Innovation in (Media) Music

For centuries, the subject of innovation has been a central element of every art form. Artists from all disciplines tried to find new ways of expression and thought provoking concepts to explore and expand the boundaries of their art form.

The target has always been to express something new while standing on the shoulders of the past without being derivative.

In a way, this premise seems really logical. The desire to say something new through one's own art that hasn't been said before and not just repurposing what exists already is absolutely understandable and of course, the ambition to be the first to do something is a quite attractive thought for every artist.

However, the conflict arises when this ambition meets a set of "natural limitations."

With music, there are several natural limitations that exist. One for instance is what is reproducable on instruments or what is "processible" by the audience. While the first barrier is relatively easy to overcome by simply eliminating the factor of the human player and exploring sounds that are decoupled from traditional instruments (like electronics), the second barrier has become a great source for arguments including the discussion where this barrier actually lies.

However, we have to say that already by the early 20th century, avantgarde music has broken through this barrier. And this is where the debate becomes very heated:

Our brain works in certain ways and has a relatively clear limit of what it can process musically. I will dedicate a more comprehnsive post to this topic but in a nutshell, our brain is wired to recognize patterns when perceiving things. When you repeat a melody or a phrase, our brain recognizes this as a pattern and gives us a feeling of reward when figuring out such patterns.

By the late 19th century, music has grown in complexity that pushed the limits of what structures even trained musicians' ears (or rather brains) could comprehend "ad hoc" (=by just listening to it). Not only have harmonic paths become more complex but also strucutral elements of musical works including melodies have become harder to digest.

At latest with 12 tone music in the early 20th century, avantgarde music has left the territory of what the human brain is capable of processing. For instance, nobody can from a hearing standpoint recognize the retrograde of a 12 tone row. The development which arose from this school of thought lead to further complication of musical structures leading to serial music that rose to a level of complexity and organisation that woud acoustically not be distingushable anymore from music that has been developed from musical concepts of pure chance and chaos.

Additionally, with the advent of the 20th century and the possibility to record music, there has been a sudden explosion and fragmentation of different musical schools of thought and approaches that often coexisted sometimes with radically different approaches (e.g. the simplicity of Minimal Music vs. the further dissolving of "musical sounds" by "Musique concrète"). However, the unifying property of many contemporary composition trends has been that it went beyond the  "intuitive comprehendability" of the general audience. Oftentimes, without a verbal explanation, you wouldn't understand what the piece is about.

In a way, many contemporary musical trends force you to throw listening experiences and expectations overboard and in a way embrace the lack of orientation that you very often experience in such music.

It is absolutely impossible, to cover that development in just a few sentences so everything that I said above is an overly compressed version of a topic that could fill books but it should be enough to at least lay the groundwork for what I actually want to discuss today.

In media music, the word "innovation" is generally understood a bit differently, if not to say "mainstreamy". A few weeks ago, on a forum for media composers that we all know, there was a poll asking who people thought was the most innovative film composer with the result that Hans Zimmer won by a landslide. 

In film and media music there is an understanding of innovation, as opposed to the innovation that I talked about above, that we could maybe call "recombinatory innovation".

It is understood as an innovation if you combine existing things into a hybrid form:

Ethnic Instruments + Orchestra = Innovation

Heavy Metal + Orchestra = Innovation

Church Organ + Orchestra = Innovation (?)

You get the idea. 

Hans Zimmer is undoubtedly the master of "recombinatory innovation" in a way that the once cleary noticable fusion between two elements (e.g. Orchestra+Ethnic Percussion) has become its own genre (Epic Music). Now, we could start an endless debate about whether the innovation that Zimmer brought to media music is similarly creative than the innovation that avantgarde composers have brought to the table in contemporary music but then again, we are defeated by the blurry definition of "innovation" on its own.

Is innovation in media music already an innovation if it hasn't been done before in the combination with media (movie, game) or is it only innovation it it has NEVER been done before?

If the later one, we probably have to admit that at least in the mainstream world, no media composer has  been truly innovative as I can't remember a single instance of media music pushing the boundaries of music on its own. But if we say that the benchmark lies at "hasn't been done in media before" we definitely have to admit that Hans Zimmer is indeed an innovator. And in fact he is way more of an innovator with what he has done in the early 2000s than what John Williams has done in the late 70s. If you want to put it negatively, Williams largely returned back to film music that was gone for a few decades while Hans Zimmer truly embraces the new technology and recombinatory innovation to create film music that definitely hasn't been heard like that before.

With media music, we have one more big factor at play that we ignored until now: accessibility. As soon as we work in mainstream media, we target a mainstream audience with a mainstream taste of music, a mainstream literacy of music and a mainstream experience of music. In order to successfully do our job as media composers, we need to write music that creates the desired effect/emotion with a mainstream audience.

This premise alone limits what we can theoretically do beyond well treaded paths as any musical adventure might make the audience disoriented and not get the narrative that we're trying to bring across. Film and game music enthusiasts have fought for decades to make it more appreciated in the "classical music world" and not only see it as functional music but in a certain way, it still needs to be functional. And unfortunately, most contemporary musical styles are only usable to create "unsettling, scary, eerie" emotions with a mainstream audience. So in order to increase the probability that the music does what it is supposed to do, we very often need to rely on the "collective musical memory" and use musical devices that trigger the right associations.

If we look at the film industry, there is yet another factor at play here which is the problems that main stream productions have become "too big to fail" which has considerably minimized the risks that studios are willing to take. With the exponential growth of movie budgets, the danger of one blockbuster that fails at the box office to create some serious financial troubles for production companies is so big that studios prefer to go the safe route with their productions. This very often eliminates experimental approaches in movies and also in movie scores. So even if a composer sets out to be more avantgarde with their score, their approach will most likely be shot down by the director or studio.

Which leaves only room "mild forms" of innovation. All the scores from the last decades that have been celebrated for their innovation were either recombinatory or sonically innovative. Not one left the safe space of tonality or common time signatures for significant amounts of time. Innovation happens on the sound, not on the musical elements. Again, with all the factors mentioned above, this forms of innovation might be just right for the media world.

On postion two in the poll about innovative film composers that I mentioned earlier came Bernard Herrmann who in my opinion pushed the boundaries of film music considerably harder than Hans Zimmer does. Herrmann used (for film music) relatively radical composition techniques as well as innovative orchestration decisions and line-ups. Herrmann (and Hitchcock) went considerably less safer routes with their musical concepts compared to today's innovation.

The discussion about innovation is endless and everybody who works in the field needs to find their own approach in this regard.

Right after school, for a few weeks I was an intern at a concert agency that was organizing a yearly festival for contemporary music. I was involved in taking care of the artists, technically helping out in the concert and generally helping out in the organisation of this event. For me, this was a time which really defined my compass musically. I was astonished by the amount of imposters in this "world". I encountered composers who behaved like a diva but whose music was soulless and craftless "art" music. My personal highlight was a composer who seriously used randomized General Midi sounds as a contemporary work of music who in the following interview clearly didn't know what he was talking about. I experienced an audience that was only there so they could later on tell their friends that they attended a contemporary music festival and wallow in their admiration.

Of course, I am aware that this was at best a third rate festival and there are countless composers of contemporary music who constantly blow my mind by writing music that feels incredibly fresh and yet emotionally accessible. Yet, seeing the emperor without clothes in a field of music that I felt I was just too stupid to understand really helped me to develop my own view on this world.

For my own writing, I generally follow the approach that I want to be emotionally touched by music. As long as I feel like I can achieve that through my music, I don't really care whether I step on paths that have been walked a million times or whether I use an approach that is relatively "special". I try however to constantly remind myself of the audience that I'm writing for. I feel that consciously forcing innovation is never creating a good result. If the music naturally calls for a more innovative approach that is great, if it works with a more traditional approach that is good either.

As I said above, everybody needs to find their own approach to the century old question of "How much new do I want to add to this?" So we will and should not find a definitive answer to this.

We live in times where the word "innovation" is overused as a commercial argument to sell something and this unfortunately also applies in music. Very often, things that are said to be innovative are relatively far away from being truly innovative. If Hans Zimmer's work is true innovation lies in the eye of the beholder but then again there are also people who say that everything has been done already in music so the desire to find something new is useless. So this discussion will probably never end.