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Old Feb 5 2008, 11:21 PM
QcCowboy QcCowboy is offline

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Quote:
Originally Posted by walkingwikipedia View Post
Film music is music made to the dictates of the mass-markets and can be said to have crowd-pleasing as a requirement.
The important thing here, is "can be said...".

An effective filmscore does not cater to a public, but rather serves the purpose of underlining and supporting the film for which it is written.

I can name a number of filmscores that I would be hard-pressed to describe as "crowd-pleasing":
Goldsmith's Alien? Planet of the Apes? Outland?
Goldenthal's Sphere? Alien 3?
Williams' (large parts of) A.I.?
Young's Bless the Child?

I get the impression your attitude vis-a-vis filmscores is based solely on "block-buster" excerpts and opening-title "marches" and fanfares.

Some scores, while clothed in more accessible harmonic language, remain seminal works:

Broughton's Silverado
Copland's The Red Pony
Goldsmith's Legend
Gordon's on the beach
Vaughan-Williams' Scott of the Antarctic

And while I may not personally feel that Howard Shore's score to Lord of the Rings makes a successful transition from screen to concert hall, the fact remains that it is a monumental work that demonstrates an astute and brilliantly thought-out thematic development and leitmotif plan.
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In musical criticism, when issues of craft and technical consideration are set aside, what remains is more subjective. However, until technical issues are dealt with, the subjective portion bears considerably less weight.
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