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

FILM MUSIC EXCURSIONS, part the second.

Generally speaking, a film music fan does not think it necessary to actually see the film before buying the filmscore CD, listening to it, and appraising it. To people outside the film music circle, this is very odd behavior. I've had the conversation a lot of times:

Me: I picked up the score to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon today.

Them: Great movie!

Me: Never saw it. But the music's terrific!

Them: Whoa! You didn't see the movie?

Me: Nope.

Them: Then why on earth would you buy the soundtrack?

Me: Well, the music's by Tan Dun, a classical composer I've liked before.

Them: But you didn't see the movie! Why would you buy a soundtrack without seeing the movie? That's crazy!

Me: Nah. It's music, isn't it?

Them: But—

Me: If a lover of classical music listens to Nielsen's first two symphonies and likes them, isn't it normal for them to pick up his third and fourth symphonies out of expectation that they may like them as well?

Them: Well, yeah, but—

Me: And if you love Eminem's music, then is it weird for you to buy his new album the day it comes out, even if you've never heard a single track of it?

Them: It may be so, Socrates.

Me: If you've never heard any of some band's songs, but then a friend comes to you and gushes about how great it is, might you not try it out on that basis?

Them: Yes, I may, Socrates.

Me: Then if I've discovered that I admire a great deal of Miklos Rozsa's filmscores and even some of his concert works, isn't it reasonable for me to pick up the CD of his score to King of Kings, even if I've never seen the film?

Them: Shut up and drink this.

Me: Ooooh, hemlock!

And so it goes.

The prevailing view is that a filmscore CD is much like, say, an action figure or a movie poster or a novelization: it's an artifact of the film, meant to recapture something of the experience of the film itself. This is definitely true to a point, and for a lot of film music lovers, it started precisely this way. When I was a young Star Wars fan growing up, home video was in its infancy, movies on tape didn't exist, et cetera. So there was no way to re-experience the film between re-releases except to do it vicariously: reading the book or the comics, staging scenes with action figures, and listening to the soundtrack LP. I'd listen to the tracks on the album and envision the derring-do going on while John Williams's music was playing, and I'd do the same for other score albums to other films.

For most casual listeners of film music, it pretty much stays at that level. These are the people who made the Titanic album a multi-platinum item, despite the fact that no film music fan I've ever met considers Titanic to be James Horner's best work, or even close. (In fact, I think that the Beyond Titanic CD is a better listen, because that first album just gets so damned repetitive after about fifteen of its seventy-five minutes…but that's for another time.) For most people, the music is intimately connected to the film, and to separate them seems foolish and weird.

But for people like me, eventually the music starts to take on a life of its own. I think it starts when connections between different scores by the same composer become noticeable, when the ear becomes refined enough to pick up on these things. For me, this was probably when I heard similarities between Star Wars and Superman, both by John Williams. And the more filmscore albums I acquired, the more the music took on this "extra life" outside the films. In my case, it helped that my sister was (and still is) a lover of classical music; the lines were pretty much blurred very early on. Eventually I started buying filmscore albums to films I planned to eventually see, and it was only a matter of time to my current attitude: where I often don't care if I ever see the film before I buy the album. (In the case of Jerry Goldsmith, this attitude results in listening to a lot of wonderful music whilst avoiding a lot of terrible movies. Not so much lately, though, as Goldsmith seems to me to be running out of steam.)

And that, inevitably, leads to a discussion of the connection between music and visuals, which in turn has implications for classical music's long distinction between "absolute" and "program" music. Which will require another essay….