Volume 2, Number 1

 

Starting a new year of blogs found me reevaluating what I want the shape of my blogs to take in the new year. Last year I wrote weekly for about half the year, then the posts dwindled as I began to run out of topics I wanted to write about and then I got a bit burned out. My blogs last year were for the most part long articles on different topics I was interested in and were researched and written and re-written to polish them up as best as I could. Whether it be laziness, lack of focus or cosmic angst, this year I’m mostly going to write informally, more in the spirit of true blogging just jotting down more informal thoughts about film and film music. Perhaps my blogs may become less interesting because of this and no one will read them (maybe no one read the ones before!), but who knows. At any rate, I need to free myself up a bit in order to return to being a regular contributor again because I do really enjoy it.

 

 

Looking back on 2009, the first year I was continually active in participating on the boards, I wanted to pick out what I personally thought was the best thread of the year. It only took me about a half a second to come up with my choice. This year’s Silver Pony Tail Award* for Best Thread of 2009 goes to…the envelope please… composer, conductor, film label exec., Bill Stromberg’s Film Music Orchestration Studies -  http://filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?threadID=62814&forumID=1&archive=0.

 

When thinking about all the threads throughout the year, one thing struck me, and that was that out of all the topics, perhaps only a percent or two actually discussed the music from a musical standpoint. Most threads tend to be wish lists, new release announcements, composer musings, discussions of individual scores in extra musical terms, etc. Rarely do they venture into looking at a score musically discussing elements such as compositional style, orchestration, formal structures, musical language, etc. and how this ultimately serves the film.

 

I’m musically trained having been a music major in college so I find this to be the most fascinating area to discuss and one that educates as well as it entertains. Frankly I wish there were more threads that looked at the music itself, but I can understand that the musical backgrounds of the board members ranges from very little knowledge of music to composer level understanding with most falling somewhere in between. Still, I wish there were more posts in this vein, starting with my own!

 

I have to say that there are a number of board regulars who decry the fact that the music itself is not discussed more often on the boards, yet I never saw most of them ever post in Bill’s thread so I don’t know what to make of that. Perhaps some were afraid to post fearing they weren’t at a level where they felt comfortable posting in a thread along with the posts of someone of Bill’s stature and knowledge, but the range of participants was wide and Bill responded to each as a valuable contributor. In any case, Bill created an outstanding thread in which he took his valuable time (as did his business partner John Morgan) to share his expertise and post examples of orchestrations. Granted many may not know how to read music, but orchestration was discussed verbally more often than not in the thread.

 

I learned a great deal from Bill’s posts and the posts of others about the nature and importance of orchestration in film music. I also posted some of my own examples that hopefully illustrated how orchestration helped the music shape the feel and tone of the film it supported. Orchestration and flexibility of ensemble selection is one of film music’s most important and interesting elements and it was great to discuss this at length in the thread.

 

Thanks Bill for starting this thread and continuing on with it for so long. And thanks to all who participated.

 

* The Silver Pony Tail rating system and Silver Pony Tail Awards are the property of the Scoreside Chat owner and anyone using them without the owner’s permission will me smote down by the score gods or facsimiles thereof!

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                                                 Epilogue

                   The place for quotes, trivia, links, etc.