Q: Where are today's serious composers? A: They went to the movies.
Has the film score become the 21st Century equivalent of the symphony? Terry Hyde investigates some of the fab soundtrack music recently donated to TASS*
These days, how many serious composers write symphonies? Or violin/piano/cello concertos? Or string quartets? And who listens to them? The answer to the first three questions is: very few. And the answer to the last question is: even fewer. If Stravinsky were a young, hip composer today, he wouldn't be composing for the ballet, he would be writing scores for the movies. In its widest generic sense, "classical music" as defined by these old formats now seems just soooooooo 20th Century darling, and early 20th Century to boot. The decline of orthodox classical music has coincided with the rise and pre-eminence of the movies as the place where serious composers can create magic. Even before WW2, major "classical composers" such as Sir William Walton were writing scores for b/w movies. At the moment, we have on LP Walton's film music from "The First of the Few", "Henry V", "Hamlet" and "Richard III" (HMV SXLP 30139). Similarly, on CDs we have music from 1940s films such as "The History of Mr Polly" (William Alwyn, CHAN 9243); "Scott of the Antarctic" and "Coastal Command" (Vaughan Williams, CHAN 10007) and David Lean's "Oliver Twist" (Sir Arnold Bax, CHAN 10126). As early as the 1930s, multiple symphony composer Dmitri Shostakovich was composing for films and we have on LP his music for the 1955 movie "The Gadfly" (CFP 41 4463 1). Nowadays, every that's-90- minutes-of-my-life-I'll-never-see- again movie has its OST (Original
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SoundTrack) released on CD, often comprising a compilation of pre-existing and mediocre rock/pop/rap tracks. At the other extreme, there are specialist film score composers, who in a previous generation or two would have been struggling to find an audience (or a recording contract) for that difficult 3rd Symphony. For example, the movie "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" (on CD: Sony SK 89347), was scored by Tan Dun and features Yo-Yo Ma on cello. Tan Dun's other movie scores have f eatured soloists of similar calibre, such as Lang Lang and Itzhak
Perlman. Of similar high quality and also in stock at the moment on CD, we have the OST for "Girl With a Pearl Earring" by the prolific Alexandre Desplat, which was nominated for the Golden Globe Best Original Score. Desplat has been Oscar-nominated five times in this category and was Golden Globe winner in 2007 for "The Painted Veil" and BAFTA winner in 2011 for "The King's Speech". For fans of Japanese movies, we
have a rare CD compilation: "The Film Music of Toru Takemitsu"
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