Why I HATE film music.

Last night I was invited to watch a film I wanted to see - the remake of Dune. It runs for 3 hours or almost. 

Except the music was an absolute disaster. This deep loud bass drone that continued almost for the entire film except for a couple of very brief breaks. Wadges of other stuff came in over the top but that wasn't varied much either. I reckon it must have been played through a filter with a high cut-off at around 250Hz. 

Instead of using changes of location and dark to light scene changes to vary the 'music' (it was more of an insult to 'music') it was this same incessant drone.

The film was unusual in that almost every scene except those in the desert was dimly lit. I wondered if there wasn't enough money left to buy lamps or pay the electricity bill.  Even worse was the poor photography: filming characters full face with the light behind them so blotting out facial features. I mean, there's nothing more aggravating than filming a black girl with the light behind her and no fill-in at all - just a silhouette.

What I concluded was that it was a 3 hour long noise posing as a piece of music with incidental images and dialogue on the screen, the dialogue occasionally drowned out. If this indeed music, a) it wasn't incidental and b) it added nothing to the story, not even atmosphere.

I hoped a large dram of Scotch would help but it didn't. 

Frankly it would have been far better without the music at all. And it's time film music was put on a sub-channel so it can be silenced. 

On 2/26/2022 at 2:01 PM, Quinn said:

Last night I was invited to watch a film I wanted to see - the remake of Dune. It runs for 3 hours or almost. 

Except the music was an absolute disaster. This deep loud bass drone that continued almost for the entire film except for a couple of very brief breaks. Wadges of other stuff came in over the top but that wasn't varied much either. I reckon it must have been played through a filter with a high cut-off at around 250Hz. 

Instead of using changes of location and dark to light scene changes to vary the 'music' (it was more of an insult to 'music') it was this same incessant drone.

The film was unusual in that almost every scene except those in the desert was dimly lit. I wondered if there wasn't enough money left to buy lamps or pay the electricity bill.  Even worse was the poor photography: filming characters full face with the light behind them so blotting out facial features. I mean, there's nothing more aggravating than filming a black girl with the light behind her and no fill-in at all - just a silhouette.

What I concluded was that it was a 3 hour long noise posing as a piece of music with incidental images and dialogue on the screen, the dialogue occasionally drowned out. If this indeed music, a) it wasn't incidental and b) it added nothing to the story, not even atmosphere.

I hoped a large dram of Scotch would help but it didn't. 

Frankly it would have been far better without the music at all. And it's time film music was put on a sub-channel so it can be silenced. 

 

I don't think that this is really fair because what Hans Zimmer (I'm assuming it was Zimmer who did the 'score') does can hardly be called music and he and his cronies are single-handedly responsible for reducing film music to the lowest-common denominator ambient noise.

Pre-Zimmer Era, there was a lot of great film music out there.

There also used to be some pretty decent movies, but they have gone to $h!t and are now just blatant propaganda pieces that don't even try to veil it in a decent production anymore. So the music follows suit. After 2001, they also got into the "gritty" phase they never really left.

But yeah, back in the 80s and such there were some really great scores. Actually, there was some great music into the early 2000s as well; I'd say John Williams did his best work in those days.

From about the 50s to late 90s, when society in general had standards, you had to possess knowledge and skill of the craft JUST to get an internship of a level that would today be exhibited only by "advanced" composers.

John Debney was talking about how it was all going to hell back in 2002. Check this

https://www.ascap.com/playback/2003/march/debney.aspx

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One of the concerns I have is technology, which has enabled us to do amazing things. In the old days, a composer might play a little theme for a director on a piano and say, "See you in six weeks on the scoring stage." Now, literally ninety-eight percent of every piece in a movie has been demo'ed thoroughly before we even get to the scoring stage. Technology can be a tool to show directors and producers a hint of what the music will ultimately sound like. The down side with technology is that, with younger composers coming up, we may sometimes lose sight of the fact that there are skills, techniques and fundamentals that have to be learned in order to be a really good film composer. I've already seen instances where the technology can really overshadow the craft. You can get someone who's barely knowledgeable of music fundamentals doing big film scores.

So I don't think it's fair to hate "film music" because of Hans Zimmer and his factory $h!tting up the industry.

Though I will say: I do agree a lot of films either don't need music or could use less of it. I don't need to hear some stabbing strings and bowed metals to know that what's happening on screen is supposed to be scary.

That is another thing I think films of the past were better at: Picking their moments. They also used to do a lot less "Mickey Mousing" and rather than trying to paint by numbers and match every moment with a musical sound, they would compose a piece that just worked well with the general scene or action and could stand well on its own.