I am a great admirer of the composers who worked for Hollywood in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s-composers like Korngold, Newman, etc. It really seems to me that film scores were magnificent pieces of music back then. Today, most movies seem to play pop music, instead of an orchestral score. I really enjoy listening to the old movie scores.
So, was the muiv better in the olden days?
Dunno if it’s “better” but a lot of times a pop song in a film soundtrack strikes me as lazy. Relying on some pre-created song that has no actual relationship to the movie to put across some point of storytelling. Admittedly this can be quite effective and there are pop-track montages that I think are truly genius but a lot of times to me it comes across like “let’s license something to create a phony association between the song and our movie” or “let’s put a pop song in here so we can bootstrap a hit single and soundtrack off the film” rather than “let’s compose a special piece of music designed to evoke the mood of the piece or to be the theme of the character.”
Lots of classic films didn’t have original scores either. As a young Creature-Feature fan, I had my first introduction to “Swan Lake” via the original “The Mummy”.
I think there were just about as many great original film scores then as now, and just as many rehashing popular songs of the era or royalty-free classical music in their scores.
There have always been great film scorers. I love Bernrd Herrman, myself. His career stretched from the thirties through the 1980s. He scored Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Ray Harryhausen, and Truffaut, among others.
Since the 1950s we’ve had
Jerry Goldsmith
Lalo Schifrin
John Freakin’ Williams
Danny elfman
the bulk of Elmer Bernstein’s work
and lots of others. There’s no doubt that there were excellent compopsers back then (Max Steiner. Dmitri Tiomkin, Hans J. Salter), and back then they were less likwely to use pop music that wasn’t written exclusively for the show.
I disagree that using pre-existing music for your film score is a bad thing. There’s so much music out there that there is probably something that “gets” your particular scene. Even in classical music alone (both old and modern), you can probably capture damn near any scene.
You must be watching the wrong movies, or not noticing the music because current sound editing tends to be a little less heavy-handed when it comes to putting music into films. I’m a score junkie, and I have a lot of scores that are easily as majestic and evocative as the scores of old. The music for the three Lord of the Rings movies, for example, or Memoirs of a Geisha, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Princess Mononoke, Sleepy Hollow … the list goes on. The music for Fight Club, while not really majestic, was a perfect musical setting for the feel of the film. The music for the recent Mummy movies harkens back to classic adventure movie music much like the Indiana Jones music does.
There’s also been some amazing music composed for non-films. Yoko Kanno tends to bring together multiple genres of music in her music for TV shows like Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Blizzard Entertainment is known for the quality of the music it puts in its video games, especially when they put together an expansion with a genuine orchestra and chorus – World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade has hours upon hours of amazing themes beautiful enough to stick in your head, understated enough not to distract you from game play, and intricate enough that they don’t get on your nerves even after hearing them two hundred times.
Whether one score is better than another is always a matter of taste, of course, but if the question is whether composers these days lack the skill and art that the composers had sixty, seventy, eighty years ago – the answer is no.
Agreed. **2001: A Space Odyssey ** anyone?
(interestingly, an original score was created for the movie, but Kubrick much preferred the classical music that he had used during previews)