Reviews: Film Music Screencraft Book, More Gladiator CD
Film Music Screencraft *** 1/2
MARK RUSSELL AND JAMES YOUNG
Focal Press ISBN 0-240-80441-4
192 pages, $44.95
It is perhaps damning Film Music Screencraft with faint praise
to say that it is the best looking book on film music I've ever seen. Given
the limited market for this subject matter and the notoriously difficult
task of giving the reader any conception of what an individual piece of
music sounds like, it's a continual source of amazement to me that books
on film music get written and sold. When they are produced, publisher's
awareness of the market limitations often translates into streamlined production
values: cheap paper; little if any artwork; and no color. For Film Music
Screencraft, the authors had the advantage of taking part in a larger
project (other Screencraft books include ones on Cinematography
and Production Design, and upcoming volumes will cover Directing, Acting,
Editing, Screenwriting and Special Effects) with apparently established
design aspects and approaches. The result is a book that not only features
things you'd expect from a book on film music (music samples and interviews
with composers) but unexpected touches like actual art direction (the graphic
look and layout of the book is terrific) and photos. Lots of photos. COLOR
photos, in fact. The end result is an impressive coffee table book full
of striking color images from films. The book is divided into sections
on thirteen different composers: Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein, Maurice
Jarre, Jerry Goldsmith, John Barry, Lalo Schifrin, Michael Nyman, Gabriel
Yared, Philip Glass, Howard Shore, Danny Elfman, Zbigniew Preisner and
Ryuichi Sakamoto. After a brief biography the subjects are interviewed
(with the obvious exception of Herrmann), pertinent musical samples of
their work are provided, and a gallery of color stills from the films in
question are presented with specific musical cues related to the images
discussed in the captions. There's also a CD provided with one musical
cue provided for each composer represented -- these are for the most part
Silva Screen/City of Prague rerecordings, but there are a few original
performances such as Howard Shore's Dead Ringers.
The interviews are interesting, particularly when composers like Nyman,
Jarre, Yared, Glass, Sakamoto and Preisner (who haven't been interviewed
to death by various film music magazines) are involved. They're also short
enough to give a good idea of each composer's individual influences and
philosophy without belaboring the point. The musical examples are surprisingly
detailed and well-chosen -- there's four pages from one of Elfman's chases
from Batman as well as salient moments from Howard Shore's The
Silence of the Lambs (and the first five pages of his Ed Wood
score), samples from Michael Nyman's The Piano and Gattaca,
Schifrin's Bullit, and Bernstein's The TenCommandments and
The Magnificent Seven, among others. Even the normally taciturn
Goldsmith comes clean about some of the unusual effects in his most famous
scores, including that weird moaning sound under the strings in Chinatown
when Gittes is spying on Evelyn Mulwray -- it's a rubber ball rubbed across
a hollow piece of wood. That's almost worth the cover price of the book,
had I not given it away here for free. Film Music Screencraft exists in
a weird middle ground, probably overly-detailed in its use of musical samples
for the novice but not really in-depth enough for a textbook. But it is
a strong mix of visual and verbal information and if you wanted one book
to display your interest in film music, this would have to be the one.
Plus we can't help but recommend any coffee table book that mentions Film
Score Monthly in its introduction. -- Jeff Bond
More Music from the Motion Picture Gladiator ***
HANS ZIMMER
Decca 440 013 192-2
18 tracks - 55:35
Depending on who you listen to, Hans Zimmer's Gladiator was either
the most over-praised or over-criticized score of 2000. In either case
it was certainly the film score with the highest profile. The original
soundtrack album was lengthy but managed to omit a few highlights, leaving
this follow-up CD a foregone conclusion. But you have to give Zimmer credit
for doing more with this effort than simply dumping the few remaining cues
not included on Gladiator, Volume One.
Zimmer's influences on the score have been a subject of debate ever
since some collector was the first to cry "Holst!" in a crowded movie theater,
but Zimmer never made a secret of the material Gladiator pays homage
to, and one of the selling points of this new album is his voluminous liner
notes, which outline his strategies for most of the major motifs and effects
heard in the score. The most obvious missing pieces are here (notably the
propulsive "Homecoming," the music for Maximus' journey to the provinces
as a wounded slave, and the climactic dramatic cues leading up to the film's
final duel), but much of the rest of the album is composed of Zimmer's
mock-ups as well as some failed experiments, making this an unusually intimate
peek into the creative process of creating a film score.
Zimmer's alternate takes (like "The General Who Became A Slave") allow
the listener to hear fuller readings of themes that only linger at the
corners of the finished score. And his synth mock-up for the film's opening
battle scene ("Gladiator Waltz"), while impressively complete, still suggests
that some of the interesting development in the piece might be due to the
contribution of collaborator Klaus Badelt, who also worked with Zimmer
and vocalist Lisa Gerrard on several other cues in the score. Zimmer chooses
to interpolate dialogue into more than a half-dozen tracks to sometimes
jarring effect (particularly in "Homecoming" where it interrupts the flow
of a fairly rousing piece of scoring), with verbiage that has only a tangential
relationship to the music. This is the sort of thing that might thrill
casual listeners looking to recreate the experience of the film (in other
words, the dwindling population of people without access to VCRs or DVD
players) but will only aggravate collectors looking to hear the music.
It's particularly galling because Zimmer's thematic material (his "Earth"
theme constantly calling the film's hero Maximus to the grave and the mellow,
noble theme that introduces "Death Smiles At Us All") is often simple,
direct and compelling.
The album ends up with a club mix of Zimmer's Gladiator music,
which sums up both the reason for Zimmer's success and the reason why he
is still looked on with contempt by many collectors and critics. Zimmer
comes from the world of popular music and understands its rhythms and approaches
in a way that old school composers like Williams and Goldsmith never will.
Gladiator will never stand as a work of modern classical composition
the way Alex North's 1960 Cleopatra is even now being reintroduced
to the world. Where North's was a distinctive and trained individual voice,
Zimmer is an admitted collaborator who approaches his work much more like
the leader of a rock band than a cloistered scribe expressing his own personal
voice. But that methodology and sensibility makes him appeal to an audience
that's at least as broad, if not broader, than someone like John Williams.
Purists may argue that Zimmer borrowing from classical composers like Holst
and Walton (who himself was untrained musically) is heresy, but popular
music itself has never been immune from classical borrowing -- as that
infamous record commercial of the '80s reminds us, "many of today's popular
hits were actually written by the great masters." Gladiator stands
as a potent popular work with surprising emotional depth, even if its effective
parts never really coalesce into a convincing whole. -- Jeff Bond
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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