to draw a tonal relationship between seemingly unrelated harmonic areas. But from all this, I can't say that I've really found any sort of new 'technique' that I can rely on... I feel like things are starting to shift in my music, but I'm not too clear on which way they're shifting. It would be interesting to hear some different opinions on this subject. Anybody?

J.

It is perfectly fine to compose "vertical" music.

I am very interested in that approach right now. Another person who has been similarly interested is Gyorgy Ligetti.

Creating sound structures of purely vertical dimension is as valid as purely contrapuntal, "horizontal" music. Counterpoint is a traditional approach to music, and has an assumed validity as a result. But nothing is necessary and nothing is required - except to create interesting sound in music.

JBM

I have my own bad reaction to Glass partly as a result of the appalling, stupid banality of several works I've heard - major works. My reaction is, if a person could create something so pretentious, insulting and just plain bad as his opera, or his sabotage of Cocteau (done posthumously - when no one can protest) how can you accept anything else? If someone is a murderer, does it matter that they also regularly bathe?

I also am interested in what you are talking about with drones, and tonality vs. atonality - an historical distinction no longer appropriate. You are absolutely right about jazz - it is one of the few purely modern forms that has done something unthinkable in the past, but instantly meaningful. However, where that puts the art of music in general I have no idea. One thing I am keenly interested in right now is microtonalism, though I am just beginning to experiment with it. Also, my approach is highly compartmentalized - even though I am fascinated by utterly contradictory modern styles, I turn around and do something that is simply anachronistic just because I am in the mood.

"I turn around and do something that is simply anachronistic just because I am in the mood." - William.

[:)]

a damn fine answer, William!

I suppose this is really the way things are going -- people simply discovering, through trial and error, or personal interest, something that is productive for them. That, in itself, makes our time somewhat unique. But I do find it very interesting that the most widely applied sort of "structure" (if you can call it that) is drone... And for no better reason than a personal tendency, I'm still very much driven by the idea of creating a synthesis of these different forces in my musical/theoretical/harmonic life.
I am curious about this idea of microtonallity, as well... Is this through Ligeti? Can you sum it up, or give me a general outline? Links? Articles?

cheers,

J.