acroyear | on film music being played by "classical" music stations (Reply)

This blog post had a ton of internet wrong on it, so I wrote a bunch of thoughts in the classcial music lj comm.

classical_music: Can film music ever be classical?:

The fact that he (or the editors of the web site) assumed "Ryan" Shore and not Howard "The Other Ring Cycle" Shore already threw me off taking him seriously.

Ryan's good, but among the names he mentioned in the rest of the sentence (Williams, Zimmer), it's Howard Shore that people think of when they hear the name Shore as a composer.

Shostakovich and Vaughn-Williams both wrote film scores, and Naxos and other labels (Chandros, I think) have been releasing quite a bit of newly recorded film scores from such big-names of the 20th century. Supposedly, the only reason Stravinsky never did was was that he out-priced himself out of the market.

As for the rest of his attitude: it's total bollucks.

Yes, I can agree that most film scores won't make the repertoire, arrogant though that term has become of late. Then again, most other 20th and 21st century works won't either.

But one shouldn't diss orchestral film scores as being lesser. They should be looked at as the doors by which someone can enter the classical (well, Romantic and 20th century) world. Find someone who really likes John Williams's Star Wars and show them Stravinsky, show them Holst, show them Copland, show them where it all comes from and maybe, just maybe, they'll bite into something deeper.

That's why I'm here, with a collection that rivals most record store catalogs - I loved film music and finally my curiosity made me dig to discover where it came from.

Basically, it really comes down to the other half of that "classical" label and its problems. We all know "classical" as a term is both limiting and wrong historically and conceptually. But rather than assume the label is wrong as a whole, he would rather per force embrace the label and then condemn the station that holds that label for playing stuff outside of what he associates with the label.

Here we are trying to make our musical world, and the outside perceptions of it, bigger and brighter, and he seems he would rather keep it in the little box.

There's reasons my fav XM station is Fine Tuning.

classical_music: Can film music ever be classical?:

I think the problem is that *because* there is so much crappy film scoring going on, even by composers who do write good material on occasion (for film or not), that its hard to separate the wheat from the chafe.

And the "classical" music snobs like the author would rather solve that problem by simply not bothering.

One extreme - "play it all, 'cause it sounds the same" is wrong.

So is the other, "don't play any of it 'cause only WE know what's really good and you obviously don't".

No radio station that has any interest in staying in business should *openly* be saying "we're playing this for your own good, not because its what you want to hear", but that's exactly this guy's attitude, and its the reason the classical format is all but dead here in America, along with its place on record shelves (my local Borders just cut its classical section *in half*).

As has been noted, a lot of major composers wrote music with non-musical ideas in mind, including film, ballet, theater, and opera. In many cases, it is secondary to the "major" works like symphonies (V-W, Sibelius (who did a lot of theater work)). On other cases, it is the core of what we know them for, and only because they did those works are we even aware of their names and their other works (Grieg).

But what must be done is to listen to each work on its own, as well as the context of its making, and give it time. Some things will endure, others won't, but to condemn a work because you don't like its content or non-musical associations NOW is to put you in the exact same elitist realm of those who rioted at the premieres of Debussy's Faun and Stravinsky's Rite. Those people all swore up and down they just *knew* what good music was, and those two works simply weren't it.

History decided otherwise. And we're all much the better for it.

With film music today, I'd rather give history the chance than to suppress it all now and make the future's decision for it.

classical_music: Can film music ever be classical?:

...finding stuff that's just "wrong" about this blog entry. Now I'm fuming about a comment on the page:

It also reinforces the utterly mistaken idea (and this really annoys me) that classical music is safe, therapeutic, background noise, some sort of palliative instead of an exciting, exacting art.

Trouble is, it's already too late. Classical music radio ALREADY IS "background noise". It always has been. The only places I ever heard classical music radio growing up were in the background at the bank, in the background of my grandmother's car (she never played it at home, only in the car, where yes it was very "therapeutic"), and in the background of some tinny am speaker radio of one of my professors at college.

Nobody when they're in the mood to LISTEN to music puts on the radio. Radio is stuff to hear. When one is ready to listen, one goes to the concert hall or to the cd collection.

The author and his supporters basically write off film scoring as 20th century "fluff" (my term), and well, I hate to break it to him, but MOST of Mozart is 18th century "fluff", stuff written for a particular target audience, and only today played because its by the same composer as the Jupiter or Don Giovanni, not because its as good as the Jupiter or Don Giovanni. In fact, its played MORE OFTEN than the Jupiter and Don Giovanni, which really defeats the author's point - the good stuff we all *really* like isn't played on classical radio (especially not here in the States).

So again, if putting a little "Pirates of the Caribbean" is enough to get someone to listen to Classical FM and discover, probably by total accident, the Mahler or Copland hidden behind it (or stolen within it, depending on your view), all the better. ALL classical music on the radio is surface music - that's been radio's point from the very beginning of commercialism in that genre.

None of the *good* stuff, unless its terribly mellow (Lark Ascending, or the Barber Adagio) ever gets played on radio prime ("driving") time. They save that for the dedicated after-hours shows for the die-hard listeners.

"I listen to Mahler because I like to enjoy film scores without the emotional baggage of having actually seen the movie." -- me.