As many of you may be aware, Howard Shore, composer of the awesome scores for the Lord of the Rings movies, has put together a concert version of the music which is being performed by various symphonies around the world. (Will be performed in Chicago in Fall.)
I have two questions: One, How does the classical “community” view this music? I read a review that said it wasn’t really a symphony, just a collection of movie themes. Is that a bad thing? Is movie music considered to be serious music by those who follow serious music?
Question Two: Anybody out there attended any of the concerts? What’s your personal verdict? (Me, I’d dearly love to go & hear it for myself in Chicago, but money will probably intervene).
There are very, very few movie soundtracks which hold up well as concert music. The main reason is the very first reason you suggest: the resulting collages are never well-integrated enough to sustain a teleological form essential to “classical” music. The tunes are nice, sometimes inspired, but they are never (or very rarely) fleshed out with counterpoint and development, and their dramatic shape is wholly tied to the images on the screen. Most soundtracks sound thrilling in the context of a movie, but are incapable of sustaining interest and are often beyond boring when heard outside that context.
In short, exceedingly few soundtracks ever have a hope of becoming a stable of classical repertoire, excepting at “pops” concerts which often feature lighter fare such as medleys from musicals and, of course, soundtracks from popular movies. A key point here is that the soundtracks which get played are those associate with the most popular movies: the attraction for the soundtrack is never its musical quality unto itself. Many excellent soundtracks are ingored because the movies they are in simply aren’t blockbusters.
There are a few exceptions, needless to say: Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Waterfront” being one of them. But it’s status as an exception is strong in that it was fully conceived and composed as a concert piece first, before it was taken apart and placed in the movie. However, even that work, the Symphonic Suite from “On the Waterfront” is not exactly a piece of standard repertoire, despite how good it is.
And yes, there is a crudely insipid LOTR Symphony written by some Dutch composer for concert band, which predates the movies. That piece is not particularly recommendable.
There’s a fairly long-standing tradition of composers writing incidental music for plays and such - why should incidental music for films work any less well? (I suppose the best known example - or at least the first one I can think of - would be Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites, which were written as incidental music for, guess what, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.) So, I don’t think incidental music can’t work as concert music on its own … whether Howard Shore’s does or not, I don’t know, I haven’t heard it.
