Story By Story

Dwight Trible Cosmic Band

2012-01-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

It is an honor to perform with this group. We hope to travel around the world together and share our music with you.

Dwight Trible - Vocals
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson - Viola
Mark de Clive-Lowe - Piano
Trevor Ware - Bass
Dexter Story - Drums

Booking contact: dwighttrible@yahoo.com

LA: SCORED Presents ‘A Trip Beyond the Moon’ – Dec 12

2011-12-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

Man, the folks in LA really got it good with this series. Hopefully you caught the last one in August, because we’re totally jealous here in NYC.

Once again, Mark de Clive-Lowe, Miguel Atwood Ferguson, and Dexter Story have come together to present their most recent SCORED installment called A Trip Beyond the Moon.

On Monday December 12th, the three comrades will be paying tribute to the “cinematic genius” of Georges Méliès. Always thorough, the guys will be making sure to cover everywhere from his earliest pieces to more recent work driven by Méliès’ groundbreaking innovations in special effects.

Per usual, Mark, Miguel, and Dexter will be bringing the aural treats with VJ Synesthete on the visual mix. Stimulation for days.

Two unique sets will take place through the course of the night: one at 8PM and one at 9.30PM – all for one admission price!

Event Details
SCORED Presents ‘A Trip Beyond the Moon’
Monday, December 12th
Doors 8pm
8PM & 9.30PM (two unique sets)
$10 (covers both sets)

The Blue Whale
123 Astronaut E S Onizuka, In Weller Court, 3rd Floor, Little Tokyo
Los Angeles, CA

Mark de Clive-Lowe on Facebook | Twitter | Official Site

Miguel Atwood Ferguson on Twitter | Bandcamp

Dexter Story on Twitter | Official Site

VJ Synesthete on Twitter | Official Site

Listening by Julian Treasure

2011-08-09T11:00:00.001-07:00

"Our ears are always on. Ears are made not for hearing, but for listening." ~ Julian Treasure

I am intrigued by the research, writings, teachings and work of Julian Treasure. He has a very interesting take on what our EARS are for. I've always been keenly aware of sounds and noise in addition to music and I love reading about distinctions related to this field. I highly recommend his book, TED lectures and his website musings. Check it out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_shh_sound_health_in_8_steps.html

Scored presents THE WIZARD » Musical direction Mark De Clive-Lowe with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson + Dexter Story » presenting a live improvised scoring of

2011-07-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

Live scoring of THE WIZARD OF OZ in it's many glorious versions

Musical direction MARK DE CLIVE-LOWE w/ MIGUEL ATWOOD-FERGUSON & DEXTER STORY

9pm (doors 8pm) / $10 gets you into Emerald City for 1 extended journey down the yellow brick road

The Wizard of Oz is such the archetypal fantasy story and movie.

Judy Garland along with Victor Fleming brought us the definitive cinematic experience of it along with a timeless soundtrack of classic story-telling songs.

I can't remember first time I saw it, but it's always super fresh. It's been created for screen 19 times including silent film and animated versions and it's a storyline we're all well familiar with.

For this performance though, we'll be visiting several versions, mashed up and intertwined along with a completely improvised soundtrack performed by myself (MdCL), drummer DEXTER STORY and viola player (composer, conductor) MIGUEL ATWOOD-FERGUSON.

MIGUEL and DEXTER are two of my favorite musicians anywhere. You know Miguel from lovingly arranged full orchestral interpretations of J Dilla's creations in TIMELESS (www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh g_fPD-Lhc) and his own recent large shows with the likes of Flying Lotus, Jose James, Pharoahe Monch, Bilal, Zap Mama and countless others.

DEXTER STORY is also such a creative force - a multi-instrumentalist performing with numerous different artists in as many different styles, he's one of my favorite people to improvise and create with bar none.

We're truly looking forward to an evening of spontaneous and limitless music-making inspired by the fantastic story that is

L. Frank Baum's THE WIZARD OF OZ.

(MdCL)

Eggs-ceptional!

2011-01-13T11:32:00.001-08:00

Last year I read about playright Susan Lori Parks' project where she wrote one play per day for an entire year. And then in 2006-07, she mounted all of them around the world. What an endeavor! I was so inspired by her that I started a similar project: 365 Days of Song. I am writing one song per day for a year (since November 2010). I am currently on song #60 and it's the most exhilarating thing I've ever done. My parameters are: 1) Start to finish lyrics; 2) Lead sheet; 3) Recording; and 4) I must share what I am up to with at least one person per day. The image of the eggs are courtesy of iconic Gap designer Patrick Robinson (https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/12d7b53c3ec46b02) but I thought they were symbolic of the simple goodness of my life.

Exclusive Dexter Story 8 CD

2010-10-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

While in Japan, I sold a compilation CD that producer Carlos Nino put together. It featured 8 short, exclusive pieces that were recorded between 2005-10 and was titled Carlos Nino Presents Dexter Story 8. At the suggestion of Turn On The Sunlight's vocalist/guitarist Jesse Peterson, I made a stencil, bought materials from mega department store Tokyu Hands (a Japanese style Target) and created a cover (See image). Surprisingly, I sold approximately 15 CD's while on tour and learned that I should never tour without merch again. It was the perfect way to preview material and share my wares with an audience as well as make extra spending cash. If you would like a copy of this compilation, please go to cyusef@aol.com, send $15 ($10 cost + $5 shipping) and provide your address. I will gladly send you a copy.

TOTS Nippon Tour 2010

2010-10-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

This is my first entry in over 5 months. Since my last entry, I ended a 2-year relationship, went on a month-long US tour with Danish soul group playing bass guitar, moved away from a wonderful Venice villa into a new spot, started recording my first "real" solo album, scored 2 short films, put my daughter in college, my son in high school and completed a 10-day tour of Japan with Carlos Nino's Turn on the Sunlight group. As much as I'd like to fill you in on the rest, it is my first tour of Japan and all of the personal insights thereof that will be the focus of this blog.

Japan! Nihon! Nippon! I already miss you very much. In you, I have met the country of my dreams. I love America (and France) with all of my heart but Japan is something special. I didn't know a nation of people could exude such warmth, love and hospitality. The Japanese are some of the most gracious human beings I have ever met. I became obsessed with bowing, salutations, politeness and FOOD. I learned that Japan is much more than sushi. I discovered different versions of Udon noodles and tried regional dishes I would have never thought Japan could call "comfort food." And the local music and musicians I encountered in Fujinomiya, Kyoto, Kobe, Osaka, Tokyo and Sapporo were nothing short of phenomenal. Yes, Japan has its own sound and artistry separate from what we are doing here in America. Trust me. My favorite of the Japanese groups I experienced is TENNISCOATS featuring lead singer Saya. Her voice floored me. I didn't know what hit me. She is experimentally otherwordly yet familiarly grounded in her execution. I am converted.

I thank Carlos Nino and Jesse Peterson for having me in the TURN ON THE SUNLIGHT group and am also very grateful to Mr. Hara and staff at Disc Corde Records and the unshakable and awesome road manager/A&R Hashim.

I so look forward to returning to Nihon soon.

Music For Independent Films - Why Your Film Score Shouldn't Fall Short By Sheila Wall

2010-05-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Music For Independent Films - Why Your Film Score Shouldn't Fall Short
By Sheila Wall

With tight budgets and very limited resources, the independent film maker often falls short when working to bring their vision to the big screen. With hundreds of film festivals taking place annually in the United States, the platform is in place for budding producers and directors to find their place in the 'reel' world. But between hiring cast and crew while ensuring that equipment is up to par when it comes to lighting and photography, the film score often becomes an afterthought. Writers devote much time and effort not only to developing their stories but in searching for the perfect cast and crew to transform their visions into a tangible reality.

As the words on paper transition to the big screen, the final production should appeal to our emotions, stimulate our thoughts, challenge or support our beliefs and excite all 5 of our senses. Through actors, lighting, photography and even special effects imagery, the audience can not only see, but can also imagine the smell, taste and even touch of the various scenes. But without a relevant, suitable film score to accompany the work, what we usually 'hear' may end up lacking, leaving us uninterested and unimpressed.

The background music and sounds that comprise your film score are integral to the success of bringing that film to life by helping to define and add additional insight to your scenes, situations and characters. Who can forget the eerie, orchestrated sound of "JAWS". We always knew when that shark was about to take a bite. It was also no surprise when Freddie Kruger was lurking, because of the familiar creepy composition that made our hearts beat frantically as we cautiously looked over our shoulder, waiting to scream. These two instances confirm how the film score was used to establish the actual presence of these characters, even before they were visible in the scene. You just knew they were there.

Additionally, the film score is used to create an emotional response from the audience and draw them into the situation. Characters in a film will laugh, cry, live and some die, and the audience should literally feel that they are part of what is happening. Music sets the tone, mood, energy level and intensity of the various scenes and scenarios. It helps to define the time period in which the film is taking place, the location, atmosphere, environment, and the various emotions the characters are experiencing. So why is it that the film score is often times one of the lowest priorities on the production budget? Mistakenly, many believe that high quality, original film scores are reserved for big budget films produced by major Hollywood studios. But that is definitely not the case.

For every struggling writer/director, there is a music composer who is also trying to make a name for themselves in the business. They are often described as 'free-lance' composers. This simply means that they do not have a contract or agreement with any of the major production companies or they are not part of the preferred music vendor network that services the film industry big boys. But, many of these free-lancers are extremely talented, creative and, most importantly, available to dedicate the time and effort needed to provide you with a unique film score that captures and enhances the true meaning of your film.

So, how do you find one of these accomplished free-lancers, and better yet, convince them to collaborate with you on your project even if your budget is limited?

1) Search the internet for Film and TV music producers/composer or production studios.

2) Join local Film Meet-Up Groups or Film/TV related organizations in your area. There are likely a few composers on the membership roster and memberships are generally free.

3) Look for someone who has a complete music library available that provides multiple genres and various track lengths, stingers, bumpers and theme music. They should also have an affordable down-load option.

4) Listen to samples of their music and ask for additional samples if they don't have what you are looking for. By doing this, you can test their capabilities and speed of delivery.

5) Make sure that their music is original, copyrighted, royalty-free and 100% owned by the Composer. This helps to avoid nasty disputes and legal issues such as copyright infringements and violations of any pre-existing contracts or agreements.

Once you've identified a potential candidate, call or send an email to discuss your project and talk about your plans. If you are going to be entering multiple film festivals or submitting your works for review by major film companies, that composer's work will be exposed as well. Having their name in the credits and their film score published as part of your overall project is a means for them to rack up some credentials for their own portfolio. You can use this advantage as a price negotiation tactic. Most importantly, avoid being cheap! Don't try to record or re-create samples using low quality equipment, bad sound and cheesy sound effects. Your film deserves broadcast quality sound and a composer with the skill, experience and talent to underscore your film, giving it the life and personality it deserves.

Sheila R. Wall
http://www.kingofkingsrecords.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sheila_Wall

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Charles Lloyd

2010-04-20T13:47:00.000-07:00

FOLLOWING IS AN EXCELLENT JAZZ TIMES ARTICLE BY JOSEF WOODARD THAT I RECENTLY READ ON THE INCOMPARABLE SAXOPHONIST/COMPOSER CHARLES LLOYD. I AM A FAN OF HIS WIFE DOROTHY DARR'S INDEPENDENT CULT DOCUMENTARY 'BEN INGRAM VS THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI' FOR WHICH MR. LLOYD PROVIDED THE AMAZING SCORE. IF YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH THIS FILM, GO TO PAFF.ORG FOR MORE INFO.

Charles Lloyd

By Josef Woodard

A brief itinerary of Lloyd’s life and GPS coordinates: born in Memphis, he headed to Los Angeles to study at USC in the late ’50s and had early sideman gigs with Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley, which brought him to New York City. There, he formed a quartet, featuring visionary youngsters Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, that became a million-selling cultural phenomenon, appealing to both jazz and rock audiences. After a few years in an increasingly hot spotlight, he jumped off the bus—or crashed and burned, depending on the source—and hightailed it back to California to “regroup,” in Malibu, Big Sur and, finally, Santa Barbara for the past 25 years.

Lloyd headed west at a time, in 1970, before other well-known jazzers followed suit. “I remember when I came back to California,” he says, “Herbie, Wayne, Miles, Zawinul, Horace—none of those cats were out here then. I remember everybody said I was doing a dumb thing coming back to California. I was up at [Bob] Dylan’s place in [Woodstock, N.Y.]. We were standing around and his manager, Albert Grossman, had a pool, with cracks in it, and Dylan said, ‘Man, why are you going out there?’ I said, ‘I gotta go back to heal a little bit. I went to college out there and I’m gonna go be by the sea and not wear any clothes and become a fruitarian.’ He said, ‘Man, that place will fall into the ocean.’ I said, ‘Yeah, so be it,’” he laughs.

Sitting in his kitchen, slowly ingesting an organic lunch, Lloyd welcomes the visiting journalist, commenting, “I’m just up here in my think tank. I’m trying to get this ship out to sea.” He’s referring to the latest release in his 19-year association with ECM Records, Rabo de Nube, the first with his new pianist, Jason Moran.

“I like to eat with wood,” says Lloyd, wielding a heavy-duty pair of chopsticks. “I don’t like to eat with metal utensils. I’ll do it if I’m out there and traveling. But when I left New York and came back to California, after I disbanded the group in ’69, I lived in Malibu. And I started eating with chopsticks. I also went into a serious detoxification thing.”

Lloyd and Darr spent much of the ’70s in Big Sur, in a humble Japanese country house that was Darr’s first architectural project. But the idyllic, inherently secluded haven of Big Sur had its drawbacks. “When Charles had a health crisis,” Darr comments, “when he nearly died in ’86, we realized that we needed to be closer to doctors. We actually were here when that happened. Had he been up there, he would not be here now. So that was how we shifted permanently down here.”

Speaking of Darr’s design for the house, built in 1998 on property they held since 1982, Lloyd says, “She has had architects want to come and see her house. These guys are supposed to be doing this for a living. She’s a renaissance woman.

“My grandfather’s property was in Mississippi. I grew up there, on his place. He had 1,600 acres, really beautiful land. Orchards for days. You could get lost there.

“After we lived in New York in lofts, I still want to live in a loft, you know? [Darr] lived in Florence. From Florence, she says, ‘OK, he needs a loft and I need the gentility of an Italian, Moorish house.’ We had this land and she built this space. The beautiful thing is that you don’t hear any sounds and you don’t have people bothering you. I think it helps me to aerate, to go for hikes in the mountains and go swimming in the water. All of that stuff is still important to me.”

In the large, high-ceilinged living room, one’s eye naturally falls on an historic original model of the Theremin—the model used by Miklos Rosza in the score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and used by Lloyd on his quirky ’70s album Moon Man. Next to that proudly sits a seven-foot Steinway B grand piano. It is, Lloyd explains, one of “the good ones that had the warm sound but that are modern instruments. This instrument belonged to a guy named Keith Hardesty, who was the master piano technician on the West Coast. It has accelerated action and it’s just so wonderfully built, and the sound is incredible. Michel [Petrucciani] has played it; Bobo [Stenson] has played it. Everybody has played it. Look how pristine it’s built and all. It’s pre-CBS.”

As we tour the downstairs area, now packed with electronic keyboards, a Baldwin studio piano and other sonic implements, Lloyd explains, “Dorothy was going to have a studio down here, with the booth in there.” He points to a room now housing tape archives going back to the 1960s. That in-house studio plan has stalled, but Lloyd’s house was the site of one renowned “home recording” so far: Which Way is East?, the two-disc duet between Lloyd and drummer Billy Higgins, made shortly before the drummer’s death in 2001.

Those recordings were made in the warmer environs of the living room upstairs, Lloyd says. “Higgins and I loved it upstairs, plus there was the fact that he was not so well.”

Of the house, Lloyd beams, “She made this full of light. When I was in New York, those guys who ran the music business, there was always talk about artists being downtrodden and living beneath the sewer. I didn’t think that was right. I thought that if a tree can’t get water in its roots, how’s it going to have wonderful blossoms and such?

“All of this is to say that the spaciousness of what happens when I can live in Dorothy’s world here is that I’m able to move all around and be on the outside and the edge. I can go exploring on tippy toes and then come back over here and get a bit of B-flat. It’s like a lot of different options. But the options will close down on your ass if there’s too much humidity and racism and too much B.S.,” he says, referring to life in Memphis.

“I don’t know how I got to be so blessed. I came around in the old days and it was a simpler time. When I lived in New York, my first apartment at 1 Sheridan Square was $98.75 a month. I was a composer and I had my publishing. They said it was ‘semi-professional. You have to qualify for this apartment.’ So I brought my royalty statements down. Different journey,” he says, shaking his head gently, “different journey.”

Audiophile Anyone?

A tour of the house reveals an impressive collection of high-end speakers and audiophile equipment, a long-standing interest of Lloyd’s, nurtured by such sound gurus as Joe Harley from Audio Research. Scattered throughout the house are speakers made by Vandersteen, B&W, Tannoy, ADS, Krell and Snell, and turntables by Macintosh and Thoren. His audiophile passion began innocently enough, back in the day. “When I was in college,” says Lloyd, “these guys in the dorm would have these Heathkit things.” Fast forward to now, and Lloyd notes that Harley “hooks me up with these audiophile people and they make this equipment available to me. I’m on a pilgrimage.”

Bookish Impulses

Sitting on his bedside table is a small pile of books, including beat poet Gary Snyder’s Back on the Fire and the late, great violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s Unfinished Journey: “He was a special guy. He had this universal love for music. I like the guys with the universal thing.”

Lloyd also recommends Indian Tales, by Jaime de Angulo: “It’s about the indigenous people who lived in our area in Big Sur, the Esalen tribe. Down here, it’s the Chumash, but up there, it’s the Esalen. Marvelous stories about them. And on our property, there grew this plant, this datura. It’s like a trumpet flower and a vine. It had medicinal purposes. They could brew a tea with it. It was a hallucinogen. They would have ceremonies up on this part of our land. I got the hit from it.”

Eastern Spirits Calling

Lloyd has explored Eastern spiritual paths for many years, and has settled on the Vedanta faith, which landed him in this corner of the planet. “I was drawn to this hill because of the Vedanta Temple [down the road]. Vedanta essentially teaches the harmony of all religions. They don’t have lines of demarcation.”

The Politics of the Soundtrack by Nina Power

2010-04-17T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Politics of the Soundtrack
by Nina Power

Was there a golden age of the film soundtrack? One might reach for Ennio Morricone (at least until the late 1980s) or the '70s and '80s records Popul Vuh made for Werner Herzog's most memorable films, Aguirre, Nosferatu and Cobra Verde. Even if much of the concept has gone out of 'conceptual' film-making and the soundtracks that accompany them, there are nevertheless highlights here and there. We could point to David Lynch, John Carpenter or Howard Shore's brittle and claustrophobic music for Cronenberg's Crash (1997), or Ed Tomney's tense and millennial compositions for Todd Haynes' Safe (1995) as proof that film and sound can be more than whatever bland indie love-songs the studio's marketing manager has been listening to on his iPod. The soundtrack to Andrea Arnold's recent Fish Tank does something interesting with the diegetic, with its muffled sounds and tinny music players -- indeed, much of the film is about recorded music and its playback, from the tiny speakers that Mia dances to in an empty room to the CD player leading her to her doom in the strip-club.

If we expand our cinematic categories a little, we can point to complex figures like Walter Murch, a 'sound designer' among other things, rather than a simple composer or hit song provider for the charts (film soundtracks are often simply understood as 'secondary usage', providing producers with additional sources of income). In early silent cinema, pianists were hired to drown out the mechanical whirring of the projectors and ramp up emotion; Murch revisits the noise of the machine in the famous scene in Apocalypse Now where helicopter blades become indiscernible from ceiling fans.1

But, for the most part, an 'original soundtrack' is the misnomer it always was, being neither the composite track of the film (the dialogue, the sound effects, the music) nor original, being comprised of whichever three-minute songs the studio/record label partnership wishes to promote. The apex, or really nadir, of this trend, which stretches all the way back to the beginning of the marketing of film soundtracks in the late '40s and '50s, was reached in Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs (2004) in which a boring couple have boring (but real!) sex to boring (but real!) songs by Elbow and Franz Ferdinand. The pop song as unifying revelation of a shared humanity features in Magnolia (1999), as the main characters coincidentally start singing Aimee Mann's 'Wise Up', an inverse tribute of sorts to R.E.M's video for 'Everybody Hurts', in which the song is a backdrop to the inner thoughts of bored car passengers, who ultimately get out of their vehicles and unite in a kind of mawkish tribute to collective misery. Music unifies, levels: it is essentially human. If there was ever a different time when the machine instead was integrated and posed as a question for cinematic sound, it could well have been the '80s, in films like Assault on Precinct 13, The Running Man and Terminator, dystopian visions in which the future sounded as synthetic as the threats that might yet come to menace it.

As we move into a period we could characterise by 'a revenge of the visual', with 3D films increasingly regarded as the only thing that will entice people from their mini-cinemas at home, cinema music is increasingly modelled on one of two forms: the pop song iPod playlist or sub-John Williams gloopy orchestral oozing (Williams recently composed a short orchestral piece 'Air and Simple Gifts', referencing Aaron Copland, for Barack Obama's inauguration). If every big-budget soundtrack starts to sound like Jurassic Park or Wagner without the quiet bits, that's probably because it is. Adorno once perceptively claimed that most films 'are advertisements for themselves'. Trailers are thus the truth of the film for which the film is the advert. Length becomes a secondary question. It comes as no surprise then to learn that trailers often use music from previous hit films as their soundtrack to create a pre-existing sense of familiarly.2 When Adorno in 'Commodity Music Analysed' (1934-40), speaks of 'archetypal cinema music' ('The birth of the Wurlitzer from the spirit of Faust' as he puts it), he argues that it is this need for familiarity that characterises much music for cinema.3 The musical means for covering over the sounds of the whirring projector were prepared by a pre-existing proclivity for a certain mix of sentiment and innovation:

It is doubtless true that towards the close of the nineteenth century the music that swept people off their feet did so because it combined drastic ideas with conventionality. In so doing it satisfied the demands of the cinema before cinema was invented.4

Commercial cinema's desire to block out the machine, to smother the jolts and gaps between movement means that music is often seen as a kind of empathetic patch, a device to pretend that the frames and hyper-technicality are always put in the service of larger, smoother, humanitarian wholes. 'Mickey-Mousing', the practice of exactly matching music to image, may be something we associate with animation from half a century ago, but this often comic self-consciousness of the relation between the sound and image is far more radical than the surreptitious manipulation of familiar emotions that much of today's cinematic music pursues.5 But mainstream cinema remains one of the few places where sounds and music could potentially afford to be brave: the tracks that Kubrick used for 2001: A Space Odysessy originally as a temporary placeholder for the real score, placed more Ligeti in more homes than a thousand Radio 3 retrospectives would ever have done. Similarly, as Alex Ross notes:

On the weekend of February 19th, and for some weeks thereafter, millions of Americans will enjoy a program of Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage, Lou Harrison, György Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke, Nam June Paik, Ingram Marshall, and John Adams. This fairly bold lineup of composers, which would cause the average orchestra subscriber to flee in terror, appears on the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's film Shutter Island.6

Academic terminology has taken something of a strange optical turn in recent years with 'visual culture' and 'visual theory' becoming catch-all disciplines that cover elements of cultural studies, art theory and critical theory. This is not to say that there aren't people working within this areas on sound, music or sonics, however. Take for example Susan Schuppli's work on media machines that investigates, among other things 'the missing or 'silent' erasure of 18-½ minutes in Watergate Tape No. 342' or Steve Goodman's work on sonic warfare.7 But we have to wonder why this stealthy academic privileging of the visual over other senses has come about.

It is a little as if the 'attempt to interpose a human coating between the reeled-off pictures and the spectators' that Adorno and Eisler recognised was the purpose of most film music has infected the entire study of cinematic culture.8 The tacked-on role of the composer for cinema that Adorno and Eisler deplored, a kind of last-minute annoyance from the standpoint of the budget, has become the occlusion of the sonic in the contemporary understanding of culture in general -- the reactionary stereoscopic tendency, a kind of re-visting of the 1950s in the 2010s, proving those covers of Debord's Society of the Spectacle correct. The photo, J. R. Eyerman's '3D glasses' taken in 1952 for Life, was captured at the screening of 'Bwana Devil', the first full length colour 3-D motion picture, a film about British railway workers in Kenya being eaten by lions. Its tagline was 'A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!' As Cameron's Avatar demonstrates, the closer you get to a pure celebration of vision, the less the music and the script matter; a comparison of the first 3D film and the biggest most recent version may well be worthwhile less for their technical similarities but for the similarity of their colonial content. James Horner's soundtrack for Avatar -- a mix of dramatic timpani rolls, ambient environmental lift-music and belligerent folderol (from 'Pure Spirits of the Forest' to 'Gathering All The Na'vi Clans for Battle'), plus Leona Lewis -- is aural soup for muddy and dubious narration to drown in. Where once the music may have covered over the whirring of new and frightening mechanisms, now the soundtrack disguises little more than the banality of the script -- plots which nevertheless seek to assure us of our fundamental intentional human goodness, even if everything we do is actually wrong and vicious.

As Esther Leslie puts the relation between music and image in Adorno's conception of cinematic music:

Adorno wrote of how in film, music lends the cinematic vision a veneer of humanity, a semblance of liveliness, by masking the whir of the projector in the background, the proof that we exist under the sway of mechanization. Without it, we are blankly exposed to our counterparts, the two-dimensional shadows that cavort on screen.9

Increasingly film music seeks to lend humanity itself a veneer of the cinematic, an eco-friendly soundtrack to dampen the fears of the antagonisms and asymmetries of everyday existence. Coupled with the painful loudness of Dolby surround sound and the brutal atonality of sounds of cinematic violence -- explosions, car crashes, gun shots -- the modern cinematic ear is trained for nothing less than the sickening, yet omnipresent, combination of cruelty and fake humanism that characterises contemporary life.

Footnotes

1 'As soon as movies lasted more than a couple of minutes, owners of nickelodeons hired pianists to drown the noise of the hand-cranked projectors and give an extra emotional dimension to the celluloid product' (Philip French, 'From the Sound of Silents to Hollywood's Golden Composers').

2 See here for a list of frequently used tracks across films: www.soundtrack.net/trailers/frequent/. Thanks to Daniel Trilling for this point, and for his comments on the piece more generally.

3 Theodor Adorno, 'Commodity Music Analysed', Quasi una Fantasia, trans. by Rodney Livingstone London: Verso, 1992, p. 37

4 Ibid., p. 42.

5 See the rather smart parody of both Avatar and Mickey Mouse in a recent episode of the Simpsons (2115), when Bart and Homer see a 3D version of an Itchy and Scratchy film called: 'Koyaanis-Scraachy: Death out of Balance'.

6 Alex Ross, 'Lo and Behold!', New Yorker.

7 For more on Susan Schuppli, see, www.uwo.ca/visarts/faculty_staff/susanschuppli.html. For more on sonic warfare, see Steven Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, London: MIT, 2009. There is a description at mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11890.

8 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, London: Continuum, 2005, p.59.

9 Esther Leslie, 'From Stillness to Movement and Back: Cartoon Theory Today', Radical Philosophy, May/June 2006.

Nina Power lectures in Philosophy at Roehampton University and is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0 Books). She also writes a blog, infinite th0ught: . This article was first published by Mute Magazine on 31 March 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.

Composer Spotlight: Jimi Cabeza De Vaca Interview Reprint

2010-04-13T01:27:00.000-07:00

Jimi Cabeza De Vaca is the man who climbs the holy mountains in between playing with bands like dios (malos) and Red Cortez. On Sunday, he will conduct his visionary Cabeza De Vaca Arcestra, performing an original live score to the classic Murnau silent Faust at Cinefamily. This interview is by Tom Child.

Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how the Arcestra came about?

Two years ago I saw that Glenn Branca 100 Guitar thing at the Disney Music Hall and I thought that was really great, but it made me think what I would do with all those guitars. And then I did a 20 guitar thing… just working with large people and large bodies of sound, shaping sound and seeing what I would do with that many good musicians and that was it. If other people could do it, I’d like to try it. Usually all the other things I’ve done have been really big productions, but it’s all productions like where we layer keyboards and layer guitars, but trying it live… there’s a difference between hearing six guitar players and six amps coming at you as opposed to six amps that are recorded onto one track coming out of two speakers. There’s a different sonic world that you just have to experience. It’s a whole other side to what’s going on. What I learned from that Glenn Branca thing was, ‘This is what eighty guitar players and twenty bass players sound like when you’re in a room with them.’ That was the only time that I’d ever experienced that and I don’t know if I ever will again. It’s just about that experience of being surrounded by so much sound.

Other than Branca, has there been anyone else doing that sort of thing who has influenced you?

In terms of numbers? No. No, at least not Western pop or classical music. I’ve been working with an orchestra a lot. I’ve written and conducted some pieces for an orchestra and that’s a completely different world but it’s still using large masses of sound. When you’re conducting those large groups of people and you’re right in the middle, it’s another sound experience. But no, it was just really the Glenn Branca experience. It made me think more about live sound and things like that.

How did you find the members of the Arcestra?

There are two sides to it. There are the people I’ve been playing with for a while like Rich Polysorbate. He’s from that generation of musicians who have those great last names. And I’m from the generation of people who have names of animals in their last names. I was playing with Rich through the Cacophony Society. I met him when I was pretty young and he was doing some really weird things—these Cacophony Society events—and I’d play along with him and people associated with him. He plays with Nora [Keyes]. And I’d been watching the Centimeters, I’d always liked her voice. It’s really kind of magical. It’s really hard to describe her voice, it’s really one of a kind and so there’s that side… people I’ve been playing with in that world. Then there are people who I’ve met at Cal Arts. People who are really great musicians and they have this really great training but they’re there at Cal Arts because they want to try new things. They think they’ve reached the peak of anything you could do on their instruments and they don’t want to play any of the things that other people are playing so they’re always on the look out. They just like to experiment, you know. So they were really open to doing things and they’re all amazing musicians. So it’s a good attitude and really good musicianship. You combine that with the other side, like Rich and Nora and all the things they’re in to, their really specific talents… it just kind of mixes well together and it’s cool. But It’s not just those two sides, people that I work with in their musical projects get recruited to participate in my events. Leviathan brother Sean [O'Connell] is a good example of that. And then there are other people I’ve met and the more I do it, I seem to pick up people who see the shows and are moved by what’s going on and they want to participate and I just find ways to work everything in. Like Kim, the dancer, she saw the seance we did and was really interested in that side of music, in the whole ritual that we put on, and I wanted to do an exorcism so we did a sonic exorcism with her. And I let things happen naturally too. Let them go where they’re supposed to go and just gently guide them.

How does the ritual aspect work with what you’re doing?

I did a show at Cal Arts where before anyone walked they were anointed with Dorado Azul, which opens up your pineal gland… I think that whole experience where you walk in and it’s dark and we do things with lighting, too… I think it’s just to create a mood and gently ease everybody into the same head space and then take it from there once everyone’s on the same page. Everything vibrates, you know? Everything resonates and all your organs…it gets kind of complicated but it’s like sound baths? I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sound bath… they use those crystal bowls. Each of your organs resonates at a certain frequency and if you play that frequency your organs will vibrate and you get this massage. Your organs are massaged… and your chakras…. my goal is to do a thing with each piece of the music in the key of very specific things, whether it’s an organ or a mountain… or a large group of people. That’s kind of where it comes from, just to get the room and everyone to resonate… to use the whole Arcestra, because everything is in a certain key, to play to the room and to the people who are in the room… for everybody to be on the same frequency. That’s a big goal and I don’t know if it’s ever going to work right, but that’s the direction I want to go… to do these things with sound. A lot of times you can get away with not doing so much with melody or harmony… just a lot of repetition and eventually just forget your body maybe?

You mentioned the Branca performance, but have there been any other rock or pop shows you’ve attended where you came out and thought that there was really something more going on than you just enjoying the show through your ears?

I think to do that, it helps if that’s your intention. I’ve been studying a lot of Indian music and the way the music and the religion is tied together, I think that works. I think it has to be there from the beginning, has to be part of the intention.

As you’re playing the music, are you getting the kind of response in yourself that you want the audience to experience? Are you feeling it too, basically?

When we get together and we all do it outside of a show context, when I’m not thinking about anything, yeah, I think we all get on that same page and we can all reach that point. But it’s hard to do that in an environment when you walk into a a room and it’s half us and half them. I think the next time we do it, which might make it easier, is if we… I think the next thing we do is going to be with the dancer, but there’s going to be twelve of us in a circle and she’ll be in the middle and it’ll be set up with people around us so that we create the circle that people have to look in on. It’s kind of weird but I’ll try it out and if it works it works, and if not there are other directions to take it. I think every time we play it’s going to be a different experience, depending on where we play and what’s going on.

Do you have any intent to do any recording with this or this is primarily a live performance piece?

I think we’re going to record an album at the Integratron over the summer. It’s this building out in Joshua Tree. It’s just made of wood, there’s no metal in it at all. Acoustically, it’s like being inside the body of a cello. The way it’s built, it’s got these great sound pockets. They give sound baths up there. The people who own practice sound healing. It was built by this ex-Air Force general who met some aliens who gave him plans to build the Integratron. The dimensions of it, all the specifics of the building were given to him by aliens. It was supposed to eventually fly and take off but he died before it was 100% completed and all his papers went missing and it never reached that point. There’s a conspiracy theory behind that. He got a lot of people to fund it, a lot of big names paid money to have it built. He was a legit dude, he just had this crazy story. You should look it up.

I know that you incorporate a lot of elements of the esoteric and the occult in your performances. Can you talk about how these things caught your interest?

I’d been playing music forever, but my rebirth, musical and otherwise, came after my hip replacement. Before that, it was all touring. I think touring really made me have to get the hip replacement at such a young age, kind of wore me down. And then going through not being able to walk for a while and taking all that medication just to make it through the day, and then finally having the hip replacement, going through all of that….it took me on a journey and led me to that point where I wanted to search through music for things. I like playing with bands. I still work with a lot of people I used to work with and even more. But I wanted my own personal music experience to be less about that element of it. It made me do a lot of searching and led me to another side of the world, you know? The way music exists outside of Western popular music. I’ve always been in a band, but there are a billion other ways music exists and happens and I’m interested in all of them.

How is alchemy incorporated into your work on the Faust film?

The movie is about an alchemist. I’ve been…I wouldn’t say ‘studying’ alchemy, but there’s a lecture series at the Philosophical Research Society over there on Griffith Park Boulevard every other Saturday by Maja D’Aoust. It’s been a ten-lecture series and it’s on alchemy. That’s been a great learning experience for me. So I’d say brush up on alchemy before coming to watch this show and maybe you’ll learn how to make gold.

Have you seen the Hermetic Museum book? My knowledge of all that stuff is so limited and based purely on the aesthetics of the imagery. I have no idea what’s going on, but I just love looking at those pictures.

Well, that’s because there’s so much to it. You see it and you acknowledge that there’s something there and I think you will absolutely unlock those secrets eventually. I think that’s why those pieces of art are made with all those symbols, to pass on information through time. It’s there for you when you’re ready. Rich and Nora… this whole Arcestra is sort of built around things I’d been doing with Rich for a long time and he brought Nora in… but talking to them is really great. They have these really well informed, strong opinions about our world. They go to the P.R.S. too.. .and Dana, the flute player goes to the P.R.S. as well. So some people have come from that world and i believe you can hear it in our music. Especially since Nora is channel singing, she puts a lot into the music. It’s a big part of the music.

Outside of music, have you had any experiences that you’d categorize as unexplainable or supernatural, for lack of a better word? Things that can’t be categorized in the Western scientific tradition?

Yeah, yeah…well, that’s…um, I have magic hands, you know? I’ve been through a lot, physically, experiencing insane amounts of pain…and I think that takes you to a really far out place. It brings you a huge amount of empathy as well. It’s taken my magic to a different level. There’s so much to talk about with that. It’s a whole other conversation.
Talk a little bit about the lineup of who’s playing the Faust score with you.
Well, Nora’s going to be the voice of Faust, which is great because like I said her voice is amazing. We’ve got a Theremin player, two percussion players, three guitar players, upright bass, flute, clarinet, trumpet, two throat singers. We added those for the dancer and that was really great, when those voices are amplified, it’s a huge sound …they’re the voice of God and they’re there to support Nora too. Piano—Leviathan Brother Sean’s going to be playing piano…and what else? Uh, you know, string players are kind of hard to work with but there might be a couple string players. The good ones are hard to get a hold of. To be that good, they’ve been playing for a very long time, they’re very serious about what they do and they’re very precise people, so maybe they’re not flaky, maybe it’s just me. But they’re the opposite of band people, but that’s been good. I think I’m right in the middle. I’m able to work with band people and classical people, like a translator between the two worlds. A lot of classical people, you have to be really exact with musical direction with them or else they get kind of lost. And band dudes like to improvise. It works out though. The best thing is that everyone from the get go knows what’s going on. They’ve seen it and they like what’s happening and they want to participate…it’s not like, ‘Woah, what the fuck are you guys doing? You guys didn’t tell me you were going to be doing this weird shit.’ You know, it’s like, ‘Yeah, it’s a seance in D minor.’

How did you go about composing the score to the film? Were you able to watch Faust and come up with ideas from there? Did you improvise live while it was playing with the band?

A little bit of both. There are themes for certain characters. All the players are really good. I’ve worked with them before with other things, so asking them to play, I know what I’m getting and they know what they’re getting. So I’ll say, ‘Well, ok, here’s the theme for the devil,’ and I’ll play it on my guitar and then I’ll say, ‘Ok, when these things happen, play the theme,’ but when I say ‘Play the theme,’ they know I’m not just saying play it exactly like I play it. That theme is shared by three guitar players who listen to each other and work well with each other and at times will be sharing that theme or variations of it and then people catch on to that. Or I’ll set up keys for different scenes or I’ll give certain scenes to a player. There’s a scene where Faust is being chased by the devil and that’s like, well, ok, this is Nora who will be singing because it’s Faust and then the theremin will be playing…and they’ve played together before too so the way they play together is really good. So, it’s kind of structured improvisation, but it’s broken up so it’s not just chaos the whole time and everyone’s playing. Everyone knows when to come in, knows when to be quiet, knows when everyone’s playing and then there’s builds and things drop out. Everyone gets their time to do their thing and it connects with the movie. There’s a carpet ride scene and in that scene it’s piano and flute. And I’m not sure exactly what’s going to happen between the two of them but there’s enough structure for everybody to work it out. And because they’re all good musicians, it gives everybody room to breathe and room to play and to let things unfold and work it out.

Ralph Ellison’s Development Into the Most Intense and Experimental African American Writer

2010-03-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

I was first introduced to the work of novelist Ralph Ellison at UC Berkeley. Invisible Man was assigned reading in the late, great Barbara T. Christian's African American Studies classes and I didn't take it lightly. I became extremely fascinated by this book and its Oklahoma-born author whose most notable work was also one of his only novels. I was also a big fan of his short stories. I am reprinting this article because it is insightful and reveals that he aspired to be a composer. Wow!

If you would like to read the article on its original link page, click the picture of Mr. Ellison or click here: http://www.artskirt.com/culture/ralph-ellisons-development-into-the-most-intense-and-experimental-african-american-writer/

Ralph Ellison’s Development Into the Most Intense and Experimental African American Writer

Author: Arthur Smith
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Make PCB Assembly

Ralph Waldo Ellison, achieved international fame with his first novel, Invisible Man upon which his literary reputation rests almost completely .

Soon becoming a classic of American literature, now regarded as among the most distinguished works of American fiction since World War II. the novel narrated by a nameless young black man, reflects bitterly on American race relations drawing upon the author’s experiences to detail the harrowing progress of the nameless young black man struggling to live in a hostile society. thus bringing its author immediate eminence

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1914. His father, Lewis Alfred Ellison, originally from Abbeyville, South Carolina, was a soldier who had served in Cuba, the Philippine Islands, and China before marrying Ida Millsap of White Oak, Georgia, and migrating to Oklahoma, where he became a construction worker and later a small-scale entrepreneur.

An upwardly mobile couple, Lewis and Ida moved to Oklahoma because it was still considered the American frontier, which they felt would provide better opportunities than the South for their self-realization. Still, Oklahoma was not free of prejudice and racism. Ellison’s childhood was thus to some extent, circumscribed, but not overly repressive.

Many years later, Ellison would find out that his father in harbouring the hope that he would grow up to be a poet like him, had named him after the great American essayist and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Unfortunately his father died when Ellison was 3, and was not alive to see his son realise his wish. But Ellison’s mother now stretched a meager income as a domestic worker, a custodian, and sometimes a cook to support her two sons, Ralph and Herbert.

Though Ralph Ellison’s great-grandparents were slaves, he insists that they were strong Black people who, during Reconstruction, held their own against southern whites.

Inspite of segregation practiced here, Ellison grew up without the oppressive conditions confronted by African Americans in the Deep South. So, he “felt no innate sense of inferiority” regarding his life goals and creative ambitions as he recalled years later. In Oklahoma City he was exposed to various elements within the black and white cultural worlds. Ellison’s mother while working as a domestic, brought home popular magazines and recordings of opera that had been discarded by her employers which were to open up a new world of culture to him.

And in the public school system, Ellison learned the foundations of musical harmony and symphonic forms as well as the songs, stories, and dances of European folk culture.

A great admirer of Oklahoma City’s legendary jazz orchestra, the Blue Devils, led by bassist Walter Page, Ellison befriended many of its members, including vocalist Jimmy Rushing, who would later become the singing great of Count Basie’s Band and eventually such a particularly strong influence on Ellison that years later he would include the essay “Remembering Jimmy” in his book of criticism Shadow And Act. No wonder then music became a constant theme both in his personal life and in his writing.

Ellison also attended Douglas School with legendary guitarist Charlie Christian, who astounded him with “sophisticated chords and progressions” played on a self-made instrument from a cigar box

Early in life Ellison becoming enamored of music. He was studying trumpet and piano as he lived at a time when several great jazz musicians were in Oklahoma City thus becoming immersed in that genre of music as well as the classical composition which he studied in school.

Growing up in the Southwest did not destroy Ellison’s self-image or his will to dream. So desiring to break free of the restrictions of race, his broad cultural experience inspired him to join several schoolmates in proclaiming themselves Renaissance Men, individuals dedicated to transcending racial barriers through the study of art and thought. This concept seems to have acted as a grounding force throughout his life. His activities in high school, his various interests in college-music, literature, sculpture, theater-and his vocation and various avocations as an adult indicate that the concept helped him realize his full potential.

To fulfill this commitment, Ellison aspired to become a composer of symphonic music. In high school, therefore, he took trumpet lessons from Dr. Ludwig Hebestreit, the founder and conductor of the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra whose instruction contributed to Ellison’s understanding of the complex structure of high artistic forms.

Though music emerged as his primary means of expression, Ellison also enjoyed reading literature. In grade school, one of his teachers, Mrs. L. C. McFarland, introduced him to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, which included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and James Weldon Johnson. At home, Ellison read fairy tales, westerns, detective stories, and Harvard Classics. Outside on the streets and in the barber shops of Oklahoma City, African Americans introduced him to the rural folk tales and legends of black cowboys, outlaws, and black Indian chiefs

Ellison after being educated in a segregated school system graduated from Douglas High School in 1931 excelling in music but like W. E. B. Du Bois who was given a scholarship to attend Fisk University because the good people of Massachusetts did not want him to integrate their school system, he won a state sponsored scholarship to study music at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This was so that he would not attend a white college or university in Oklahoma. He was however not financially able to attend immediately. Later, he had to hitch ride there on a freight train as he was without funds for transportation.

The music department where Ellison, studied music at Tuskegee Institute was perhaps the most renowned department at the school, headed by the conductor Charles L. Dawson, an accomplished composer and choir director.whose reputation drew Ellison there. The Tuskegee choir was an added attraction as they were often being invited to play at many prestigious locations throughout the world, including Radio City.

Ellison’s studies there from 1933 to 1936 included amongst others music appreciation, modern languages, physical education, and psychology. He also profitted from the close tutelage of the piano instructor Hazel Harrison one of Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni’s prize pupils and a friend of Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev whose three-hour- a-day trumpet practice sessions heavily influenced him.

Ellison found the South restrictive because of “the signs and symbols that marked the dividing lines of segregation” . He insists, too, that a great deal of his education at Tuskegee was away “from the use of the imagination, away from the attitudes of aggression and courage… There were things you didn’t do because the world outside was not about to accommodate you”.

Ellison was also baffled by the political alliances Tuskegee made with whites, especially that with Dr. Robert E. Park, a professor at the University of Chicago’s School of Sociology. He observed that it was with the help of Dr. Park, whom many considered the power behind Booker T. Washington, that Tuskegee gained a national reputation.

Yet this same sociologist along with Ernest Burgess wrote Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1924), a textbook often used at Tuskegee, in which he disparages the Black man’s intellect by affirming that he ” is by natural disposition neither an intellectual nor an idealist…. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, the lady among the races”.

Despite all these, Ellison found Tuskegee to be a progressive institution where he met Morteza Sprague, the head of the English department to whom he later dedicated his first book of essays, Shadow and Act (1964). True to his Renaissance man ideal, he studied sculpting under the direction of Eva Hamlin, an art instructor who was later responsible for his meeting and studying with August Savage, a Black sculptor in New York.

Though Ellison made no serious formal attempt to study literature at Tuskegee, while he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading modernist classics. There he began to explore literature, examining T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) –a piece of poetry that, as he later explained, utilized “endless patterns of sounds” that resembled the improvisational approach of “the jazz experience.”

Ellison found the poem intriguing because, as he explains, he was able to relate his musical experience to it: “Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets” He specifically cited it as a major awakening moment for him. For it was the fascination with the poem’s musicality that really got him interested in writing. As he confesses, “Somehow in my uninstructed reading of Eliot and Pound, I had recognized a relationship between modern poetry and jazz music. Indeed, such reading and wondering prepared me not simply to meet [Richard] Wright but to seek him out”.

From the references of The Waste Land, Ellison learned of other great modernist writers. Soon he was reading the works of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway. His readings thus got him interested in writing. Through Harrison, Ellison met famous Howard University professor, philosopher, and anthologist Alain Locke, who visited the Tuskegee campus in the mid-1930s.

After his third year, Ellison moved to New York City to find summer employment to earn enough money to return to his studies in the fall to complete his final year. The economic impact of the Great Depression limited his chance of finding work as a trumpeter. Unable to raise the money to return to school, Ellison decided to remain in New York.. He supported himself by taking jobs as a waiter, free-lance photographer, and file clerk.

He had originally intended to study sculpture during his stay in the city. Unable to find an opening with Harlem artist Augusta Savage, he studied for one year with Richmond Barthe. He made acquaintance with the artist Romare Bearden. As his interest in sculpture waned, he returned to the study of music composition.

On the day after his arrival, in New York , he met with Alain Locke who introduced him to Langston Hughes who was accompanying him. Hughes later asked Ellison to deliver two books–Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Days of Wrath–to a friend after reading them. But after reading them, Ellison found the writings important sources of inspiration that drew him closer to the world of literature.

Ellision’s most important contact would be with African American writer Richard Wrioght with whom he developed a long though complex relationship. It was Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes who helped him to meet Wright. who was at the time the editor of the New Challenge. Ellison met him in the office of the Daily Worker on 135th Street in Harlem, in 1937. After becoming engaged in a discussion about literature, Wright asked Ellison to write a book review of Walter Turpin’s These Low Grounds for the first edition of the short-lived periodical New Challenge. “To one who had never attempted to write anything,” Ellison stated, “this was the wildest of ideas.”

After Ellison wrote the book review, Wright encouraged him to pursue a career in writing fiction which resulted in his writing his first short story, “Hymie Bull”, for the 1937 winter issue of New Challenge. Not long afterward, he became a regular contributor to the left- wing cultural periodical New Masses and to the Negro Quarterly. His writing career was thus begun with Richard Wright being the first person who encouraged him to write.

The summer Ellison came to New York, the Great Depression had sapped America’s economic and industrial growth. The Harlem Renaissance, which depended heavily on white philanthropy for its existence, ran out of steam with the crash of 1929, because many of its patrons were not able to continue their financial support of the movement. Fortunately, the New York Federal Writers’ Project was established by the WPA, and Ellison like Wright and other writers were able to continue their careers by joining it . During this time he worked in the Black community gathering and recording folk material that became an integral aspect of his writing of Invisible Man.

From 1938 to 1942 Ellison worked for the New York City Federal Writers’ Project. contributed stories, reviews, and essays to New Masses, the Antioch Review, and other journals; and in 1942 became editor of the Negro Quarterly. In 1941 he published “Mister Toussan” for New Masses. After serving as managing editor for the Negro Quarterly, he wrote two short stories in 1944, “Flying Home” and “King of the Bingo Game,” which dealt with a young black man’s attempt to control his destiny within the impersonal surroundings of a northern city.From 1937 to 1944 Ellison had accumulated over twenty book reviews as well as short stories and articles published in magazines such as New Challenge and New Masses. These constituted his earliest published writings.

During this time he focused his literary themes on African American folklore and ethnic identity.His first creative works as a writer were influenced by Wright’s harsh vision. The short stories “Slick Gonna Learn” (1939) and “The Birthmark” (1940) are examples of his use of brutal themes and violence. But he soon broke from the literary naturalism of Wright and the Hemingway school. Instead of focusing entirely upon environmental forces, he upheld faith in the inner strength of the individual to overcome the barriers and oppressive elements of his surroundings.

Early details of his life such as these, set down in Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, reviews, and interviews enhance an understanding of Invisible Man dealing with, in its author’s words, “literature and folklore, with Negro musical expression–especially jazz and the blues–and with the complex relationship between the Negro American subculture and North American culture as a whole.”

In it, Ellison answers critic Irving Howe on the responsibility of the black writer, contests the nature of black folklore presented by Stanley Edgar Hyman, and criticizes LeRoi Jones on his interpretation of the blues.

Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for his first novel Invisible Man (1952), the story of an alienated and isolated black man living in racially repressive urban America.The remarkable success of Invisible Man made Ellison famous worldwide and he was suddenly considered one of America’s most important writers. Reluctant to assume the role of a representative for his race, Ellison always maintained that in writing his book he was pursuing art more than he was pursuing racial justice.

Though Ellison’s early writings reflect Richard Wright’s creative imagination, but as he continued to hone his craft, his writings demonstrated “the richness and complexity” of his own vision. Ellison’s style was unique because of the way he combined such diverse elements as realism, surrealism, folklore, and myth in Invisible Man the story of the nameless narrator, a Black man who learns to assert himself.

Shadow and Act has been described as autobiographical, but it only reveals the young Ellison, the Ellison who, to a great extent, is still under the influence of Wright’s vision and feels it necessary to defend himself. Going to the Territory Ellison’s second collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and interviews reveals a mature Ellison-the literary statesman, the ambassador of good will between the races, the philosopher who believes not so much in the integration of the races as he does in a culturally pluralistic society.. It treats figures such as Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, and Duke Ellington while considering the question of American democracy and identity.

An author’s standing in a literary tradition rests on how well he or she perceives that tradition and how much he or she contributes to or changes it. Ellison insists that he was following the great writers of the world and claims as his literary ancestors such giants as T. S. Eliot, Henry James
, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and William Faulkner.

Though Ellison does not claim Richard Wright as a literary ancestor, he did embrace Wright’s vision of naturalistic determinism. Ellison found that Wright’s vision was too narrow to represent the Black experience in America. He believed that Wright’s writing, in many instances, only perpetuated in the larger community stereotypical images that the Black writer should attempt to deflate.

In Shadow and Act, Ellison maintained that too many books written by Black authors were aimed at a white audience, the danger in this being that Black writers then tended to limit themselves to their audience’s assumptions about what Black people were like or should be like. The Black writer is as a result reduced to pleading the humanity of his own race, which Ellison saw as the equivalent of questioning whether Blacks were fully human, an indulgence in a false issue that Blacks could ill afford. Believing that a naturalistic/deterministic mode could not define the Black experience, Ellison created a style that embraces the strength, the courage, the endurance, and the promise as well as the uniqueness of the Black experience in America.

In breaking away from the traditional literary path of Black writers, Ellison became a liberator, freeing Black literature from American literary colonialism and bringing it to national and international independence. Ellison’s liberating spirit is evident in such writers as McPherson, Ernest J. Gaines, Leon Forrest, and Clarence Major, and in the surrealism of Ishmael Reed, the folk tradition of Toni Morrison, the historical tradition exhibited by Gloria Naylor, and the spirituality of Toni Cade Bambara who have developed alternative modes of expression or, as Ellison would say, have realized new literary possibilities. They write not only about the Black experience in America but also about the American experience. While writing in the tradition of the great writers, Ellison blazed a literary trail for younger writers to follow. His innovative style was probably the first step in helping Black writers to break the literary constraints of the sociological tradition in African American letters. And Ellison has also had a “profound effect” on mainstream writers.

Ralph Ellison, more so than any other Black writer, brought change to the African American (and also to the American) literary canon by refusing to accept prescribed formulas for depicting the Black American. He thus brought a fierce reality to his vision that neither Blacks nor Caucasians were quite ready to accept. But his truth was/is so eminent, so palpable that neither race could deny it. Ellison will be remembered in literature and in life for making Blacks visible in a society where they had been invisible.

Within his early stories like “King of the Bingo Game,” Ellison employed techniques of irony, gothicism, and macabre humor to describe realities hidden behind the surface of the black and white worlds..

Unable to join the U.S. Navy, Ellison enlisted in the Merchant Marine during World War II serving as a cook and sailing with a naval convoy that supplied troops at the Battle of the Bulge. Whilst serving here he published short stories. Around the same time, having secured a $1,500 grant from the Rosenwald Foundation, he wrote the story “In a Strange Country.” Set in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, the tale describes a black fighter pilot’s struggle as the highest- ranking officer among his fellow Allied prisoners.

Upon his return to New York, with his Rosenwald fellowship Ellison accepted an invitation to spend time on a friend’s farm in Waitsfield, Vermont, where he conceived the idea for his novel Invisible Man. Ellison recalled in his book Going to the Territory how, one afternoon during his stay, he “wrote some words while sitting in an old barn looking out on the mountain…. ‘I’m an Invisible Man.’ I didn’t quite know what it meant, or where the idea came from. But the moment I started to abandon it, I thought: ‘Well maybe I should try to discover what lay behind the statement.’” After a long period of contemplation, Ellison built upon the meaning of the phrase and its relationship to the theme of alienation and self-definition. ,.

Few novels of postwar American fiction have been as celebrated, written about, and analyzed as Ellison’s Invisible Man. Many critics contend that this author’s ability to delve deeply into the chaotic and complex character of American society has rendered him a lasting figure in modern literature. Rooted in the great musical and literary traditions of African American and European cultures, Ellison’s prose breaks from the earlier styles of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary naturalism of Richard Wright; his writings are filled with surrealistic, dream-like scenes that provide a view of the dark recesses of the human experience.

In 1964, Ellison published Shadow And Act, a collection of of 20 essay, 2 interviews and speeches, dealing with African American culture, literature, and music criticism. Written mainly for publication in magazines, the book’s articles cover a time span from the late forties to the early sixties.

“Art is the celebration of life,” stated Ellison in Shadow and Act . it is, as he explained, a means of understanding the value of “diversity within unity,” allowing us to explore the full range of humanity.

The following year, in 1965 a survey of 200 prominent literary figures authors, editors, and critics conducted by the New York Herald Tribune was released that proclaimed Invisible Man as the most important novel since World War II. It was “the most distinguishable single work published in the last twenty years.”

He contributed to The Living Novel (Granville Hicks, ed., 1957), The Angry Black (John A. Williams, ed., 1963), and Soon One Morning (Herbert Hill, ed., 1963) and to numerous literary journals. In 1964 the Tuskegee Institute awarded him an honorary doctorate.

A perfectionist regarding his practice of the art of the novel, Ellison had said in accepting his National Book Award for Invisible Man, that he felt he had made “an attempt at a major novel”, and despite the award, he was unsatisfied with the book.

Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison’s determination and passion for literature kept him in the forefront of intellectual and academic circles. Ellison thus continued to receive major awards for his work.

In 1969, he received the Medal of Freedom; America’s highest civilian honor awarded him by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The following year, he was awarded the coveted Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, acting from 1970-1980. In 1975, he was elected to the American Academy for the Arts and Letters and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College’s Langston Hughes Medallion. The following year saw the publication of Going to the Territory, a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and his friend Richard Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America’s national identity. His second collection of essays and lectures, Going to the Territory, was published in 1986.

Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, in New York City, leaving his second novel which he had begun around 1958 unfinished and unpublished,. A fire at his summer home in Plainsfield, Massachusetts, destroyed much of the manuscript, forcing him to reconstruct much of what he had already done.

Ralph Ellison was buried in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. His wife, who survived him, lived until November 19, 2005. After his death, more manuscripts were discovered in his home, resulting in the publication of Flying Home: And Other Stories in 1996. Still, with the praise and critical attention already bestowed upon his published work, there is little doubt that his universalist message will endure long after the close of the twentieth century.

Born and schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Arthur Smith has taught English for over thirty years at various Educational Institutions. He is now a Senior Lecturer of English at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing for the past eight years.

Mr Smith’s writings have been in various media. He participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature in the U.S. in 2006. His growing thoughts and reflections on this trip which took him to various US sights and sounds could be read at lisnews.org.

His other publications include: Folktales from Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works Celebrating Black Dignity, and ‘The Struggle of the Book’

Author: Arthur Smith
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Make PCB Assembly

Great Danny Elfman Interview

2010-03-14T23:10:00.000-07:00

I'm reprinting this amazing Danny Elfman interview. I apologize to the interviewer and publication as I have misplaced that information. Enjoy!

If you’ve seen a few Tim Burton movies, you’ve definitely heard the music of Danny Elfman. That’s because with the exception of just a few titles, Danny Elfman has been the one composing the music. Here’s some of the films they’ve done together: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish,Planet of the Apes, Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks, Batman,Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and would could forget Beetle Juice!

Anyway, with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland opening this weekend, I had the chance to sit down with this great composer to talk about his latest score. Of course we also talked about how his collaboration with Burton really works, how he picks what projects he works on (he’s done over 70 movies!), what really happened on Wolfman, how he writes music, and so much more. If you’re a fan of Danny Elfman’s, I promise you’ll love this interview. As always, you can either read the transcript or listen to the audio of the interview after the jump.

Finally, a small scoop from our interview. While Gus Van Sant’s latest project is listed as untitled on IMDb, Elfman called it Restless when he was talking about it. Perhaps that’s the final title? Hit the jump for the interview:

The full transcript is below. Click here to listen to the interview: http://media.collider.com/collider_audio/Alice_in_Wonderland_Audio/Danny_Elfman_Alice_in_Wonderland_interview_collider.mp3. You can right click the link and save it to your computer.

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Collider: Are you at the point when you work with Tim that you sort of don’t even talk to each other? That you sort of just, you know, he like looks at you and with a look he can sort of tell you a lot of stuff?

Danny: Well, the answer to that question is yes but we never did talk about the movies. So in a way it’s no different than on Pee Wee. We never really…he doesn’t like to talk about the movies. It’s the quickest spotting session; you know what a spotting session is?

Collider: I’m not familiar with a spotting session.

Danny: A spotting session is where you sit with the director and the editor and you break down all the cues-the musical cues-in the movie. You go through every scene and you talk about music should start here, what they want it to do, where the music might come out. And at the very longest, I won’t say which director; I’ve had spotting sessions go 2 days. With Tim, I’ve never had a spotting session go much over 2 hours. He doesn’t want to talk about it. And is there body language? In deed there’s body language. Usually it’s his head in his hands shaking his head as if he’s just been stabbed in the heart. That’s the bad body expression when I play a piece of music. The good one is a kind of a slight nodding of the head.

Collider: Okay.

Danny: And that’s a good one. We like that. But it’s all just reaction to music. So we just talk about we’ll do music, here, here, here, here and here. Don’t talk about it very much. If he has some concerns about the film he might tell me what they are, but it’s all going to be later when I’m writing a lot of music and he’s responding to the music, that’s where our communication is. And even then it tends to be non-verbal, but through his reactions I can hone in on what he’s looking for.

Collider: I’m curious, how is it with you getting ready for the project? I know you mentioned downstairs in the press conference that you will go on-set and draw inspiration and how on this picture there was nothing to really draw inspiration from as it was mostly green-screened. I’m curious how early…where the creation process for you as a composer is? How early in the process it is? And if you could just talk about the way you write music?

Danny: Well, it begins when I see footage on the screen. Even when I went and saw the Gotham set and they were only halfway done with Batman, but they showed me 10 minutes of footage. And seeing an image on the screen is where it begins. I wasn’t kidding when I said virtually on any film anything I’ve done before that has never made it into the movie. All early preparation has been for naught. Every idea I’ve ever had from a script, not a single one has survived. So I now take completely the opposite approach. Before I’m going to see the first footage, and it doesn’t matter if whether it’s 10 or 15 minutes of a film or the whole film, I’m going to just try to blank my mind out of any preconceived musical ideas I might have carried with me. And the less I have preconceived, the better off I am.

Collider: I am curious about your writing process. Are you…I’m familiar with writers but I’m not really familiar with how composers work. Do you say for example walk around with a tape recorder and you might hum something? Or are you very much I need to be in a specific location and that’s where I’m writing my music?

Danny: Well, it’s both. I’m definitely looking at image and getting first impulses down. And then walking away and coming back and more impulses and then I listen to what I just did. I have a technique that I’ve used for a long time, which is I look at the film, I get an idea, I start to play it and I start to lay more parts on and lay more parts on until I’ve gotten maybe several minutes or more of a scene composed. And I do all the orchestration everything until it sounds complete. And at the point where I’m feeling pretty decently happy with it, I walk away, do something else, watch some TV or anything else and come back in and start from scratch without listening to what I’ve just done. And the idea is to try to take any scene that has any importance, I’m going to approach it 3, 4, maybe half a dozen times. And then I’ll go back and listen to everything I just did. Now that I’ve got 3 or 4 completely different things, I’ll listen to it and go oh, yeah. That doesn’t work. Hmm, this is interesting. I’m going to start now and do variations on this. That one is interesting too but maybe not for this spot. I don’t know why I’m interested in it but I’m going to keep this one alive. And so at that point some die and get kicked out. Some I keep alive and carry on. And of the ones that seem interesting, even if they’re in very different directions, I’ll play them all for Tim because I really want to get his reaction. Because very frequently I’ll have 3-4 pieces of music for a single scene and I’ll tell Tim, I’ll say “I don’t actually yet have an opinion about which I really prefer. I can see them all working in a different way.” And then now he’s going to get involved and go, “Oh, oh no, no, no. Ah, that one! That one. I don’t know why.”

And then I start doing elaborate, elaborate, elaborate variations and variations and then slowly I start to fall into “okay, I understand now. This is a theme and this is a theme and this theme follows this character. This theme follows this feeling.” So sometimes a theme follows a feeling not a character. And that’s my lack of technique/technique of how I do it because there’s no science to it. It’s just really try a lot of stuff and then if possible try something you like and once you start to like it slap yourself in the face, erase it and try something different.

Collider: With Alice in Wonderland vs. the other many projects you’ve worked on, was this more of a challenge for you with the fact that so much was coming together in post-production at the end? And that maybe some of the footage wasn’t done until very recently? Or could you talk about the challenge of this project vs. the others?

Danny: Well that was a huge challenge but only because that was a big challenge for Tim. Tim’s used to having everything in camera. There are very few directors who would actually build a chocolate waterfall and a chocolate river that a boat could actually row through. Most directors would do that with CG. That would be done after that. Tim built it. He likes it “in-camera”. He likes to see in the frame what you’re going to see on the screen. Maybe add a little elaboration here and there but very little in the dozen or so films I’ve worked in, very, very little isn’t there in the beginning. So for him, it was a wildly different experience because there was nothing there. There was an actor in front of a green-screen. And he was freaked out. So him being freaked out made it crazy for me. The process for me of not seeing the backgrounds and footage isn’t difficult because I’ve done that a lot. Fortunately for Tim….he used to joke Tim was my first film, my 5th, my 10th and my 15th. And he would joke, he says “You’re doing 4 films between each of my films.” I go, “I’ve got to learn more so I can do a better job on your films.” So I’ve done a lot with green-screen….not green-screen motion capture but with things unfinished and it doesn’t bother me. I’m okay with that but he was…it was driving him insane. His insanity gets passed down to me, so I was then going insane, because my experience with Tim will just simply follow his state of mind, completely.

Collider: I’m curious how long it typically takes you beginning to end on a project? Is it 4 months? Is it 6 months? And could you talk about how much time you spent on Alice?

Danny: Well I like to have 12 weeks on a film. I don’t always get it. I mean, it can be as little as 5 weeks, you know, on Mission Impossible and Hulk and movies where I’m stepping in late. And I think the most I’ve ever had was 4 months. But I like to have, you know, at least 10-12 weeks to write a score. And then, of course, there’s time going into recording and mixing because I’m there for all the mixing of the score and the producing. So that could add another week or two and then finally the soundtrack album editing. But I look at them more or less as 3 month periods.

Collider: Is there one score that you’ve done that you were really rushed on that you felt “wow, this really turned out a lot better than I expected”?

Danny: Well, yeah..I never feel that anything turned out better than I expected on any film. I usually don’t even know how I feel about the score until later. But there’s certainly huge challenges as I just mentioned Hulk. I’d stepped into where…I’ve done 5 or 6 films where I was replacing a score. And there was 106 minutes or 108 minutes of music…maybe 112 and 5 weeks top to bottom. And that I took on strictly as a challenge to see if I could do it. Well, I shouldn’t say strictly, I did it because I loved Ang. But rather than saying Ang I love you but this is impossible. I took that more of I wonder if this is possible. I wonder how much I could write in this amount of time. And so, that was the most like a compressed time period I’d ever had because that much music really needs more time and the action music is very slow to write to boot. I mean slower than non-active music, you know, action scenes. It’s amazing how many hours you can spend and finish a sequence of events and then go wow, how much music did I just finish. And you go, “My God, 22 seconds? I just feel like I wrote 3 minutes” because you know you’re catching everything in these…it’s so intricate. And there was a lot of that. So that was like the climbing Everest film. But every film is a different experience and I just had to know if I could do it. And I still kind of do any kind of acrobatics or stunt or go to war with Ang, you know, there’s certain people that just kind of make you want to do that for them. And you know for Tim, that goes without saying. Whatever amount of time I have with him, I’ll use it. He has me completely and totally and I kind of cherish that time. It’s special when I’m starting one of Tim’s films it’s kind of like special time. And I’ll try to have as few distractions in my life as I can.

Collider: I’m curious what your criteria is for picking projects that are not Tim Burton and Ang Lee? What gravitates you or what makes you want to do a certain project and what do you have coming up? What other scores are on your agenda?

Danny: Well there’s 2 primary things that attract me…let me see if it’s 2. One is it’s a director I want to work with and it doesn’t matter what the movie is. When Ang called, when Gus Van Sant called, there are directors who I get a call and it’s like the movie they’re doing is kind of irrelevant. It’s kind of what Johnny was saying in the press conference, like what about playing the Hatter? He says “I’d have played Alice. It doesn’t matter.” Well that’s how I feel very often. It’s like I get a call from a certain director it’s like Guermo Del Toro …alright no, I would not necessarily have gone for a sequel to a film that I didn’t do the first one for but it’s Guermo. I don’t care. I want to work with Guermo. And so sometimes it’s the director. Timur Bekmambetov you know, it’s like I probably would have done anything if Timur, whatever the film was, I would have been interested in it, the fact that it was Timur because I was a big fan of movies. Big fan of Gus’ movies, Timur’s movies, of Guermo’s movies. Sometimes it’s a director or I’m not quite sure but something seems interesting about the project. Sometimes it’s the fact that there’s something about the project seems like it would be fun or interesting or challenging. And sometimes, in fact frequently, it ends up being something where I’ve never done that before. That’s a really big one. For example, when I asked originally…I didn’t end up doing the movie…but I was asked… Oliver Hirschbiegel. He wanted to do a movie for theInvasion. It was all atmospheric. Electronic and atmospheric. No orchestra. I was immediately attracted to that. First off he’d done a wonderful movie but I was attracted to the fact that he wanted that.

Now, it ended up going in a different direction and I had to leave, but when somebody gives me something…you know when Pete Berg approached me for The Kingdom, it was like let’s use guitars. Let’s see what we can score with guitars. Don’t even need an orchestra. Great. Let’s do something with a string quartet. All percussion. Anything that sounds like ooh, that’s interesting, that can catch my attention and make me decide to do the film. So there’s all kinds of different things. Sometimes a movie is just fun. I mean, my attraction to the Wolfman was simply because I grew up on the Wolfman and monsters. Okay, there’s the hook. So there’s a number of things that can hook me. It could the subject matter. It can be a nostalgic attachment to something from the past. It could be the director. It could be something about it that enables me to do something that I’m not used to doing or haven’t done as much of or maybe haven’t even done at all before. And all of these things are kind of hooks for me. And, occasionally, it’s just like I’ll bet this will be fun. And it depends on what I just finished. If I finished something really heavy, something fun seems really…oh the Green Hornet we just talked about. Michel Gondry. It’s like I wouldn’t be normally looking for another action film of another action hero, but it’s Michel Gondry. I’ve got to work with Michele. I’ve got to meet Michele. And so sometimes it’ll be direct response to what I just finished. I finished something serious, I want to do something fun. I finished something really silly, I want to do something serious. And whatever I’ve done I’m always yearning to do the opposite or as close to it the next.

Collider: Clean the palate.

Danny: Yeah.

Collider: So besides Green Hornet is that the only thing you’re on?

Danny: No, I’m on Restless of Gus Van Sant’s right now, even before Green Hornet with Mia. I just told Mia, I said “I’m just going from you to you right now” and she’s the star of Gus’ movie.

Collider: Totally. I know I have to wrap with you. I could ask you more questions for example on Wolfman but I will leave it alone and say thank you.

Danny: Oh you just have one question for Wolfman. Go ahead.

Collider: I’m just curious what like from an outsider it looked to me like Universal just…I mean being blunt about this, just was what the fuck went on with that movie and Universal? And I felt that like there was a lot of stuff that was going on behind the scenes. What was your kind of…looking on it now, it’s been a least a few months, I’m just curious what sort of….do you want to talk about it at all? Like all that stuff? Or do you want to sort of leave it alone?

Danny: Well, let me just do the short version. I mean, it was a troubled project from early on once I came on the film. But Joe Johnston was such a great standup guy. He wanted a score that was atmospheric and stylish and narrative and I wrote a score that was all those things. Now, unfortunately then the movie got extended many, many months and when a movie get extended many months there’s a lot of messing around that goes on with it. But in the end, Joe was still a great guy and I just tried to support him because at a certain point a film can be like a battlefield. It could like a battleground. And you just try to keep your head down, keep your flak jacket on and try not to get taken down by friendly fire or unfriendly fire. But in the end, as a composer, we’re still kind of like a captain serving at the…trying to support our general and the director is the general. And sometimes on a film you just become taken with the fact that, all right this is as rough as it gets, but I’m going to support my general and I’m going to do the very best I can for him because he’s a good general and I like him, you know? And that was the case with Wolfman. Lot of stuff happened. My score got thrown out. My score got thrown back in again. It was out, it was in. But throughout all the thick and thin of it, Joe was fighting the whole time to try to keep his original integrity there as best I could and I felt like whatever I could do to help him out. He’s a standup guy. A lot of people in that position would have just rolled over and said, okay give me rock and roll, you know, instead of orchestra. John never did. He just never let up. So he’s a good guy. Very difficult project but some of them are.

Collider: I have to wrap with you. I’m going to say thank you.

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

2010-03-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

Interesting article on the death of creativity (or not).

David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?

By: Ryan Blitstein | February 22, 2010 | 05:00 AM (PDT)

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/

The Most Important Black Filmmaker You've Never Heard Of

2010-01-20T19:42:00.000-08:00

The Most Important Black Filmmaker You've Never Heard Of

F. Gary Gray breaks down his body of work

By Zach Dionne

January 20, 2010

If Spike Lee is the king of black filmmakers, F. Gary Gray is the prince. The tireless, underrated, pure-entertainer prince. In the career retrospective Shooter Series Volume Two: F. Gary Gray, the now-40-year-old director looks into a camera in 1991 and says he wants to direct epic movies—before he's directed even a noteworthy music video. "I was very clear on what I wanted to do, even if it was going to take me 50 years to get there," Gray tells GQ.

Gray distances himself from the Michel Gondrys and Spike Jonzes who went from point A to point B, from MTV to Hollywood. Gray helmed a short film at age 21 before diving into music videos, and has bounced enthusiastically between the two since the early '90s. "Most of music videos were short films—they had dialogue, action sequences. I shot with cranes and helicopters. I wanted to created cinema-like moments."

He considers his first seven movies the beginning, the first chapter. "I'm excited about film more now than ever. I get to apply what I've learned to the next seven films, and the next seven films," Gray says, adding, "I have a hard time looking back unless I'm forced to."

We forced him to. Click here for F. Gary Gray's thoughts on his entire feature filmography and the milestone music videos.

Shooter Series Volume Two: F. Gary Gray comes out on DVD on February 16.

Click the link below for the slideshow:
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201001/f-gary-gray-slideshow

Hurricane Season Direct To DVD

2010-01-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

THIS IS THE FIRST AND LAST TIME I WILL COMMENT ON HURRICANE SEASON GOING STRAIGHT TO DVD. I AM NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT BUT HAVE NO SAY IN THE MATTER.

This is just great! My first Music Supervision gig and the movie goes straight to DVD. I don't understand film companies that run out of money but aren't open to doing business to let the film go to another company that has the money and wherewithal to put it out. Please, please rent and watch this movie. It features Oscar winners Forest Whitaker, Taraji P. Henson along with Isaiah Washington, Bonnie Hunt, Bow Wow, Lil Wayne and a cast of amazing young actors. Yes, the story is centered around Hurricane Katrina which is not a pretty topic. Yes, it is directed by my youngest brother Tim Story. Yes, it is a basketball/sports movie. Yes, it sku's young with rappers-turned-actors in it. Yes, the title of the movie sucks. Yes, it is edited to shreds. BUT you won't be disappointed. In fact, you'll be moved, touched and inspired by the acting and story. It is also very funny in spots. And please disregard the last song of the movie during the end credits. That was Mr. Weinstein's call, not mine. Release date: February 9, 2010.

Crowded Out of Eden: Composers and the Hollywood Dream

2010-01-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

I reprinted this excellent article by Jonathan Rhodes Lee about the travails of composing in today's and yesterday's film industry.

Crowded Out of Eden: Composers and the Hollywood Dream
By Jonathan Rhodes Lee

Film composer James Horner has been in the news a good deal lately. Horner is a versatile and experienced musician, with soundtracks as diverse as Star Trek II and Field of Dreams to his credit. His most recent effort, the sci-fi extravaganza Avatar, directed by James Cameron, reunites him with the director and genre that launched his professional career in the first place.

Avatar has generated a huge amount of press as, putatively, the most expensive film ever made. What’s more, Cameron’s work with new camera techniques and 3-D rendering has been said (by Cameron himself, among others) to be the next revolution in sci-fi. As a by-product, Horner has gotten more attention than for any of his scores since Titanic.

Now, you’d think that all the attention would please him, but his reunion with Cameron also seems to have dredged up some long-held, hard feelings. Horner demonstrates, in various recent interviews, that his relationship with the movie industry is definitely of the love–hate sort.

Film music historian Jon Burlingame wrote a fascinating article for last month’s Variety, in which Horner expresses dismay at the status of film composers. In Horner’s estimate, film musicians are no longer on the level of picture editors, as they once were. They’re treated more as hired hands, as contract workers. In another interview, for London’s Times Online, Horner describes a tense working relationship between himself and Cameron in one breath, and then lambastes the state of contemporary film composition in another: “The idea of film themes is not necessarily an important construct anymore for a lot of film composers. I hope it changes. Now it’s all action music, and it shows.” He might be hoping against his own predictions. Burlingame closes his article by quoting Horner’s dismal outlook: “No one just says, ‘What do you think of my picture? I want you to write what’s in your heart.’ I haven’t heard that in years. That simple concept does not exist anymore.”

All this grumbling about working methods and Hollywood’s controlling grasp raises an interesting question: Did the “simple concept” described by Horner ever really exist in Hollywood? Presumably, he’s remembering the late-1970s and ’80s, when composers like Horner and, more famously, John Williams collaborated with the London Symphony Orchestra on vast, lushly detailed, symphonic poems. Those films’ scores were tied to the visual action, to be sure, yet the music was given prominence and achieved a life of its own in the collective cultural conscience of my generation.

This period was a circumscribed one, though, and the list of people working in this type of music-happy movie environment is brutally short. Disgruntled movie musicians make up a much longer list. Their story stretches back at least to the Golden Age of studio production, the 1930s. A brief review of this history of kvetching reveals that each generation of musicians working in Hollywood tended to view the past through rose-colored glasses, using language as grumpy as Horner’s to describe their own situations.

Assembly-Line Composition Comes to the Studio System

Those composers working under the huge studio systems in the 1930s and ’40s longed for the good old days of silent-film orchestras, when they raked in huge salaries as composers, arrangers, and conductors (often filling all three roles on one picture) and were viewed as important artists in a new, creative medium. In sharp contrast, the grueling pace of film production during Hollywood’s heyday precluded any time for artistic reflection. The production method was definitely of the assembly-line sort. In a 1974 interview, film composer and orchestrator Hugo Friedhofer (The Best Years of Our Life, Between Heaven and Hell) explained the process of musical typecasting throughout his long career: “So-and-so was a great man for main titles, so-and-so was a great man for string arrangements, so-and-so was a great man for chases, etc.”

David Raksin (Laura, Fallen Angel, and so on) recalled his early experiences similarly. “Friday afternoons I would usually go over to Warner’s [the Warner Bros. studio], where Leo [Forbstein] would show me either a main title or a montage or a battle scene. That was all I did — maybe a chase. ... In most cases, I never even saw the rest of the picture.” Even the king of 1930s film scores, Max Steiner, wasn’t in full artistic control of his creations, despite the fact that his name appeared on credits as prominently as the films’ directors. Music Director Forbstein instructed the staff orchestrators like Friedhofer to “‘write as close to what Max is doing as possible.’” That’s because their own music was to appear anonymously on a score officially composed by Steiner.

It's not that composers like Steiner were incapable of producing their own scores. Rather, it was the case that deadlines were simply too grueling in this system, with composers expected to produce scores in sometimes as little as two weeks, often seeing bits and pieces of the picture only as they were created. Teamwork was therefore of the utmost importance to music department staffs, and some composers and arrangers remembered the period for its great camaraderie.
Meddling Muddles Music

Many of them didn’t see it that way, though. A number of composers recalled meddling supervisors, studio businessmen who cared very little about music and knew even less about it. Prolific orchestrator Leo Shuken recalled how industry bosses instructed him to “throw those Goddamn harmony books away.” Famed producer Irving Thalberg once issued a memo to his music department at MGM, demanding that composers “kindly refrain in the future from using minor chords.”

America’s most famous classical composer, Aaron Copland, also tried his hand at film composing throughout the 1940s, but not without letting his views be known in print. In Our Music, he wrote: “[The] typical Hollywood composer is concerned not with the reaction of the public, as you might think, but with that of the producer. ... A pleased producer means more jobs. That alone is sufficient to explain the Hollywood stereotype of music.” Thus, even these celebrated figures from Hollywood musical history didn’t get the type of leeway that Horner dreamed of in his interview with Burlingame.

The studios’ heyday came to a crashing end after decades of antitrust lawsuits, which broke out as early as 1938. The plaintiffs cited studios’ corporate ownership of theaters and publishing companies as a monopoly over the distribution of filmed information. Court rulings and appeals were delayed throughout the course of World War II, but the Supreme Court eventually decided against the studios in the landmark Paramount case of 1948. This decision led to the major studios’ relinquishing their theater chains, which was accompanied by a major restructuring of the organizations’ internal affairs. For composers, this meant that their home bases — the huge studio music departments — were suddenly dissolved.

Rock, Temp Tracks, and Directors, Oh My

One interesting by-product of all this legal squabbling and studio restructuring was the change in interaction between composer and director. While David Raksin and Leo Shukin had complained so fervently about their lack of contact with film directors and about moronic studio executives’ demands limiting their artistic control, composers in the 1950s and later decades found themselves in constant contact with the production staff.

This change partly had to do with the shifting aesthetics of film scoring. Whereas large orchestras had been employed since the dawn of the sound era for lush, romantic scores, the 1950s and ’60s saw the rise of the pop music soundtrack and other approaches that didn’t require a single-composer credit. Many of the older music department employees complained about this new aesthetic. Shuken, for instance, stated, “Well, I’m personally fed up with, for example, at a graveyard watching somebody getting buried and hearing the high hat [cymbal] and electric bass.”

Even more insulting to film composers was the rise of auteur directors who provided their own music. Stanley Kubrick famously rejected Alex North’s score for 2001: A Space Odyssey in favor of his own “temp track” (the industry term for temporary music used while editing a film). William Friedkin also unceremoniously cast off Lalo Schifrin’s entire score, opting instead for a score of licensed music. “It really is Music Score by Tower Records,” quipped Friedkin.

Composers hated the fact that the music departments were gone, hated the new rock ’n’ roll soundtrack, hated the gall of a new breed of directors encroaching on their work. Many of them also hated the fact that they were unemployed, with no residuals or rights to their old classic film scores. By the 1970s, complaints had reached a fever pitch, and composer Elmer Bernstein even longed for the days when composers enjoyed the “buffer” of a music department staff, whom he remembered as “men who were fully qualified to discuss the considerations of a score much in the same way that a doctor and a consultant discuss a patient’s case.”

The reversal of complaints is striking. Whereas those composers working in the 1940s and ’50s lamented their distance from the creative heads and their unhappiness with the conservative, industry-minded music departments, a younger generation of composers dreamed of having someone to mediate between them and the directors, whose musical tastes they disdained.
Taking Composers’ Complaints to the Courts
Although the aesthetic complaints would seem to have shifted somewhat, the basic business complaints remained the same. A whole new round of lawsuits beleaguered the industry throughout the 1970s, with Bernstein as the plaintiff’s primary spokesperson.

Bernstein managed to reestablish the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, an organization that had been formed in the 1940s, once it became clear that ASCAP was of limited use to film composers. At the time of the 1970s suits, the CLGA had never been recognized as a trade union; staff composers continued to feel exploited; and credited composers experienced increased loss of revenue from the newly popularized recorded soundtracks, for which they received limited residual payments. Bernstein launched a magazine called Film Music Notebook in 1974, largely as a mouthpiece for these disenfranchised composers. Their complaints were noisy — indeed, most of the anecdotes in this article come from the pages of Bernstein’s magazine.

The project ultimately failed. The CLGA’s lawsuit was a multimillion-dollar class-action affair brought by 71 members of the organization against the major movie and TV studios, and other companies. The complaints mainly hinged on the composers’ inability to collect “neighboring rights’ assets” (royalties). Theodore W. Kheel represented the group, and directed the case toward the old territory of monopoly charges. The plaintiffs also played the “public access” card, charging that the studios not only were suppressing competition among publishers and denying composers’ potential earnings, but were also “depriving the public of access to the music.”

In the end, the courts dismissed the case, stating that it was a labor squabble. Since film composers never managed to unionize (and still never have), the battle was lost. The CLGA acquired some copyrights for publishing older scores, which partially put a halt to the studios’ practices of destroying old scores whose films were out of circulation. However, the details of the settlement also strictly stipulated that the composers were independent contractors. The class-action suit of the 1970s brought to a close a period of artistic and legal dissent with roots in the old studio squabbles of the 1940s.

So the freedom that James Horner enjoyed in the 1980s was rare indeed. In truth, his longed-for halcyon days may not have characterized the experiences of most Golden Age studio composers. And perhaps the new Golden Age of film music represented by the most famous scores of John Williams and Horner is coming to a close, too. We could be witnessing the dawning of a new era. In these days of YouTube and mashups, directors once again are wresting control of musical elements from composers, and using streamlined, technologically minded approaches that crowd out orchestral scores.

Hollywood film scores always seem to lag slightly behind popular taste, but eventually they embrace the best elements of that culture in their most successful products. Perhaps the upcoming generation of composers will produce exciting, new approaches to film scoring — and probably they, too, will long for some earlier model of production once they have worked in “The Industry” for a while.

Jonathan Rhodes Lee studied harpsichord in New York, San Francisco, and the Netherlands. He is currently enrolled in the graduate program in historical musicology at UC Berkeley.

Top Ten JRPG Composers - Music feature - at IGN

2010-01-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Top Ten JRPG Composers - Music feature - at IGN

The First Composers Union

2010-01-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

I'VE KNOWN ABOUT THIS FOR A FEW MONTHS BUT THOUGHT I'D HAVE IT BE MY FIRST BLOG ENTRY OF 2010:

Teamsters Say They’re Ready To Help Film & TV Composers Unionize at LA Meeting
Film Music Magazine • November 17, 2009

“If film & television composers want to organize,” stated Steve Dayan, “We, the Teamsters stand ready to help you.”

This was Dayan’s core message as he spoke November 16 in Los Angeles to approximately 450 composers in his capacity as an official of the Teamster’s Local 399. This initial and preliminary public meeting with regard to composer collective bargaining was co-chaired by composers Bruce Broughton, Alf Clausen, Jim DiPasquale, and Alan Elliott.

It was stated from the outset that film & television composers remain virtually the only non-unionized work force in the entertainment industry, specifically in the production of original music for feature films and television programming.

Statistics made available to the attendees at the Pickwick Conference Center allege a staggering drop in composer fees from the 1980s to the present time—as much as an 86% pay-cut on an average movie adjusted for 2009 dollars. Further statistics purport a 240% increase in actual minutes of music used in today’s movies in contrast to those produced in 1980.

Over this 30-year period while composers and lyricists have had no industrial representation, the composer-panel emphasized that overall compensation has drastically declined while the sheer volume of minutes of music delivered per-show has dramatically increased. Issues adding fuel to the fire include increasingly unrealistic delivery deadlines, punitive working conditions, lack of benefits enjoyed by most workers in the industry, plus the amalgamation of skill-sets turning many composers into regretful recordists, music editors, copyists, session contractors, and mixing, dubbing, and mastering engineers. These once-separate job descriptions are often demanded by producers without compensation to the composer nor his or her staff in what are labeled “package deals.”

Panelists Broughton, Clausen, DiPasquale, and Elliot made cogent presentations of the past and current state of affairs, disclosing that their work together during the past four years as an organizing committee in conjunction with the Teamsters was now ready for consideration by composers and lyricists. Said each in their own fashion, “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

The questions and comments from the attendees ranged from enthusiasm to anxiety and frustration. Of particular rancor was the demand of some producers for composers to submit elaborate, virtually finished works as a condition of employment and without compensation. Further, any excessive demands by producers for composers and lyricists to surrender total rights of authorship and even forfeit writer’s royalties from the continuing sales and performances of their musical works in film & television.

There were a host of earnest and concerned questions by attendees, including if the proposed affiliation with the Teamsters would encompass composers working for production music libraries, in music for advertising, for games and other media.

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” answered Steve Dayan of the Teamsters. “Our efforts to help organize the casting directors took four and a half years, but we’re very happy with those positive results. Taking on issues such as wages and minimums, working conditions, health benefits and pensions is what we do. But you have to decide if you want it, and then work together as a team.”

Said one composer, “This is a no-brainer for me. We already KNOW the consequences of having no industrial representation. It’s a bottomless pit. Better to band together than to see overall conditions go from bad to worse.”

Additional information on this composer/lyricist initiative with the Teamsters is available from the Association of Media Composers and Lyricists at http://theamcl.org

Composer Chris Thomas Hopes For Oscar Magic

2009-12-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

I love this story. This is how it all begins.
Dex

Local composer hopes for Oscar magic
Woman Rebel documents rise of Nepalese rebellion, makes short list at Academy Awards

By KATHY ANEY
The East Oregonian

Filmmaker Kiran Deol and composer Chris Thomas are on a wild ride that has so far taken them from the jungles of Nepal to the Academy Awards short list.

Their documentary film, "Woman Rebel," follows the trajectory of a female guerilla fighter who finally lays down her gun to take a seat in the country's parliament.

Deol hopped a plane to Nepal the day after she graduated from Harvard University in 2006 to begin documenting the story.

"She was crazy," said Thomas of Deol. The filmmaker arrived on the scene during an extremely volatile moment during the country's civil war.

But Deol desperately wanted to tell the story of the rebel army, which was approximately 40 percent female. The filmmaker, who has South Asian roots, was intrigued by these women who "were willing to pick up a gun and go out and fight for their rights."

Most of the women come from the bottom level of the country's caste system, she said.

"If you aren't allowed to use the same faucets as other people, if people won't eat their food because your shadow fell on it...," Deol said. "There is an entrenched sense of inequity. It's difficult to wrap your mind around it."

The women, she said, were traditionally seen as powerless and poor.

In Nepal, her first challenge involved getting access to the rebels. A journalist friend worked to connect her. A middle-of-the night phone call directed her to be at a certain location at 5 a.m. After a circuitous journey, Deol ended up in a jungle camp. Through an interpreter, she pitched her project to rebel leaders who gave it a reserved thumbs-up.

Meanwhile, home in the U.S., Thomas worked to compose a musical score that would compliment the film. At that point, Deol envisioned a comprehensive look at the female rebels and the inequities that drove them to fight.

Thomas worked to craft rich orchestral music that transmitted plenty of tension and anxiety. Then things in Nepal changed. Deol found a rebel with the code name of Silu who fought against the Royal Army where her brother was a soldier. Silu chose to fight partially because of her sister who was married off at age 12 or 13 and beaten regularly by her husband, Deol said. Eventually, the sister killed herself.

"Silu didn't want to be part of a society that would allow something like that," Deol said. "She is incredibly driven."

Deol and Thomas realized the music was wrong for this more-personal view of rebel life.

"As the story focused down to one person, Kiran said, 'I think we are just stomping all over this,'" Thomas said. "We did a complete 180 on the score."

"The film evolved into this intimate story," Deol said. "The music became more focused and tailored down."

Thomas immersed himself in Nepalese music, learning about East Asian instruments such as the dilruba and the bansuri flute. The dilruba has a sitar-like neck and a violin body and is played upright. The bansuri is made of bamboo and produces a deep, delicate sound, said Thomas.

Though the composer generally writes for other musicians to produce the final product, Thomas personally created some of the sounds with his cello and had a rental dilruba at the ready in case he needed it.

Deol listened with pleasure.

"Chris is phenomenal," she said. "It was such a pleasure to work with him."

Thomas' music takes Silu from the jungles to the Nepalese Parliament. In 2006, Silu and her fellow rebels agreed to join a transitional government and end their fight which had left 13,000 people dead. The rebel Maoist party in the new government agreed to designate one-third of Parliament seats to women. Silu got one of the seats.

As the film neared completion, Deol, Thomas and their colleagues worked feverishly with Deol madly finishing the edit, while Thomas tweaked the score to match.

"We were constantly in contact at all hours," Thomas said.

The 37-minute film, finished in August, has since been short-listed for an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary (Short Subject). Final nominations will be announced Feb. 2 in Los Angeles.

Thomas, a 2001 Pendleton High School graduate, will add "Woman Rebel" to a growing list of composer, conductor and orchestrator credits involving television shows and films such as "Lost," "CSI," "Captain Abu Read," "Dragon Wars" and others. Two years ago, he became the youngest nominee for Best Orchestrator by the Academy of Film and TV Music Awards.

Deol, buoyed by the success of her maiden documentary, is busy dreaming of new projects.

Golden Globe Score Nominations 2009

2009-12-23T15:20:00.000-08:00

I have some listening to do but so far my vote is for Giacchino. I can't stop listening to Up and can hear the melodies in my head when I am not listening to it. Burwell and Karen O's score is also amazing and Horner's score is drab in my opinion. Stay tuned for my take on Hamlisch and Korzeniowski.

Michael Giacchino - Up

Marvin Hamlisch - The Informant!

James Horner - Avatar

Abel Korzeniowski - A Single Man

Karen O and Carter Burwell - Where The Wild Things Are

Carter Burwell Wild Things Score Review

2009-12-08T15:49:00.000-08:00

Where The Wild Things Are Score Review
Small-Scale, Heartfelt Fantasy Score by Carter Burwell

Nov 24, 2009 David Abraham Dueck

Writing in the small-scale mode that brings out his best music, Burwell's intimate music for "Where the Wild Things Are" is a score of deep emotion and striking clarity.

Carter Burwell is a wonderfully talented composer whose music has yet to find a place in mainstream consciousness. His most fruitful and famous collaborations have been with the Coen Brothers, but elsewhere, his music, while normally of high quality, goes largely unnoticed even by many film score collectors.

Carter Burwell: Underrated Composer

Both epic works such as his score to The Alamo and broodingly classical masterpieces like In Bruges have been inexplicably passed over, while ironically one of his weakest scores (for 2008's Twilight) has become one of his most famous and beloved.

Burwell's talent becomes strangely more apparent when he writes music of a smaller and more intimate scale: In Bruges remains one of his most fascinating compositions due to its reliance on a tiny chamber ensemble to perform the surprisingly complex music, even for action set-pieces.

Small-Scale, Atmospheric Fantasy Score by Burwell

Where the Wild Things Are follows this template in very satisfying fashion, although he adds some colorful surprises to the instrumental mix to give it the necessary fantasy atmosphere. The score relies mainly upon piano, one or two guitars and a tiny string section as the bulk of the ensemble, although an occasional appearance by light, tingling metallic percussion ("Training") and fluttering woodwinds do increase the depth of the group somewhat.

Thematic development does not appear to be Burwell's priority in this score: rather, the atmosphere generated by his music is the primary factor and the score's greatest continuity, with bleak but soothing progressions performed at a leisurely pace by the sparse ensemble.

Wild Excitement in Where the Wild Things Are

Moments of excitement do pop up, however; most notably in the entertainingly savage "Dirt Clod Fight", but also in "Max Joins": Burwell lets his guitars and acoustic percussion take center stage in a wild display of nearly juvenile glee, and the shouting children's vocals in "Dirt Clod Fight" provide a winking connection between Burwell's score and the dominating songs in the film, performed by Karen O and The Kids (which have been published on a seperate album).

Summary

The score as a whole is very brief at just over twenty-five minutes long, but this is to be expected given the prominence of the film's songs as the primary musical identity of the story. Burwell's score is not to be overlooked, however: the cues "This is Your World" and "We Love You So" are among the loveliest, most unassuming pieces that Burwell has composed in recent years, and each cue is marked by that peculiar clarity and intimate sense of heart which Burwell is so skilled at creating with his small ensembles.

A truly satisfying and well-rounded musical souvenir of the film would involve both the film's songs and Burwell's score, but on its own, the score does not disappoint those familiar with Burwell's work. In no way is it stunning or surprising, or even very memorable in its somber, plodding melodicism: but it is a quiet, comforting, warm and subtle score to a fine fantasy film, and will be much enjoyed by those who seek it out. Recommended.

Carter Burwell's score for Where The Wild Things Are can be purchased downloaded online at AmazonMP3, or the iTunes store.

Read more at Suite101: Where The Wild Things Are Score Review: Small-Scale, Heartfelt Fantasy Score by Carter Burwell | Suite101.com http://instrumentalmusic.suite101.com/article.cfm/where_the_wild_things_are_score_review#ixzz0Z90pChKY

Key Art

2009-12-06T15:07:00.001-08:00

Save Some For Me Soundtrack Cover

2009-12-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

Photoshop works wonders...

OBITS: Composer Vic Mizzy (Green Acres, Addams Family)

2009-11-25T02:44:00.000-08:00

Vic Mizzy dies at 93; film and TV composer wrote 'Addams Family' theme song
He also composed the theme music for the 1965-71 rural comedy 'Green Acres.'

"Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air," Mizzy once said, referring to his success with the "Addams Family" song. (Micah Smith / Associated Press)

By Dennis McLellan

October 20, 2009

Vic Mizzy, a film and television composer best known for writing the memorable theme songs for the 1960s sit-coms "Green Acres" and "The Addams Family," has died. He was 93.

Mizzy died of heart failure Saturday at his home in Bel-Air, said Scott Harper, a friend and fellow composer.

A veteran writer of popular songs such as "There's a Faraway Look in Your Eye" and "Pretty Kitty Blue Eyes," Mizzy launched his TV career in 1960 when he was asked to compose music for the dramatic anthology series "Moment of Fear."

He quickly moved on to score episodes of "Shirley Temple's Storybook" and "The Richard Boone Show" and to write the themes for "Klondike" and the Dennis Weaver series "Kentucky Jones."

Then came an offbeat assignment: “The Addams Family,” the 1964-66 TV series based on Charles Addams' macabre magazine cartoons and starring John Astin as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones as his wife, Morticia.

For his theme song, Mizzy played a harpsichord, which gives the theme its unique flavor. And because the production company, Filmways, refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times. The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: "They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Addams family."

In the 1996 book "TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From 'Dragnet' to 'Friends,' " author Jon Burlingame writes that Mizzy's "musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy's music."

For Mizzy, who owned the publishing rights to "The Addams Family" theme, it was an easy payday.

"I sat down; I went 'buh-buh-buh-bump [snap-snap], buh-buh-buh-bump," he recalled in a 2008 interview on CBS' "Sunday Morning" show. "That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps and you live in Bel-Air."

The season after "The Addams Family" made its debut, Mizzy composed the title song for “Green Acres,” the 1965-71 rural comedy starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor.

For "Green Acres," Burlingame observed in his book, Mizzy "again conceived the title song as intertwined with the visuals" of the show's title sequence and telling the story of wealthy Oliver and Lisa Douglas moving from New York to a farm in the country.

Burlingame on Monday described the themes for "The Addams Family" and "Green Acres" as "two of the best-remembered sitcom themes of all time."

"Vic was an old-school songwriter who believed in melody and hummability," Burlingame said. "He thought that people ought to be able to easily remember a theme.

"Vic was one of the wittiest composers I ever met, and he had an uncanny ability to incorporate his own personal sense of humor into his music."

Mizzy's use of bass harmonica and fuzz guitar in the music of "Green Acres," for example, "was somehow perfect for that show's setting, and it only added to the humor of the situations," Burlingame said.

In the case of "The Addams Family," he said, "you've got the harpsichord, which lends this antique, sort of macabre quality to the theme. But then you add the lyrics, which make it funny. So you have the perfect combination of macabre and amusing. It was just right for that show's sensibility."

Mizzy's many TV credits include writing the themes for Phyllis Diller's 1966-67 sitcom "The Pruitts of Southampton" and "The Don Rickles Show" (1968-69), for which Mizzy also conducted the orchestra.

Among his movie credits as a composer are the Don Knotts comedies "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken," "The Reluctant Astronaut," "The Shakiest Gun in the West," "The Love God?" and "How to Frame a Figg."

Born in Brooklyn on Jan. 9, 1916, Mizzy learned to play the piano as a child. While he was a student at New York University, he and his friend Irving Taylor began writing songs and sketches for variety shows.

They appeared on radio's "Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour" and won an amateur contest on the Fred Allen show. The team's first published song was "Your Heart Rhymes with Mine."

Mizzy, who served four years in the Navy during World War II, had a number of hits with Taylor, including "Three Little Sisters" and "Take It Easy." Under a later partnership with Mann Curtis, Mizzy had hits such as "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time," "The Whole World Is Singing My Song" and "The Jones Boy."

Mizzy is survived by his daughter Lynn Mizzy Jonas; his brother Sol; and two grandchildren.

A funeral service will be held (at 11 a.m. today) at Eden Memorial Park, 11500 Sepulveda Blvd., Mission Hills.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com

http://www.vicmizzy.com/

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

Anthony Valadez Flyer

2009-11-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

I love this flyer. This is the guy who inspired me to buy Photoshop. He is an awesome DJ, radio host and artist. And he did the flyer. Check him out on 89.9 KCRW Monday mornings 12 midnight to 3am. Ladies and gentlemen, my friend, ANTHONY VALADEZ.

CD Cover Artwork

2009-11-07T01:46:00.001-08:00

My friend DJ and KCRW radio host Anthony Valadez suggested I get Photoshop in early 2008. He had started doing impressive promotional flyers and thought I might also enjoy dabbling with the popular Adobe program. So, I gave it a shot and purchased Bamboo for $100 from the Mac store in Santa Monica. Little did I know that I would become addicted to making my own artwork and other fun stuff. Here are 2 album covers I designed over the last few days that I may or may not use. The point is that I feel confident enough to share them and hope that it may inspire someone to dabble too. Btw, I am planning to release at least 2 records in 2010, one that features my jazz/soul-inspired music and the other that will pay tribute to our unsung and unknown Black composers. Heads up!

The Essensibility Banner

2009-11-05T23:27:00.001-08:00

Not only am I composing original music for Essensibility at The Electric Lodge next Friday, Saturday and Sunday (11/13-15) but I am also doing the key art in Photoshop. What a creative undertaking! We had no photo shoot and the ladies asked me to use symbols. I found an ancient ouroboros, cleaned it up and used it as the centerpiece of the art. Here is the banner I created for the Electric Lodge wall. I wish I had done it sooner but better late than never. It will be up by Tuesday of next week.

David Weininger

2009-11-05T16:49:00.000-08:00

My hats off to David Weininger who just recorded vocalist Dwight Trible and his ensemble last weekend at his Free To The Earth facility and home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. David's studio complex is run entirely by solar power and he invented a revolutionary new system called binaural recording. The recording technique involves a dummy ("Fritz") which has microphones and constitution similar to a human head. The outside ear on the dummy looks and acts like real pinna. The recording is done with no monitors, sound partitions or sweetening. It's basically a 2-channel mic'ing with the channels being 2 ears of the dummy head. The end result sounds otherwordly and outside the current realm of listening to music. It is not a 2-channel stereo experience nor is it a surround sound one. The music sounds like it's literally outside ones head as do sounds we normally hear. And it requires that you listen to a binaural mix through headphones as speakers do not do it justice. Needless to say, the session was also recorded with stereo and surround sound microphones created by his friend renown ambient composer/sound designer Michael Stearns. I can't wait to hear the new Dwight Trible album. David is a genius.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Weininger

The Kaiso Tree Performs Every Other Sunday at Angel's

2009-11-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

My friends steel pan player Alan Lightner and percussionist Ricky Rodriguez and I have started a new vintage caribbean night every other Sunday at Angel's in Santa Monica. We call ourselves THE KAISO TREE and we play classic calypso, soca, mambo, merengue, cha cha, rock steady/reggae and other island classics in a wonderful new supper club openned by the former owners of Temple Bar. We play from 9 to 11:30pm this Sunday, November 8 and November 22. As they say in Trinidad/Tobago, come lime with us. Angel's is at 2460 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica near 24th Street.

Essensibility!

2009-11-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

I'm performing original music with my girlfriend Kimberly Miguel Mullen as part of her Essensibility show at Venice's Electric Lodge. She and Brazilian master dancer Rosangela Silvestre have collaborated on an amazing interactive theater dance piece derived from Rosangela's Faces of Nature. The show also features Bata Ketu master drummer Mark Lamson as well as Stevie Wonder's percussionist Fausto Cuevas. Please come. Tickets are $20. The times and dates are 8pm on Friday, November 13, 8pm on Saturday, November 14 and at 6pm on Sunday, November 15. The Electric Lodge is at 1416 Electric Avenue between California and Milwood. Electric Avenue is one block East of Abbot Kinney Blvd.

Composer Spotlight: Black Dynamite's Adrian Younge

2009-11-01T22:57:00.000-08:00

Black Dynamite Composer Discusses Film Score

October 23rd, 2009 | Author: Krysten Hughes

Since its unveiling at the 2009 Sundance Festival earlier this year, Black Dynamite [click to read] has been well-received by large audiences. Aside from the captivating spoof plot and prototypal theme of blaxploitation films in the '70s, the music behind the motion picture is both authentic and inventive.

In an interview with HipHopDX, editor and composer Adrian Younge, opened up about the making of the official Black Dynamite score. "Hip Hop has served as the generational bridge to the forgotten art of vintage recording and dark soul music. The creativity and recording ingenuity embedded within these vintage recordings is amazing," expressed the multi-instrumentalist.

Embarking on the Black Dynamite score three years ago, Younge played several instruments ranging from a cello, Fender Rhodes, flute and drums, as well as an assortment of guitars including bass guitar, electric and acoustic. Furthermore, he recorded everything analog and used recording equipment and instruments dated between 1968-1974. "The music of these films were essential in creating the mood," said Younge, "I tried to score the movie as they would have done so back then," he continued.

Noting artists such as Ennio Morricone, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes and Barry White as influences, Younge expressed how he was able to combine that with Hip Hop, capturing both elements. "Deejaying and studying the breaks," he revealed, "you have to study old music in order to make it, explore the composition, recording and playing perspectives of the time. I had to know the recording and playing limitations that existed during this golden era of vintage soul," he said.

Currently, Younge is planning distribution for the 2007 documentary he wrote and directed titled Respond to Sound II, which depicts the evolution of black American street dancing from 1760-1960. The documentary, which features both footage and commentary from KRS-One [click to read], Black Eyed Peas [click to read], Sammy Davis Jr. and more, is slated to be released via Wax Poetics.

Black Dynamite is currently in theaters in select cities and the official Black Dynamite soundtrack is available now on iTunes and Amazon via Wax Poetics Records.

http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.10007/title.black-dynamite-music-composer-discusses-the-making-of-the-score

Corigliano speaks out on ‘Darkness’ rejection

2009-10-28T23:29:00.000-07:00

The following interview with John Corigliano is from MoviesScores Magazine. What a learning experience this is for all of us. Things happen. I respect Corigliano for keeping his word and bringing out the humanity in this unfortunate situation. Well, it's not so unfortunate given that Corigliano made the money he feels he deserved.
Dex

Corigliano speaks out on ‘Darkness’ rejection
28 October 2009

Last week, MovieScore Magazine published the news about Howard Shore replacing John Corigliano as the original score composer on the upcoming Mel Gibson thriller, Edge of Darkness. Today, we have a lot more information for you – from Corigliano himself! One of the most respected and acclaimed composers of contemporary concert music in the world, Corigliano had written three feature film scores prior to Edge of Darkness, with The Red Violin earning him the Oscar ten years ago. The rejection of his Edge of Darkness score was met with great disappointment among fans of his music and in the film music community, and the reasons behind the switch of composers has been somewhat unclear.

MovieScore Magazine can now present to you a revealing interview with John Corigliano himself on his music for Edge of Darkness, and the events that ultimately led to the rejection of the score. Why was it replaced? What did it sound like? Will he ever score another film? We asked.

How did you first get the assignment to score Edge of Darkness? Did you actively seek new opportunities to work on a film, or did the filmmakers come to you? If they came to you, what in your music and repertoire attracted them?
JC: “The director, Martin Campbell, wanted me to score the film because he wanted to picture the lead actor, Mel Gibson, in a more introspective and intimate way than he is usually portrayed. Stuart Baird, film editor, had worked with me on both Revolution and Altered States, and thought I would be the right choice and suggested me to Martin.”

Did you feel that you had the ability to channel your own style and voice in the music or did you have to adapt very much to the film?
JC: “I always try to answer the problems of the scoring in as much of my personal language as is possible. Sometimes it is not possible, and if the film is too alien to my voice, I reject the film.”

Can you tell us a little about what your music for the film sound like?
JC: “The work was highly motivic and thematic. Since I felt the entire film was about the bond between father and daughter, her theme became the first material generated. It was simple, warm and memorable, and from it, I derived a four note motive for her father, which threaded its way through the film, changing from sorrow to anger to release. This all led to the last scene.”

You recorded in London, co-incidentally with Michael Kamen’s old session orchestra of choice, the London Metropolitan Orchestra. Have you recorded with them before, and was the link to Kamen, who scored the 1980s TV series, intentional?
JC: “I have never recorded with the LMO, and must say they are an extraordinary orchestra. Teese Gohl was the music producer for me, and he set all of this up.”

How important for you was it to work with Leonard Slatkin on this? Has he conducted any film scores before? What did you want him to bring to the table?
JC: “Leonard comes from a Hollywood family background, his father was concertmaster of the Warner orchestra, his mother first cellist. He loves films, and loved this score – and asked to do it. I was more than happy to have him do it.”

edge_of_darknessCorrect me if I’m wrong, but I think that you’ve now had two good and two bad experiences in film music. Revolution was a difficult project, but on that your music at least remains in the film. How did you react to the rejection of your music for Edge of Darkness and did the film company, producers or director explain to you the reasons behind it?
JC: “I was in Australia when the news of the rejection of my score reached me, so there was little I could do about it. The original producer, Graham King at GK Productions, was extremely enthusiastic about the music, he was in London when we recorded it, as was Martin and Stuart. The problem is that instead of leasing the film for distribution, Graham sold the film to Warner Brothers. They had a very different idea of what the film should be. With Mel Gibson starring, they wanted it to be more of an action film. So they filmed more violent scenes, and wanted a score to match the macho image they wanted to create for their star. If I had been asked to score a Mel Gibson action film, I would have refused it – not because it isn’t a perfectly valid idea, but because it is wrong for me. On the other hand, this happens all the time. Howard Shore – whose music replaced mine -had exactly the same thing happen to his score for King Kong, which he’d composed, recorded, and had replaced by James Newton Howard’s music. It just hadn’t happened to me before.”

Were you asked to rescore the film yourself?
JC: “I was contracted to be in Australia for three weeks at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The company wanted an immediate fix, and there was no way I could leave Australia to do this. In addition, I think that what they wanted conflicted enough with what I felt I could contribute as composer, so the change was probably for the best.”

What are your views on the film business after this and your other experiences in this field? Will you ever score another film?
JC: “If the right film comes along, I would do another film. I was well paid for this film, and therefore feel that the new company had the right to choose something else. If I had been given a small fee, however, I would feel very differently about things. So if I do another film, it will also have to come with a fee that compensates for the fact that the company may not actually use the music. That’s just reality.”

Mikael Carlsson

New Caribbean Music Night @ Angel's Santa Monica

2009-10-17T12:35:00.001-07:00

Starting October 25, 2009.

If You Haven’t Heard The Music Of Gerald Clayton, You’re Missing Out

2009-09-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

Gerald Clayton’s debut album, Two Shade, was released through the ArtistShare label on July 1st, 2009. It has already been getting rave reviews by everyone from the New York Times to jazz.com. Recently, it was voted in the Top 10 Must Have CD’s by the Audiophiliac, a part of C-Net. Two Shade made the list along with other acts like Elvis Costello and John Mellencamp.

Background:

Gerald Clayton grew up mainly in Los Angeles with a musical family that includes his father, bassist/composer John Clayton, and uncle, saxophonist Jeff Clayton. At the age of six Gerald began eleven years study of classical piano with Linda Buck before enrolling in the Jazz Studies program at the University of Southern California. In college in Los Angeles and a year at the Manhattan School of Music, Gerald studied piano and composition under Shelly Berg, Billy Childs, and Kenny Barron.

Avoiding early pressures to emerge as a prodigy, Gerald instead honed his talents and his resolve to ensure that this next generation is never lacking for intricate, swinging pieces and performances that are steeped in tradition while always facing the future.

Accomplishments:

Gerald Clayton’s dynamic and award-winning sound has been praised in print by the Jazz Times and Los Angeles Times. The New York Times has saluted his “Oscar-Peterson like style” and “huge, authoritative presence” and Down Beat Magazine’s 2008 Readers’ Poll named him one of the top up-and-coming pianists to watch.

As a composer, his work has been commissioned by the Jazz Gallery in New York City and performed overseas by the BBC Orchestra. He has been honored with a Level 1 award by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts (NFAA), the title “Presidential Scholar in the Arts,” and second place in the Thelonious Monk Institute Jazz Piano Competition.

His Work:

Professionally, Gerald has had the honor of performing nationally and internationally with some of the most established names in Jazz such as Lewis Nash, Al Foster, Terrell Stafford and Clark Terry. Duo piano concerts with Gerald have featured artists as celebrated and diverse as Hank Jones, Benny Green, Kenny Barron, Mulgrew Miller and Tamir Hendelman. Gerald also relishes playing with Jazz’s next generation of innovators: Ambrose Akinmusire, Dayna Stephens, Kendrick Scott and many others.

From 2006-2008, Gerald toured extensively with Roy Hargrove in his quintet, big band, and funk group and he is currently a member of the Clayton Brothers Quintet. He can be heard on the Clayton Brothers’ latest release, “Brother to Brother,” as well as Hargrove’s 2008 “Earfood,” and Diana Krall’s “From This Moment On.”

But it is Gerald’s own trio, based in New York City and comprised of Justin Brown (drums) and Joe Sanders (bass), that provides him the most direct opportunity to explore and expand his own thoughts in music. While touring in Europe and the U.S., they were praised for balancing a “deconstructivist aesthetic” with “a stronghold on the swing factor.”

His Approach:

Gerald relishes a sense of open-mindedness: “I have listened to lots of different musical styles as long as I can remember. I continue to absorb all these influences and in doing so create my own voice—by combining their forces into a harmonic whole…I seek to blend the various styles and sounds I love into a balanced, tasteful musical language.”

Posted by drumminfabe on September 13th, 2009
http://www.allyourjazz.com/2009/09/if-you-havent-heard-the-music-of-gerald-clayton-youre-missing-out/

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Terence Blanchard Releases New Album "Choices."

2009-08-31T00:23:00.000-07:00

Jazz musician Blanchard explores life's "Choices"
By Gail Mitchell

LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - Out of pain and destruction can come hope and celebration. That's the genesis of jazz trumpeter and film composer Terence Blanchard's new album, "Choices."

Featuring spoken-word segments by educator/activist Dr. Cornel West and vocals by soul singer Bilal, the August 18 release -- Blanchard's first solo album on Concord Jazz -- debuted at No. 5 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart.

Blanchard's latest follows his Grammy Award-winning Blue Note CD, "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)." On that 2007 release, Blanchard and his band delivered a passionate discourse on Hurricane Katrina's ravaging toll on New Orleans.

"Jazz is the language I speak," the New Orleans native says. "And there are so many things to say inside of that language. I wanted to continue the discussion about what's happening in New Orleans. A lot of positive things are happening here, but there's still a ways to go. Out of that, I wanted to create a debate about the choices we make as a society and as individuals."

Blanchard and band members Fabian Almazan (piano), Derrick Hodge (bass), Kendrick Scott (drums) and newcomer Walter Smith III (saxophone) wrote most of the album's music. Blanchard traveled to Princeton University to record conversations with West about topics ranging from love and respect to how to live a decent life. The Bilal connection stemmed from the singer's guest stint on a series of concerts with Blanchard showcasing music from Spike Lee films. Rounding out the guest list is guitarist and Blanchard protege Lionel Loueke.

The 15-track "Choices" was recorded at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, itself a Katrina survivor.

A series of five webisodes chronicling the "Choices" evolution -- dubbed "Terence TV" -- was launched in advance of the album's release. An upcoming documentary is in the works, as is a worldwide tour.

Blanchard, who has written and scored music for Lee's "25th Hour" and "Miracle at St. Anna," is composing the score for the George Lucas-produced "Red Tails," a film about World War II's Tuskegee Airmen. He also has completed the score for Disney's fall release "The Princess and the Frog."

In his other guise, as artistic director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in New Orleans, Blanchard contends that jazz is far from dead.

"There's always been a look-to-the-past approach in promoting this music," he says. "But a lot of young artists out here are doing unconventional things that are unique. And we need to celebrate that, not deny it."

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Harry Gregson-Williams

2009-07-02T00:03:00.000-07:00

I appreciate WSJ for allowing me to reprint this article:

‘You Don’t Wait for the Muse to Hit You’
Film composer Harry Gregson-Williams knows how to serve each movie’s story

By JIM FUSILLI

Harry Gregson-Williams’s score for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” is stirring, romantic and so robust as to suggest its mutant characters are part of a new, contemporary mythology. His music for “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” is gritty, pulsing and percussive, with themes that help articulate two characters who aren’t as uncomplicated as they may seem. The scores bear as little resemblance to each other as do the two films.

Thus, Mr. Gregson-Williams meets the primary objective of the film composer: to serve the story as subtly or overtly as the project demands. His ability to do so may explain why he’s one of Hollywood’s in-demand composers, having scored the “Shrek” and “Narnia” films, at least a half-dozen projects produced or directed by Tony Scott, and a host of videogames and TV episodes. He wrote the score for the forthcoming David Rackoff film “I Am Bad” and already has a handful of assignments for 2010.
Matt Dames

A childhood in England committed to music and a relatively late entry into the movie business contribute to his success, Mr. Gregson-Williams said when we spoke by phone earlier this month. The 47-year-old was at his Wavecrest music studio in Venice, Calif.

“When I was a child, I sang my damned heart out all over Europe with a precise, well-drilled choir. That level of discipline is necessary for a film composer. You don’t wait for the muse to hit you. It’s music to order. A certain discipline and knowledge is required.”

Mr. Gregson-Williams was a music teacher at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Amesbury School in Surrey with an expertise in choral music when his career path was altered by a chance meeting with Hans Zimmer. “He put me to work right away, conducting the choral music for ‘Crimson Tide,’” he said, referring to the 1995 film directed by Mr. Scott and scored by Mr. Zimmer. “It was water off a duck’s back for me.”

Mr. Zimmer encouraged Mr. Gregson-Williams to use his skills in Hollywood. “He didn’t have to persuade me. I got the proverbial one-way ticket and started to learn the ropes. Hans certainly became my mentor. I didn’t hang about. He gave me what he’d call a studio—I’d call it a closet—and I started to have a voice of my own. I’d orchestrate some cues,” he said, using a term for a piece of music within a score. “If I was lucky, I thought I could write a couple of cues.”
Tune In

Listen to a song from the soundtrack of “The Taking of Pelham 123,” with music by Harry Gregson-Williams :

Mr. Gregson-Williams told me that as a young musician he had no ambition to score films and thus hadn’t studied the industry’s great composers. “When I arrived here, I had no knowledge of what was going on,” he said. “I have found out about the legacy and tradition of great film music.” However, he added, “I don’t worry about who I sound like or my music identity. It’s all about how I feel about the project and what’s required.”

His first opportunity to score a film came in 1993 with a low-budget independent project, “White Angel.” Other assignments followed. In 1997 he, along with Mr. Zimmer, scored the film version of “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” and a year later he did Antoine Fuqua’s “The Replacement Killers,” thus demonstrating his versatility: The former is an esoteric work with elements of mystery and science fiction, while the latter is a Hong Kong-style action tale.

That range is displayed in “Wolverine” and “Pelham 1 2 3.” “Wolverine” is, in essence, a comic-book tale with classical storytelling overtones; though endowed with extraordinary powers, the hero, played by Hugh Jackman, seeks love and tranquility. In “Pelham 1 2 3,” the opposing forces are flawed men—John Travolta’s character is a psychotic who’s cooked up a deadly, ingenious scheme, while Denzel Washington’s is a smart, resolute workingman who harbors a secret.

I mentioned to Mr. Gregson-Williams that I found his “Wolverine” score stirring. “I’ll settle for that,” he replied. “Hugh Jackman shines so bright, the music had to be muscular and appealing.” And yet the film’s most effective cue may be the haunting theme he composed for Wolverine’s lover Kayla Silverfox, played by Lynn Collins, whose presence sends the mutant in an unexpected direction. It was the first piece Mr. Gregson-Williams composed for the film. “The plot twist was my starting point,” he recalled.

“Pelham 1 2 3” is set almost entirely in a hijacked subway car and an underground transit-system dispatch center. Thus, the audience is locked in a confined space with the characters. When the action shifts above ground, police cars are hurtling through the streets of New York at a pace that guarantees calamity. “The nature of the film is very kinetic,” Mr. Gregson-Williams said. “With Tony Scott, the camera is on the prowl.”

Listen to a song from the soundtrack of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” with music by Harry Gregson-Williams:

The music that illuminates Ryder, Mr. Travolta’s character, seems to emerge from ambient sound—the squeal and clack of steel wheels on train tracks, for example. Mr. Gregson-Williams’s expertise with computer-generated sounds gives him a musical palette beyond what an orchestra can produce, enabling him, he said, “to color or lend a certain uniqueness to the character or film.” In this case, those sounds within the score constantly remind the viewer that not only are the hostages trapped with Ryder, an armed madman, but they’re also in a rat-infested metallic maze deep below midtown Manhattan.

And Ryder is more than just a troubled killer. “The character has such enjoyment wreaking havoc,” Mr. Gregson-Williams said. “He doesn’t always put on a dark face. Not that he has a sense of humor. Maybe a sense of whimsy.”

As for Mr. Washington’s character, Mr. Gregson-Williams’s theme for Garber is heroic yet accessible—until it isn’t. “The cue for Garber must work when he makes an unexpected confession,” the composer said. “The music for Denzel, it’s not like it’s compensating for anything. It’s all up on the screen with him.”
—Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter @wsjrock.

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Early Music Instrument Discovered

2009-06-24T10:55:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of New York Times

Stone Age Flutes Are Window Into Early Music
Daniel Maurer/Associated Press

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they first began spreading through Europe or soon after.

Archaeologists reported Wednesday the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represent the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.

But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of music instruments had previously come from France and Austria, but dated well after 30,000 years ago.

In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”

Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years old.

Dr. Conard’s team said that an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals were found in the sediments with the flutes. Many people appeared to have lived and worked there soon after their arrival in Europe, assumed to be around 40,000 years ago and 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals were to become extinct.

The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no firm evidence of having been musical.

The most significant of the new artifacts, the archaeologists said, was a flute made from a hollow bone of a griffon vulture, skeletons of which are often found in these caves. The preserved portion is about 8.5 inches long and includes the end of the instrument into which the musician blew. The maker had carved two deep, V-shaped notches there, and four fine lines near the finger holes. The other end appears to be broken off; judging by the typical length of these bird bones, two or three inches are missing.

Dr. Conard’s discovery in 2004 of the seven-inch, three-holed ivory flute at the Geissenklösterle cave, also near Ulm, inspired him to widen his search of caves, saying at the time that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”

Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music, reproduced the ivory flute in wood. Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. “The tones are quite harmonic,” he said.

A replica is yet to be made of the recent discovery, but the archaeologists said they expected the five-hole flute with its larger diameter to “provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities.”

Archaeologists and other scholars can only speculate as to what moved these early Europeans to make music.

It so happens, as Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tubingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, noted, the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old. The discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.

Was this evidence of happy hours after the hunt? Fertility rites or social bonding? The German archaeologists suggested that music in the Stone Age “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”

PICTURE AT TOP: Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, showed a thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago.

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By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: June 24, 2009

Top 10 Most Anticipated Film Scores of 2009

2009-06-24T01:14:00.000-07:00

This article was published in January 2009 but is still relevant.

Top-10 Most Anticipated Scores of 2009

Upcoming Film Scores lists the ten most exciting, promising and anticipated film scores of 2009, according to its editor Mikael Carlsson who can't wait to hear what will come out musically of these projects:

1. AVATAR (James Horner)
Director James Cameron and composer James Horner are of course best known for the multi-zillion-whatever-megahit Titanic, but they also gave us Aliens in 1986 which stands out as one of the most exciting nailbiter scores in sci-fi history. On that film, Cameron gave Horner a pretty hard time as judging from the composer interview on the special edition DVD, and basically what you hear in the film is the result of a composer writing under enormous pressure. On Avatar, the situation is the complete opposite. A luxury in film scoring today, the total time given to the scoring process on this film will probably exceed one year! Horner is currently working exclusively on this film, with first bout of scoring possibly to take place in spring. Horner is working with his close team of collaborators on Avatar: music editor Jim Henrikson, engineer Simon Rhodes and programmer Aaron Martin are already involved. What to expect in terms of the music is difficult to pin down: the film is said to be totally unique, so will the score be that too? How will the composer portray the otherwordly humanoid culture said to be a cornerstone of the story? Are we going to hear a full-blown symphonic score, or will Horner find alternate ways to depict other worlds? Will we hear those rousing brass triplets and thundering percussion from "Bishop's Countdown" accompanying the battle for survival in Avatar? Many questions and we will have to wait almost a year before we get the answers: the film opens on December 18, released by 20th Century Fox.

2. STAR TREK (Michael Giacchino)
The new Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams is relaunching the classic sci-fi series and Abrams' composer-in-residence, Michael Giacchino, follows in the giant footsteps of composers such as Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner when he enters the USS Enterprise. Giacchino's TV music for Abrams' Lost is intensely effective, and his straight-forward action writing in Mission: Impossible 3 added a lot of energy to a film where the only question was if that extra adrenaline boost really was needed. In Star Trek, the most interesting aspect of the score is going to be whether or not Giacchino picks up the nobility and grandeur of the classic Goldsmith scores, or if he is going to do something completely unexpected (anything that doesn't sound like a "real" Star Trek score will undoubtedly have a hard time with the Trekkies). Film opens in May and most likely to the sound of Alexander Courage's classic fanfare (anything else would be sensational and, of course, disappointing).

3. THE SOLOIST (Dario Marianelli)
The collaboration between director Joe Wright and composer Dario Marianelli has already given us two gorgeous scores: Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, and the composer one Oscar. As their new film presents a story where music actually has a prominent role, The Soloist certainly is something to look forward too and most likely one of the main events in film music 2009. Marianelli's composing style, beautifully rooted in melody and always orchestrated with great sophistication and grace, should lend itself perfectly to the story about a journalist (Robert Downey Jr) who befriends a classically trained musician (Jamie Foxx) who lives his life on the streets of Los Angeles. Score was recorded in L.A. with Benjamin Wallfisch conducting.

4. THE WOLF MAN (Danny Elfman)
When Universal decided to remake the studio's 1941 monster classic, with Joe Johnston helming the project, there were many options as to who the composer would be. Johnston has worked extensively with James Horner and also with Don Davis and James Newton Howard - all of them capable of penning a solid monster score, no doubt about it. But the composer chosen is Danny Elfman, and it's a very inspired choice. Throughout his career, Elfman himself has shown such a passion for evil creatures, and particularly those who are misunderstood. His motif-driven writing and busy orchestrations will perfectly underscore the horror and excitement of the story, while his old-fashioned romantic and knack for sentimental harmony will capture the sadness of the story. This is a dream project for Elfman!

5. CREATION (Christopher Young)
Of course, a major horror film score such as Drag Me to Hell (Young's new project with Spider-Man helmer Sam Raimi) is always something to look forward to, but when I look at the list of upcoming Christopher Young scores it is Creation, his fifth project with director Jon Amiel, that triggers my enthusiasm the most. This is an unusual opportunity for the composer who is otherwise best known for his huge bombast of darkness in Hellraiser, Spider-Man 3 and Amiel's previous film, The Core: Creation is a biopic, a drama and, not to forget, a period piece about Charles Darwin. Whenever Young has been allowed to stretch his musical voice into more character (as opposed to spectacle) driven stories, the result has been highly interesting - his beautiful score for Murder in the First being the prime example. With a confident director who trusts Young's musical instincts, Creation can - if the film itself is good enough - very much be the composer's first real chance to flirt with Oscar!

6. BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (David Shire)
David Fincher's stroke of genius, to bring back David Shire to A-list film scoring on Zodiac, is now followed by veteran director Peter Hyams' thriller Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, a remake of the 1956 film noir by Fritz Lang. Shire's approach to film scoring is rooted in the 1970s, which means less is more - refreshingly, quite the opposite of mainstream film music aesthetics of the new millennium. Shire brings his unique voice (often blending jazz elements with sinister string writing) to this mystery thriller and with his classic scores for The Conversation and All the President's Men, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt has the potential to be the dark horse of film music 2009. Another reason for my high expectations is that Peter Hyams always have great trust in the music; many great action scores have been composed under his direction (Jerry Goldsmith's Capricorn One and Bruce Broughton's Narrow Margin to name a couple).

7. THE LOVELY BONES (Brian Eno)
Clearly the most surprising scoring assignment of 2008 (just another Upcoming Film Scores scoop!), the attachment of legendary record producer and ambient electronica artist Brian Eno to Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones is so interesting in itself that it simply has to be included on this list. Most people were, of course, expecting Howard Shore or James Newton Howard - but folks, this is not Lord of the Rings and it is not King Kong. This film goes back to Jackson's other side of his storytelling, the Heavenly Creatures one, and although Shore and Howard probably would have penned great scores for The Lovely Bones, having an artist such as Brian Eno doing the music for it will, without any doubt, result in a unique accompaniment to Alice Sebold's original story. It is a brave choice of composer and one of the most interesting film scoring assignments in recent years.

8. G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA (Alan Silvestri)
Everyone loves a good Silvestri action score. What will the composer of Predator, Back to the Future and Judge Dredd bring to the table of G.I. Joe, Stephen Sommers' big budget spectacle starring Brendan Fraser and Dennis Quaid? Well if you look at the previous collaborations between Sommers and Silvestri, The Mummy Returns and Van Helsing, I'm sure we can expect an adequate amount of adrenaline-pumping orchestral music - the big question is whether or not the approach will be an old-fashioned one, or if the music will be tailored more towards the film's target audience. It has to be said: G.I. Joe looks like a film any Remote Control composer would score on autopilot with studio execs applauding a "modern sound that will speak to the young audiences." I for one hope that the studio will allow Alan Silvestri to do his thing - if he is allowed that creative freedom, G.I. Joe is going to be a very exciting score.

9. PUBLIC ENEMIES (Elliot Goldenthal)
A new score by Elliot Goldenthal is always of highest interest. The composer who won an Oscar for Frida but made his most important contributions to film music with his ferociously orchestrated scores for Alien 3 and Interview With the Vampire, previously worked with Public Enemies director Michael Mann on Heat and that resulted in an intense and highly unusual score that worked very well on screen and on CD together with some hand-picked tracks by the director. Public Enemies is also a crime drama, but the big difference is that this is a period piece taking place in 1930s - a gangster epic. Goldenthal has proven before that he is an expert when it comes to mix various styles with his own strikingly original orchestral writing, perhaps we can expect a jazz flavor in Public Enemies. That said, Michael Mann seldom favors scoring approaches that are too obvious and most of his films feature a pretty eclectic collection of score, source tracks and songs. Film opens on July 1.

10. DAYBREAKERS (Christopher Gordon)
Aussie composer Christopher Gordon, one of the finest orchestral writers in the business, has done the music vampire film which takes place in the year 2017, when a plague has transformed most people into blood-sucking monsters. Perhaps not the most unusual of stories, but I'm sure it has given Gordon the ability to pen an absolutely marvellous orchestral score. On the TV show Salem's Lot, he delivered a stunning orchestral score which showcased an inventive composer who pays a lot of attention to detail. Although Gordon wrote the music for Peter Weir's Master and Commander five years ago (together with Iva Davies and Richard Tognetti), Daybreakers should be the feature that finally establishes him as a major composer to watch.

The Runners-Up:
Book of Blood (Guy Farley), Brothers (Thomas Newman), Knowing (Marco Beltrami), Land of the Lost (Michael Giacchino), Lesbian Vampire Killers (Debbie Wiseman), Monsters vs. Aliens (Henry Jackman), The Secret of Moonacre (Christian Henson), The Tree of Life (Alexandre Desplat), Up (Michael Giacchino), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Harry Gregson-Williams).

Also worth keeping an eye (ear) on:
Afterwards (Alexandre Desplat), Agent Crush (Michael Price/David Arnold), Angels and Demons (Hans Zimmer), Blood: The Last Vampire (Marcus Trumpp), Broken Embraces (Alberto Iglesias), A Christmas Carol (Alan Silvestri), Coraline (Bruno Coulais), Dragonball: Evolution (Brian Tyler), Effie Briest (Johan Söderqvist), Franklyn (Joby Talbot), Giallo (Marco Werba), Hachiko - A Dog's Story (Jan A.P. Kaczmarek), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Nicholas Hooper), I Sell the Dead (Jeff Grace), Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (John Powell), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Jeff and Mychael Danna), Jennifer's Body (Theodore Shapiro), Knife Edge (Guy Farley), No-Do (Alfons Conde), The Princess and the Frog (Randy Newman), Shanghai (Alex Heffes), The Taking of Pelham 123 (Harry Gregson-Williams), Terra (Abel Korzeniowski), They Came from Upstairs (John Debney), Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen (Steve Jablonsky), The Young Victoria (Ilan Eshkeri).

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: 19-Year Simpson's Vet ALF CLAUSEN

2009-06-20T02:44:00.000-07:00

After several years composing music for the television programs “Alf” and “Moonlighting,” Alf Clausen was in unfamiliar territory. He was out of work.

In fact, he’d been out of work for seven straight months. That’s when he got a call about working on a new animated series.

“And I said, ‘What’s the show?’ And he said, ‘It’s called “The Simpsons.” Have you ever seen it?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Are you interested in doing animation?’ And I said, ‘No,’ ” Clausen recalls.

The Jamestown, N.D., native and 1963 graduate of North Dakota State University wanted to do dramas and TV movies of the week. But at the interview “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening told Clausen, “We look upon our show as not being a cartoon, but a drama where the characters are drawn, and we’d like it to be scored that way. Could you do that?”

“Well,” replied Clausen, “now that you put it that way, yes, I could do that.”

And for 19 years, he has.

The two-time Emmy Award-winning Clausen makes his way to North Dakota for two events presented Tuesday by BisonArts, a group that raises funds for the NDSU Division of Fine Arts. The latter event features a discussion of composition for film and television and a performance of Clausen’s music, conducted by Clausen himself.

“NDSU gave me a lot and I’d like to give back in some way, shape or form,” Clausen says from his Los Angeles home where he lives with his wife, Sally.

Maybe it’s fitting that Clausen ended up as the lead musical mind for a cartoon. He enjoys a joke. In relating part of his early story during an interview, he says he uttered a Homer-like “D’oh!” and then says “Oh, wait. That word didn’t exist then, did it?”

Fellow North Dakota native and retired music teacher at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, Calif., Gerry Schroeder says Clausen has a “terrific sense of humor” and a “great laugh.” He says Clausen wrote a rock opera for Golden West College titled “Joan Baby” in which Joan of Arc comes back as a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints.

And retired businessman and salesman Tim Smithson of Fargo used to play in NDSU’s marching band with Clausen, and described his sense of humor at that time as “very dry, but very funny.”

For whatever reason, “The Simpons” shoe has fit. But Clausen’s early academic days could have led him in a very different direction. He started out majoring in mechanical engineering “because my college entrance tests told me I would be good as a mechanical engineer and I had no idea what I wanted to do when I went to college.”

Of course, the move to music wasn’t totally out of the blue. He started playing French horn in the seventh grade. And as a child of the 1950s, he says, “I just fell in love with Little Richard and Chubby Checker and Elvis and the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino – all those R&B artists.”

He was creatively inclined as a youth. He had a Lionel train set layout that stretched over three 4-foot by 8-foot tables. He also got into hotrods, founding a National Hot Rod Association certified car club in Jamestown.

Given his penchant for working with his hands, maybe engineering wouldn’t have been so bad. But life would lead otherwise. He took a trip to Manhattan between his sophomore and junior years in college to stay with his cousin, a professional musician.

He saw the original productions of “West Side Story” and “My Fair Lady.” He saw Ingmar Bergman films. He attended the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival and remembers telling someone “ ‘Boy, that trumpet player’s amazing. Who is he?’ And the guy said, ‘You’ve got to really listen to him. That’s Miles Davis.’ ”

Clausen says those six weeks “totally turned my life around. And when I went back to North Dakota, as I say, I lasted about six weeks in mechanical engineering and realized that what I had just seen was something that I really wanted to be involved in.”

The place to start was with a change in major. He earned a degree in music theory, later making his way to the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston and eventually moving to Los Angeles in 1967.

“One thing led to another, and contacts led to other contacts, and eventually I ended up getting a call at the last minute to write an arrangement for the ‘Donnie & Marie Show,’ ” he says.

The music director of the show loved Clausen’s work and invited him to join the show as an arranger. He would become the show’s music director, his first “big network job.”

It’s only one of many big-name productions he’s worked on or contributed to, including the television programs “The Critic” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Variety Hour” and the films “Airplane II,” The Beastmaster,” “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off,” “Dragnet,” “Mr. Mom,” “Naked Gun,” “Splash,” “Weird Science” and “Wise Guys.”

Despite those credits, it’s probably his work as composer/conductor/songwriter for the “The Simpsons” that’s his biggest claim to fame. And the whole affair can get pretty grueling, too. He says that during the heat of production, he’s pulling about 80 or 90 hours a week. But, he says he likes the instant gratification that television offers.

In his words, “There’s nothing like seeing your work come to fruition in that short turnaround time and see it on the air and be able to sit back and say, ‘Yeah, I did that. I made it work again. How did I do that? I have no idea.’ ”

If you go

* What: BisonArts Gala benefiting the NDSU Division of Fine Arts

* When: 5:30 p.m. Tuesday

* Where: 300 Broadway, Fargo

* Info: Call (701) 231-7969

* What: An Evening with Alf Clausen

* When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

* Where: Fargo Theatre, 314 Broadway

* Tickets: $10 for adults and $5 for students. Call (701) 231-7969 for more information.

Readers can reach Forum reporter Shane Mercer at (701) 451-5734

New Haskin Book

2009-06-19T05:52:00.000-07:00

Film and media composer Scott Haskin has announced the release of his first book, “Becoming An Indie Film Composer.” Designed for those looking to break into the industry, this guide offers the reader insight into the world of independent film.

The author discusses many topics including setting up a studio, locating a film, and working with a director to complete a musical score. He also shares some of his real life stories to not only entertain but educate the reader to assist them in avoiding some of the potential pitfalls of the business.

“When I first started out, I was unable to find comprehensive resources that explained the industry in its entirety,” says Scott. “It is my hope, through my own experiences, successes and failures alike, to help others reach for their dreams.”

For more information, visit Scott’s website at: http://www.scotthaskin.com/Book.htm

Thank you for the update Film Music Mag. Click the title above for Filmmusicmag link.

Copyright Law Campaign

2009-06-11T17:49:00.000-07:00

Film, TV music composers urge copyright law change
By Sue Zeidler Sue Zeidler – Wed Jun 10, 5:29 pm ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Nathan Barr has scored horror films like "Hostel" and the HBO vampire series "True Blood," but what really keeps the composer up at night is fear he will not get paid for music distributed online.

"'True Blood' is my first big show for TV and it's definitely going to see a lot of play on the Internet. It's a big issue for me," Barr, 36, told Reuters in an interview. "I don't understand why composers don't get paid if someone downloads it."

The issue is the latest digital copyright debate pitting creators in the entertainment industry on one side and studios, broadcasters, cable operators and technology companies on the other. Barr underscores how a growing number of artists -- writers, actors and, yes, composers -- feel they are not fairly compensated for content distributed on the Internet.

Actors and writers have aired their grievances and demanded Hollywood studios pay up. Now, composers, along with publishers, are urging Congress to change copyright law so that when music airs in an audio-visual download, it is considered a public performance that earns them royalties.

The stakes are high: Industry experts believe composers could potentially earn nearly $100 million in additional royalty payments annually as Internet viewing grows -- if the law was changed to deem downloads of music in audio-visual works as public performances.

"We see audio visual as a vigorous growth area for composers, whether it's on Hulu, Netflix or iTunes, and a big issue is clarifying public performance rights as they apply to digital downloads," said Richard Conlon of Broadcast Music Inc (BMI), a performing rights group that collects royalties on behalf of artists.

The copyright issue, apart from being proposed legislation, is also expected to be the subject of a House Judiciary committee hearing in July, industry experts say.

At the center of the debate is a federal court ruling in April 2007, considered a victory for companies like AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! Inc YHOO.O> that found that downloading a music file was not considered a "performance."

Composers are arguably one of most overlooked among the so-called frontline entertainers behind a movie or TV series.

"Most composers don't get pensions like other people ... and we're now realizing we're not covered for much of the way entertainment is viewed online," Barr protested.

Performing rights group American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is appealing the 2007 ruling.

And ASCAP, BMI, and various other publishing and songwriting groups sent a letter in March 2009 to Congress urging a change in the U.S. Copyright Law.

"It's important these markets get locked down as composers really rely on public performance royalties," Conlon said.

Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a trade group for Hollywood studios such as General Electric Co's Universal Pictures, Viacom Inc's Paramount and Walt Disney Co, strongly opposes these efforts, arguing that a download is not a performance.

"The MPAA is opposed to amending the copyright law to require a double payment for music in movies and TV shows downloaded from the Internet," Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the MPAA said. "We do not need to amend the Copyright Act to compensate these composers twice for the same activity."

Veteran entertainment lawyer Jay Cooper said composers collect performance royalties when their music airs on cable, TV, radio and is streamed over the Web.

"But if a film along with the music in it is incorporated in a DVD, the typical contract between a composer and studio does not grant the composer a royalty or payment for sales of the DVD or for any downloads of the DVD," Cooper said.

"Composers believe the performance right of a download is not a contractual right but a legal right to which there is great opposition," he said.

Martinez and others like Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association, which represents online services like Apple Inc iTunes and Yahoo, believe composers are being disingenuous.

"This legislative request is the latest effort by these groups to blur the lines between making a copy and making a public performance in order to get royalties where none are obligated or should be obligated," said Potter.

(Reporting by Sue Zeidler; Editing by Edwin Chan, Richard Chang)

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Bear McCreary's Battlestar Gallactica

2009-06-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

See LA Times article below:

Among the hundreds of TV show themes currently coursing through the nation's cable boxes, Bear McCreary's compositions for "Battlestar Galactica" could arguably be described as the most symphonic.

The cult TV series, which airs on the Sci Fi Channel and stars Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, features a score that is classical in scope and romantic in sweep, with references to many of the great composers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Wagner, Bruckner, Sibelius and Mahler.

Sacrilege? Close your eyes and listen to the score from any of his work for the show, and you're almost guaranteed to feel transported to a concert hall, with a conductor and a full symphony orchestra in front of you. Or at least we at Culture Monster were.

McCreary is a young composer, barely out of his 20s, who studied classical composition at USC's Thornton School of Music. (He was a protege of the late, great film score composer Elmer Berstein.) On June 13, he'll be conducting selections from his music for "Battlestar Galactica" live at California Plaza in downtown L.A.

The performance begins at 7 p.m., but you may want to consider getting there extra early, lest you get trampled by passionate "Battlestar" fans.

-- David Ng

Whatever Happened To TV Theme Music?

2009-06-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to TV theme music?
Main-title melodies were once cultural touchstones

By JON BURLINGAME

OPENING NUMBER: Gone are the days when producers would use main title music to set up a skein, as the 'Laverne & Shirley' creators did when they ordered a full theme for pilot presentations starring Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall

Nearly 35 years ago, producers Thomas Miller and Edward Milkis put together a 20-minute presentation to convince ABC that two guest stars on "Happy Days" could be spun off into their own series.
They shot just a few new scenes of Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams as "Laverne & Shirley" but, recalls composer Charles Fox, they insisted on a 75-second main-title sequence with a fully produced song, "so, right from the beginning, people would know what it was about."

Fox and lyricist Norman Gimbel came up with "Making Our Dreams Come True." It became a top-25 hit -- one of many TV theme hits for Fox, who won an Emmy for "Love, American Style" and wrote themes for "Happy Days," "The Love Boat," "Angie" and others.

Today a composer is happy to get 10 seconds on a broadcast skein, and hit TV themes are rare.

Over the past 15 years, the broadcast networks have demanded shorter main-title sequences, preferring to jump into the action faster and thus reduce the chance that viewers will flip to another channel. Emmy's Main Title Theme Music category, however, disallows themes under 15 seconds, so many network shows are ineligible.

Last year's theme-music Emmy winner, Russ Landau ("Pirate Master"), says, "It's getting tougher and tougher to convince (decisionmakers) to spend the time that they would normally be making on advertising dollars.

But some producers like music -- Mark Burnett ("Survivor") likes a good, long-line theme. It sets the tone for the show."

Jeff Beal, who scores ABC's "Ugly Betty," gets 12 seconds -- so short a time that the music can't really be called a theme.

"It's a little sonic signature that says a lot about the style of the show and who the character is," he explains, its prominent marimba suggesting Betty's Mexican heritage.

For USA's "Monk," Beal got 45 seconds (and won one of his three Emmys), and for HBO's "Rome" he got a minute and a half. Longer openings offer a chance "to tell more of a musical story," he says.

"Heroes," by contrast, gave composers Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin just 10 seconds. "You have to think in terms of 'stings,'" says Coleman, referring to the film-music tradition of brief but impactful musical statements. "We knew it had to be big and somewhat supernatural sounding. It didn't need to be terribly melodic, just atmospheric."

This year, PBS producer David Horn wanted to reinvigorate the opening sequence of "Great Performances" for the high-def era and called five-time Oscar winner John Williams to compose new theme music. Williams' piece debuted March 25 and is only his third primetime series signature in 25 years.

"It is elegant, and it sneaks up on you," says Horn, who previously had commissioned Oscar winners John Corigliano and Maurice Jarre to write "Great Performances" themes.

"I wanted to use a full symphonic orchestra, to invite the viewer to come in to a series that we like to think is classy," says Horn -- "one week the Metropolitan Opera, next week Carnegie Hall, then a musical theater piece, Shakespearean drama, a lot of different things."

In contrast, say many observers, the commercial networks are missing a bet by ignoring the power of a good theme.

"Quickening the pace, getting into storylines faster, all conspire against the theme," says Cleveland Plain Dealer TV critic Mark Dawidziak. "But on cable, the name of the game is people knowing who you are -- FX viewers, USA viewers, HBO viewers -- and this is where that old-fashioned network thinking comes into play. They hear that music and they remember that opening."

"Eighty years from now," he adds, "today's kids, sitting in their wheelchairs in the nursing home, will be humming the 'SpongeBob SquarePants' theme in much the same way that we know the theme songs of our youth. It's more than just a TV theme. It becomes a communal thing, a shared cultural point among your friends, your community."

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Michael Giacchino Interview

2009-05-30T17:31:00.000-07:00

Michael Giacchino is the top movie score guy
by Stephen Whitty/The Star-Ledger
Thursday May 28, 2009, 3:44 PM

Michael Giacchino wrote the movie scores for "Up," which opens Friday, the recent blockbuster "Star Trek," and the upcoming "Land of the Lost."

He doesn't have a Top 10 hit, but millions of Americans are going to spend the summer listening to the music of Michael Giacchino.

That's because the Edgewater Park native wrote the movie scores for "Up," which opens Friday. And the recent blockbuster "Star Trek." And the upcoming "Land of the Lost."

It's just the latest peak in a career that took him from Delran's Holy Cross High School to Manhattan's School of the Visual Arts -- and then to Hollywood, and an early gig scoring video games. He's been busy ever since.

Somehow, though, the prolific 41-year-old and father of three -- who also scored "The Incredibles," and writes the music for TV's "Lost" and "Fringe" -- still found time to chat recently about his work as one of Hollywood's go-to guys.

Q: One of the most charming things about "Up" is your music, which is romantic and old-fashioned and sort of unusual for an animated film. It's like something you'd hear in a bistro.

A: Yeah, it's a very small ensemble for the most part. Stand-up bass, guitar, violin, clarinet -- those are the main pieces. We wanted that intimate kind of feel. There's a tendency in animation to go huge, this idea that just because it's an animated film it needs overbearing music to convey any emotion. And I've always hated that. If it's a good story, you just need something simple to make it work. ... That's what I love about Pixar. It's always about the story. That's where every project begins, with the story -- not the marketing.

Q: Well, it is a movie about a cranky old guy and a chubby kid. Not the usual choices for product tie-ins.

A: Oh no, if merchandising had been the beginning of the conversation, the movie never would have been made. But that's what's great about Pixar. First they come up with, and commit to, the story. Then they go off and make it. And then they figure out how to market it.

Q: You've said that, like a lot of people -- and I was one of them -- you started out as a kid making movies in your yard. But you were even more interested in putting together the soundtracks afterward.

A: Yeah, that was a huge part of it for me. I'd use a bunch of classical stuff, all my sister's rock 'n' roll records, my dad's "Lawrence of Arabia" album. Getting material wasn't the problem. What was frustrating was figuring out how to sync it up.. I would spend hours working on those soundtracks. Really, endless, endless amounts of time.

Q: Do you remember the first soundtrack album you bought?

A: I remember getting the "Star Wars" album for Christmas one year. That was the be-all and end-all getting that, not only because of the John Williams music, but it had these great liner notes, talking about the instruments, and how the trumpets came in for Luke's theme. It was like finally getting a chance to look under the hood and see how the engine worked.

Q: Was it daunting taking on "Star Trek"? You want to do something new, but not new enough that the fans hunt you down and kill you.

A: It was somewhat frightening. I like "Star Trek," I love the movies and the soundtracks that came from them. And, first, I was sitting there, writing what you think space music is supposed to sound like. And I would listen to it with (director) J.J. Abrams and the producers and it just didn't feel right. It was music for what had come before. And so we kind of talked and decided, hey, this is not a film about the grandeur of space. This is a film about two guys, and how they become friends, and that's what we need to concentrate on, and let go of everything else. This is a reboot, not a continuation. That's why I only used hints of the Alexander Courage theme until the end.

Q: Which was a risk.

A: Oh, I knew that would make a lot of people -- serious soundtrack fans, and real "Star Trek" fans -- unhappy. But you know what, the film is not just for them, it's for everybody.. And, in the end, I feel I did the right thing for the film. I saw it again this week with my oldest and I've never had so much fun in a theater.

Q: Do you have any horror stories? One composer told me about this director who handled him a really awful comedy once and said, "Make it funny."

A: Right, "Now write some funny music." That never works. How do you write that? But I don't believe in that approach anyway. Really, it's probably my No. 1 rule.. "Land of the Lost," OK, it's a comedy, but my thought was, I'm going to support this seriously, 100 percent. Will Ferrell is the comedian; my music is the straight man.

Q: We should talk a little about your work for TV's "Lost," which really stands out for fans.

A: I love working on that because it allows me a lot of freedom. I'm never at a loss for inspiration there. I can be very simple and emotional, or as avant-garde and atonal and crazy as I want. You couldn't do that on "Up"!

Q: Or on a lot of other TV shows. So many of them now seem to have really forgettable music. Or just stick in a lot of pop songs. It's not like the '60s, when even a cartoon like "Jonny Quest" had a great theme.

A: That's true. But back then, music on TV didn't come out of a computer, it was live people making music on real instruments -- "Get Smart," "The Twilight Zone," all those things, you soaked them up, not even knowingly, but it was a real education. ... So much of it now, it's an afterthought. It's just something to get you from A to B -- or sell a record.

Q: Are you still able to go to the movies and get swept away the way you were when you were a kid? Or do you sit there listening to the soundtrack thinking, "Hmm, oboe. Interesting choice."

A: Only if the movie isn't doing its job. If it's doing its job, then I'm just watching the story like everybody else.

Stephen Whitty may be reached at swhitty@starledger.com or (212) 790-4435.

Tax Law and the Musician: IRS Q & A

2009-05-21T16:55:00.001-07:00

While doing my taxes this year, I found this interview on tax laws that pertain to musicians by Antonio J. García with IRS agent Sallie Godingwith. Although posted in 2001, it is very insightful. See the excerpt below:

Employee

GARCÍA: Is a musician required to file a W-4 with every employer, no matter how infrequently employed by that person?

GODING: Yes. All new employees are required to give their new employer a Form W-4 when they start work. If a new employee does not give the employer a completed Form W-4, the employer is required to withhold taxes as if the employee is single, with no withholding allowances.1

GARCÍA: Where do I claim my employee income on the 1040 form?

GODING: If you are an employee, you should receive a Form W-2 from your employer showing the pay you received for your services. Depending on which form you use, report this income on the "Wages, salaries, tips" line of Form 1040, 1040A, or Form 1040EZ.2

GARCÍA: If I've received payment for performance by cash or check involving no W-2 or W-4, I should still claim the amount as income on my Form 1040. But where do I place such income on the form?

GODING: Assuming this income is related to your being an employee, it should be reported on the "Wages, salaries, tips" line of Form 1040, 1040A, or Form 1040EZ, even if you do not receive a Form W-2.3

This article is copyright 2001 by Antonio J. García and originally was published in the International Association of Jazz Educators Jazz Educators Journal, Vol. 33, No. 5, March 2001. It is used by permission of the author and, as needed, the publication. Some text variations may occur between the print version and that below. All international rights remain reserved; it is not for further reproduction without written consent. Antonio Garcia can be reached at www.garciamusic.com.

Photoshop Fun

2009-05-21T16:51:00.000-07:00

Having a blast doing Kimmipeli's flyers. Photoshop is another creative outlet for me.

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Bill Brown Interview

2009-05-20T23:04:00.000-07:00

Interview: 'Wolfenstein' composer Bill Brown

Composer Bill Brown has made his mark creating scores for games such as Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, the film Ali and the CBS TV series CSI: New York. His next video game project is Wolfenstein, the sequel to id Software's Return to Castle Wolfenstein (due later this year from Raven Software for PS3, Xbox 360 and PCs).

Brown recently finished the score and took time to talk about the project via email.

Q: How did you get connected with the 'Wolfenstein' franchise?
A: I had already scored about 20 game titles when Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) came up. I had previously worked with Activision on Quake II and Quake III, and they loved my scores for the Quake cinematics (in-game movies) so when they completed the intro cinematic for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, they gave me a call to talk about the score. It's actually kind of unusual to start a game project with an intro movie, but for some reason, developers were doing it a lot back then.. it was a great way to find the essence of the score, themes, etc.

Q: Talk about how your work in video games lead to TV and film.
A: Scoring games allowed me to write orchestral music every day for years and hone my writing and programming chops. It also allowed me to work with live orchestra which was rare for someone just getting started in the industry (12 years ago). Then, as I was also working on some commercials at the time, I was meeting directors and getting into scoring films - starting with a short film by Jim Sonzero (director of Pulse) and a film for USA television directed by Deran Sarafian (dir: Terminal Velocity, CSI, etc.) called Trapped.

It just happened that Deran was filming the pilot of CSI:NY a few years later and gave me a call. I composed about 15-20 minutes of new music in a style that was inspired by the pilot, and put together a DVD with the music synced up to some aerial footage Deran had just shot of New York City from a helicopter, which we shared with the producers of the show. The next thing I knew, I was scoring the pilot and then the show... Five years later, we're wrapping up season 5 of CSI:NY and after 118 episodes, it's still just as exciting to work on for me as the pilot was. The episodes we're working on right now, "Yahrzeit", "Grounds For Deception" and the season finale, "Pay Up" are all quite remarkable (as I've said before in interviews.. in my humble opinion..) We've traveled back to World War II to solve a mystery (which, btw, musically sounds completely different from Wolfenstein!), all the way to Greece with the team to solve another, and back to NYC for the season finale.

This past summer I also scored an indie sci-fi horror film starring Cuba Gooding Jr., directed by Jason Connery called The Devil's Tomb. I'm proud of the score for that one, too, which we recorded with a live orchestra. The DVD comes out in May.

Billbrownx-blog200 Q: Describe the difference in scoring a video game and a TV series like 'CSI: NY'.
A: The main difference is that the action in a film or TV series is linear after the picture is locked - it's always the same. With games, the action in non-linear - always changing. The challenge remains the same for both - to create music that is interesting, fresh, soulful, thematic and brings an added dimension to the scene or level that wouldn't be there without the music. Where scoring to picture is a relatively simple process, the technique that goes into creating music that reacts to the player of a game can range from a simple ambient loop for a game level, to multi-layered (multiple audio tracks with reactive / interactive automation), scripted, beat-accurate, looping underscore that constantly shifts with decisions and actions the player makes. It's deep, and pretty amazing stuff.

Q: Is there a personality or flavor that you have brought from 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein' to the new 'Wolfenstein'?
A: There is a dark, sci-fi edge to Return to Castle Wolfenstein that definitely exists in the new score for Wolfenstein, but I think that is mainly because they did such a great job of staying true to the dark, supernatural atmosphere and haunting World War II context in both games.. With Wolfenstein, of course the technology has evolved, and so has the score.. and they really took the game play to the next level, so it truly feels like a sequel, and it feels fresh at the same time. Where the music for Return to Castle Wolfenstein was more atmospheric, you'll hear more themes and a big 1940's 'modern' orchestral influence in the score for Wolfenstein. I was originally listening to scores like Raiders of the Lost Ark for inspiration, but I found that Wolfenstein just naturally fell into more of a Bernard Herrmann-esque, 20th century, dark angular-orchestral vocabulary.. which is great for me as that is naturally where I tend to go (organically) myself writing for orchestra.

Q: Talk about when you got involved in the process.
A: We just wrapped up actually. I was working on it for about a year - off and on. We started the process more than a year ago when the levels had just started to come into focus and they were ready to hear some music in them. I composed about 20 minutes of music to start, and then we stepped away from it for a while and the producers decided to expand the scope of the score to over 60 minutes of music.

Q: What are your thoughts of 'Wolfenstein', based on what you have seen so far?
A: I had a chance to see every new level as I worked and really got inside the game.. and it is thrilling, and still carries that haunting essence of World War II drama - with some killer new twists.. The game is so cool in that it really feels like you're picking up where Return to Castle Wolfenstein left off, and then it takes a left turn and this incredible new story opens up.. I guess I can't go into too much detail, but it's a fun ride for sure.

For more about Brown go to www.billbrownmusic.com.

By Mike Snider
Images courtesy of Activision

Great Robert Kraft Interview (By Lukas Kendall)

2009-05-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

So You Want to be a Film Composer?

by Lukas Kendall

Man alive, the number of people who want to be film composers these days... it used to be that when people wanted to be in music, they wanted to be a great pianist or a Broadway songwriter. Then, everybody wanted to be in a band. Now, everyone's already in a band, and they want to make money by scoring films.

I think it's great that film music is being taken seriously to the point where so many people want to get into it. But like screenwriting or professional athletics, this is a field where the available slots are few, and the hopefuls are many. To that end, here's some helpful advice, and we plan much more of this in FSM (the magazine) in 1998.

To start, two tips, from my own personal observations. If you want to be a film composer:

1) Don't try to be John Williams.

So many people, especially young people, want to be film composers because they love big, sweeping, beautiful orchestral romantic music--like the kind John Williams writes! This is a problem in that this is only a tiny fragment of what it is filmmakers are looking for in film score. Keep in mind, I am not talking about John Williams per se-- most directors would give their left nut for him--but the kind of melodic, symphonic score he has done on a specific type of fantasy film.

For one thing, John Williams is around 500 times smarter than most anyone reading this, and he can do these types of scores and make them great, instead of bloated and cliched. More practically, only a specific type of movie that requires a Star Wars type of score. They're aren't many of them made, and when they are made, they are so expensive that, if John Williams himself isn't hired, James Horner will be. Or Jerry Goldsmith. Or Bruce Broughton. Or around 40 other guys who have tons more experience than you.

If you really want to be a film composer, you have to divorce yourself from your 12 year-old dream to score the next Star Wars movie, and come up with the kind of sound that will make filmmakers come to you. If you write traditional, symphonic music, you will without a doubt end up working on a lot of lousy, juvenile children's films. But if you can come up with something sophisticated—something dramatic but subtle and contemporary— you can be "typecast" into good movies. Think Thomas Newman, Howard Shore, Rachel Portman, Graeme Revell, Elliot Goldenthal and the newest example, Mychael Danna. These composers write music that isn't necessarily flashy, but gets them consistently employed on high quality product. And from there you'll have a lot more options than you do now.

2) Put down the jar of paste.

Not to dwell too much on this, but I've met a few aspiring film composers whose personalities are about as fun as a Jehovah's witness at a Halloween party. Almost without exception, the big-time working film composers are also intelligent, likable, trustworthy and fun to be around. They aren't necessarily "party" people, but they radiate a certain confidence and charm that says, "Hire me." They are sensitive, but they don't burden you with their problems.

If you really want to do this, you can't be an arrogant, nerdy dullard. Film composing is highly competitive. (First prize: the oldsmobile. Second prize: steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.) You can't afford to be a creep.

Free Advice from Top Agent-- RICHARD KRAFT Now for something useful for a change. This was a brief set of questions I put to agent Richard Kraft in August, 1994, for issue #48. Richard represents Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Marc Shaiman, Basil Poledouris, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman, and several others, so he knows what he's talking about.

One note: since this conversation, the film scoring landscape has changed with regard to independent films, in that there is once again a thriving independent market and many of today's most promising composers came out of it-- such as Mychael Danna, John Ottman, and Stephen Endelman. But other than this I don't think anything substantial has changed. Here's Richard:

***

1. How tough is it to break into film scoring?

Extremely tough, because there are so few movies made. There are probably six major studios and they make maybe a dozen movies each, so that's not a large pool of films. The number of independent movies being made is substantially less than it was even ten years ago, when there were Cannon Films and New World Pictures and Dino DeLaurentiis, those were a great breeding ground for up and coming talent. But now it's like major films and that's it. Television is not the great minor leagues it once was. If you look at John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and people like that who cut their teeth in TV, it's not the same type of music being written anymore, there aren't all those great shows like Twilight Zone. Plus, there's a kind of snobbery that exists between features and television that I don't think existed back in the '60s.

2. How can I meet various important people to get myself work?

I would skip "various important people" and start with people in a similar "up and coming" spot. Instead of trying to get to Steven Spielberg, I would try to get to the next Steven Spielberg by working on student films, AFI films, UCLA and USC student films and forging relationships with the people who will be the next generation of biggies.

3. Is moving to L.A. or another production center (like New York) really important?

Essential. If you want to be in the car making business, you have to be in Detroit. You've got to be where the industry is.

4. What's the best kind of demo tape?

One based on knowledge of the project you're sending it out for. If you're going up for a horror movie, there are very few directors who could listen to great music for a love story and make the leap of faith that you would be appropriate for a horror movie. I would make the tape as specific to the project as possible.

5. Is it worth it to hire live players for a demo?

The better the tape could be, the better it is. It's best to do the "A" version of what you're doing. If you're trying to achieve an orchestral score, use live players. A problem with demos is that the ambition of the music sometimes exceeds the production abilities; it's hard to hear and fill in the blanks of what it's supposed to sound like. You should only have music that sounds like the real thing you're trying to achieve.

6. When should I start contacting agents?

The time to have an agent is when an agent wants you, when the agent feels he can parlay where you currently are in your career into something bigger. Agents are not set up to break talent in their first one or two movies. It's when there's a small movie that has some interest behind it--a Sex, Lies and Videotape, Drugstore Cowboy or Dead Calm--that an agent can take you to the next step.

7. How important is a traditional musical education and being classically trained?

It entirely depends on the type of composer you would like to be. The more varied your background the better, because film composing is about being a chameleon, being able to write in different styles to meet the needs of the movie. So the richer your background the better, but I don't think anybody has ever hired a composer based on looking at their degree. I think of the majority of currently successful film composers, their backgrounds are not conservatory training but life music training. Marc Shaiman was Bette Midler's musical director, Danny Elfman had the band Oingo Boingo, Stewart Copeland was from The Police, James Newton Howard was a session player and record producer, and so on.

8. How can I work on becoming a film composer while simultaneously supporting myself on a job?

There are two trains of thought. One is, have a job that has nothing to do with your career, just to make money. That way you can just do the job and leave it behind at the end of the day and concentrate on your film scoring career. Or, the best job is like being an orchestrator or a copyist, where it puts you in the situation where you meet people who are working on movies, and you can be a fly on the wall at scoring sessions and absorb all kinds of knowledge and information.

9. How many aspiring film composers are there?

Endless. Nowadays, almost all the major music schools have film scoring programs and the interest in being a film composer is at an all time high [cue Octopussy]. Besides writing hit songs, film composing is about the only lucrative job for somebody who composes music for a living.

10. Is it worth it to do projects for next to nothing just to get experience?

Absolutely. It's essential, as a matter of fact. The first few movies you do should be viewed like obtaining tuition to go to college. It's a learning process for you and having done three movies where you've lost money in the process puts you so many steps ahead of having no movies.

11. Should I try to develop the ability to sound like other composers, or work on developing a unique sound of my own?

I don't think it's an either/or. You definitely need to develop your own voice, but also to have an understanding of what other people might want. I wouldn't work on doing an Elmer Bernstein imitation, but if I was doing a movie where they said, "We want the feel of To Kill a Mockingbird," I'd need to have an understanding of what that meant so as to interpret it in my own voice.

12. Is it helpful to meet other film composers, established or otherwise?

It's helpful to commiserate and to have a support group, but--and again it's not black or white--if I had a choice I'd rather know five directors than five film composers.

13. Are there any sure-fire ways to piss off people so much that nobody will ever hire me?

Well... never say never, but I think a lot of talented people's careers haven't developed as far as they should based on them pissing people off.

14. Are there any specific pathetic stories of aspiring film composers you know about?

Specific pathetic stories? How about I give you a positive story: There was a composer several years ago who was in college and wanted to get a job in Hollywood. So what he did was he videotaped the main title sequences of all the Quinn-Martin TV shows, wrote new themes for all of them, got his college orchestra to play his new themes and sent the tape to Quinn-Martin Productions. And of course they're going to look at their own main titles, and they got such a kick out of it, they gave him a chance to write one cue for one episode of some show. They liked it and he ended up on a series. That's a positive story. The pathetic stories all tend to fall into the exact same category: People give up. It's hard. It's hard enough to be a composer, but at the beginning of your career, it's equally important to be a salesman, and that's not really a skill composers have developed. It's like selling any product, it's pounding the pavement and knocking on a lot of doors. It's hard to take the rejection so I think the reason most people don't make it isn't from a lack of talent, because I know there are a lot of really talented people out there, it's because they give up. They don't get this instant gratification and it's so hard to take the rejection that they don't keep it up.

15. What specific piece of advice would you have for getting work?

Put yourself in the shoes of the person who's hiring you. If you were making a movie, and you got a call from a composer, what would you want to hear? Get out of the brain of a composer and into the brain of the person hiring you. The people who tend to get those first few jobs are the people who make it easy for the person to hire them--by being so willing to do demos, by being available, and by being persistent, because most people aren't. It's a very delicate balance between being persistent and being pushy. Learning to finesse that, that's a real skill to work on. And this is my number one analogy: Every skill that one uses to get a date is the exact same skill one uses to get a job. Both involve seduction, it's identical. If you're a man and wanting to ask a woman out for a first date, how do you do that? How do you present yourself physically, what things do you say, how do you connect with the other person, what's the other person looking for? It's the exact same thing when you're trying to present yourself as a composer. It's a relationship you're trying to get involved in.

16. Realistically, if I'm an average aspiring film composer, what are my chances?

I don't think there's such a thing as an average one. There are so many factors. Are you talented, are you smart, do you have a good personality, do you know how to work with filmmakers? Someone who has all those ducks in a row has incredibly better odds than a social misfit who writes crappy music. I would say that if you have your act together, write really good music, and have the financial ability and determination to stick it out, the odds are you'll make it, because there are so few people who meet those requirements.

***

THR's Top 100 Film Scores

2009-05-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

This is a great article by The Hollywood Reporter. I have so much work to do to get to the level of these amazing composers like Bernard Hermann, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, John Barry, etc. Click the title for the link.

Spring Film & TV Music: The Top 100
Our industry poll of the best scores in 100 years of film music

By Jeff Bond

April 27, 2009, 07:04 PM ET

1 | Godfather

Nino Rota 1972

The Godfather
Nino Rota's music for "The Godfather" stands on its own yet fuses itself to Francis Ford Coppola's classic film so that each is unimaginable without the other. Rota's main title, his theme for Marlon Brando's Don Vito Corleone, is so instantly recognizable that an audience could probably identify it simply from the melancholy sound of its first sustained vibrato trumpet note. This soulful melody, tinged with dignity and regret, seems to encapsulate the end of Corleone's journey from street thief to Mafia kingpin and all the Faustian bargains, the incremental sacrifices of his humanity that the journey cost. It's a sentimental waltz and mournful dirge all at once.

Yet this famous melody is rarely overused and for the most part remains restrained and reflective in its voicing. It's Rota's "Immigrant" theme that soars to operatic heights as the story deepens and Al Pacino's Michael Corleone finds himself traveling down the same path as his father, and this melody often ties together the movie's disparate plot threads and reinforces the film's epic scope.

Of course Rota was able to add authenticity to the film's many views of Italian family celebrations and rituals with traditional forms -- a mazurka, a tarantella and many others over the course of the saga. Rota's final, memorable contribution is the lyrical love theme for Michael Corleone's romantic sojourn in Italy. It's a detour for the film and Rota's melody for Michael's courtship and marriage to a young Italian girl plays perfectly into Coppola's sleight of hand for the interlude, lulling the audience into a romantic reverie so that the woman's death in a car bombing comes as a devastating shock. The love theme became a popular song, "Speak Softly Love," but Rota's title music and his grand Corleone family theme are the stuff of movie legend.

Ironically, despite the tremendous popularity of Rota's first "Godfather" score, he was disqualified for Oscar consideration after the score was nominated because he had reworked a melody from his 1946 score "Fortunella" as part of the "Godfather" music. Rota got his redemption when he, along with Carmine Coppola, won the Oscar for "The Godfather, Part II" -- but, sadly, Rota was not at the ceremony to receive the award.

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Dan Zank

2009-05-11T00:46:00.000-07:00

Music man Dan Zank shoots for the stars -- and gets there
By Eileen FitzGerald
Staff Writer
Updated: 05/08/2009 05:34:55 PM EDT

When the 2009 Oscars aired in February, Hugh Jackman opened the show with a glitzy musical tribute to all the big films of the year.

As the star sang and danced his way across the stage, Danbury native Dan Zank was watching from his home in Yonkers, N.Y., with his wife and a few friends, and he was a little nervous.

The 35-year-old musician, composer and arranger had arranged the music for Jackman's performance in a whirlwind -- it was a last-minute assignment -- and he didn't know what the outcome would be until he saw it on TV.

There was no need to worry. Jackman's performance and the music were just what Zank envisioned. And the audience applause was thunderous.

Zank's nimble and creative talent was honed in a musically diverse career that started with organ lessons at age 4. Zank was in the band at King Street Intermediate School in Danbury, by age 12 he was learning jazz on the piano and playing in his brother Stephen's high school rock band.

He joined the music major leagues a week after college, when he began touring with the late jazz legend Maynard Ferguson. He also recorded an album with him.

Composing came naturally in 2001, when he decided to stop touring after three years as a pianist with Blood Sweat and Tears.

"I started getting calls about composing. It was good timing. I started getting into scoring for television and connected with some good people,'' Zank says. "Immediately, it was clearly what I wanted
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to do the rest of my life.''

These days, his sights are set on composing for feature films.

Zank's original music can be heard in commercials for McDonald's, Disney, and Coca-Cola, as well as in the marketing video for the Tour de France bicycle race, and on television shows and films.

"The fun comes in stages," Zank says. "It's amazing to see a visual with no music on it and see it amplified with music. It's also fun to put my hands on a piano and bring it to another level. The process is exciting right from the start to the end. There's so much control you have."

He likes the diversity of his work, because it calls for many styles of music.

Working from home

Zank discussed his work on a recent afternoon in the Yonkers, N.Y., studio he built in the basement of his house with his father.

He was comfortably surrounded by 11 guitars in racks, a Yamaha upright piano, a Hammond organ, two synthesizers, and an electric piano.

The collection of instruments lets him duplicate different eras of music. Whether he needs the '70s sound of an electric piano or the rich tones of a Hammond, it's there.

Zank said he writes music on the computer and works out sequences on the guitar or piano. He'll choose the instruments, mix the sound and produce a piece of music that can be digitally broadcast to his client. He can write music in Yonkers and play it for a singer in a studio in Los Angeles, all because of technology. And do it from the home he shares with his wife, Mary, and their six-month old daughter, Mia.

"Twenty years ago, there is no way I could be doing this without spending tons of money,'' Zank said.

Each day he works on a different project, which is more fun that performing the same music on the road every night.

For instance, he's playing the piano when the chipmunks play the instrument in the movie "Alvin and the Chipmunks." He played the background music in the elevator scene in the movie "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and he wrote the music for the "Terminator 3" trailer.

Most of the work he does for commercials is through a company called Yessian, based in New York. But the bulk of what he does for film and television is as a freelancer.

"I'm still looking to get into full feature film composing, but I've had glimpses of it,'' he said.

"There's something music adds to a film. You can lift the scene. It gets the director's point across,'' he said. "You get the opportunity to support amazing visuals and add to them."

Thanks Mom and Dad

Zank credits his parents for the success he's achieved.

"My parents are amazing," he said. "They love to listen to music, but they can't play instruments.''

They carted their two sons to lessons and concerts for years. "If they hadn't done that, I wouldn't be doing what I love so much."

He said his mother is selfless. "She was endlessly taking us to lessons and made me practice at night. To do that was no small task.''

Linda Zank, who lives in Danbury, said it's wonderful to see Dan as a professional musician and composer, and Stephen continuing to play music as a hobby. She's also glad to know Dan appreciates his parents' efforts.

She said sports and hikes and picnics and other family activities are great, but she and her husband, Richard, believed music would offer the boys something enduring.

"If you do music, you can do it wherever and whenever you want, forever," she said.

One of her favorite jobs of her son's is the music he wrote for the Tour de France video. She said he took a simple, silent video of circling bicycles and added music she loves.

Another favorite is a touching commercial for Morgan Stanley in which a young boy flies a kite. "That music was so inspiring," she said. "He used a flute that was just beautiful."

She and her husband are thrilled with Zank's career and family life. "It's so important for children to do what they love."

A major influence

One turning point for Dan Zank was in seventh grade, when he decided to get serious about the piano. He went to Danbury teacher Jeff McGill, who prepared him for the future.

"He was the inspiration I needed," Zank said of McGill, a performer and musician. McGill opened The Music Learning Center in Danbury 16 years ago.

"The strength of his ear and musicality came through very early on in his lessons with me," McGill said in a recent interview.

Zank focused on jazz piano, which also is the instrument McGill plays and it laid the foundation for him.

"Developing your skills as an improvisor in the field of jazz can be very significant in creating your abilities in composition and arranging," McGill said. "When we were teaching jazz arrangement, we looked at harmony and chord substitution and that's the first exposure to the skills."

McGill remembered Zank's original compositions.

"I definitely saw how he could organize his musical thoughts in a wonderful way that becomes important for a composer and arranger," McGill said. "Dan is very gifted in a number of ways."

Zank said he's in a great place.

"I'm very happy. I'd like to be the next John Williams or Hans Zimmer, but I'm blessed and fortunate to have gotten what I have personally and creatively in life. I have a supportive wife and a beautiful daughter. My life is good."

Contact Eileen FitzGerald

at eileenf@newstimes.com

or at (203) 731-3333.

AfroCaribe Special Flyer

2009-05-11T00:11:00.001-07:00

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Russ Landau Receives Doctorate

2009-05-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

A Survivor receives an honorary doctorate.

Emmy winning Survivor composer Russ Landau can add doctor to his credits. The University of Bridgeport will honor alumnus Russ Landau, Class of 1977, at its 99th Commencement on Saturday, May 9th with an honorary doctorate. Landau was an accomplished musician by the time he graduated with his bachelor’s degree in music composition and theory from U of B. He performed with Paul Winter for several years, producing 14 records for the group, including the Grammy Award-winner for Best New Age Album, "Prayer for the Wild Things." He then made the transition to TV and film composing. Landau’s obvious talent and creativity has made him one of the most successful television composers today. In addition to "Survivor," he has themed and scored many other primetime series including “Fear Factor” (1, 2, 3 and 4), “Survivor UK,” “America’s Most Talented Kid,” “Dog Eat Dog,” “The Restaurant” (1 & 2), “Average Joe,” “Three Wishes,” “The Assistant,” and more. Last fall he won an Emmy for his theme for "Pirate Master," a CBS unscripted serial. Additionally he has won over a dozen Emmy nominations and ASCAP awards. Russ Landau lives in California but spends summers in Connecticut. Landau will receive a doctorate degree in humane letters.

Overdrive Pedals For Composers

2009-04-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

Freelance Music Composer Tools: Overdrive Pedals

An important tool for today’s freelance music composer may be a guitar overdrive pedal. Overdrive pedals, and electric guitars in general are becoming more prevalent in music composed for film, television, and video games. This can mean more opportunities for freelance music composers if they are familiar with the guitar and how to produce guitar overdrive sounds.

It is important as a modern freelance music composer to be able to compose and produce music in a variety of styles. Being familiar with both piano and guitar is the best start to this issue, and knowing how to properly use guitar distortion and overdrive pedals to create rock and other sounds can be important for any freelance music composer.

The more tools you are familiar with as a freelance music composer, the more opportunities you will have to be hired, and this is obviously a key point to being involved with freelance music. Check back at freelancemusiccomposers.com for more information on compositional tools and instruments of value to freelance composers today.
by Admin ~ April 26th, 2009. Freelance Music Composers.

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Brian Tyler

2009-04-23T12:52:00.001-07:00

ON THE SCORE is sponsored by La-La Land Records

“Fast & Furious” is the title of Brian Tyler’s latest exercise is rhythmic excitement. But it might as well stand for his rise to become one of Hollywood’s most prolifically talented composers in the next wave of action scoring. Using a high-tech combo of orchestra, rock-based percussion and strong, melodic themes, Tyler’s music been in perfect tune with the enjoyable Hollywood mayhem of “Eagle Eye,” “Paparazzi” “Alien Versus Predator: Requiem” and Timeline.” Tyler’s hip beat has also carved a niche in the Asian action arena, with bullets, swords and feet flying to his distinctive Oriental sound in “War,” “Rambo” and “Bangkok Dangerous.”

Sure Brian Tyler might take a breather with the beautifully surreal intrigue of “The Lazarus Project,” “Bug”s dissonant mind games, “The Greatest Game Ever Played”’s nostalgically epic orchestra and the eerie Elvis-isms of “Bubba Ho Tep.” But when you want a winning driver to run a constantly energetic musical course over your movie, than Brian Tyler’s the composer to have in the pole position. Now after teaming with director Justin Lin for “Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” Tyler returns with Lin to the franchise with rocking gusto in “Fast & Furious,” charting an even meaner course with infinite rhythm pads and a dark heroic edge. And where he might have a Spanish feel for the new film’s villains, Tyler doesn’t stint on the Oriental vibe for “Dragonball: Evolution,” giving symphonically cosmic flesh and blood to the anime-turned-celluloid characters.

Both “Fast & Furious” and “Dragonball: Evolution” stand as some of Brian Tyler’s most entertaining entries in the popcorn genre he hears like few other next-gen composers. Now on a new edition of “On the Score,” he reveals how success can be found by putting a musically innovative pedal to the metal.

The Art of Jeremy Sole

2009-04-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

DJ/artist/radio host/music supervisor/promoter Jeremy Sole is my hero. His music awareness, artistic prowess and gracious nature make him one of LA's (and the world's) best kept secrets. Although I don't think he's much of a secret anymore, it is just a matter of time before he becomes a household name. Quite simply, J Sole champions all that is good in our music and art universe with a specialty in world cultures. Behold his collection of flyers at http://tinyurl.com/cu8d5v and see what I mean by "hero."

Porsche Panamera

2009-04-19T19:53:00.000-07:00

Porsche designs the most amazing cars. Every line is well-conceived. Every curve is perfect. The engines are fuego! Same goes for their new Sedan launching in China:

Porsche Chooses China for Its Entry Into Sedans
Marijan Murat/European Pressphoto Agency

Porsche presented its new Panamera at the Shanghai auto show on Sunday.

Article Tools Sponsored By
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: April 19, 2009

SHANGHAI — Porsche unveiled its entry into the luxury sedan market here on Sunday night, the eve of the Shanghai auto show. It was the latest confirmation of the importance of the Chinese auto market and the first time that Porsche has entered a new market segment at an auto show outside Europe or North America.
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Related
Wheels: Porsche Designer Talks About the Panamera (April 17, 2009)

Auto sales rose 10 percent last month in China to a record, and exceeded sales in the United States for the third month in a row as the world’s largest single-country market. That has prompted automakers from around the world to pay particular attention to the Chinese market, with a range of models to be introduced here.

Subcompacts and very small and simple minivans are the fastest-growing segments of the Chinese market. But China has also emerged as the world’s second-largest market after the United States for a growing number of luxury car brands, and become the focus of energetic marketing by luxury manufacturers.

The global economic slowdown, which trimmed Chinese growth to a still respectable 6.1 percent in the first quarter, has hurt luxury car sales, although less than in many other markets. Luxury car sales fell 8 percent in the first two months of this year compared with the period a year ago, according to the research firm J. D. Power and Associates.

“This year there will be some impact, but when the economy recovers, this segment will also grow,” said Yale Zhang, a Chinese market forecaster in the Shanghai office of CSM Worldwide, a global automotive consulting firm.

Not one of the models to be unveiled at the Shanghai auto show, which starts on Monday, has drawn more discussion in the auto industry than Porsche’s entry, the Panamera. It is Porsche’s first sedan after more than six decades of manufacturing sports coupes and, since 2002, the Cayenne car-based sport utility vehicle.

Klaus Berning, Porsche’s executive vice president for sales and marketing, acknowledged that the timing for entering a new market segment was difficult but said the company had received enough orders that it expected to meet its goal of selling 20,000 a year. “The current orders already make us very comfortable and optimistic,” he said.

Company executives said that the car would start at $89,800 in the United States and more, sometimes much more, in countries with higher taxes. The turbo version with a V-8 engine will cost 2.5 million yuan, or $366,000, in China, which has stiff import taxes and heavy taxes on family vehicles with large engines.

Porsche executives said that they expected the car to have better fuel efficiency than most luxury sedans, describing this as necessary for “social acceptance” at a time of international worries about global warming. They did not provide gas mileage statistics for the Panamera, however.

A dark gray Panamera rolled onto a stage Sunday night on the 94th floor of the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center, the tallest building in mainland China, having been wedged nearly vertically into an elevator barely wide enough for the task. With long, smooth lines, the Panamera looked like a Porsche — arguably more so than the much taller Cayenne.

The rounded sides of the Panamera’s front end are considerably higher than the hood, and the length of the front end compared with the passenger compartment preserves the image of power projected by the 911 series and the less expensive Boxster. With a long low rear window, the Panamera avoids looking like a lower-riding version of the Cayenne, which has been much scorned by sports car enthusiasts.

To attract performance-car enthusiasts, the Panamera comes with a rear spoiler that automatically deploys from the back of the car at high speeds, using the air flow over the vehicle to help keep the rear wheels tightly pressed to the pavement for better control.

In Asian countries like China with high levels of income inequality, wealthy car buyers frequently have chauffeurs. While Porsche purists tend to believe that the driving experience is the whole point of buying a Porsche, offering a spacious back seat could make the Panamera competitive as a chauffeured car.

In an indication of how far the Panamera is from Porsche’s traditional offerings, the company estimates that 90 percent of the car’s buyers will be new to Porsche.

Music By Story

2009-04-19T19:30:00.000-07:00

I'm co-writing a pop song for a television series. I've asked Sy Smith to be a partner as well as my daughter. It's exciting. I'm going into the studio tonight to come up with alternate music. The question that begs to be answered is "What's POP?" Is it a style of music? Hip-hop, rock, folk...? I'm going to go in and do what I do but one never know what's hot or not until it catches on. I've never had a hit song so this is unfamiliar territory. Here I go! Lock in!

Lofty Dreams 1

2009-04-19T19:15:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter!

2009-04-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

The images in this 11x17 poster are from my amazing trip to Trinidad and Tobago in December 2008. I put this together for fun but it documents my experience visually. All the best!

New Logo?

2009-04-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

My daughter helped me with this one. Hmmm...

LFT, Pt. 4

2009-04-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

John Debney Interview

2009-04-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

Composer John Debney brings his amazing talent to movies
By Sandra Barrera, Staff Writer
Posted: 03/22/2009 12:56:22 AM PDT

John Debney is an Academy Award nominated film composer. Photographed in his Burbank CA studios. (Photo by John McCoy/staff photographer)

Back when John Debney was a kid, his Disney producer father would bring home loaner reels of "Bambi," "20000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Swiss Family Robinson" and other classics for family movie nights.

It was the job of the self-described "industry brat" to man the projector.

"It was probably around that time that I became enamored with the magic that can happen with music and film," says Debney, now 51.

"When the lights are off, and the movie would come up, and the theme music would come up, I always liked that. I think that was a seminal moment in my life."

Debney is conjuring up some of his own magic these days as one of Hollywood's most prolific and versatile film composers.

"He's easily up there with the greats," says fellow composer Alan Brewer, who will be moderating a panel discussion Wednesday between Debney and the director Garry Marshall as part of the inaugural Burbank International Film Festival at Woodbury University, where the composer is also being honored for career achievement. "The breadth of his talent is pretty amazing."

In a career spanning nearly 30 years, Debney has set the tone for more films than he can remember, ranging from comedies such as "Elf," "Liar Liar" and "Bruce Almighty," adventures like "The Scorpion King" and "Spy Kids," to the thrillers "I Know What You Did Last Summer" and "Sin City," as well as his Oscar-nominated score for "The Passion of the Christ."

And that's just a sample of his repertoire, which includes the forthcoming Eddie Murphy comedy "A Thousand Words" and next month's highly anticipated "Hannah Montana: The Movie" for Disney.

Debney grew up in Glendale during the 1960s. An only child, he remembers riding the full-size train in Disney animator Ward Kimball's backyard and attending movie premieres at Walt Disney's Golden Oak Ranch with his mother and father, the late Louis Debney.

He was also a regular at Disneyland.

"I remember when they were building the Haunted Mansion, and I got to walk through the structure," says Debney as he sits inside his Burbank studio.

In these brown leather chairs, many of Hollywood's biggest directors have sat to brainstorm with Debney on musical scores.

The room is equipped with a projector and screen in front of a large mixing board. To the left is where Debney composes on a pair of computers.

Outside the room, the walls of the reception area and hallway are lined with autographed posters of movies he has orchestrated.

Debney gravitated toward music early on. Both parents played instruments around the house. His father was an accomplished jazz pianist, while his guitar-playing mother favored the hootenanny scene.

As for Debney, he gigged around town in different pop and blue-eyed soul bands like Seacliff as he got into his early 20s.

"I really thought I was going to be a major rock guy," he says, adding that the oldest of his three boys, ages 20 to 25, is now pursuing the dream of rock stardom.

But it didn't work out for Debney. So, he turned his attention toward orchestral music and arranging during his junior year at Cal Arts. From there he went to work in television in the early '80s before making his mark as a film composer the following decade.

As he explains, the role of composer is crucial to the moviegoing experience.

"Music can either heighten the emotion or play against what you're seeing," he says, offering "The Passion of Christ" as one example. "Many times my music had to bring you to a different place because what you were seeing was horrific and tough to watch. So, it absolutely plays a huge part. And if it's done elegantly, it should be very seamless and invisible, and other times it should be bombastic and in your face. It's shades of color and texture."

In addition to his Oscar nomination for "The Passion of the Christ," he has received recognition at the Annie Awards for animation and TV's Emmys.

In 2005, Debney became the youngest recipient of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers' prestigious Henry Mancini Award for lifetime achievement.

"I thought that was weird," he says. "But then again, I've done so much stuff that when I look at the list it's sort of daunting. I don't remember half of it."

Gigastudio Announcement

2009-04-02T11:49:00.001-07:00

I don't even own this but damn...

FILM MUSIC MAGAZINE
April 1, 2009 - SPECIAL NEWS UPDATE
==========================================

GARRITAN PURCHASES GIGA TECHNOLOGY FROM TASCAM

TASCAM, a division of TEAC America, Inc. and sample library manufacturer Garritan have announced the completion of the sale of technology assets relating to GigaStudio, Gigasampler, GVI, GigaPulse and all Giga products.

After revolutionizing the sampler industry when the first Gigasampler was introduced in 1999, Giga products became the sampler of choice for many pro film, game and television composers. The industry expressed shock last year when TASCAM announced it was ceasing development of Gigastudio and Gigastudio related products as of July 2, 2008 and ending support as of December 31, 2008.

"We're very excited about this opportunity and proud to own some of the very best sampling technologies on the planet," said Gary Garritan, CEO of Garritan Corporation. "Acquiring the Giga technology helps us achieve our vision of providing the best tools to make great music available to all musicians."

"After reviewing over twenty companies, we believe that Garritan is the best candidate to carry on development of the Giga platform", stated Derek Davis, EVP/COO of TEAC America, Inc. "Garritan has demonstrated a sincere interest in building on the present Giga technology and taking it to the next level."

Garritan will be announcing its plan for the assets in the coming months. For more details, FAQs and information please visit http://www.garritan.com

Reginald Hudlin Book Signing

2009-04-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

LFT, Pt. 3

2009-03-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

I don't usually talk about my art but the logo above was done in Photoshop Novice using courier font and the cliche "star" to offset the Life and Force. I created the bold top and bottom stripes by expanding a basic underline and then colored in any holes with the brush. I like the simplicity and flag aspect of this design. I'm immediately drawn to the star when I look at it but it has an attractive balance about it. My thought process during the design was to allow the courier font to speak for itself (e.g. traditional, journalistic, typewritten) and the 3 planes to pull the viewer in. I like this design even though I would probably never use it for anything else but observation.

(Hilarious! I sound like I'm engaged.)

Life Force Trio is Back! Pt. 2

2009-03-24T00:21:00.001-07:00

Another Anthony Valadez Flyer. Damn!

2009-03-24T00:20:00.001-07:00

Life Force Trio is Back!

2009-03-22T16:16:00.001-07:00

The Life Force Trio is back. Carlos and I are working on tracks for an upcoming release that may feature Dwight Trible. Dwight has heard some music and seems to be on board but, regardless, the record will release. The new music is a fusion of Carlos' beautiful soundscapes and my instrumentation. We will probably start adding the key players soon like Miguel, Gabs and Andres. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I started making little logo mocks for fun. See above or click the title for the myspace page.

More Anthony Valadez Bannerage

2009-03-22T16:13:00.001-07:00

Anthony Valadez Banner

2009-03-18T10:49:00.001-07:00

I mess around with Photoshop. It's a more amateur version but it allows me to be creative in my own way. I post a lot of flyers on this blog that I've done with the program. As a marketing director in the past, I had always wanted to learn the application so I could better communicate to my graphic designers. Now, I can literally design it myself. I have to thank Anthony Valadez for suggesting I purchase it and who inspires me with his graphic design growth. His banner is a testament to what's possible.

New iPhone OS 3.0

2009-03-17T12:29:00.001-07:00

Apple Shows Off Next Version of iPhone Software
By Brad Stone
Robert Galbraith/Reuters Scott Forstall, senior vice president for iPhone software at Apple, discusses the new iPhone OS 3.0.

CUPERTINO, Calif. — In a shot across the bow of other mobile phone makers who are rushing to emulate aspects of its popular iPhone, Apple on Tuesday previewed some features that are due out in the next version of the phone’s software.

iPhone OS 3.0, as Apple calls it, will allow developers to create multiplayer games that work over a close-range Bluetooth connection, better integrate the maps that Apple and Google have developed for the device, and “push” messages to users through their programs.

That last improvement could unleash a new wave of creativity on the iPhone. Companies like ESPN.com can send score updates to sports fans, and instant messaging can now become far more practical on the device. Programs can solicit the attention of users with either a pinging sound or a text message. Apple said it was late developing such “push notifications” because of the challenge of preserving battery life and processing power.

Apple said the new operating system would be available to current iPhone users at no charge sometime this summer. It will sell for $9.95 to owners of the iPod Touch.

The new software will also give developers new ways to make money on the device, allowing them to sell monthly subscriptions, new levels in a game or items in an online store without asking users to leave the application. So for example a seller of electronic books on the iPhone can sell digital texts right within its application, instead of directing iPhone users to their Web sites.

Representatives of the game developer Ngmoco were at Apple’s event and demonstrated how players of its virtual pet game can buy clothes for their digital animals, and how users of its shoot-em-up games can pay small amounts of money to upgrade their arsenals.

Purchases are tied into the iTunes store, where users have already stored their credit card information.

Scott Forstall, an Apple senior vice president, added that developers who make free applications available on the iPhone will not be able to later charge within their program, saying that “free apps remain free.”

Apple demonstrated a long-awaited “cut, copy and paste” function, so users can select a piece of information in one program — say, a FedEx tracking number in an e-mail message — and then paste it elsewhere — on FedEx’s site in the Web browser, for example. Other mobile phone platforms, like Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, have long had their own versions of that feature.

Apple also said it was adding support for MMS, a way to send and receive multimedia files like photos and audio files over the mobile phone network, and is extending Spotlight, a feature of its desktop operating system that allows users to conduct searches through all information on the device.

At a similar event last March, Apple first introduced the App Store, which has become a significant source of revenue for Apple and the central focus of its advertising for the iPhone. More than 25,000 applications have been created for the device, and they have been downloaded more than 800 million times over the last 8 months.

But the iPhone itself could use a boost. Though Apple exceeded its public sales goals for the device, it sold 6.9 million phones during its fall quarter, then only 4.4 million units over the holiday months.

Many Apple watchers believe the company is preparing to unveil new hardware updates to the iPhone over the summer, and they speculate that they might include a less expensive version.

“The numbers indicate there is some leveling off of excitement,” said Chetan Sharma, an independent wireless industry analyst. “Sometime later this year they have to introduce something different or the competition from the Palm Pre, Google’s Android, RIM or other device makers will be significant.”

COMPOSER UPDATE: Nico Muhly

2009-03-16T04:19:00.000-07:00

“Margaret” Gets An Original Score by Nico Muhly

By Mikael Carlsson | Film Music Magazine | March 9, 2009

Following the acclaimed scores for Stephen Daldry’s The Reader and horror movie Joshua, young composer Nico Muhly has composed the original music for Margaret, a drama written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, the screenwriter behind Analayze This and Gangs of New York. Just like Joshua, Margaret will be released by Fox Searchlight. The film stars Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno, and the story is about a bus accident and its effect on a young woman who witnessed it. 27-year old Nico Muhly, who is a protege of Philip Glass, is an eclectic composer who is writing for the concert stage, cinema and also works with pop artists such as Björk and Rufus Wainwright.

Support the Performance Rights Act.

2009-03-16T03:43:00.000-07:00

For decades, AM and FM broadcasters have enjoyed an exemption from current copyright law which requires satellite radio, cable radio channels, and Internet webcasts to pay a royalty for the use of music. The Performance Rights Act (H.R. 848) would correct a loophole in the copyright law by removing the broadcaster exemption to assure that all platforms are treated equally and pay a performance royalty to artists.

With the introduction of the Performance Rights Act (H.R. 848), we need your help now more than ever. Please take a few minutes to contact your representative and let him or her know that you support fair pay for air play.

You can make a big difference in just 5 minutes. That's all it will take to learn the issues and send a letter to your elected officials. The actions of our government have an enormous impact so please educate yourself and take action.
Please take the following actions:

1. Send a Letter to your elected officials and tell them to pass important legislation that we are following for you.
2. Join our Action Network and we'll send you important updates regarding our issues and how you can speak out on important issues.

Thanks.

Great Interview on Getting Music into Film and TV

2009-03-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

Following is an informative interview on getting music into film and television. I forget the source website. Please forgive...

Playback

Songs Into Film & Television

Want To Get Songs Into Film & Television? Here are helpful tips from a
group of music supervisors

Independent songwriters can generate a significant stream of income
from a song used in a film or television project if they understand
how the business works and who to deal with. While there are several
avenues one could choose to help guide a song's path into a visual
medium (i.e. knowing the director, producer, music editor, etc.), one
major source for getting songs placed in film or television is through
a music supervisor. Here, ASCAP's Mike Todd shares some frequently
asked questions after conversations with a group of film and
television music supervisors who gave their advice about song
placement.

ASCAP's Mike Todd assembled a "Film & TV Music" panel of music
supervisors and consultants for the DIY Convention last February. The
panel shared insights on the basics of licensing songs in film and
television followed by a question & answer session. Pictured (l-r) are
Joel C. High (Head of Music for Lions Gate Films & TV), music
supervisors Thomas Golubic, PJ Bloom and Michele Wernick, creative
consultant Bambi Moé (consultant to recording artists for Unencumbered
Productions), Mike Todd, and music supervisor Julianne Jordan.

What is a "music supervisor?"

A music supervisor oversees all aspects of music in a particular
production and plays a key role in the development of the entire
musical landscape. This may include facilitating a show's creative
needs with artists, songs and score, handling all licensing and
contractual elements, dealing with the technical aspects of on-camera
and studio production work, soundtrack solicitation and more. We are
the liaisons between the music and production worlds.

How does one license a song for use in a film or a television program?

Once the creative decisions have been made with regards to a song, we
locate and contact the master and copyright owners (usually, record
labels own the master and a publishing company owns the copyright)
and, based on a particular production's music budget and the necessary
licensing rights needed, we proceed with the negotiation process.

Can I license a song that has never been published?

Yes. A song can be licensed if it has not been previously published or
registered with a performing rights society. In this case, the music
supervisor would deal with the songwriter directly. However, it
behooves a songwriter to publish their material so that future
performance income can be generated and potential theft prevented.
Moreover, if you get a song licensed in a television program or any
kind of feature film, you are entitled to get a copy of the "Cue
Sheet" from the production company who is usually the one responsible
for submitting this form to the Performing Rights Organization
("PRO"). A cue sheet contains information on each piece of music used,
how it was used (i.e. theme, background, feature performance), how
long it was used (down to the second), and the list of songwriter(s)
and publisher(s) along with their PRO. For a sample of a cue sheet
visit ASCAP's website here. You should always keep a file of these
"Cue Sheets" if any piece of your music is used in television or film.
Remember, many times production offices disappear after a film has
"wrapped" (or ended) and it then becomes virtually impossible to get a
copy of the cue sheet at that point. This is important because if you
ever need to show proof to your "PRO" after your program or movie has
aired, you'll have a file on it as proof.

It is also very important to know and understand how money can be
generated from licensing songs. Three separate streams of income could
come from the following:

1) A Synchronization License fee (also known as a "Sync" License fee)
on the "front-end" which is a fee for the actual use of a composition
in a film or TV program.

2) A Master Use License fee on the "front-end" as well which is a fee
for the use of the actual Master recording.

Both a Sync and Master Use agreement can be lumped into one license if
the Master and Copyright owner are the same person or entity. This is
often preferred by Music Supervisors due to the ease of licensing.
Generally speaking however, there will be at least two different
Licenses issued by two or more parties.

3) A Public Performance royalty on the "back-end" which is a royalty
for the "public performance" or "broadcast" of a song that is aired
over a television station (including cable and local) as well as
foreign theaters. Performance royalties are not collected for the use
of music on films in movie theaters within the United States because
of a 1948 court decision when most of the major film studios also
owned the movie theaters. Even though this is not the case today, this
non-licensing status has never been reversed.

Here a few resources for a complete list of Music Supervisors
• The Music Business Registry: Film & Television Music Guide
7510 Sunset Blvd., #1041 Los Angeles, CA 90046-3418 Office: (800)
377-7411 or (818) 769-2722, Fax: (800) 228-9411 or (740) 587-3916,
E-mail: info@musicregistry.com Website: www.musicregistry.com

• Hollywood Reporter: Blu-Book Office: (323) 525-2150 For a list of
outlets, call SCB Distributors at (310) 532-9400. Website:
www.hollywoodreporter.com/blubook

• Also, look for the Hollywood Reporter: Film & TV Music Special Issue
which is released four times a year (January, April, August and
November). For details visit: www.hollywoodreporter.com. For
information contact: jpulver@hollywoodreporter.com

• For more detailed information on this topic and an excellent
resource guide, purchase the book titled, Music, Money and Success:
The Insider's Guide to Making Money in the Music Industry by Jeffrey
Brabec and Todd Brabec. To Order Call: (800) 431-7187, Fax: (800)
345-6842. E-mail: info@musicsales.com. $24.95 in USA. Schirmer Trade
Books, Order No. SCH10104. UPC:7.52187.42837.4. ASCAP members receive
a 20% discount.

• For a complimentary condensed version in a booklet called "Music,
Money, Success and the Movies: The Basics of Music in Film Deals" from
the book, contact ASCAP at (323) 883-1000.

• ASCAP Film & TV Music Dept.: Los Angeles (323) 883-1000 or New York
(212) 621-6227
How do I find or contact a music supervisor and what are the chances
that they will really listen to my music?

While there is no "directory" that specifies what supervisor may be
working on a particular project, the information is out there if you
take the time to look. There is resource material available that lists
Music Supervisors and their contact information, but it generally
won't list projects (see the end of this article). Also, keep in mind
that the question, "So what are you working on?" is incredibly
annoying. The reality is that you, the licensor, aren't really
interested in what we're working on but rather how can you get
involved. Remember, you are just one person, but we get bombarded by
people all day long. Accordingly, you want to make the conversations
quick and painless for us. Try something to the effect of "Is there
anything you're looking for or need?" or "Can I help you with music in
any way?" Also, we constantly listen to music but it must be done at
our pace. We know you're anxious to hear back and do business, but if
you haven't gotten a call it means that we haven't found anything of
use yet. You wouldn't want someone standing over your shoulder bugging
you to finish writing a song, right? You can always check back. Two
months is appropriate versus a few days down the road. In addition,
only send what we request. Do not "throw in a few extra things just in
case." It only confuses the entire process and takes up limited office
space.

How would a music supervisor want a CD presented to them for each project?

Make all the contact information (artists and songs) clear, simple and
highly visible on the CD as well as the jewel case with the important
information on the spine. Some even like to include the name of the
artist on the spine as well. We need the facts – artist and record
company (or if self-released), writer(s) and publisher(s), PRO
(performing rights organization) affiliation and contact info.
Ideally, it is also helpful to include the genre (Latin, Alternative
Rock, etc.) and tempo (Mid-tempo, Ballad, etc.) of each track along
with what project the song is being pitched for. It is generally not
necessary to send bios or glossies. We can always get that from you
later. If you don't have neat handwriting though, you should print the
information from a computer. Please note: Music supervisors are not
record companies! We are not concerned with how cool you are or how
artsy your album looks. The creativity will shine through in the
music, but if we can't locate you or find your album in the sea of
material we constantly get – we can't license your music.

What should I know about the film or television project before
submitting any of my songs?

First, you should know what type of music the music supervisor is
looking for. Investigate the nature of the production you are
submitting for and use deductive reasoning. Second, make sure that ALL
the legalities of your music are in order so that when we contact you
to license your material it is quick and easy. This is a business and
relationships are crucial. Being a fantastic songwriter or artist is
not enough. And remember, there is never only one song that works for
a particular scene. If it is difficult or becomes too complicated to
do business with you, we will find another song and another person to
license from, period.

What are the rights and terms I can expect to deal with when licensing a song?

While all License Quote Requests look different, they all contain the
same basic information. There will be a "Rights" section that reflects
the licensing needs of a particular Production (like theatrical,
television, home video or trailer use), a "Territory" section that
defines where a Production needs rights for, a "Term" section that
defines the period of time a license is good for (most companies try
to license "in perpetuity") and a section that has a description of
how the song will be used within the body of a show and for how long.

How do I compete with other major publishers and major record labels?

Make the licensing of your material FAST, EASY and INEXPENSIVE. We
will keep coming back. Keep it simple – No extra pictures, folders or
press stuff. BUILD THE RELATIONSHIP. Don't try to bilk a supervisor
for a big score up front. Think long-term. If you end up walking away
with less than you hoped, it is not a reflection on your creativity.
It is merely a byproduct of a supervisor's project budget.

What can I do to make sure my music is available and ready to license
and what would make my package stand out to a music supervisor?

There are many books on the subject of licensing and your PRO rep is
available to help you through the legalities of it all. It's difficult
to say what will make a package stand out as our creative needs are
constantly changing. Some music supervisors might be more visually
oriented and would give more attention to a CD that looks unusual
(even if its just a color xerox), as long as the song titles are easy
to read. The important thing is to keep developing relationships and
don't be too pushy. Something will happen eventually. Be sure to add a
cover letter referencing the conversation and the project you are
submitting for. Also, including a "post-it" of standout tracks may
work as we don't often have time to listen to an entire album. Feel
free to call but don't do it too frequently. Again, once every two
months is appropriate.

Should I have a manager or lawyer or other representative submit my
songs on my behalf?

Frankly, this only works if your manager or lawyer has a relationship
with a music supervisor. If they don't, it's no different than you
calling. However, if you are unable to conduct business on your own in
an appropriate manner (which is okay, many artists can't), find a
representative who can do this on your behalf. But keep in mind that,
in the eyes of most supervisors, the involvement of an attorney tends
to put us off. It smacks of being too complicated and difficult to
license. Any representative should incorporate everything previously
discussed in this article into his/her approach as well.

FINAL NOTE

Music supervisors for television in many cases are more in a position
to place songs than in major films, usually because time is a big
issue. In major films, there are more decision makers that may get
involved with the music decision process. However, for independent
films it may vary. Also, in television, production studio executives
and network executives in their music departments are the ones who
hire music supervisors. Although these executives have final approval
over the music, it is typically left up to the music supervisors to
place and clear the music licenses.

It is important to understand that television music licensing business
is cyclical and for the most part, coincides with pilot season. A
majority of pilot programs are produced in January through April, then
in May the networks makes the announcements of the new programs chosen
for the fall season. Therefore, a large portion of music licensing
takes place in the summer during the preparation for the fall season,
which starts in September. If you really want to contact the right
person for a particular show or movie, the best thing to do is watch
for the credits at the end of that program or movie and start there.

While all of these comments and responses came from music supervisors
(and most of them share similar views), every person is different and
there is no exact formula for getting music or songs into film and
television. That is why it is up to you, the individual, to do your
homework and understand the music business as well as the players
involved.

Contributions to this article were made by PJ Bloom. Additional
comments were also contributed by Thomas Golubic, Julianne Jordan and
Bambi Moé.

PJ Bloom's recent credits include Michael Mann's "Robbery Homicide
Division," "The Shield," Crazy/Beautiful and John Frankenheimer's Path
To War.

Thomas Golubic's credits include: HBO's "Six Feet Under,
Synchronize:the Live Re-scoring/DJ residency at club Dorscia, and
radio host at KCRW FM in Los Angeles.

Julianne Jordan's credits include the upcoming feature film Agent Cody
Banks (2003), The Bourne Identity, Rollerball, Tortilla Soup, Go and
Swingers.

Bambi Moé is a Film/TV/ Commercial music licensing rep for indie
recording artists. Clients include Jonatha Brooke, Nina Storey, Judith
Owen, Cary Pierce and others. Moé is a former VP of Music at Walt
Disney Television Animation and provided music supervision on numerous
features and TV series including A Tigger Movie, PepperAnn and A Goofy
Movie.

More Simple and Elegant Fashion Logos.

2009-03-14T23:55:00.001-07:00

More Simple and Elegant Fashion Logos

2009-03-14T23:55:00.000-07:00

Simple and Elegant Fashion Logos.

2009-03-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

New Composer Reel Logo.

2009-03-14T23:37:00.000-07:00

Branding is work.

Postcard Idea

2009-03-11T02:28:00.000-07:00

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Fairly Godparents' Guy Moon

2009-03-04T02:32:00.001-08:00

I found this item on Fred Siebert's blog:

Meet The Composer: Guy Moon

I’ve been a huge fan of the cartoon music ever since I was a kid and realized there was a difference between Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera. I had an essay written once about the greatness of HB’s Hoyt Curtin (there was already plenty on Carl Stalling), and when I started making cartoons I vowed to pay special attention to the scoring, since I felt it was an essential ‘character’ in a film. So, every once in a while I’d like to pay homage to the great contemporary composers who work on Frederator cartoons.

Guy Moon has produced more scores for us than any other composer; we met through Bodie Chandler, Hanna-Barbera’s music director, a great champion of new artists. Starting with The Addams Family, Guy went on to really prove his chops on the deceptively challenging What A Cartoon! shorts, which led to Cow & Chicken and Johnny Bravo. When we moved over to Nickelodeon Guy would hold the record for the most scores for Oh Yeah! Cartoons, and those in turn led to the lead chair on The Fairly Oddparents and ChalkZone, in addition to one of our movies, The Electric Piper. And Guy’s been no slouch working on other shows and films either. Whew!

Growing up in Wisconsin, going to college in Arizona (loving Chick Corea’s Return to Forever), Guy and his family live in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.

Thanks Guy, for all your great work.

Shugeru Umebayashi's Fearless

2009-02-25T23:37:00.000-08:00

Reviewed by: Randall Larson (www.musicfromthemovies.com)

The expressive score to Jet Li’s Fearless is a massive action/adventure score from the composer of House Of Flying Daggers and Kar Wai Wong luxurious drama, 2046, Shigeru Umebayashi. Anchored in a sturdy, heroic orchestral theme (‘Shanghai Fight’), the music to Fearless is as much a Hans Zimmer-styled action score as it is a distinctly Asian-sounding martial-arts score. Comprised of two dozen mostly short cues, the Lakeshore CD proffers more than an hour of music.

Jet Li’s alleged “final martial arts film” is a poignant and provocative tribute to Huo Yuan-jia (aka Fok Yuen-gap), a national hero in China and martial arts master at the beginning of the 20th century, who early on experiences the dark, vengeful side of wushu (martial arts). He eventually rises to embrace its more positive side by taking on some of the world's greatest fighters in a sporting competition that takes place at a time when a distressed China is being encroached upon by foreign powers. Li’s journey through arrogance, tragedy, and redemption mirrors that of the great Japanese Samurai, Musashi Miyamoto, also the subject of many films such as Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, and Fearless is equally provocative and spectacular, beautifully directed with a great visual flair by Ronnie Yu (the magnificent Bride With White Hair 1 & 2).

The film re-teams Jet Li with producer Bill Kong (Hero) and action director and choreographer Yuen Wo Ping (Unleashed). The same story inspired Bruce Lee’s Fists Of Fury (1972), where Lee plays a fictional student who avenges his master’s death (Jet Li played the same role in Fist Of Legend). Yuen Wo-ping directed the 1982 Legend Of A Fighter which was also about Yuen-gap.

Adopting the style popularized by Tan Dun in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Umebayashi scores a number of fight scenes with heavy percussion (‘Master Huo’s Fight,’ ‘Tianjin Fight,’ etc.); although the use of the big drums is perhaps less influenced by Dun than it is by the simple fact that many of the fights are depicted in a large Shanghai arena to the visual accompaniment of tanggu paigu drums. The majority of Umebayashi’s cues support various action or fight scenes, but they are nicely interspersed with a variety of melodic themes and gentler poignant passages that emphasize the spiritual aspects of Yuen-gap’s martial arts.

Tracks like ‘Mother and Daughter’ seethe with passionate emotion and emphasize the beginnings of Huo’s slow-working deliverance; the passion is mirrored in the following cue, ‘Yuan-Jia Falls,’ in which a hushed choir resonates powerfully, augmenting the profundity of Yuan-Jia’s change from vengeful aggression to self-castigation. ‘Man’s Theme,’ proffers a passionate swelling of strings, amazingly expressive and unfortunately all-too short. ‘Moon Explains’ is a poignant and very evocative Chinese melody for violins and flutes; the same rich, string-full melody recurs in ‘Yuan-Jia And Moon,’ supporting the gentle relationship between Yuan-Jia and the blind girl in the mountain village. The hushed choir, violins, in ‘Children Play With Dragonflies’ and the harsh, loudly modulated ‘Village Flute Solo’ that follows are extremely compelling and offer an interesting sonic texture.

‘Final Fist 1’ and ‘2’ resolve the score with an air of melancholia, notably playing the final martial arts tournament not with the powerful drums of early scenes but with the bittersweet spirituality that accentuates Yuan-Jia’s rejuvenated outlook. ‘Fearless Men/Theme of Yuan-Jia And Moon’ return the sensibility to one of heroic nobility, culminating in a poignant solo female voice that is both tragically sad and honorable appropriate. ‘Ending’ recapitulates the main theme over the end titles roll.

Overall, Fearless is a very compelling listen – the overall throb of the massive drums contrasts nicely with the introspective trills of Umebayashi’s flutes and his Asian strings, and the score carries a constantly changing and varied musical texture throughout its length.

Wallywood!

2009-02-25T00:13:00.000-08:00

Wally Wood
"Disneyland Memorial Orgy"
Poster, 1967

One of the original Mad Magazine illustrators, Wally Wood published this poster in The Realist, an underground newsletter, in 1967. An inside source at Disney told Realist editor Paul Krassner that the company chose not to sue to avoid drawing attention to what could ultimately be a losing battle. However, Disney was not so reluctant when an entrepreneur pirated the drawing and sold it as a black light poster. The blatantly commercial nature of the bootleg--as well as its potential to reach an audience far larger than the Realist--prompted Disney to file a lawsuit, which was ultimately settled out of court.

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: MGM's Scott Bradley

2009-02-22T18:31:00.001-08:00

From Wikipedia:

Scott Bradley (November 26, 1891 - April 27, 1977) was an American composer, pianist and conductor.

Bradley is most famous for scoring the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) theatrical cartoons, including those starring Tom and Jerry, Droopy Dog, Barney Bear, and the many one-shot works of Tex Avery.

Bradley was a conservatory-trained composer and pianist. In 1934, Bradley began composing for Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, who were producing cartoon shorts for MGM. After MGM established its own cartoon studio in 1937, Bradley was hired permanently, and he remained with MGM until his retirement in 1957.

His early style incorporated fragments of popular and traditional melodies, as was common practice in scores for animation. However, by the late 1940s, Bradley's compositions and orchestrations had become more original and complex, occasionally utilizing the twelve-tone technique devised by Arnold Schoenberg who, along with Bela Bartok, Igor Stravinsky, and Paul Hindemith, influenced Bradley's approach. "Scott writes the most blank-blank-blank difficult fiddle music in Hollywood," concertmaster Lou Raderman was quoted (complaining good-naturedly) in Sight & Sound magazine. "He is going to break my fingers."

Bradley expressed considerable pride in his "funny music" and believed scoring for animation offered far more possibilities to the serious composer than live-action films.

Bradley retired in 1957 when MGM closed its cartoon department. He passed away on April 27, 1977 in Chatsworth, California.

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: Looney Tunes' Carl Stalling

2009-02-22T14:39:00.000-08:00

From Wikipedia:

Carl W. Stalling (November 10, 1891 – November 29, 1972) was a noted American composer and arranger of music for animated cartoons. He is most closely associated with the Looney Tunes shorts produced by Warner Bros., where he worked, averaging one complete score each week, for twenty-two years.

Stalling was born and grew up in Lexington, Missouri. He started playing piano at six. By the age of 12, he was the principal piano accompanist in his hometown's silent movie house. By the time he was in his early twenties, he was conducting his own orchestra and improvising on the organ at the legendary Isis Movie Theatre in Kansas City. During that time, he met and befriended a young Walt Disney who was producing animated comedy shorts in Kansas City. Stalling composed several early cartoon scores for Walt Disney, including Plane Crazy and Gallopin' Gaucho in 1928, (but not Steamboat Willie, Disney's first released sound short). Early discussions with Disney about whether the animation or the musical score should come first led to Disney creating the "Silly Symphonies" series of cartoons. These cartoons allowed Stalling to create a score which Disney handed to his animators. While there, Stalling pioneered the use of "bar sheets" which allowed the musical rhythms to be sketched out simultaneously with the storyboards for the animation. He left Disney after only two years, at the same time as animator Ub Iwerks. Finding few outlets in New York, Stalling rejoined Iwerks at his own studio in California, while freelancing for Disney and others. In 1936, when Iwerks was hired by Leon Schlesinger, who was under contract to produce animated shorts for Warner Bros., Stalling went with him to become a full-time cartoon music composer, with full access to the expansive Warner Bros. catalog and musicians. He remained with Warner Bros. until his retirement in 1958. His last cartoon was To Itch His Own, a cartoon directed by Chuck Jones which featured the world's strongest flea, the Mighty Angelo.

Stalling was consistently an innovator. He was the first music director to extensively use the metronome to time film scores. He was one of three composers, along with Max Steiner and Scott Bradley, credited with the invention of the click track. His stock-in-trade was the "musical pun", where he used references to popular songs, or even classical pieces, to add a dimension of humor to the action on the screen. Working with legendary directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, and Chuck Jones, he developed the "Looney Tunes" style of very rapid and tightly coordinated musical cues, punctuated with both instrumental and recorded sound effects, and occasionally reaching into full blown musical fantasies such as The Rabbit of Seville and A Corny Concerto.

Stalling was a master at quickly changing musical styles based on the action in the cartoon. His arrangements were very complicated and technically demanding. The music itself served both as a background for the cartoon, and provided musical sound effects. The titles of the music often described the action, sometimes forming jokes for those familiar with the tunes. Some examples are listed below:

* A beautiful woman sashaying into a room would be accompanied by "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby".
* A drunken character would stagger to "How Dry I Am," "Little Brown Jug," or a slow-tempo "Shuffle Off to Buffalo".
* Any scene in which food was prominently featured called for the Joseph Meyer composition, "A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich, And You"
* A football team would scrimmage to "Freddie the Freshman".
* An establishing shot of a home, such as Elmer's cabin in Rabbit Seasoning, would be accompanied by "There's No Place Like Home".
* An establishing shot of a character waking up would be accompanied by Edvard Grieg's "Morning Mood".
* Sudden wealth or good fortune demanded Harry Warren's "We're in the Money" (Warners' Gold Diggers' Song) or Harry M. Woods' "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover".
* The vaguest reference to "going West" or exiting called forth a breakneck rendition of Buddy DeSylva's "California, Here I Come".
* Any scene depicting complex mechanical processes would have Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" playing.

Stalling made extensive use of the many works of Raymond Scott, whose music was licensed by Warner Bros. in the early 1940s.

Jones and the other Looney Tunes directors sometimes complained about Stalling's proclivity for musical quotation and punning. His contemporaries, especially Scott Bradley, were considered more "serious", writing more original melodies and utilizing more high-brow compositional methods. In an interview, Jones complained: "He was a brilliant musician. But the quickest way for him to write a musical score [...] was to simply look up some music that had the proper name. If there was a lady dressed in red, he'd always play "The Lady in Red." If somebody went into a cave, he'd play "Fingal's Cave." If we were doing anything about eating, he'd do 'A Cup of Coffee, A Sandwich, and You.' I had a bee one time, and my God if he didn't go and find a piece of music written in 1906 or something called "I'm a Busy Little Bumble Bee." (Adamson, quoted in Goldmark, p. 22)

Nevertheless, Stalling is remembered today for setting music to cartoons that have remained wildly popular to this day, and are often remembered for their musicality. His scores are heard constantly, both in re-runs of classic cartoons, and recycled in new Looney Tunes compilations and features such as Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

Noted film critic Leonard Maltin, on one of the special segments of the DVD series Looney Tunes Golden Collection, pointed out that listening to the soundtracks of the Warner cartoons was an important part of his musical education; and the use of the full Warner Bros. Orchestra resulted in a richness of sound that is often lacking in more modern cartoons. It is undeniable that Stalling subtly introduced the babyboom generation to classical music and much of the Great American Songbook.

After Carl Stalling retired, he was replaced by Milt Franklyn, who had assisted Stalling as arranger since the late 1930s. Carl Stalling died on November 29, 1972, at the age of 81.

Click the title for an interview with Carl Stalling.

BAA Photos

2009-02-22T14:26:00.001-08:00

COMPOSER SPOTLIGHT: 1960 Flintstones' Will Schaefer

2009-02-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

Date of Birth
23 November 1928, Kenosha, Wisconsin, USA

Date of Death
30 June 2007, Cathedral City, California, USA (cancer)

Birth Name
Willis H. Schaefer

Mini Biography
An Emmy Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee composer, conductor, and arranger, Will Schaefer was educated at Mary D. Bradford High School in Kenosha (Distinguished Alumni Award), De Paul University (BM, Distinguished Alumni Award), and Northwestern University (MA and graduate work extending into study for a Doctor of Music degree). During the Korean War, he was assistant conductor and arranger for the 5th Army Band, Special Services at Fort Sheridan, Illinois (1951-1954) where he wrote music for Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and local stations. Coming to New York after his military service, he wrote for well-known music publishers and composed, conducted and arranged for radio, television, commercials (Pillsbury, Post Cereals, Ford, Chevrolet and over seven hundred others), industrial films and records. While there, he arranged for the Buddy Rich and Count Basie bands and thirteen Broadway musicals ("What Makes Sammy Run?", "Kicks & Company", "The Prince and the Showgirl", "Spotlight" and others). In Los Angeles from 1966 for Walt Disney Studios, he orchestrated about thirty episodes of "Disneyland" (1954) (aka "The Wonderful World of Disney") and sections of many Disney films plus music for the live attractions "Pirates of the Caribbean", "America the Beautiful", "Bear Country", "It's a Small World", and "Innoventions". His over-150 songs and instrumentals include "Midnight Matinee", "Caribeguine, "Autumn Beguine", "Overture - Fanfare and Capriccio", and "Ballada" plus others. He received an Emmy nomination (Best Musical Score) for The Sky Trap (1979) (TV). Received a Pulitzer Prize for his concert piece "The Sound of America" for the U.S. bicentennial celebration in 1976.

UCLA Flyer Versions 1 and 2

2009-02-20T02:10:00.000-08:00

Townhouse Venice

2009-02-15T01:49:00.000-08:00

I co-own a bar/speakeasy with former Temple Bar owners Louis and Netty Ryan. It's called the Townhouse and is located at 52 Winward Avenue, just West of Pacific in Venice. The place dates back to 1915 and belonged at one time to Abbot Kinney. Please stop by. There is no cover but be warned: There may be a line down the street.

Wisdom: 7 Stages

2009-02-12T02:00:00.000-08:00

The image to the right is from Landmark Education's Wisdom Unlimited course. The 7 Stages are a model or guideline for growth and development in ones life. According to the course syllabus, each stage is a possible progression from the prior stage. In other words, we start at one and end at seven. A key aspect of this chart however is that although one may be at a higher stage with regard to a particular endeavor, another may be at one. The course is life-altering. I promise. Try it for $2,500 or thereabouts at www.landmarkeducation.com. Quote of Note: "It can only come from my originating circle or community." The IT being whatever one intends.

Grammy Soundtrack Noms and Winner

2009-02-09T09:38:00.000-08:00

I congratulate all Grammy Award winners with a big shout to the winner and nominees in my career field.

Best Score Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media
(Award to Composer(s) for an original score created specifically for, or as a companion to, a current legitimate motion picture, television show or series or other visual media.)

* The Dark Knight (WINNER)
James Newton Howard & Hans Zimmer, composers
[Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.]

* Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull
John Williams, composer
[Concord Records]

* Iron Man
Ramin Djawadi, composer
[Lionsgate]

* There Will Be Blood
Jonny Greenwood, composer
[Nonesuch Records]

* Wall-E
Thomas Newman, composer
[Walt Disney Records/Pixar]