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Thoughts About the Industry of Movie Music, by Juniper S.
13 years ago
Looking for a place to chat? Join us at #composers on FurNet!
And now, a message from one of our kind composers :
It has been a long time since I stopped and listened to movie music. I had become so focused on concert music as it is my career path. Most people might not know, but it was movie music that made me want to be a composer, and the original career path I was going to seek out was to be a movie composer. I will get into why I stopped seeking that path later in this journal.
What I was listening to in terms of music were older movie soundtracks. I had forgotten just how amazing they were. Back in the day, these composers really knew how to work the orchestra and showed their absolute potential when creating a movie score. It seems that in the recent age, the original art form is dying away and the creativity dwindling. The new age of movie music seems to be this Hans Zimmer style of epic score (and speaking of which there are a number of crappy epic movies coming out all the time lately). The Hans Zimmer style when it first came out was very interesting, and I loved it just as much as the next person, but it feels like it has worn out its stay in the industry. I am just about ready for the next thing which might never come. Even composers I formally really liked such as James Horner have been abandoning their older styles to assimilate into this "epic" style that I just don't care for. There isn't that color and creativity that composers used to have; and I will demonstrate below. Nowadays it seems like everything has strings with this massive reverb and put through so many filters to a point where I feel like the organic sound is gone. The same with a lot of "dramatic" piano music. It is put through heavy echo and other effects which to me make it loose its organic feeling. In the old days none of that existed and composers had to find their way around the orchestra to create the effects they wanted. Now, all these effects and reverbs, there is nothing wrong with them, they do sound good, that is why they are used. What I mean to say is that now everyone uses them and I feel like they do not sound new or fresh anymore. Anyway, below I have linked a few soundtracks I think are noteworthy, that are timeless, organic, and colorful.
Please listen to these soundtracks. They are some of my favorites and perfectly illustrate what I mean about color and creativity, not to mention expression.
The Wind and the Lion (1975):
I would say The Wind and the Lion still is my favorite movie score, and Jerry Goldsmith still my favorite movie composer.
The Secret of NIMH (1982):
I am sure a lot here have seen this movie, but I wonder how many have taken time to listen to the score. It is just very expressive and is definitely to me the best soundtrack to any animated movie. This is again by Jerry Goldsmith
On the Waterfront (1954):
I never actually saw this movie, but I heard the score to this on the radio one day and loved it from beginning to end. No one writes like this anymore in the movie world. Leonard Bernstein, while best known as a conductor, was also a great composer.
Ben Hur (1959):
Another very colorful score. What I like about this is the way the strings are used to what I feel is more their potential, which nowadays is rarely seen. Score composed by Miklos Rozsa
Vertigo (1958):
This list wouldn't be complete without Bernard Herrmann. I am sometimes amazed at how many people have not heard his name.
Now earlier in this journal I had said I had quit the movie music business and now I will explain why. The main reason is because of the way the modern industry works. People do not realize what a small portion of the work the creative process is, and how much of it is actually sucking up to people while you get little to nothing for a lot of work. Believe it or not, movie/media music does NOT pay well unless you are on the A list, which is difficult to begin with. You can spend many months working on a score for someone's movie and only get maybe $5,000-$7,000 and then you need to find your next job. In some cases, you need to do free work just to get noticed, and even then it might not happen. In the beginning you might have to sit and work with another composer as his assistant. This means you might actually have to write some of the music for him, and you do not get any credit for it, the main composers gets it. Other times when you are working on a movie, you have to suck up to producers and directors. This sometimes goes as far as doing their laundry, getting them their food, coffee, you name it. You get treated like absolute crap. I very briefly worked with a composer on a TV show he was working on (I will not say which one). It was an internship of sorts. He gets paid about $15k a year and he has to compose all day, everyday, for every new episode that comes out. It does not allow him any creative process and often times he ends up having to send crap which sometimes is only sent back to him to redo. Writing it is just one part, then he has to record, and use his resources properly because his budget is very limited. I can make almost double that on the current career path I am in with half the work I would have to do. A lot of people do not realize what the reality is for movie music nowadays which was not necessarily the case in the older days.
See, unless someone has a rich mom and dad who can pay the remainder of the expenses while they try and make it to the A list, there is no realistic way to make a living if you start from the bottom. I could never work around not having the best equipment as directors will always choose the people with the best samples and not necessarily the best composers, so for those of lowish-income or even some middle-income people, getting into the industry is hard because of costs. Movie/Television composers are non-unionized, and because of this, companies have continuously paid composers less and less, and as mentioned before, sometimes not at all, under the pretense that they will get them media attention which sometimes doesn't happen. Most other jobs in the movie industry such as costume design, animation, etc on the other hand are unionized. All in all, the stress that it puts on you and the low pay is what pushed me away from the career path of movie music. Either way, they do not want my music. They want to keep hiring the same 10 guys over and over again until they die. I think maybe all of this has contributed to the downfall of good movie music in the recent era. Its great to look back at the great classic scores and adore their creativity.
This was
juniper_squirrel's last journal
So why did I upload this?
Because I think he's right, and I though that reflections must be shared.
Don't hesitate to have an ear to his gallery !
karuno
It has been a long time since I stopped and listened to movie music. I had become so focused on concert music as it is my career path. Most people might not know, but it was movie music that made me want to be a composer, and the original career path I was going to seek out was to be a movie composer. I will get into why I stopped seeking that path later in this journal.
What I was listening to in terms of music were older movie soundtracks. I had forgotten just how amazing they were. Back in the day, these composers really knew how to work the orchestra and showed their absolute potential when creating a movie score. It seems that in the recent age, the original art form is dying away and the creativity dwindling. The new age of movie music seems to be this Hans Zimmer style of epic score (and speaking of which there are a number of crappy epic movies coming out all the time lately). The Hans Zimmer style when it first came out was very interesting, and I loved it just as much as the next person, but it feels like it has worn out its stay in the industry. I am just about ready for the next thing which might never come. Even composers I formally really liked such as James Horner have been abandoning their older styles to assimilate into this "epic" style that I just don't care for. There isn't that color and creativity that composers used to have; and I will demonstrate below. Nowadays it seems like everything has strings with this massive reverb and put through so many filters to a point where I feel like the organic sound is gone. The same with a lot of "dramatic" piano music. It is put through heavy echo and other effects which to me make it loose its organic feeling. In the old days none of that existed and composers had to find their way around the orchestra to create the effects they wanted. Now, all these effects and reverbs, there is nothing wrong with them, they do sound good, that is why they are used. What I mean to say is that now everyone uses them and I feel like they do not sound new or fresh anymore. Anyway, below I have linked a few soundtracks I think are noteworthy, that are timeless, organic, and colorful.
Please listen to these soundtracks. They are some of my favorites and perfectly illustrate what I mean about color and creativity, not to mention expression.
The Wind and the Lion (1975):
I would say The Wind and the Lion still is my favorite movie score, and Jerry Goldsmith still my favorite movie composer.
The Secret of NIMH (1982):
I am sure a lot here have seen this movie, but I wonder how many have taken time to listen to the score. It is just very expressive and is definitely to me the best soundtrack to any animated movie. This is again by Jerry Goldsmith
On the Waterfront (1954):
I never actually saw this movie, but I heard the score to this on the radio one day and loved it from beginning to end. No one writes like this anymore in the movie world. Leonard Bernstein, while best known as a conductor, was also a great composer.
Ben Hur (1959):
Another very colorful score. What I like about this is the way the strings are used to what I feel is more their potential, which nowadays is rarely seen. Score composed by Miklos Rozsa
Vertigo (1958):
This list wouldn't be complete without Bernard Herrmann. I am sometimes amazed at how many people have not heard his name.
Now earlier in this journal I had said I had quit the movie music business and now I will explain why. The main reason is because of the way the modern industry works. People do not realize what a small portion of the work the creative process is, and how much of it is actually sucking up to people while you get little to nothing for a lot of work. Believe it or not, movie/media music does NOT pay well unless you are on the A list, which is difficult to begin with. You can spend many months working on a score for someone's movie and only get maybe $5,000-$7,000 and then you need to find your next job. In some cases, you need to do free work just to get noticed, and even then it might not happen. In the beginning you might have to sit and work with another composer as his assistant. This means you might actually have to write some of the music for him, and you do not get any credit for it, the main composers gets it. Other times when you are working on a movie, you have to suck up to producers and directors. This sometimes goes as far as doing their laundry, getting them their food, coffee, you name it. You get treated like absolute crap. I very briefly worked with a composer on a TV show he was working on (I will not say which one). It was an internship of sorts. He gets paid about $15k a year and he has to compose all day, everyday, for every new episode that comes out. It does not allow him any creative process and often times he ends up having to send crap which sometimes is only sent back to him to redo. Writing it is just one part, then he has to record, and use his resources properly because his budget is very limited. I can make almost double that on the current career path I am in with half the work I would have to do. A lot of people do not realize what the reality is for movie music nowadays which was not necessarily the case in the older days.
See, unless someone has a rich mom and dad who can pay the remainder of the expenses while they try and make it to the A list, there is no realistic way to make a living if you start from the bottom. I could never work around not having the best equipment as directors will always choose the people with the best samples and not necessarily the best composers, so for those of lowish-income or even some middle-income people, getting into the industry is hard because of costs. Movie/Television composers are non-unionized, and because of this, companies have continuously paid composers less and less, and as mentioned before, sometimes not at all, under the pretense that they will get them media attention which sometimes doesn't happen. Most other jobs in the movie industry such as costume design, animation, etc on the other hand are unionized. All in all, the stress that it puts on you and the low pay is what pushed me away from the career path of movie music. Either way, they do not want my music. They want to keep hiring the same 10 guys over and over again until they die. I think maybe all of this has contributed to the downfall of good movie music in the recent era. Its great to look back at the great classic scores and adore their creativity.
This was
juniper_squirrel's last journalSo why did I upload this?
Because I think he's right, and I though that reflections must be shared.
Don't hesitate to have an ear to his gallery !
karuno
Still, Juniper is right. I'm not paid.
Composers who don't have money can't buy expensive soundbank, so potential employeers have no interess in hiring them.
They prefer to give jobs to people who have tons of amazing sounds rather than to those who got talent and lack money.
Still tl;dr?
It smells like shit if you want to be a composer.
I admit I did the same when I had to improve my musics. But I spared a lot, and with the help of a friend, I could buy Reason.
What program do you use? Which soundbank?
I find this is a pretty hard software, but curiously, this must be the most used by amateurs like us. But again, I'm certainly the dumb in the history.
Maybe that ease to pirate it is the reason why. Though I always bought my software and, no, I can't get used to fruity loop :/
Sorry to hear about your experience with the movie industry, sounds like the reality of the beast tho. Originality is risky, so it often gets squashed in the mainstream arena in favor or stable consistency.
Nowaday, it's the most cheeky, the most combattive that get the job. Not only the more talented. And it doesn't concern the music only.
You have to crush other human to live. Law of the jungle. Yep, this is where economy led us.
Cuz honestly, without the Internet, I doubt I would ever heard of many talented people here. I don't listen any famous band, now, only people here on FA or on Youtube, who have a little fame but not worldwide. And -not so- curiously, they really have something "great" band don't.
As for originality and creativity in movie scores, this is yet another reason why I love being a horror fan. The genre is just mainstream enough that people acknowledge it as a genre, but it still has a lot of creative freedom in it, because most major studios still don't really want to associate themselves with it. The result is the music for a lot of the really good ones still remains interesting and effective at building tension and atmosphere, as well as helping drive the scares home.
Maybe next time I see a horror, I'll think about it. Thanks for the suggestion
It's. A. JOB.
I do sympathize, I'm in LA and facing the same situation, pirating what samples I can (and that's why Filesonic being taken down really hurt), trying to cover rent let alone hardware, doing free work while looking for the "in", etc. At the same time though, when you're getting hired to support someone else's movie, that takes priority over your creative liberties. If you want to write whatever the hell you want, fine. Starve. Or write music that people want to hear, will pay to hear (and therein lies the flipside of piracy), which is more the concert world. If you want money and creative liberty, tough.
I want to do movie music not for fame, obviously not for money, but because I feel like the music I write (mostly tonal, lyrical, melodic, programmatic, etc) has no home in today's concert world, that the mainstream concert composers (or at least the ones being deferred to in academia) are Ferneyhough, Cage, Nancarrow, etc, that to be taken seriously as a concert composer one needs a scientific, rather than aesthetic, approach. That may be changing, but my perception has been that eking a living in the concert world is as hard as in entertainment, just different styles of music.
Game music I'm starting to pay more attention to, as even the A-list film guys are starting to branch out, and it seems both adequately lucrative and flexible in allowing for creativity. I was shocked (shocked!) to spontaneously notice one day that four of my top five favorite soundtracks were to games rather than films. Being the long-term cynic I am I think the game music industry will eventually stagnate in much the fashion film has today, but for now it is a pristine horizon of fresh new ideas.
Interesting thing I noticed about scores to Bluth movies is just about every one has a different composer (he never seemed "married" to one), yet all the scores sound similar (in a good way, nice mysterious Ravellian Daphnis sound), which suggests how much say the money has in the final sound.
For games I'd highly recommend investigating Tomas Dvorak, most prominently Machinarium but also Samorost 2, as well as some solo albums.
I actually disagree with your take on concert music not taking tonal programmatic music. The one type of ensemble that still takes almost every style of composing is Concert Bands/Wind Ensembles. They are here to stay and only have about 100 years worth of repertoire unlike the orchestras (who'd rather play Mozart for the 1000000th time than play something new). People even now are writing blatantly tonal pieces that are selling well. Even so, there are some orchestras that are looking for more lyrical type music rather than the avant-garde Cage stuff. I have a beef against concert music going that direction just as much as I have it with movie music going the direction it has. Another place that has a lot of creative liberty is liturgical music. Granted most of it is set to biblical text but there is still instrumental music: organ, piano, combined forces etc that can be used as possible church music you can sell.
I agree with what you say about game music. It is actually quite amazing how much the market has grown there. I am not familiar with the industry or how well it pays, but there is a growing demand for video game composers.
Perhaps my classical music experience has been tainted by too much time in academia, where all they present you are Cage, Murail et al, and don't even take Copland, Bernstein, Part etc seriously. I didn't realize you'd made a distinction between concert and orchestral, I was thinking of the latter, there's definitely some great stuff for the former (Robert Russell Bennett, Norman Dello Joio, Morton Gould), but my experience playing in wind bands, there's GREAT program pieces, there's painfully formulaic and calculated to audience please overtonal pieces (Richard Saucedo, James Swearingen), and perhaps like you said because they only have 100 years of repertoire, they're indiscriminate in accepting both those. Holst and Vaughan Williams make me love it, Ticheli and Whitacre make me hate it.
Haven't thought of church music though, definitely an avenue for investigation
The thing about Wind Ensembles/Bands is that you will find concert band directors that like varying genres and consequently buy the music they like, but they are so diverse that for this reason, publishers take all kinds of music.
As for church music, they have always been a great place for composers, since there are so many of them. Particularly now that some of the denominations have changed their text English translations last December, now they need more new music with the new text. Definitely look into that if you're willing to write choral and organ! Believe me, as an organist, I love getting new music to play since not a lot is written for this instrument. I have written music for myself and for my choir in the past but still always nice to get other people into it.
I'm still too intimidated by the organ performance-wise to tackle its idiom just yet (all in due time), but do LOVE writing for choir, including faux-counterpoint (a modern imitation of the ancient sound, while bending the original strict rules).
(hidden comment below was mine, forgot to hit "reply" first :-/ )
As a result of this, I've started listening to soundtracks that are more unique to me. Interestingly, Hans Zimmer seems to be trying things beyond the epic style he created. The scores are still quite epic, but the soundtrack for Sherlock Holmes and Inception are unique among other soundtracks today. The only other composer I can always pick out nowadays, for whatever reason, is John Powell.
If not done yet, listen to the "Pokemon - The first Movie" soundtrack. It's one of my personal top 1 from the 20 last years. It has a special flavor, the musics are epic but not too much, while the ambience sometimes has nothing to do with the music, and it's still amazing how well it fits though.
Also, I need to go listen to the music from the first Pokemon movie again because I do actually remember really liking it. I also really like the music from the second Pokemon movie as well, especially Lugia's song.
Sincerely, Toothless is adorable. I had a big mood crash after seeing this, especially the fact that at the end, they're both reduced and need each other to be "complete". That's sort of epic. °w°
So yeah. Cliché. But so beautiful :'3