The Recent Evolution of Film Music - Part 2

In the last part of this article, I was explaining how I think that the change in the way how film music is being created has influenced the music itself.

The fact that film scores are more "produced" than "written" nowadays has tremendous implications on the music itself. In many cases this has lead to an obsession with sound. Many film scores nowadays don't go through the step of "properly recording" them after they are being approved but they are more or less at a final stage already when they are being approved. Especially more electronic orientated scores don't go through an actual "recording" phase but are being constantly developed and finalized during the composition process.

As I said in the last part, this opens up a whole new way for composers to get into filmscoring without "classical" academic training but there are some negative side effects as well. Some of these side effects also apply to academically trained composers, as many of the film scoring courses nowadays focus alot on the production side of things.

The Influence of Orchestral Samples

In many ways, composers who don't go through a thorough educational phase where they learn what is possible with real instruments very often become creatively limited by their orchestral samples. A lot of what defines the current film score style is just a direct consequence of "sample composition". For instance it is and has been possible for a while to convincingly create beds of string staccatos with brass chords on top.  On the other hand, a lot of the writing that sounds phenomenal with real orchestras and has been used for decades is very hard to pull off convicingly with samples. Just imagine trying to get high soaring violin legatos to sound good with samples.

But with filmmakers demanding to approve almost perfect sounding tracks, composers have of course limited their music to things that sound good in a sample version which created some sort of constant feedback loop (through temptracks etc.) which lead to filmmusic favoring such things. And consequentially, even when nowadays through the advancement of samples it has become more and more possible to imitate a real orchestra better, the decade long phase of sample limits has brought up a generation of composers who understands these limits as "the orchestral default". 

This whole development has gone so far that some composers are disappointed by a real orchestra recording of their music because it doesn't sound as fat as the many libraries that they layered on top of each other, resulting very often in samples being the fundament in the mix with the real orchestra just "adding in".

Consequentially this again leads to a distortion in the real orchestra world. Recent decades have shown a disproportional growth of certain sections in the film orchestras. It is not uncommon to nowadays see sections of 12 Horns or Trombones in scoring sessions to mimick the fatness of the sound that the sample demos created. In a way, film orchestras have become a xerox of a xerox of a xerox. 

This of course could be seen as a new way of musical expression and development of the musical language. But is it, though? Personally, I know a lot of orchestral music that has been written for a "regular" sized orchestra that sounds "bigger" than all these "huge section" scores, just because it has been orchestrated well. I personally often see the approach to solve the problem of a "too small sounding orchestra"  by simply adding more musicians as the lazy alternative to "fixing the orchestration". There are only rare cases where these huge sections really seem appropriate. However, you can't be blamed for chosing this way if your entire musical upbringing has circled around sample orchestras.

The Influence of the DAW

I have stated several times already that I see a lack of control when writing music in a DAW rather than writing it on a Score Sheet. One of the biggest issues is the vertical connection between lines which is lacking much more in most DAW compositions. In fact, I would say that a DAW composition remains obviously a DAW composition even when transfered to Score Sheet. For instance, even the highly detailed scores by John Powell, who conceives them in a DAW clearly show a degree of orchestrational "blockyness" that happens when you focus on a certain figure in a certain section without having the overview of the entire orchestra at that specific moment. 

Educational Limits

While this sounds extremely elitist coming from someone with an academical background, there very often is a limit of what can be reached through teaching music to yourself. Not necessarily because it is not possible to theoretically absorb and learn all the things an academic training offers on your own but much more because you often stop doing so at the level of "good enough". Motivation to push further is of course limited if your non-musical client is happy with what you're giving them. And unfortunately many even very ambitioned composers get stuck at a level that is just above what they need to write to pay the bills. Another issue as mentioned above is that a lot of film scoring courses have adjusted to the shift in the industry as well, particularly expanding their curriculum on the production side of things. This of course makes total sense considering the increased need for production skills but on the other hand it keeps feeding that feedback cycle mentioned earlier.

There are several things that an academical training does which in retrospective I value tremendously:

1.) Forcing you to dive into music and musical concepts that are beyond your personal interest which however subconsciously have a huge impact on your own writing. Music is not sorted in boxes that are stowed away but everything connects with everything, so learning to become a more universal musician makes you a better musician at a specific task.

2.) Challenging Feedback. In music university, you don't get away with a half assed idea that would make 90% of non musical clients happy but you get pushed by musically educated feedback. Of course the academic bubble can become a problem if it gets too detached from the "real world" but having someone question your work at a high level motivates you to keep pushing.

3.) Network. Being in a bubble of other musicians in best case scenarios motivates you to push each other forward more and more. Being in your early 20s seeing some of your fellow students writing a piece that you admire motivates you to strive for more in your next attempt. Of course that also happens in the film composer world where you might be motivated by another composer's work but physically seeing each other almost every day nerding out about music at least for me created a higher motivation for improvement.

Why is this important if your clients demand only music that is not very challenging? If the task that you have to do is just below your capabilities your solution will still be weaker than the solution by someone who has the same task but their skill set exceeds the complexity of this task by a considerable amount.

Of course, we can only look at the broad development of the industry and there are alot of instances that are exception to this but in a way we could see current filmmusic in a trend of trivialisation. On several levels we lost sophistication of the actual craft of writing music. Additionally, we gained sophistication on the production side. I think we can not clearly call whether the general decline of melody is due to skill limits of composers being able to write a compelling melody or due to other factors. But what we can say for sure is that film music has limited itself from using the full potential of musical expression. And of course there is this wide field of soundtracks these days that are not really orchestral and go more towards sound design which are a world on their own and require another skillset.

I personally see a very big difference between limits that you consciously chose to set or limits that are set by your lack of capabilites.

Having said that, circling back to that constant argument of John Williams vs. Hans Zimmer from the beginning of this dicussion, there is something more to unearth here. I reject to position both in the two extreme corners of Williams being the classically trained composer with extreme writing skills who could not produce a single note in a DAW and Zimmer being the self taught composer with extreme producing skills who would struggle writing a detailed piece on score sheet. But we can maybe use both as symbols for the "old" and "new" ways of film music.

Being part of the composer/musician bubble we often get too caught up in a world that celebrates "musician's music." Part of the truth is, that current film music is commercially more successful than "traditional" film music. If we look at Spotify stream counts, Williams has about 2/3 of the daily listeners of Hans Zimmer (ca. 400k vs 600k). While this should not be seen as a definitive measurement, I would also argue that the Zimmer tours that fill venues of more than 15000 people all over the world probably outnumber what a similar tour effort by Williams would draw in.

Nevertheless we can probably say that the general audience reacts more to reduced musical concepts than to sophisticated ones. This of course also proves a look at current chart trends. With film music being a commercial art form that needs to speak to a general audience, it is of course a wise decision to write music that creates the biggest audience reaction. 

It probably comes down to where you see yourself in that spectrum and I think there is no wrong or right here. I see composers who have incredible commercial success because they deliver exactly what is in demand in spite of having a rather limited skill set and I see composers with unbelievable writing chops staying in the shadow for their entire creative life because they don't go with the commercial trend. Unfortunately, with music just because you're good at it doesn't mean that you're successful with it.

I personally think there must be a middleground somewhere. One that allows accessibility on the one hand and the utilization of the entire bandwidth of musical expression on the other. All the great masters of filmmusic from past times that we remember nowadays went way beyond what was "commercially necessary" with their work. They did so because they wanted to give it their best shot. And those are the scores that we remember, that get played in concerts all over the world. They managed to transition to become classics and stood the test of time. I'm not entirely sure this will be the case with all film scores written today.

In the next part, we will discuss how the film industry and films in general have changed and how that influenced the film music.