The Unanswered Column

by Doug Adams, the Voice of Reason

Since nothing of note came out this past weekend (i.e. I didn't get out to a movie) I thought I would take a little space and respond to the e-mail generated by the first few columns.

Ethnic Scores

A few weeks ago we looked at James Horner's The Devil's Own and at what works and doesn't work in ethnic scores. The most asked questions were, "What about Braveheart and Far and Away?" Braveheart is pretty easy to dismiss as an ethnic score, because it scores the wrong ethnicity! Not only is it written for Irish bagpipes instead of Scottish, but the theme is actually quite English. In fact, it's a pretty darn close knock off of Englishman Gustav Holst's B theme from the Jupiter movement of The Planets. So Braveheart is not so much a Scottish score as it is a pan-British mishmash.

Far and Away is a different can of worms. On one hand, yes, the Irish and non-Irish elements are very well balanced. On the other hand, the film is bad and generates very little drama which means that Williams has to go a bit over the top to generate any emotional connection. Far and Away is certainly pretty apt as an ethnic score, but it's really somewhat sappy and the film is awful, so I could hardly mention it along side Papillon or The Wild Bunch.

The Fifth Element

There were basically two different responses to the column on The Fifth Element and the inclusion of dance music in film scoring. One: I don't like any pop-derived musics and therefore this isn't a good trend. Or, two: I only like pop-derived musics and it's about time that movies got with it and tossed symphonic writing. To me, either response was a little disappointing. One of the great things about film music is its ability to blur the lines between genres in a way that concert music has yet to embrace. Neither symphonic nor pop music is going to provide for all possible dramatic needs. I'm afraid that our obsession with reproducing that which we've enjoyed before is going to condemn us to retrace our musical footsteps for a long, long time. Film music has the potential to find some wonderfully interesting new directions, but we have to open minded enough to let it.

Theme Paper

Tacked at the end of one e-mail was this comment:

"I'm beginning to wonder myself, can't anyone write a decent theme anymore? Maybe it's the sign of times. Costs and demands go up, quality suffers. People resort to warbling synthesized sounds and sampled orchestral instruments."

This statement really got my attention and I thank its author for bring up an intriguing point. We hear a lot of complaints about the lack of themes today. It seems like it'd be a simple issue, but there are really a lot of sides to be considered.

People always tend to pay the most attention to scores with big, emotional themes that sound like they could be a concert piece if they needed to be. However, I think this is more based on the desire to hear the album than anything else. In reality, there are a lot of ways to use thematic material in films. Certainly the long form Romantic theme has its place, and let's face it, this will probably always be the public's favorite. But, what about a score like Herrmann's Cape Fear? The whole thing revolves around four notes. The four notes Herrmann uses perfectly sum up the tension and underlying threat present in the film. They're also incredibly memorable—see them get skewered once a year on "The Simpsons" as the Side Show Bob theme. That's a great film theme.

And how about Planet of the Apes? I don't whistle that as I walk down the street, but thematically, it's an incredibly tight score. That piano figure in the low tessitura ties things together wonderfully. I think our expectations for long, self-contained themes probably has its roots in the so called "golden age" scores. As a matter of fact, some (and only some) of these "golden age" scores sound a little dry to me as film music because of their over reliance on the theme as a scoring device. I think it's more fun to hear a theme used within a score rather than simply reproduced every time the producers need a knee-jerk emotional reaction.

Clever thematic usage in film scores is really pretty important. Used and developed well, themes can make a film feel like a tangible story rather than just a string of events. After all, a theme is not just something that goes over the credits, or plays as the introduction of a cue. It should have some sort of input in the entire score. Even if our ears don't immediately pick up on the fact that we're hearing a four note motive played backwards as minor chords they will recognize the fact that the resulting color is pretty organic to the rest of the score. And a coherent score helps lead us towards a coherent film.

Now here's the tricky part. What makes a good theme—either long form Romantic, or short motivic, or textural? For an example, let's look at two Romantic themes since that's what everyone seems to understand the most. As we discussed a few weeks ago, Alan Silvestri's Volcano theme didn't work . And let's use Goldsmith's Star Trek the Motion Picture as a theme that did work. When you get right down to it, what's so different between Goldsmith's theme and Silvestri's theme? We could say the construction of the thematic cues, but that's judging the cue and not the theme. I want to know what makes one handful of twenty or so notes sound any better than another one. Both the Star Trek theme and the Volcano theme draw from the same palette of major and minor scales and chords. They both are written for the symphony orchestra in a kind of Neo-Romantic vein.

My initial reaction was—well, maybe it isn't so much the actual melody, but the usage of that melody within the context of other musical occurrences. However, then I remembered what Thomas Newman once told me. (I'm not trying to drop names here, but Newman is arguably one of the best thematic film composers today, so it puts the comment in context.) His opinion was that in order to write a good cue, a composer must first have good materials. Meaning that his themes and motives must be of the highest quality before he can do anything with them. So, cast in this light, it seems that thematic materials can be evaluated in and of themselves.

But, I don't think we can really evaluate them with any specific criteria. Generally, we all seem to know a good thematic collection of pitches when we hear it, but trying to explain its appeal if a pretty futile task. Maybe part of the beauty of film music is that there aren't any hard and fast rules about musical gestures and specific emotional reactions—it keeps everyone searching for the best way to say what they want to say. I once saw a producer tell a composer that the four-note motive he was using sounded like shock and disappointment—but what he really wanted was shock and realization. These things are pretty hard to pin down.

Thus we have the article with no conclusion. I know themes are important in film and I know why they're important, but that's all the answers I can give right now.

Next week: John Williams' The Lost World.

Comments? Know what makes a good theme? DAdams1127@aol.com