Trends on the Horizon

by Doug Adams, the Voice of Reason

I promised last week that we would take a look at Eric Serra's The Fifth Element and while we're certainly going to be checking out that score, I think it will be much more interesting to delve into what exactly this score represents. Namely, the trends apparent in the future of film scoring.

As has been duly noted on these pages, Eric Serra is basically a composer of dance-oriented, synth pop music. Whenever I read that sentence about film composers I immediately think, ooh, that's pretty insulting. But, why should it be? Dance music has no more or less inherent relevance to a film about intergalactic taxi drivers, perfect beings, and great flaming balls of evil than a symphonic score does. I made the statement to someone the other day that jazz and pop have a limited future in film music because they're much too associated with specific situations to general audiences, and while I partially stick to the statement, it's a pretty dumb philosophy. Symphonic music has just as many social-economic correlations as any other form of music.

The Neo-Romantic symphonic film score has become the expected norm for most big-budget studio projects for many years now. (Non-commercial/non-studio and art films are usually pretty much off on their own; one would be hard pressed to find any genuine overall trend in these film's scores.) However, film music, like any art, needs to be able to grow and change if it is to survive. I'd guess the next trend is to turn to this dance music, simply because it's the music that commercial film's target audiences are the most into. I really don't think that it means we'll see the Romantic score disappear altogether (though maybe we will), but we will probably see a lot of work geared towards this new direction. There's definitely a lot of artistic ground left to be covered in this kind of scoring, so I'd say that the trend is a positive thing.

Thus, we turn to The Fifth Element—a Euro-pop/dance music based score. The Fifth Element is actually quite representative of both the weak and strong points of this kind of scoring. In my opinion, the scenes that worked best were the ones where the music hit that Middle East influenced groove along side the establishing shots. (It wasn't really all that Middle Eastern, but it contained that augmented second interval which seems to suffice for most Western ears.) The first views of the garish cityscape were very nice as was the introduction to the super-clean garbage-filled spaceport. Also good was the chase that ensued when Leeloo first broke out of her regenerating tube. These are scenes that are paced strictly in terms of momentum or images. A scene like the one where Bruce Willis first woke up didn't work. The problem comes from the fact that dance music is beat or groove oriented music. In fact, I've seen it argued that rock and its subgenres are really an orchestrational style and a rhythmic sense more than a compositional style.

Back (Beat) to the Future

Symphonic scoring for this kind of picture probably first became popular due to the fact that it can be utterly shapeless when it needs to be. It can fill the nooks and crannies around any kind of pacing or storytelling. But, pure dance music is always propelled forward by its regular rhythmical element—the beat. Thus, it becomes a completely linear form of music and linear music always wins the tug of war against images. This is how music videos can go nuts with editing and still feel cohesive—the song takes the reigns. If you put linear music against an establishing shot, like Fifth Element's cities, it works fine; it's supposed to play through everything. But, if you put it behind Bruce Willis slowly waking up, everything feels like an out of place montage. The pace of the editing and the pace of the music are totally at odds because the music is dealing in terms of song-form architecture. How does pop scoring get around this problem? We've already seen the solution—it's the micro-groove.

Danny Elfman's Mission: Impossible serves as a great example of what I'm calling the micro-groove. The rhythmic element in this score—that sequenced percussive web behind everything—is extremely steeped in dance/pop/rock music. But instead of creating one propulsive beat that drives a cue, Elfman chops it up into little chunks. There is certainly always a driving force, but it's leading us into the next bar instead into the next chorus of a song. And once we hit the next musical signpost, the beat regenerates and leads us ahead again to something else. By using the music this way the beat becomes infinitely more pliable and its usage possibilities in the score increase exponentially.

This problem is exactly what kept something like Blade Runner from being the kind of influential score it might have been. It was certainly influential to a degree, but its successful progeny really only followed it in terms of emotional content and not scoring style. Vangelis's score works great for mood, but it has very limited dramatic usage past this point because of the way the music is constructed. It's the right score for Blade Runner, but it's not stylistically applicable to other projects.

The other way I've heard this micro-beat idea being put into usage is in kind of a music concrete kind of way. Example: Elliot Goldenthal's Demolition Man. The rock/hip-hop portions of the score are used as sound references rather than an integrated element. They become "concrete" because they are colliding against the rest of the cue rather than weaving in and out of it. The result is we still get the drive of rock and the hipness of the reference without the clumsy side-effects because the composer can start it up and shut it down as he pleases. And when we get to the obligatory car chases the synth sequencer beat can really let it rip and put the beat on the front of the musical activity, because these scenes can take it. This hip music concrete approach is also favored by Mark Snow in his X-Files music.

I think that if we see the pop influenced film score succeed, it will most likely proceed along these lines. And I hope people actually pay attention, because it's not enough to just write a pop tune with no words and drop it into a film. There is as much a responsibility to write excellent dance music scores as there is to write excellent symphonic scores.

Comments? DAdams1127@aol.com