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I think the easiest thing to do is acknowledge Horner had a habit of using existing work as a launchpad for his own scores, more obviously than his contemporaries. He also quoted his own work regularly. But his ability to distill emotion into music and underscore moving pictures is not contestable. He was brilliant at it. 
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Schiffy makes excellent points. But I don't think it's a fair comparison to call what Horner does simply ripping off (though maybe that's right in the Amarcord case, that's one I don't know). Because he doesn't just rip off - it's much more what David Coscina says - he uses the quotes often as starting points for his current work. But opinions and concerns will vary on that.
His approach is more like other collagists in Classical music in the period he was in academia - people like Luciano Berio and David Del Tredici, and particularly George Rochberg, who would write whole movements of larger disparate works as if they were composed by others. And of course Stravinsky did this kind of thing all the time, and has the best line on the subject that I don't think has been quoted yet: "Good artists copy; geniuses steal."
So I've always wondered if Horner was carrying that tradition on. And he pulled in music that I think spoke to the film's needs and satisfied his own itch to incorporate.
That said, it is endlessly irritating that the borrowings are never acknowledged in real time with movies. I was so pissed off when I found out that the love theme in Delerue's A Little Romance was actually a Vivaldi piece, that it took a long time for me to listen to the score again.
I just wish the acknowledgements were forthcoming as they usually are in Classical music.
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Posted: |
Dec 2, 2022 - 10:41 AM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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But the collapse that I feel many film music fall into, is the be-all, end-all aspect of originality. If it isn't super original and something you've never heard before, it's not worth one's time.
Interesting. But I don't think I've seen that sentiment here. Certainly I don't subscribe to it.
Let me say this: I enjoy the hell out of "Swing Swing Swing" from 1941. Back when I first got that LP a million years ago, a friend of mine (who had aspirations to being a musician, though he became a nurse) heard it and was upset: "That's a shameless rip-off of 'Sing, Sing, Sing'!" Then he saw the title, laughed, and said "Okay, never mind, that's cool." Williams was acknowledging the source, riffing on it to make it his own, and having some fun with it. Just as he clearly did when interpolating a variation on "The Nutcracker" in Home Alone (a reference he could reasonably assume a significant portion of the audience would recognize). One could make the same argument, possibly a little more shakily, for the Holst quote at the beginning of Star Wars, but again, the quote is pretty brief, and very defensibly an "in" joke. So there you go: Original? No. Enjoyable? Yes.
Early Danny Elfman references Nino Rota, occasionally fairly explicitly, but it never crosses the line into egregious for me, personally, because he seems to be putting it through a blender, channeling it through his own voice.
Of course, whether any of this works for you is a matter of personal taste.
Please understand, my point here is not to try to argue anybody out of loving something they love. We all need things to bring us joy, and what kind of jerk would object to that? But for those of us who have a hard time getting past Horner's very very frequent predilection for passing off the work of others as his own, it's not out of faux outrage or impossible standards. It's because it feels a bit like a betrayal.
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PS I don't mind Williams' near-quotes much at all in most works where I've noticed them. But I found the ersatz Steve Reich and the Richard Strauss bits in AI so off-putting I've never been able to give the music a fair listen.
So for me there is never a clear line between acceptable and unacceptable. I either enjoy it, don't mind it, or just hate it. And can't say why for sure.
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Can we all agree that Tyler Bates ripped off Elliot Goldenthal's Titus in his score to 300? I mean, there was literally a court case on that too.
I'm a Horner fan, but pretending he never did this is ridiculous. Does it really not matter at all to folks when one composer so directly quotes another's work *and passes it off as their own*? Yeah there are some Williams examples of course (usually where he was told to follow a temp track, with Star Wars as the most extreme example) but nothing to egregious as unchanged as Horner managed on multiple, far more frequent occasions. Yeah, sometimes Horner recast things in his own style *somewhat* and laid in his own thematic material, like taking Bartok's The Wooden Prince ballet opening as the opening of The Land Before Time. That's more like what Williams did in E.T., sure. But Prokofiev in Red Heat? Shostakovich and Britten in Troy? (Intrada LITERALLY had to leave some music off their 2 CD edition of that because *it was still in copyright to another composer*)
C'mon now people, Horner has literally dozens of examples throughout his career of outright shameless verbatim quotes, *not* because of temp-tracking, and without the original composers mentioned.
Again, I'm a Horner fan, but any mature Horner fan can acknowledge this even as they continue to appreciate his film scores.
Schiffy, that was a great post and I'm so often glad you came back to the board.
Yavar
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I'm realizing that most of the examples cited as being the worst are in scores I don't really know (Troy and Honey I Shrunk) or care about (Red Heat).
I'm so much more familiar with Horner suddenly working in a snippet of, for example, Prokofiev, in the midst of something otherwise his own. Almost like a wink.
Clearly he does both, sometimes more or less ongoing or blatant. Always fair to call that out.
But movie music has ALWAYS been about mimicking already-familiar music, that's been one of its central issues.
It feels hypocritical to me. I think people tend to cut some composers more slack than they deserve while calling out others.
Yeah, we can blame temp-tracking. So what? The composer has chosen the field to work in. They know semi-plagiarism is part of the game. And they're playing it. The result is the same.
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Posted: |
Dec 2, 2022 - 12:32 PM
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By: |
neumation
(Member)
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If Disney paid the publishers of Amarcord and Powerhouse to use these tunes in HISTK, end of discussion. An editor on the film told me that these were credited on the cue sheets and the “Rota, Scott and Elfman sued Horner” rumor was started by someone talking out of their ass.
The publisher is the entity that has legal claim and I have yet to see proof any of them had an issue, except for Troy. Composers generally do not own the rights to their published music. The most their estates can do is complain. They cashed the checks.
The Britten passage in Troy is a complicated example as large parts of the score were not written by Horner despite his name being on it. Britten’s publisher had a valid claim against Warner Bros + Warners publishing branch, so the offending cue was omitted from the Intrada CD. In a seminar, one of the orchestrators said the sketches only had timings. They were otherwise blank. If Horner didn’t put the notes on the page, who is truly culpable?
I get the feeling that those who are most vocal about Horners borrowings must hate rap, hip hop, and a large chunk of contemporary music. Sampling has become a valid, widespread compositional tool. “Sampling” is just the 20th century definition for a practice that has existed for 500 years. I will never understand why anyone gets bent out of shape about this. Of all the examples of gratuitous sampling/borrowing, Horner is among the most skilled and tasteful at doing it. It is clearly done with craft, not cut-and-paste hackery. It takes serious skill to weave borrowed music into a large composition and have it fit in the dramatic framework of the score.
Prokofiev’s grandson Gabriel is a hip hop producer. Someone should ask him how he feels about Horner sampling dedushka’s music. I doubt he cares as much as film score fans do.
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Hey, I became aware of hours of classical music that I would have been ignorant of otherwise. So props for at least cribbing from geniuses.
And his original work was smashing.
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I love Horner's music and always have since I first got into it with BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, but I can't deny that he's the worst for cribbing from classical works and reuse.
Christopher Young was pretty bad in his earlier years and a lot of that was ripping off Goldsmith and even Horner himself.
Jerry Fielding could be quite shameless when stealing from some classical composers and Herrmann and Morricone didn't seem to care about reusing material.
Goldsmith and Williams have obviously borrowed heavily from their classical heroes but both had/have strong enough individual styles to make it sound like their own stuff.
David Newman would copy the temp track too closely at times and John Debney and Joel McNeely have forged careers using the greatest hits of the A list Hollywood film composers.
No music is written in a vacuum (and film music especially has to adhere to the demands of the director and producers and the film itself).
Even those olde classical composers drew from music they'd heard in folk song or hymns - and each other - and such like.
If the music moves me and sounds like its composers style in general, I've learned not to let it bother me so much.
Sometimes it's actually fun catching the source.
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Crickets when Williams does it.
Schiffy directly wrote about that above:
Let me say this: I enjoy the hell out of "Swing Swing Swing" from 1941. Back when I first got that LP a million years ago, a friend of mine (who had aspirations to being a musician, though he became a nurse) heard it and was upset: "That's a shameless rip-off of 'Sing, Sing, Sing'!" Then he saw the title, laughed, and said "Okay, never mind, that's cool." Williams was acknowledging the source, riffing on it to make it his own, and having some fun with it. Just as he clearly did when interpolating a variation on "The Nutcracker" in Home Alone (a reference he could reasonably assume a significant portion of the audience would recognize). One could make the same argument, possibly a little more shakily, for the Holst quote at the beginning of Star Wars, but again, the quote is pretty brief, and very defensibly an "in" joke. So there you go: Original? No. Enjoyable? Yes.
I for one have witnessed people (maybe more in the world of classical music) attack Williams left and right for being unoriginal and stealing from classical composers.
Yavar
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Posted: |
Dec 2, 2022 - 4:47 PM
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By: |
Solium
(Member)
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Crickets when Williams does it.
Schiffy directly wrote about that above:
Let me say this: I enjoy the hell out of "Swing Swing Swing" from 1941. Back when I first got that LP a million years ago, a friend of mine (who had aspirations to being a musician, though he became a nurse) heard it and was upset: "That's a shameless rip-off of 'Sing, Sing, Sing'!" Then he saw the title, laughed, and said "Okay, never mind, that's cool." Williams was acknowledging the source, riffing on it to make it his own, and having some fun with it. Just as he clearly did when interpolating a variation on "The Nutcracker" in Home Alone (a reference he could reasonably assume a significant portion of the audience would recognize). One could make the same argument, possibly a little more shakily, for the Holst quote at the beginning of Star Wars, but again, the quote is pretty brief, and very defensibly an "in" joke. So there you go: Original? No. Enjoyable? Yes.
I for one have witnessed people (maybe more in the world of classical music) attack Williams left and right for being unoriginal and stealing from classical composers.
Yavar
This clearly proves my point. Williams does it and he's given a pass. Horner does it and is raked across the coals.
As far as Williams being attacked left and right. I've never seen that. Surely not by score fans. Maybe upper class snooty music elites who probably think film scores are as artistic as rap.
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Solium, if you could only see my nose up in the air right now, you would absolutely plotz! 
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Williams … given a pass.
Oh, come now, Williams has gotten plenty of flak from all sides, high and low, over the course of his long, illustrious career.
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