Book Review Knowing the Score

DAVID MORGAN

$14 - paperback, Harper Collins, 2000

313 pages

Knowing the Score compiles topics discussed by 16 of today's film composers and also includes a brief "interview" with Varese Sarabande's Robert Townson about the "art" and "business" of film scoring. In certain sections of the book, author David Morgan takes an interesting approach by organizing information as "panel discussions." This method works well at times, but varying comments from different sources are too often presented in a disjointed context -- this sometimes holds true even when the discussion is with a single composer. There's one such section where Jerry Goldsmith talks about Explorers -- from his comments one would think that Jerry considered this to be one of his best scores. However, since we do not know if this dialogue comes from a recent interview or from something five or ten years ago, it's hard to know just how serious he was in the first place. This could have been easily clarified by either footnoting the information (or at least providing a year in parenthesis next to the text). The Appendix does not sufficiently correct this problem.

The panel discussion format does have benefits. It's interesting to hear what David Shire or Jerry Goldsmith have to say about a given topic, and to have both their thoughts presented in the same section. But their comments, taken out of context (from an interview either with Morgan, or from another source), can be difficult to follow within the topic. The most glaring instance comes in the section with Townson. In a discussion of Alex North's score for 2001, Townson's words imply that he discussed the recording of this score with Alex North in 1993 -- two years after North had died (p. 279). On top of this, the recording sessions were in January of 1993. My guess is that if this discussion took place it must have been a decade earlier, but the text looks familiar to something I've read regarding Goldsmith's and Townson's plans for recording the score.

Knowing the Score also devotes substantial sections to individual composers and films. John Corigliano discusses his work on Altered States and The Red Violin, while Elliot Goldenthal details his work on The Butcher Boy and Titus. There is an interesting part chronicling Alan Menken's career and the resurgence of film musicals. (It would have been even better had the discussion of Doyle's work on Love's Labour's Lost been integrated there -- this was a good chance to use the "panel" method that Morgan uses elsewhere.) The "interview" with Philip Glass about his work on Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi is decent but some will find his explanations confusing. One gets a sense that he was being purposely elusive or confusing. It's also difficult to tell if Morgan conducted this interview. Either the interviewer did not understand compositional techniques and did not pursue the questions that needed to be asked, or these topics have been deleted by Morgan to keep the text from becoming too technical. The section devoted specifically to Kundun is much better than the sporadic Glass comments interspersed elsewhere in the book.

Other composers featured are: Elmer Bernstein, Carter Burwell, Elia Cmiral, Mychael Danna, Patrick Doyle, Mark Isham, Michael Kamen, Basil Poledouris, Jocelyn Pook and David Raksin. It's interesting is that big names like James Horner and John Williams are missing from the work. The absence of Williams is made more obvious by the "End Titles" section where other composers repeatedly cite his music among the best in the industry.

Morgan's introduction states that Knowing the Score is meant to offer an "appreciation of and inquisitive exploration into the art and craft of film music." For the most part the book succeeds. It does not match the scholarly quality that Schelle's The Score provides, but it does collect a variety of worthwhile data. It provides a helpful index that enables one to piece together the various composition topics, films and composers discussed throughout. It's a shame that the hard work that went in to compiling this information did not go into providing more footnotes or even an annotated bibliography. A discography wouldn't have hurt either.

The bottom line is that Knowing the Score is an unspectacular but economical peek into the world of film music composition -- I even found myself pulling many of the albums out to re-listen after reading several of the discussions. Still, this book tends to read like a piece of semi-informed journalism intending to guide neo-phytes. With all of the hard work that went in to compiling the data, the lack of scholarly support within the writing and notes is unfortunate.  -- Steven A. Kennedy

The author can be reached at: stev4uth@hotmail.com

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com