Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Now that 2002 is gone, it's time for my yearly recap of my film music collecting activity over the past year, concentrating on the best new things to enter my collection. In past years I've posted this article to the Usenet newsgroup rec.music.movies, but this year I am inflicting it upon the blogosphere.

Disclaimer Number One: I have always believed that seeing the film is not essential to enjoyment and appreciation of a film score. Good film music should be good music first, and good music by definition can stand alone.

Disclaimer Number Two: This is not a summation of film scores for films released in 2002, but a summation of film scores I acquired in 2002, no matter what year the film came out.

:: John Williams, 2002. I always start my summation with Williams, because he is the composer who launched my fascination with film music that began in 1980 when I used my allowance, saved over a number of weeks, to buy the double-LP of the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back. Williams is the composer to whose music I most often return and whose work I still most anticipate, although I now feel that he is on the back side of a remarkable career. Of course, that is a statement that requires qualification: it sounds bad to say that a baseball player's average has dropped thirty points over the last five years, but if he was hitting .387 five years ago, that means he's still hitting pretty well.

Williams opened 2002 by conducting the premiere performance of his theme for the 2002 Winter Olympics, at the opening ceremonies, on his seventieth birthday. That's a hell of a way to spend one's birthday, to be sure, and Williams's entire 2002 had that same whirlwind quality, with no fewer than four new film scores appearing, along with several new releases of his concert works and the news that he is composing an opera commissioned by Placido Domingo. I haven't yet heard Williams's score to Minority Report, but I've heard good things about it. His newest score is Catch Me If You Can, which is enjoyable if light; Williams was a jazz musician before becoming a classically-motivated film composer, and that jazz knowledge comes into play in Catch Me…. The score album is entertaining, and the score sounds like a hybrid of Williams's typical sound and the sound James Horner applied in his score to Sneakers.

Less successful is his effort for the second Harry Potter film, for which he had a collaborator. I did not buy the CD; instead, I listened to the album via a streaming audio that AOL provided before its release, and I found it overly reliant on the themes from the original film (themes that I never found all that compelling to begin with) and some new material that sounded recycled from earlier Williams scores, such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The best Williams score this year, and perhaps the best film score of the year as far as I have heard (although there are some highly-regarded ones that I haven't heard yet) is Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Williams doesn't break much new ground here, but he begins to blend the sound he developed in the 1990s – primarily with scores like Nixon -- with the sound of the classic trilogy, with fascinating results. The main contribution of this score to the Star Wars musical world is the love theme for Anakin and Padme, a ravishing minor-key variation on his original Star Wars main theme. The score's action music is also wonderful, although it's taken me a long time to decide that I do, in fact, like it. There was some consternation in film music circles when the film's final third turned out to be mostly scored with music tracked in from Williams's score to The Phantom Menace, but this didn't bother me that much – the music, as used, worked well (except for one notable use of Yoda's Theme at a point when such makes no dramatic sense at all). That said, I do wish that the film's final battle scenes could have been completed in time for Williams to actually compose new battle music, but the compromise brokered here is not remotely the disaster that many film music fans think it is.

I should also mention an old Williams score that saw new, and much deserved, light this year: his score to the 1970s horror film The Fury. This brooding, scary music is excellent work indeed from Williams's greatest period (the late 1970s and early 1980s), and this score, combined with his Dracula and some of the darker cues for Close Encounters of the Third Kind make me wish he would get to score another full-fledged horror film.

:: I had another good year for collecting the filmscores of Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, who is best known for his scores to Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful anime films. I missed out, unfortunately, on seeing Spirited Away -- it only played here for a week, and we simply couldn't get free that week to see it. Grumble, grumble…and wait for the video. I did get the score album, though, and it is a delight, full of Hisaishi's wonderful ability to combine a Japanese folk sound with Western orchestral colors. The other Hisaishi scores I acquired this year are Kiki's Delivery Service, which has a lot less Japanese color (appropriate to the film's setting in an unnamed European city) and the Symphonic arrangement of his score to Laputa: Castle In the Sky. (It’s a common practice with anime-related filmscores to have multiple releases, one featuring the actual music tracks from the film and one featuring a rearrangement of the film’s music into longer suites, called "symphonic albums". These symphonic albums are always welcome, but the OST albums are not to be discounted. Where money is not a factor, a listener is well-advised to acquire both.) Both Kiki and Laputa are treasures. Most of Hisaishi's music is only available on fairly expensive import CDs (Spirited Away is a welcome exception), so collecting him involves something of an investment. But I've never spent the money on a Hisaishi score and not felt I was getting my money's worth.

(News this week is that Hayao Miyazaki is already at work on another film, which means another Hisaishi score sometime in the future.)

:: The other huge name in film music today is Jerry Goldsmith. I found his newest score, Star Trek Nemesis, to be a huge disappointment, and I enjoyed delving in Goldsmith’s past more. An expanded edition of his wonderful score to the Ah-nuld SF flick Total Recall came out this year, and it’s a highly enjoyable effort, both exciting in its action parts and evocative of the "sense of wonder" that is SF’s most important, but also most elusive, quality. Goldsmith's more important achievement this year, though, was his weathering of a fairly serious illness.

:: Important work continues on restoring and releasing the classic, and sadly neglected, film music of yesteryear. In many cases, the original tracks are being unearthed in the vaults of the major studios – the ones who care about such things, anyway; some studios are apparently totally uninterested in such things, and are allowing the tapes to dissolve into that vinegary sludge that old magnetic tapes become – and remastered for the digital age. The best such release, from my point of view, is Miklos Rozsa's score to the Biblical epic, King of Kings. Other Rozsa releases this year include the original tracks to Ivanhoe (the music to which was done admirable service in a fine rerecording by Intrada a few years back) and Lust For Life.

Where original tracks are no longer available, a secondary possibility lies in making a new recording entirely with a modern orchestra from the original score. Rerecordings sometimes take a back seat with film music collectors, but if film music is good music and ergo can stand alone, then it follows that, like classical music, film music can stand up to different interpretations by different conductors. Rerecordings are also frequently the only way to make the music available to modern audiences, and are especially valuable on that basis. I don't own the recording yet, but I have been told that the new Chandos recording of the film music by great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the finest such recordings to come down the pike in some time. I look forward to getting this one.

Rerecordings, though, like recordings of classical works are not always perfect. My biggest film music disappointment of the year was in the recording of Erich Wolfgang Korngold scores conducted by Andre Previn. Korngold's music has long been near-and-dear to my heart, with its brilliant orchestrations, sweeping melodies, blazing fanfares and excitement evident in nearly every bar. Sadly, Previn leads the London Symphony Orchestra in a bass-heavy recording that blunts the impact of Korngold's great brass writing, and he selects tempi that are invariably too slow to allow the music to really take flight. Most unforgivably, Previn omits the male chorus ("Strike For the Shores of Dover") from The Sea Hawk, an omission that makes absolutely no sense. The nearly thirty-year old rerecordings of this material made by conductor Charles Gerhard are still the gold standard here. Previn is a great conductor, and he has a great deal of Broadway and Hollywood experience as well as experience on the classical podium, so the lackluster results of this recording are all the more mystifying. The album is technically proficient, but almost totally lacking in fire, which is the essential quality of Korngold's music.

:: Film music took something of a back seat for me this year as I turned my attentions to bolstering my classical collection – something that was aided and abetted by my inexplicably-delayed introduction to the Naxos label. Classical music has always formed the center of my musical life, but in recent years it had taken a secondary position to film music. This year, though, I became more interested in longer musical works with a concentration on structure and form, which are typically the two areas least well-served by film music. The most notable additions this year to my film music collection in 2002, apart from the ones already listed, are:

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Howard Shore. (I'll have much more to say about this one once I've seen the film.)
Possession, Gabriel Yared.
Gigi, Frederick Loewe (music) and Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics).
The Warsaw Concerto and other Piano Concertos from the Movies, a Naxos collection.
Powder, Jerry Goldsmith.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Alan Sylvestri.
The Rescuers Down Under, Bruce Broughton.

:: What film music events are in the future that I'm looking forward to? Rerecordings of scores by Dimitri Tiomkin, for one. At the end of 2003 we'll have Howard Shore's completion of his work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, when The Return of the King arrives. I'm not sure what John Williams has in the offing; it would depend, I suppose, on whatever Steven Spielberg is working on. We're still two-and-a-half years from hearing Williams's final excursion into the galaxy far, far away in Star Wars Episode III. And the biggest film music event for me, in the short-term, is the reissues this coming February of all of the scores from the James Bond films (up to GoldenEye), some of which – most importantly, On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- will be expanded releases containing music long unheard except for in the films.

The year 2002 was pretty good for me, in terms of film music. I'm looking forward to more good things in 2003.