Our students in the Music History, Culture and Creativity have a final project that involves providing music to a one minute clip of film, excerpted from the actual working print from which Paul Chihara worked. The excerpt is from a famous anime film and has SMPTE time-code streaming on top.

The class of 80 each has to score this one minute segment using only QuickTime Pro 7 ($29) and Audacity (available on both platforms and free). Quite a few students used GarageBand. The three professors have been discussing composing, and affect and effect and issues in film music around the world; we’ve had two guest lecturers speak about film music from different perspectives; and NOW they get to compose film music themselves! This is a real coup for me; the notion getting a class of 80 students composing film cues as naturally as if they were doing harmony exercises.

I am also quite satisfied that they taught themselves. I went over the process once in class, I put up a forum that so they could ask each other technical questions, and many used it.

In that adding music to video/film is becoming technologically easier and easier, why not add it to the list of musical exercises all music students should be required to do?

When I first came to UCLA, many of my colleagues referred to this chap as “Jamie”–a nickname he now supposedly loathes. He did his Masters work at UCLA, was a TA, a classmate of Mark Carlson, and was on the way towards getting a PhD, but the Roger Corman films started coming fast and furious. Juliana was an undergrad with him at USC. My dear friend and patron, Ronnie–who lets me stay in her Palm Springs house to compose and goes with me to new music concerts in LA–is his cousin. And despite all these connections, I had never met James until last Thursday when he came to speak to our composers about his work on Avatar.

He was soft-spoken at first, and as the two hour session went on, he became more forceful and clearly enjoyed talking and teaching these young and eager students–also his biggest fans. Many of them stayed afterwords to have their picture taken with James. He graciously stayed late to pose and speak with them.

Some memorable quotes and paraphrases:

• He has tremendous respect for John Williams. “In a class by himself.”
• Cameron was clear that he did NOT want any themes or melodies. “A tuneless score.” [WOW!]
• JC kept a tight hold on the reins for the entire score.
• JH graciously acceded that it is JC’s vision, his movie, his world. He pushes until it’s right.
• He spoke about his collaboration with Wanda in their effort to find a sonic palette “unlike anything we’ve ever heard.” Of the 25 instruments he culled, JC rejected 20 of them. JH ultimately blended these sampled instruments into his orchestration.
• He seemed proud of that his orchestration, “which I do myself” is rooted in tradition, but adding these new [sampled/world] instruments transforms it.
• JH, when asked what his favorite score was, admitted that he couldn’t pinpoint one film, rather cues from a variety of films.
• Juliana asked whether he would ever write an opera; he said ‘no’ but he would LOVE to write a ballet.
• “I could never make people cry in my concert music. In my music for film, I can. [...] I loved having the opportunity [in TITANIC] to help the audience fall in love with two characters; and knowing that they will both die offered me a unique musical challenge.”

I found James to be a true gentleman; a smart businessman; an excellent teacher; an sensitive artist with a big heart; and a composer who loves the art of collaboration, despite not always getting his way.

When the composition area at UCLA interviews perspective undergraduate students in composition, one of the questions we ask them is “Who are your favorite composers?” James Horner has been at the top of that list for five years running. I confessed that statistic to Horner as the session wound down. He was clearly touched. Another student [winner of this year's Jerry Goldsmith Award] confessed that James was his childhood “hero.”

For someone who had been described as quiet, shy and private, I saw a gracious, generous, sensitive but outgoing and humble man. He promises to come back for a future visit.

I loved Glass’ work in Koyaanisqatsi. Music is foreground; hand in glove with the imagery. Some of his other film scores seemed, to me, heavy handed: imposing themselves on the scenes rather than providing underscore.

Philip Glass’ score for THE ILLUSIONIST is his best yet. The harmonies are fresh; the melodies are new; the textures are new; he tailors his cues beautifully to the scenes, rather then the torn-off abrupt ending the minimalists have tended to favor; there are a wide range of dynamics (he used to favor terraced dynamics, mostly loud).

The cinematography is continually breathtaking; stellar performances by Edward Norton, Rufus Sewell and Paul Giamatti, and Glass’ score rounds it out. The music doesn’t really sound “minimalist”– if anything, it sounds “classical”––”serious”––continually effective.

Glass’ reward for providing such tasty underscore, is that he gets to let loose in the end credits, a cue called “Life in the mountains.” Here is that cue: lovely, don’t you think? A long way from Music in 5ths.

I’m sure many of you have heard this tune, not knowing what it was. I figured it out after watching THE THIRD MAN (1949) directed by Carol Reed, starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.

What is amusing to me is how Reed chose to use Anton Karas, the Viennese zither player, to score the entire film. The program notes on YouTube say:

Release dates, September 2, 1949 UK 2 January 1950 USA
The distinctive musical score was composed and played on the zither by Anton Karas. A single, “The Third Man Theme”, released in 1950 (Decca in UK, London Records in USA) became a best-seller, and later an LP was released.
Before the production came to Vienna, Karas was an unknown wine bar performer. Reed and Howard fell in love with Karas’ zither after hearing him play inside a café. Karas agreed to record some of his own compositions on a reel-to-reel tape machine that Reed set up in the bedroom of his hotel; one of these was later to become the Harry Lime Theme and become a popular hit. The exposure made Karas an international star after the movie was released.

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’?”
And I would say that never an introduction to the sadness reality was presented so well.

While musics plays, various documentary-style shots of post-war, divided, fragmented and occupied Vienna (a ‘frontier’ city dividing East and West – and governed by four Allied forces) are surveyed, an anonymous voice-over delivers a first-person prologue. Director Carol Reed in the original UK version. Joseph Cotten delivers prologue in US version.

Over the holiday I watched two movies, twice: Avatar, and Sherlock Holmes. Like Howard Shore in the Lord of the RIngs trilogy, Mr Horner’s score for Avatar is wall-to-wall music, and, for my money, effective and not memorable. Throwing in a song over the end credits didn’t matter as most of us were racing to the restrooms after sitting for three action-packed hours. My students all remember the Lord of the Rings music, but even after 3 viewings, it just never stuck for me. (Horner and Shore are, of course, terrific film composers, no trashing intended. Both know how to write sticky melodies.)

Hans Zimmer’s score for Sherlock Holmes was terrific. A small ensemble that features a banjo (huh?? in 19th century England??), a hammered dulcimer and a few other instruments. Only occasionally do we hear a full orchestra. Zimmer has fun with this score. He doesn’t try too hard, the score sounds relaxed, effortless, and memorable.

It made me think of scores where composers try too hard, drawing too much attention to themselves and their “goddam counterpoint” as Lionel Newman used to say. Horner’s score was effective and unmemorable; Zimmer’s was effective and memorable. I am in the school that favors memorable tunes in films, so that the audience walks away with not only a theatrical experience, but a new tune or two as well.

Gary Calamar

Despite having the same composer duo as seasons 1-3, someone’s wings got clipped in season 4.

As I study the credits on IMDB.com, the music figure gone after season three seems to be the music supervisor, Gary Calamar. Was it actually Calamar’s vision that made seasons 2 and 3 so terrific? I don’t know the inside story — I can only speculate: Calamar got bought away by someone else; the WeeDS team had to cut back their music budget as commissioning all those famous musicians became too expensive; or, Ms Kohan found the music was becoming too good, so much so that it was distracting from the story.

“Little Boxes” only appears in the opening episode for programmatic reasons–which is fine. Nothing really replaces the introduction now, the show just starts after we see the “previously, on WeeDS” segment. The variable theme music has been replaced by new clever Title/Creator card. Cheaper, I’m sure.

The music for season four is fine, normal, does its job like other TV shows. Too bad.

Mel Shapiro

I’m doing the music to a short film by Mel Shapiro called INFRARED. Mel, as you may remember, wrote the book and lyrics to HOMER IN CYBERSPACE — a musical we premiered last years. I’m playing all the parts myself using Logic 9 (just arrived yesterday). It’s the smokiest, jazziest music I’ve composed to date, but somehow the material seems to call for it. The orchestration so far is piano, pizz acoustic bass, brush light drums, and sustained strings. I’ve got a muted trumpet obbligato line in each cue if we need it — I’m leaving it out because it interferes with the dialog, but by itself, the chord progression is screaming for a melody. So, I’ll probably string together a piece made from cues from INFRARED and if we end up using the trumpet melodies, I’ll get a REAL trumpeter to play that line.

[I have some advice for electronic musicians in emulating monophonic instruments (i.e. instruments that can only play one note at a time) on a keyboard: don't let notes overlap; use ONE FINGER to play the melody whenever possible. You'll find this works surprisingly well, especially for brass. This won't work for fast passagework, of course.]

The “hit” song from the 38 minute film is called “Terrible” which is a very infectious Vaudevillian-type song that I know people will like.

I stumbled across this cover for a film I that did the music for in 1989 called NIGHT LIFE. I didn’t realize that it had been released in Spanish under the name “Animas” and at another time as “Vida Noctorna.” Here is the VHS cover. Zowie!

Remember this one? I had once thought that it was John and Yoko that were the trail blazers for Asian-Caucasian relationships, but no, South Pacific was. I looked at the population statistics for Hawaii and saw a huge spike right after this movie came out. But it wasn’t until after 1968 that interracial relationships were legal in America.

As I listened to the score of SOUTH PACIFIC, one of the most important harmonic colors is sharp-4. The sharp-4 (on the syllable ‘Hai’ in Bali Hai) gives a feeling of exoticism. The parallel chords in the introduction to this song evoke impressionism––a style that was also strongly influenced by the East (Debussy heard the Balinese gamelan in the 1894 Worlds Fair). The final chord of the song has a tonic add-6 chord that gives the impression of a magical hovering, not unlike that magical island in the distance in the film.

The most stunning film I’ve seen in a long time is Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Ennio Morricone provides mystic cowboy music for the score with haunting, unforgettable leitmotivs. Every shot in the film is one I would be proud to blow up and hang on my wall. Every shot has a fantastic sense of perspective, texture, and clutter. Yes, clutter. He jams stuff into every shot. It is really western baroque in its attention to detail — detail made up of little things, and shapes. The textures are breathtaking. Pause any frame in the film and you’ll see what I mean. (The representation on YouTube is a lower resolution than what you will see on the DVD.)

Many composers in the 20th century were driven to explore alternative sound sources. “Musique concrete” was such a music put together from bits and pieces of sounds: sounds made by familiar and ambiguous sources. The sound is then manipulated and can be played backwards or sped up or slowed down. This is all common practice nowadays, but then it was done by cutting up and splicing pieces of audio tape. French composers, Pierre Henry, and Pierre Schaeffer were the pioneers in this field. Here is Schaeffer’s first work in this genre, “Etude aux chemins de fer” (1948).

In “Once Upon a Time in the West” Ennio Morricone uses musique concrete to provide a chillingly original and effective film score.

Sounds are collected and looped In the opening scene, we hear a drip, and then something that is probably a bird. An unusual bird. But then it changes. We don’t find out what actually is making the sound until 5 minutes into the movie. (It is a squeaky windmill.) This use of sonic found objects from the scene of the shoot is an organic approach and highly effective. There are no pitches or melodies or harmonics in the opening of the film. (Morricone evidently wrote some but it was discarded.) We hear water dripping, insect buzzing, train sounds, bells, a mysterious choral chant, escaping steam, along with the mysterious bird call that opens and closes this amazing scene.

And then the first “music” enters — it is the harmonica leitmotiv.

We don’t find out what it means until the end of the film, and I won’t tell you, but this little tune is used continually throughout the film. The main orchestrational palette in the film is the harmonica, the solo banjo, and strings.

There is a love making scene that is accompanied by a solo viola that is not to be missed.

Morricone was Leone’s composer of choice. Contrary to tradition, Leone asked Morricone to compose the music FIRST, so that all the actors could get the feeling of the movie and reflect it in their work.

His controlled sense of patience in pacing is palpable. Everything unfolds and flows slowly. The music and sonic creatures drift in the air. No scherzo, no danse macabre, no moto perpetuo. It just hangs in the air, like gunsmoke in a bright New Mexican sky.