Film Score Composers Quotes

A stage adaptation of The Giver has been performed in cities and towns across the USA for years. More recently an opera has been composed and performed. And soon there will be a film. Does The Giver have the same effect when it is presented in a different way: It's hard to know. A book, to me is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does. There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat. The important thing is that another medium--stage, film, music--doesn't obliterate a book. The movie is here now, on a big screen, with stars and costumes and a score. But the book hasn't gone away. It has simply grown up, grown larger, and begun to glisten in a new way.

As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar!

In major movies these days, the fine details of music, instrumentation and sound design are lost. This is a shame, and it is one of the various reasons that make me not want to be part of the entertainment business. Although I have done it in the past, finally I know that I'm not here to create industry products. Music is more than images, it's more than language... it's the medium that's capable of communicating the answers to the Big Questions.

We see this even more in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954), with Mercer again at MGM, collaborating with composer Gene De Paul. This one has a real Broadway score, every number embedded in the characters’ attitudes. Ragged, bearded, buckskinned Howard Keel has come to town to take a wife, and a local belle addresses him as “Backwoodsman”: it’s the film’s central image, of rough men who must learn to be civilized in the company of women. The entire score has that flavor—western again, rustic, primitive, lusty. “Bless Yore Beautiful Hide,” treating Keel’s tour of the Oregon town where he seeks his bride, sounds like something Pecos Bill wrote with Calamity Jane. When the song sheet came out, the tune was marked “Lazily”—but that isn’t how Keel sings it. He’s on the hunt and he wants results, and, right in the middle of the number, he spots Jane Powell chopping wood and realizes that he has found his mate. But he hasn’t, not yet. True, she goes with him, looking forward to love and marriage. But her number, “Wonderful, Wonderful Day,” warns us that she is of a different temperament than he: romantic, vulnerable, poetic. They don’t suit each other, especially when he incites his six brothers to snatch their intended mates. Not court them: kidnap them. “Sobbin’ Women” (a pun on the Sabine Women of the ancient Roman legend, which the film retells, via a story by Stephen Vincent Benét) is the number outlining the plan, in more of Keel’s demanding musical tone. But the six “brides” are horrified. Their number, in Powell’s pacifying tone, is “June Bride,” and the brothers in turn offer “Lament” (usually called “Lonesome Polecat”), which reveals that they, too, have feelings. That—and the promise of good behavior—shows that they at last deserve their partners, whereupon each brother duets with each bride, in “Spring, Spring, Spring.” And we note that this number completes the boys’ surrender, in music that gives rather than takes. Isn’t

It’s important that you don’t leave your reader in the dark about characters’ subtext. Inexperienced writers often make this mistake, leaving it out of the narration completely. I come across this frequently in reviewing emerging writers’ manuscripts. I think it’s because they’re relying on how they hear and see the scene in their head, as though they’re watching a lively film. No wonder: ours is a film culture; we’re saturated by films. But a novel is not a film. In a film there is an actor skillfully showing every nuance of emotion, giving rich life to dialogue that might reveal nothing on the words’ surface. The actor is playing the subtext, and the viewer sees it. A film also gets the potent boost of a music score composed to stir specific emotions in the viewer. But that experience does not exist for the reader of a novel. The novelist does not enjoy the luxury of having an actor effortlessly reveal complex meaning with a single look, and a musical score to emphasize it. When subtext is necessary, the novelist must write it, write the character’s precise thoughts and feelings. Imagine the scene above stripped of its written subtext. It would be Cardinal simply saying, “Hi, Kelly. How’s school going?” and Kelly chattering on about her art, without the author giving us Cardinal’s emotional state as he listens. The reader would have no hint of the love Cardinal longs to convey with his words, but can’t.

The goal of the film composer is to walk the delicate line between serving the visual story and existing independently – between guiding an emotional journey and not being noticed.