Something for Thursday

Incommunicado for much of the day. Hectic week! I can't believe how much we've had to spend on school supplies. I also can't believe the kinds of hyper-specific things that schools ask for now. Math class requires a notebook, and a folder with pockets, and four green pens. Huh? Is there a unit on Irish math? But anyway, back to the music. A bit of film music this time!

Lots of film music lovers are very discouraged about the state of film music these days. Increasing reliance on electronics; music being composed by musicians who are not trained in the classical techniques; a seeming obsession on the part of filmmakers with a certain type of musical sound; the complaints go on. I tend to be unconvinced by such arguments; historically, the people living in any particular era tend to be very poor at judging the work of their own artists, and the whole "test of time" thing requires the actual passage of time. The music that filmscore lovers decry now may end up being the classic filmscores of score fans twenty, thirty, forty years from now.

One voice fairly new to the filmscore scene is Michael Giacchino. This composer first began to get noticed by his music for videogames, and over the last seven or eight years, Giacchino has secured a lot of high-profile scoring assignments. He's done several Pixar films (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Up), and he's been lucky enough to become the composer-of-choice for one of the bigger "new names" in movies and teevee, J.J. Abrams. Giacchino has been leading a fairly charmed life of late.

Of course, it helps that he writes some very fine music. His score to Star Trek 2009 sounded a bit odd in my ears at first, but the more I listened to it, the more it grew on me, to the point where I now think it's one of the finest scores of the 2000's. My favorite cue is the sad and beautiful cue that underscores the self-sacrifice of George Kirk and the birth of little James Tiberius. Here, from Star Trek 2009, is "Labor of Love".