While most of our Baby Boomer peers grew up with the pop music of the 50's and 60's, we became enraptured by the can't-get-out-your-head movie themes of Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman......and as we moved into adolescence and adulthood, Ennio Morricone, Maurice Jarre, John Williams and other gifted composers......
The music of these composers indelibly weaved its way into a film's DNA to the point where you couldn't ever imagine the movie without its score...........and listening to these scores brought the movie back into your head like a welcome daydream......
Nowadays? Whole different story.
It's hard to pinpoint what specifically led to the downfall and current miserable state of film music......and there's a depressing irony to what's going on.......in that there's more huge symphonic scores being written than ever before (for all those mega-budget CGI atrocities), but the music stinks of mediocrity, lacking any creative thought or memorable themes....
What we have now are scores that sound like elevator music written for 150 piece orchestras.......heaving around with no identity of their own and for the most part drowned out by the sound effects mix.......somewhere underneath the explosions, gunshots and rocketship blasts, you can barely hear the score rumbling around........not that there's anything worth hearing in it.
Tragically, this seems like intentional policy from studios.......reducing film scores to shapeless walls of background noise instead of bolstering the movie with a unique musical signature. For those of us who've spent a lifetime listening to classic film scores......it's a sad, sad state of affairs.....just compare the music of "The Magnificent Seven", "Vertigo", "Ben Hur", "The Wind And The Lion" to the generic muck that's applied to films today......
We hold out this glimmer of optimism........perhaps a director-composer collaboration will come along in which they return to the idea of using a boldly thematic score that irrevocably welds itself to the film and stands out as much any of the characters in the film. Since studios love imitating success......maybe it could start a trend.....and composers could regain their place as key creative partners in the filmmaking process.....right now, movie composers are like the saloon piano players in old Westerns.....aimlessly pounding away until the gunfights start.....
Anything can happen out there in La La land.....so here's hoping.
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