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  • Let's talk about film music.

  • Editor Tony Zhou's Every Frame a Painting -- a great video series that I love--

  • has just posted a new video about a question that a lot of people have been wondering

  • about for a while now:

  • Why is Marvel's superhero film music so forgettable?

  • And he's right. Marvel's film music IS forgettable

  • Tony Zhou makes some great points

  • Especially about directors using music from other films as temp music.

  • -- as guides for their composers.

  • But his explanations don't fully work for me

  • So this video, it's a RESPONSE, and it's a THEORY of FILM MUSIC

  • So in the video, Tony Zhou has people singing things from memory

  • Starting with the Star Wars theme

  • Bummm bummm ba-dum-ba bummm bummm [scatting the Star Wars theme]

  • This is an interesting choice because, although everyone thinks of Star Wars

  • as one of the most memorable themes ever written, it's not particularly original.

  • Star Wars was actually temp-tracked really closely

  • And it still shows. Take a listen to the main theme from King's Row by Erick Wolfgang Korngold.

  • Now, if I were to take that and edit in a few ??? [artist name?] hits

  • from a western theme... like How the West was Won

  • I'd get something a lot like Star Wars

  • This is no accident though.

  • Star Wars--it's a movie that self-consciously looks back to what made the films of the Golden Age of Hollywood

  • so successful. It's the king of what postmodern theorists, Frederic Jameson, called "The Nostalgia Film"

  • Reworking all the traditions is how Star Wars works.

  • The music is no different.

  • The opening theme wants to tell us that what we're about to see comes from a different tradition of film,

  • that it's a Golden-Age-Hollywood adventure romance... set in space.

  • It's working creatively with unoriginal pieces.

  • [sounds of lasers blasting and engine working; no music]

  • Temp tracks were actually used for the whole film

  • George Lucas even had to be convinced that there was a need for original Star Wars music at all.

  • Originally, he wanted to be like Kubrick in 2001 and use classical music.

  • That reliance on temp tracks still comes through

  • Particularly in the desert Tattooine scenes

  • where we're basically hearing a reworking of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring

  • Note. for. note.

  • Using temp tracks wasn't a new practice, even in 1977

  • It dates back to the earliest film sound tracks

  • Up until 1937, the head of a studio's music department

  • would get the Oscar for best soundtrack, and not a composer

  • because dozens of people actually worked on a film's music

  • creating a patchwork of preexisting, adapted, and new music.

  • So temp tracks aren't actually unique to contemporary film

  • They aren't unique to contemporary blockbusters

  • and they certainly aren't unique to the Marvel's symphonic universe.

  • They're as old as film music itself.

  • So something else is going on here.

  • Temp tracks do not explain why Marvel's music is forgettable.

  • So film music has actually always faced this critique

  • That it's unoriginal, that it rips off other people's work

  • In 1947, Theodore Adorno, the critic, wrote that

  • [text above]

  • and that, "[quote above]"

  • Adorno's general idea was that film music acted like a brand:

  • recycling little ideas that work well for certain situations over and over again

  • My favorite example of this is from a composer called James Horner

  • Check out how he uses the same musical idea for danger in Troy

  • in Enemy At the Gates [clip: "He always managed to lead us to victory"]

  • in The Wrath of Khan

  • in Avatar

  • And here's my favorite version of it in Rachmaninov's First Symphony

  • The question of originality is, in fact, one of the defining questions of film music, full stop.

  • Film music is an embrace of rampant unoriginality

  • and to think about how film music works,

  • we need to think of new ways to talk about these questions,

  • rather than just saying, "It's a copy."

  • So if originality is normal for film music,

  • maybe the problem, today, is that the pool of influences

  • that composers draw from has grown smaller.

  • In Star Wars, we saw that we had everyone from

  • Korngold, and westerns, and Stravinsky, and Holst(?)

  • pull together in this pot. But as Tony Zhou argues,

  • today's blockbusters tend to reference and rework themselves.

  • Today, a temp track is more likely to be from Transformers

  • or The Bourne Ultimatum, than the (seahawk?) or a symphony

  • But the other important factor--for me, THE most

  • important factor here--is techonology

  • I wanna talk about this guy playing keyboards at the

  • back of Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star.

  • This guy changed film music, pretty much forever--it's Hans Zimmer.

  • He's important because he pioneered the use of computers

  • to make music. He did this right from the beginning

  • This is Driving Miss Daisy--it's pretty goofy, but it's all digital, 1989

  • Here's the thing: traditionally, film music was a problem

  • for Hollywood. It cost a lot. Imagine paying all of those musicians

  • the professional rate for a month of recording.

  • It was technical. Here, John Williams is working with an

  • editor to check the tempo of a scene, and run through it

  • in their minds, before taking it to an orchestra

  • and it had to be the last thing done. Editing music was

  • difficult, and re-recording it was expensive, so when the

  • score was done, the movie had to be done as well.

  • No more edits, no more changes.

  • If the director hated the music, this would be the moment where they found out.

  • Sometimes, they would just have to live with it--too bad.

  • Or they could fire the composer, and hope the replacement did a better job.

  • Jerry Goldsmith famously wrote Chinatown in just ten days,

  • after the previous composer was fired.

  • So here's why computerized composing was a revolution

  • A director could hear the music as it was being written

  • They could request changes, get more involved, and

  • continue to edit the film at the same time.

  • It's also cheaper, and it's quicker.

  • So along comes Hans Zimmer, and a lot changed.

  • Here he is again, talking about the Dark Knight Rises in 2012

  • "The writing in the computer, the way I do, is that you perform every note

  • At one point or another, every note that is in the score, has been played by me."

  • Okay, so let's hear a standard piece of today's action music--could be in any film.

  • Now here's the thing: I actually made that piece of music on my computer

  • with no actual recording or instruments involved

  • I listen to a lot of music, and I think that sounds okay to me.

  • It doesn't sound fake or really pre-fabricated.

  • And that's just me working by myself--I've done a game

  • soundtrack and a few small projects, but I don't have the resources that someone like Hans Zimmer has.

  • It's just me, in my room, at home.

  • So this is how most film soundtracks are written today.

  • Some go on to be recorded or re-recorded or augmented and edited together with a full orchestra

  • but some don't. For someone like Zimmer

  • "You perform every note"

  • which is then massaged by all of these people--

  • you've got sound designers, synth designers,

  • people who are there just to program these digital instruments

  • The end result is music that is created for a computer to play

  • and the computer makes music lean in different directions

  • Early on, the easiest sounds to get right were short and sharp sounds

  • Things like percussion [drums sound plays], stabbing brass [stabbing brass plays]

  • rhythmic strings [rhythmic strings play]

  • These are much easier to simulate than the lyrical, slow flute

  • or a solo violin.

  • And so the end result is this: you get twenty years of percussion

  • and heavy brass in film music, lead by Hans Zimmer

  • The Zimmer sound is one of rhythm--it's like a rock band playing through an orchestra

  • And as a composer using these tools, you actually fiddle with each note

  • and each sound more. You end up creating a landscape of sound

  • rather than melodies and harmonies

  • It's time to talk about superheroes again, because Hans

  • Zimmer is really the one responsible for their current sound

  • He did the Batman trilogy, and the new Superman films

  • and he gave them his digital sound.

  • There it is. No hummable melody, but a texture full of

  • distorted and manipulated strings to represent the Joker

  • For Man of Steel, it's the same

  • No huge melody to draw you in, but the texture of a

  • drumming ensemble and a pedal steel guitar, which are

  • added with digital instruments later.

  • And this is why Marvel's music isn't hummable.

  • Each film has a musical landscape, but they're different

  • not through melody, but through texture.

  • This is the impact of digital technology on film music.

  • So are we in an era where composers are told to play it safe?

  • To be invisible? To copy temp tracks? Yes. But most of

  • that isn't new. Remember, Hollywood film music isn't

  • about originality. It's about new ways of working with

  • proven formulas, and digital technology has changed

  • that hugely. It's creative unoriginality for our era of Hollywood.

Let's talk about film music.

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電影音樂理論 (A Theory of Film Music)

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    ping 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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