Month: May 2003

Oh, and speaking of the “$374K-a-year, Top One Percent” thing — I’m no expert on economics and I’m not particularly inclined to work through all the math on my own (yeah, I’m lazy that way — it’s not that I’m bad at math, but when it comes to math I’m not very patient at all). So, as income disparity grows and more and more of our nation’s wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, would it not follow that if these trends are allowed to proceed unchecked, than that $374K/year figure will actually go up? In other words, is the cut-off line for the Top One Percent going to keep going up?

I’m wondering because if someone manages to move from, say, $65K/year to $150K/year over ten years or so, but the Top One Percent figure rises disproportionally as well — actually, I’m not sure exactly what that would mean. If anything. Any ideas, anyone?

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The other day I bitched eloquently expressed my annoyance at the removal of composer Alan Silvestri from the upcoming film Pirates of the Caribbean. In so doing, I realized that I haven’t listened to much of Silvestri’s music lately, so I did a bit of “crash listening”.

Silvestri is generally viewed as a “B-level” composer. He’s not one of the masters, like John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith, but he’s a solid professional who always turns it good work which is generally very accessible but also has more of a distinctive voice than some of the duller composers working today. I think that viewing Silvestri as a “B-level” guy sells him a bit short; it implies that what he does isn’t as good as the greats, whereas I think what he does is a bit different. Thus, if Williams and Goldsmith are the Wagner and Verdi of film music today, I see Silvestri not as a Bellini (a second-rate guy) but as a Sir Arthur Sullivan (a first-rate guy who’s not doing hugely profound work by design and intent).

Silvestri’s work tends toward pastiche, mainly because a lot of the films on which he works tend toward pastiche. But pastiche isn’t something on which we should a priori discount or look down upon; and it’s my view that when Silvestri is allowed to go beyond pastiche (which isn’t all that often, admittedly) he can hold his own with anyone. So here’s a general rundown on the Silvestri scores with which I’m most familiar. This is not exhaustive, but I think it captures most of his biggest profile scores.

:: Romancing the Stone. This was the first of Silvestri’s scores that I recall noticing. It’s notable for its use of Latin-American sounds, reflecting the film’s setting of Colombia, as opposed to the more “Korngold-esque” style of adventure scoring.

:: Back to the Future, I, II, and III. Silvestri’s work on this trilogy is actually pretty interesting. It’s known best for the main BTTF theme, which is a big, brassy melody that’s most often scored as a march and motif for Marty McFly’s adventures. However, the trilogy’s wide-range between time periods allows Silvestri to indulge in 50s style madcap comedy stylings, sci-fi adventure, and even Western-style Americana. It’s all in great fun, even if the BTTF theme gets a bit repetitive.

:: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Here Silvestri does pastiche-to-the-max, what with his take on comic noir, cartoons, jazzy hard-boiled romance, and more just plain madcap foolery. He breaks absolutely no new ground in this score, but with this much fun being had, he doesn’t need to.

:: The Abyss. While Silvestri is best known for his long-standing relationship with director Robert Zemeckis, this score to James Cameron’s undersea SF thriller is one of my favorites. I love how Silvestri is able to suggest the unknown vastness of the world beneath the sea, capturing both the fear and the wonder down there. The action writing isn’t his best – serviceable, but not particularly notable – but the other stuff is gold. (And it’s my firmly held opinion that The Abyss is far, far superior to Aliens, a film whose near-classic status I find incomprehensible.)

:: The Bodyguard. Yes, it had an Alan Silvestri score. This film isn’t just the source of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, which held sway as the Most Overplayed Song In History between 1992 and 1997 (when “My Heart Will Go On” seized that title). Here Silvestri wrote some noirish, bluesy music that I’m not sure was ever released on CD.

:: Forrest Gump. Silvestri really indulged his penchant for Americana in this film (which I still like, even though it’s probably the most hated Best Picture in history). The score is one of Silvestri’s most accessible works, full of melodies that are mostly characterized by simplicity, as befits the film’s main character. There are two soundtrack albums for Forrest Gump: one features Silvestri’s score, and the other is the song-compilation album (I will have more to say about song-compilation albums in another essay, someday.) The song-comp CD includes a suite of Silvestri’s music, which basically consists of the suite he wrote for the film’s end credits with a prelude of Forrest’s Theme, played mostly on the piano before the strings swell and take it over. This is my favorite of all of Silvestri’s melodies. I love how it offsets with the gently syncopated piano background, and I love how the piano continues to elaborate on the theme and provide background coloring even when the strings take over. As for the rest of the score, it’s pretty much mainstream Silvestri, and that End Credits suite actually covers pretty much all of it.

:: Contact. My favorite of all of Alan Silvestri’s film scores. This one is deceptive, sounding much simpler than it really is. In fact, if one listens to the End Credits suite from Contact immediately after listening to the same suite from Forrest Gump, one might initially think that Silvestri has fallen victim to the James Horner self-quoting trap. But the differences quickly become apparent, as the main Contact theme (Ellie Arroway’s theme, I suppose) is punctuated by soft horn calls that imply, to my ears, Ellie’s constant wishing for the stars. And there are passages in this score that capture the “Sense of cosmic wonder” that dominated everything Carl Sagan ever wrote (he wrote the original novel on which Contact is based). There is also some excellent suspense music, accompanying the scene where the alien transmission is first received. Silvestri builds the suspense nicely, but without loud histrionics; this befits the conflicting impulses in the SETI researchers (“Oh God, I think we’ve found it!” versus “Oh God, this can’t be it.”) This probably sounds trite, but Silvestri’s score to Contact always makes me want to go off into a field and look up at the night sky.

:: Castaway. Silvestri and Zemeckis took a chance on this one: they left a great deal of the film totally unscored. There is virtually no music in most of the film, and all of the island sequences are unscored. The music only really starts up again when Tom Hanks finally gets off the island on his raft. At that moment, Hanks has done everything in his power, and now he is putting his fate in other hands. Thus, the music of the film is quasi-religious in nature. It isn’t specifically liturgical, but I find it has a very solemn, hymnic feel. There’s not a lot more I can say about it.

The largest-profile score of Silvestri’s with which I am unfamiliar is The Mummy Returns. I have heard that it is an excellent adventure-film score, but I have also heard the complaint that anyone who has dipped into film scores at all will know: “They left the best part off the CD!” (That’s another issue I’ll delve into some other time.) Silvestri also wrote music for the TV series CHiPS. The wacky music you remember from those chases on the LA Freeway system, and the goofy stuff that accompanied those freeze-frames of everybody grinning at the end of every episode? Yep, Silvestri. But don’t hold it against him. Everybody starts out somewhere.

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23 September 2003:

That is all.

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I’m pretty sure that my mother has no idea that I write this blog, so I’m not going to use this space to observe Mother’s Day in her honor. But I will thank all of your mothers, who raised you all to have such discriminating taste as to read Byzantium’s Shores. And now, as Yoda said: Pass on what you have learned! Save you, it can!

ummm….yeah….

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Wow….first posts on atheism, and now SDB is once again spanking Apple Computer. It’s like old times over on USS Clueless!!

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Matthew Yglesias makes a very useful point for liberals and Democrats who want to argue against the Bush tax-cut plan: state the opposition in a way that people are more likely to understand. Few people really have any idea of just who falls into the “Top One Percent”, so what Democrats need to do is stop saying “Top One Percent”, and instead actually cite the salary figure that people need to be above if they want to be in Bush’s privileged percentile. That number? $374,000 per year.

Looking at that number, I suddenly find it spectacularly unlikely that I will ever be in the Top One Percent, and what’s more, I certainly don’t know anyone who’s even close, either.

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The media critic on CBS Sunday Morning — whose name I can never remember, despite the fact that he’s been doing the reviews on that show for years and I’ve watched them for as long as he’s been doing them — reviewed The Matrix Reloaded this morning. He described the movie as one of “the most pretentious” action films he’s ever seen. That doesn’t bode well, and it seems to reflect some other reviews I’ve read. Virtually all of them agree that the film spends a great deal of time in talk-mode, with Laurence Fishburne spouting a lot more of the prophetic, mystical stuff from the first movie.

I’m one who didn’t find the original Matrix all that interesting from the philosophical standpoint. The ideas expressed in its running time are pretty much covered in any standard, college-level introductory philosophy class, and all the Christ-like imagery got a bit heavy-handed. And I don’t think the film improves on repeat viewings, once the “Wow”-factor falls off. So, if I’m the one person in the universe who thinks that of the big SF films to come out in 1999, that The Phantom Menace is the superior film, well, I’ll just suffer in my loneliness.

I plan on seeing Reloaded, but it’s not terribly high on my list of priorities. I’m much more jazzed about seeing X2 tomorrow.

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Isn’t that the loveliest looking cup of coffee you’ve ever seen? It sure makes this mug of Eight O’Clock Hazelnut Coffee that I’m drinking right now look kind of lame. Check out this article on Seattle’s most exacting coffee master, the guy with the highest standards in a city that views coffee the way Buffalo views chicken wings.

I own a Krups espresso machine, but I don’t use it that often because I misplaced the instructions in a move some years back, and I’m not entirely sure now of how to get the best results. Am I supposed to tamp the grounds into the filter basket, or do I level them loosely? Do I brew the espresso right into the demitasse cups, or do I brew it into the glass carafe and then pour it into the cups? Why is it that I never get that beautiful foam on top of my espresso?

I do grind my own beans, which is something, I guess. No “Taster’s Choice” for me. I like to think that if Sam Jackson and John Travolta ever drop by, looking to dispose of some poor slob they’ve accidentally shot in the face, they’d be impressed with my coffee; but reading about this Seattle fellow, I’m not so sure.

(BTW: The linked article was written by Jon Bonne, who also wrote the articles I linked a few weeks back about the privately-developed space ship. This guy is getting paid to write articles about things that interest me, and they’re generally fascinating articles, too. Therefore, I both admire him and want to kill him.)

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I haven’t begun my month of reading nothing but short fiction yet, because I’m trying to finish a novel for review at Green Man Review, and the book is very slow going, because I’m just not liking it. If it was a book I’d bought myself, or checked out of the library, it would be back on the shelf and forgotten already; but since I’m committed to reviewing it, I have to finish it.

I’m hoping to finish the damn thing this weekend.

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Film Music excursions, part the third: Program Music, one.

The classic Disney film Fantasia opens with a bit of narration by musicologist Deems Taylor, as the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra take their place in the studio. Taylor spends a moment or two describing what is to come in the film, and this in turn involves the distinction between “absolute” music and “program” music. The distinction is simply this: program music is music that tells a definite story, while absolute music does not. Absolute music is abstract music, depicting nothing but a series of musical relationships much as the shapes and colors in an abstract painting depict nothing specific.

This seems, at first, a perfectly sensible distinction. But I had an experience in, of all places, a grade school music class that suggests otherwise.

This was that standard class we all knew and hated, when we’d all get handed a bunch of song-books, the teacher would play the piano and teach us the songs, and we’d sit there either half-heartedly singing or, more likely, just “lipping” along, hoping she wouldn’t notice. (She always did, the crafty old bat….) Or sometimes she’d lecture us on some classical composer and play some music on the stereo and we’d once again sit like bumps, listening along. (I’m not sure why we ever had these classes in the first place. It always seemed to me that a better approach to music education would be to require every student to either learn an instrument for band or orchestra, or failing that, participate in the choir. But I digress.)

Anyway, one time Mrs. Herkishimer (not her real name; I don’t remember it) wanted to demonstrate the evocative power of music or something like that. When we got into class and took our assigned seats, she proceeded to hand out to each student one sheet of white paper and a few crayons. Our mission, she then informed us, was to listen to the piece of music she was about to play on the stereo and draw what we imagined the music to be depicting. Soon we’re all drawin’ away while the air is filled with the strains of some orchestral masterpiece, and when it was done she asked us all what we drew. Since the music was pretty dramatic, some of us drew space battles; others drew forest scenes with big animals; some drew towering mountains, et cetera. No one, to my recollection, drew a ship plying the waters of a great and unknown sea, even though the piece turned out to be the first movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s program music masterpiece, Scheherazade. That movement is titled “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship”.

Since that day I’ve doubted very much that music ever, truly, expresses any concrete image. When we encounter a piece of music that bears a descriptive title, I suspect that in every case this is because the composer had that image in mind before he or she began the composing. Thus the music does not so much depict the image as it depicts what the composer had in mind, musically, when considering that image. The two are not the same thing.

This was borne out years later when I read Leonard Bernstein’s invaluable book The Joy of Music, in which there is a chapter — in the form of a dialogue — where Bernstein questions the very notion of “descriptive” music when a friend of his describes some hills as “pure Beethoven”. The whole idea of Beethoven’s music evoking physical scenery strikes Bernstein as almost alien. He later brings up an Etude by Chopin, and posits that while Chopin is saying something in this music, it must be something that Chopin had felt could only be expressed in music, or else he would have used words to say it in the first place.

So I ultimately suspect that the connection between music and imagery is much weaker than many believe. What are the implications, then, for listeners of music, and for film music in particular? Stay tuned.

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