30. What do you think it is about film scores that makes you love them so much?
It’s so difficult to explain why you like a certain genre of music. Film scores are so centered on the aesthetics and just give you me that unexplainable feeling. Certain cues are the only piece of music that can make me cry and trust me, thats a pretty hard thing to do. There is so much beauty in music that depicts emotions.
I just adore orchestral pieces and arrangements but feel that music from the classical era have too many rules. Soundtrack music, especially today, is so much more free and open.
I guess I also appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into the composition. Not only does the composer have to write a fantastic piece of music but it has to match the images, please the audience and please the director while keeping that delicate balance so it doesn’t fully attract the attention away from the film. And this is all done in a few weeks.
Ugh, It’s so difficult to explain. Soundtrack music has just alway fascinated me and I don’t really know why exactly.
28. A score you can be really creative while listening to.
Any score really. I study music so I tend to take any inspiration from what I’m listening to at the time. As for while I’m working, I can never listen to music because I’m making my own…
21. To you, what defines a great score?
A good soundtrack should have a few elements. There is basically a tick-list-type-thing of techniques and ways to write music for film. (Cue Chiara re-writing her year one essay in a smaller post)
1. The music must tell a story along with the film, each cue must tie together and relate. This can be done through instrumentation, key, tone but mostly by themes. A good soundtrack must have a recognisable theme that can easily stick in the audience’s head. The melody is deep inside our minds, sitting in our short-term (and sometimes long term) memories and it triggers and emotional response when played at a pivotal, emotional or important part of the film.
2. Each cue has to be be accurately synchronised with the cuts and action on screen. If the music just played over the top of the film with no rhythmic relation, it would feel out of place and completely disorientating. A good soundtrack does this while at the same time, not using the images as a complete guideline. This creates the “Mickey Mousing” technique in which every movement is recorded and highlighted by the music. The term was attributed to the early Walt Disney films and cartoons such as “Tom and Jerry” who used the method of synching and mimicking almost every action on screen with music. This technique can work with these types of cartoons and some comedy, but the idiom is mostly used as a negative expression, especially when utilised too obviously or with live action films.
3. Because many films today are set and based off different countries and cultures, the music also has to reflect that. Music is associative, we automatically link instruments, scales and tones to certain things. For example a flamenco guitar is Spain whereas the tabla drums are linked to India.
4. But even with all of this technical crap, although important, to me the aesthetics is what separates soundtrack music from any other genre. It is centred on emotion and timbre rather than the structural aspect of music. This means that the composer can easily portray a feeling to the audience even if they are not ‘musically educated’. Certain cues in soundtrack music personally just give me that ~feeling that other genres can’t provide.
So basically, I tip my hat to any soundtrack composer because they have so much to think about and in such a small space of time (Usually, at the beginning of the process, the composer will be told that he/she about 7 weeks to compose the whole thing but the film is postponed or late because of problems while filming. This leaves typically about 3-5 weeks composer to compose, hire musicians, hire the studio and record the soundtrack.)
tl;dr Soundtracks are awesome.
