Shameful Tales From the Movie-Scoring Trade

[Karl Henning]

This week on Too Similar to Be Coincidence?—submitted for your approval:

Jas. Horner's "Main Title" from Aliens—specifically, where the violins come in at about the 01:00 mark:

http://www.youtube.com/v/wnPJRJbVEIg

The first movement of the Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphony, "De profundis":

http://www.youtube.com/v/3hfdN_IgWYo

[North Star]

This week on Too Similar to Be Coincidence?—submitted for your approval:

Jas. Horner's "Main Title" from Aliens—specifically, where the violins come in at about the 01:00 mark:

The first movement of the Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphony, "De profundis":

Coincidence my foot.

[Karl Henning]

That was rather my sense.

[some guy]

He probably thought that nobody ever listens to the 14th.

Probably shoulda used something from the 3rd, eh?

[Karl Henning]

He should write his own material!  There!  I said it!!

[Brian]

I'm still angry that The Artist won an Oscar for its music a few years ago, when the best and most effective scene in the film used Bernard Herrmann's score to Vertigo. And not a "quote" or "homage" either - a naked theft of several minutes of music.

[Karl Henning]

Oof!

[jochanaan]

Well, it's just garbled enough not to be copyright infringement. 

[mc ukrneal]

This week on Too Similar to Be Coincidence?—submitted for your approval:

Jas. Horner's "Main Title" from Aliens—specifically, where the violins come in at about the 01:00 mark:

http://www.youtube.com/v/wnPJRJbVEIg

The first movement of the Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphony, "De profundis":

http://www.youtube.com/v/3hfdN_IgWYo

And yet, from Mark Wigglesworth:

The first melody of the De profundis, ironically high in the violin register, makes immediate reference to the notes of the Gregorian Mass for the Dead whose Dies Irae theme has been used by so many composers over the centuries.

Back to you....

[mc ukrneal]

He should write his own material!  There!  I said it!!

I agree. Shostakovich was a stealing bastard! Thought we wouldn't notice if he went back in time far enough...

[amw]

I agree. Shostakovich was a stealing bastard!

The 8th quartet? This Shostakovich fellow, all he did was take a lot of quotations and string them together! 0:)

[mc ukrneal]

The 8th quartet? This Shostakovich fellow, all he did was take a lot of quotations and string them together! 0:)

Ha!

I feel that much music in the canon can be linked in either direct or indirect quotations to music of the past. And I am never clear why we give some composers a pass (admired for their theft, if theft is the word we want to use), but not others (criticized for their theft). Even an iconic piece like Beethoven's 9th has a history that many ignore - from references to Mozart all the way to Beethoven's own Choral Fantasy. 

[SimonNZ]

There's an interview with Horner in the bonus material for Aliens where he says he was brought in at the eleventh hour and had to score the film in an absurdly short amount of time, practically with couriers waiting in the wings to take each new piece to the editors.

Not defending him - just sayin'.

[Mirror Image]

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." - Igor Stravinsky

[North Star]

And at around 2:30: Shostakovich Symphony no. 4 ending...

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." - Igor Stravinsky

Vincenzo Peruggia was a great artist, then.

[Karl Henning]

There's an interview with Horner in the bonus material for Aliens where he says he was brought in at the eleventh hour and had to score the film in an absurdly short amount of time, practically with couriers waiting in the wings to take each new piece to the editors.

Not defending him - just sayin'.

The temptations were strong, to be sure.

Well, it's just garbled enough not to be copyright infringement. 

Yes!

Ha!

I feel that much music in the canon can be linked in either direct or indirect quotations to music of the past. And I am never clear why we give some composers a pass (admired for their theft, if theft is the word we want to use), but not others (criticized for their theft). Even an iconic piece like Beethoven's 9th has a history that many ignore - from references to Mozart all the way to Beethoven's own Choral Fantasy. 

It truly puzzles me that you conflate cultural reference to the Dies irae—which is intentional communication, contextualization—with (say) Horner's work here, which masquerades as "original" to the degree that the average movie-goer is ignorant of the individual work which has been pirated.

But I also know that I have failed before to explain it to your satisfaction.

[mc ukrneal]

The temptations were strong, to be sure.

Yes!

It truly puzzles me that you conflate cultural reference to the Dies irae—which is intentional communication, contextualization—with (say) Horner's work here, which masquerades as "original" to the degree that the average movie-goer is ignorant of the individual work which has been pirated.

But I also know that I have failed before to explain it to your satisfaction.

But it's not just cultural reference. Composers steal (and stole) ideas in color, atmosphere, melody, rhythm, etc. all the time. Shostakovich used a theme from Carmen in his 5th symphony. Does that lessen the accomplishment? Why should a film composer using an effect from Shostakovich (or Strauss or Mozart or someone else) be any different? He starts with something that has been done before (an atmospheric effect) and goes somewhere else with it. it seems to me as if you equate similarity to copying/theft, and I struggle to understand why.

[Karl Henning]

I repeat:  the Dies irae, or Carmen, is part of the known literature.  The allusion is essentially a sharing.

In the case of Horner here, it is laziness and cover-up.

This is just one of the issues.

No composer expects "clarinet solo" to be his intellectual property, any more than Rembrandt might have copyrighted a shade of brown.

Think of a student writing a paper, Neal.  You observe a line to draw, I should think, between citing something which is common knowledge (without reference), citing something which belongs to someone else (with acknowledgement), and plagiarism.  I really don't expect you to condone plagiarism on the grounds that "everyone borrows ideas from everyone else."

[Madiel]

I repeat:  the Dies irae, or Carmen, is part of the known literature.  The allusion is essentially a sharing.

In the case of Horner here, it is laziness and cover-up.

Erm, this basically reads as "I knew about that quotation up-front, so it's okay, but I didn't know about this quotation up-front and spotted it myself without anyone else telling me about it so therefore he must be hiding something". The difference is in your knowledge, not in the composer's.

Why is Carmen part of "known literature", but Shostakovich's 14th symphony not?

Plenty of cases where the dies irae is referred to are not cases where the composer stood up and said "listen, everybody, before we start, I'd like to make sure you all know that the dies irae is in here".

[Monsieur Croche]

He should write his own material!  There!  I said it!!

''He should'a writ his own ssss''

Horner was perhaps more infamous for this sort of thing than is John Williams. They both wrote/write somewhere in between the lines of highly derivative while just not enough so to be liable for copyright infringement.  I suppose one must call that a musical skill of sorts. Whether you find that skill anything to admire is another matter; the skill is clever, at least.

Some guy was only half right when he said he bet Horner thought no one ever listened to that Shostakovich symphony. Trained movie composers with their classical backgrounds do know that people listen to classical, modern and contemporary classical; they also know that ninety-seven percent of the world population do not, and that of the three percent who do, a good chunk of them are less than familiar with modern and contemporary classical.

These sorts of composers bank on the fact the vast majority of the film-going audience will not recognize the copied gestures, the near to similar harmonic style, the bar or two of as near to directly cribbed as it gets when the brass section 'signal/call' from Britten's War Requiem fly by in the score's texture, as they plainly do in Horner's score to Troy.

Horner seems 'guilty' of a fairly high rate of occurrences of wholesale cutting and pasting, whether it is a fragment of a melody, or a few bars [the above cited Britten passage].  John Williams adapts and mimics, a bit less directly, in a game where a bit less direct from the original goes a long way.

It is a tiny handful of the whole movie-consuming public who will, upon first viewing/auditioning, know that virtually every musical segment of the first Star Wars score is an adapted variation intended to near-mimic another original piece.  For those who are familiar with a good deal of the repertoire, that film experience is quite different; those viewers may recognize every bit of rep which are the sources for the film score, at which point this then becomes an aside distraction, and makes for zero chance of the score becoming a symbiotic element of the film or its becoming the beloved audio object as sentimental prompt to the person who loved the flick. With Horner, those wholesale snippets of quoted material 'suddenly' flying by in an otherwise original film score, when they are recognized, are perhaps worse because they are startling intrusions, anomalies, for the viewer.

The more you know a lot of classical rep, and it seems a lot of the rep from the first half of the twentieth century is more used as model in film scores because it is that much less familiar to the general audiences, the less impressive, original, or 'appropriate' the derivative soundtrack often becomes.