Settling the Score

Who hasn't sung the John Williams' Jaws theme when sneaking up on their siblings, significant other, or children while swimming in the ocean? Somewhere in the back of your mind, Alan Silvestri's theme from Back to the Future, and Maurice Jarre's theme from Lawrence of Arabia are floating around next to 6th-grade algebra and your childhood home phone number.

These songs helped create cinema magic, and because we connected with them so fully, they were permanently written into our brains. Beautiful leitmotifs captured the spirit of our favorite characters, gave us a sense of dread lurking in the shadows, and left us feeling triumphant after a hard-fought battle.

If I were to ask you to hum a score from any movie in the past 20 years, could you do it? Maybe Klaus Badelt/Hans Zimmer's "He's a Pirate" from Pirates of the Caribbean. Perhaps the dozen or so bars from Silvestri's Avengers theme, or the brass blast featured in Zimmer's "Time" from Inception. But outside of those notable exceptions, there hasn't been a memorable cinematic score since Howard Shore's work on the Lord of the Rings almost two decades ago.

So, what gives?

First, there's been an industry-wide shift toward playing it safe when it comes to film scores. (And, one could argue, films in general) Movie studios don't want to take the risk of using musical scores to highlight emotions. The opposite of show don't tell, films are becoming more and more unchallenging. Studios want to make their money back, and they want to do that by catering to the lowest common denominator. As a result, they spoon-feed emotion and thoughts to their audiences, and they do this by literally explaining what's happening on the screen by way of character dialogue, rather than utilizing a musical cue to strengthen the emotional response. Rather than stand out, musical cues play it safe in current movies by adding textures and backgrounds without defining a scene.

Second, the use of temp tracks has become problematic throughout the film industry. During the editing process, directors and editors will use musical cues from other movies to score their in-process films until a proper score is completed by the composer. What ends up happening is the directors get so used to the temp tracks that they insist the composer mimic them. So, instead of getting a stand-out and original piece of music, we get a photocopy of something that already exists - and something that wasn't specifically made for the movie we're watching.

Finally, musicians are expensive, while digital instruments are less so. The heavy brass of John Williams' famous scores has been replaced with the synthetic textures of a computer-produced track. While yes, a composer still needs to write the music (at least for now), the raw and unvarnished sounds of a live orchestra are lost in the 1s and 0s. We are at the point where anyone with time and an iPhone can create a passable track for their next home movie, and it would be on par with most of the bland scores coming out of Hollywood today.

There are, however, plenty of composers working today who still create with live orchestras and make exceptionally beautiful scores. Thomas Bergersen and Nick Phoenix's outfit, Two Steps from Hell, AudioMachine, and 2WEI are creating some excellent scores that you've no doubt heard in commercials, video game trailers, and sports packages. And while they may not be as popular as the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Danny Elfman's Batman theme, they give me hope that the art of film music isn't lost.

My wish is that this is just a fad and music scores can bring back the leitmotifs of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I long for the day when I exit a movie theater humming the music of the new film I just watched, and I hope the great composers working today can be unshackled by movie studios and directors and be allowed to let their genius run wild.

Until then, I'll put on the soundtracks from my favorite movies and be taken on a sonic journey back in time.