film music styles
Apr. 2nd, 2014 05:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIn my latest review, I wrote of the orchestrations by a film-music composer that they were "in the common vocabulary of post-American-nationalist film-music style." This is because they reminded me strongly of a lot of film music that I've heard from the last two or three decades.
Thinking over what I know of film music arranged historically, I get a sense of three clusters or prevailing styles that gradually succeeded each other. These are generalizations, mind. I'm speaking only of conservative orchestral scoring, mostly for dramas, and even within that there are many exceptions and composers who took very different paths. I mean only that there were periods when a lot of the leading composers wrote work which had a strong family resemblance, both to each other and to some particular period or style in concert music.
Here's my perception.
1. The post-romantic music of the 1930s and 40s. This is the style of Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Sweeping, with massed strings, often subtly beefed up by other instruments. While the vocabulary comes from composers like Tchaikovsky and especially Liszt, melodic lines in this music tend to be much more chromatic, with little reliance on strong cadences, and to be rhapsodic rather than rhythmic. The classic original "movie music" style, associated especially with adventure films.
2. The populist modern music of the 1950s through 70s. The guiding spirits are Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, but the film composers are more populist than their models. This is the style of Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams. Hans Zimmer is a somewhat younger composer who still writes in this style. Punchier in impact than style 1 and addicted to catchy tunes - so much so that the melodies are sometimes now more famous than the movies - it's also focused on the brass and winds, and it thrives on elaborate rhythmic patterns.
3. The post-American-nationalist style since the 1980s. A kind of smoother, polished version of the music written by the mid-century American nationalists, not so much Copland (who was, in this context, a Stravinskian modernist) as Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Randall Thompson. Capable of building to grandeur, but mostly contemplative, blended orchestration more string-heavy than style 2, richly consonant but not so strongly melody-based. This is the style of James Horner, Thomas Newman, Stephen Warbeck. The family resemblance between their music, and its difference from other styles, is probably more distinctive than with style 1 and definitely more than the relatively diverse style 2.
There are many other noted film composers who don't fit into these categories - Danny Elfman has the spirit of style 3 but a very different sound world, while Bernard Herrmann has the vocabulary of style 2 but a more harshly modernist spirit actually closer to style 1 - so I don't need to be told of exceptions, but I will ask: do you see these same clusters as I do? Do you consider them significant or representative of film music of their time?
Thinking over what I know of film music arranged historically, I get a sense of three clusters or prevailing styles that gradually succeeded each other. These are generalizations, mind. I'm speaking only of conservative orchestral scoring, mostly for dramas, and even within that there are many exceptions and composers who took very different paths. I mean only that there were periods when a lot of the leading composers wrote work which had a strong family resemblance, both to each other and to some particular period or style in concert music.
Here's my perception.
1. The post-romantic music of the 1930s and 40s. This is the style of Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Sweeping, with massed strings, often subtly beefed up by other instruments. While the vocabulary comes from composers like Tchaikovsky and especially Liszt, melodic lines in this music tend to be much more chromatic, with little reliance on strong cadences, and to be rhapsodic rather than rhythmic. The classic original "movie music" style, associated especially with adventure films.
2. The populist modern music of the 1950s through 70s. The guiding spirits are Stravinsky and Richard Strauss, but the film composers are more populist than their models. This is the style of Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams. Hans Zimmer is a somewhat younger composer who still writes in this style. Punchier in impact than style 1 and addicted to catchy tunes - so much so that the melodies are sometimes now more famous than the movies - it's also focused on the brass and winds, and it thrives on elaborate rhythmic patterns.
3. The post-American-nationalist style since the 1980s. A kind of smoother, polished version of the music written by the mid-century American nationalists, not so much Copland (who was, in this context, a Stravinskian modernist) as Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Randall Thompson. Capable of building to grandeur, but mostly contemplative, blended orchestration more string-heavy than style 2, richly consonant but not so strongly melody-based. This is the style of James Horner, Thomas Newman, Stephen Warbeck. The family resemblance between their music, and its difference from other styles, is probably more distinctive than with style 1 and definitely more than the relatively diverse style 2.
There are many other noted film composers who don't fit into these categories - Danny Elfman has the spirit of style 3 but a very different sound world, while Bernard Herrmann has the vocabulary of style 2 but a more harshly modernist spirit actually closer to style 1 - so I don't need to be told of exceptions, but I will ask: do you see these same clusters as I do? Do you consider them significant or representative of film music of their time?
