Keeping Score Behind Scenes : Film: Composers walk a fine line in deciding when the music should enhance or stand out on its own.

“There’s an old truism (that says) a good score is something you don’t really notice,” said film music composer Hans Zimmer, “There’s nothing worse than going to see a film and suddenly the score belts you over the head and rips you out of whatever the emotion of the film is, and you can’t watch it anymore because you’re listening to the music.”

Zimmer’s fellow composer Michael Kamen agreed:”By definition, scores are supposed to blend in with the scenery.”

In that way, composing for films fits in with the other “invisible” branches on the Oscar tree--those quiet, fellow-suffering categories of editing, cinematography, special effects and art direction, all disciplines of which a captivated audience is expected to remain blissfully unaware.

One big difference, though: You can’t buy a copy of the editing and take it home.

You can quite often purchase a sound-track album of a musical score, though. And audiences and Oscar voters alike may make judgments of a score’s quality based more on how it stands alone than on how it actually works to contextually enhance the movie, a far more subtle achievement.

“What music is supposed to do in a film is fairly mysterious for most people,” said veteran Elmer Bernstein. “And it’s really no less mysterious to a lot of people in the academy. The general membership of the academy tends to go for something they just recognize and like; sometimes they like it because it has a nice tune or something. What they’re supposed to be looking for is that score which most brilliantly served the purposes of the movie it was in.”

Among voting composers surveyed, John Williams’ work on “Fourth of July” seems most strongly felt to have served that purpose among this year’s score nominees, followed closely by James Horner’s music for “Field of Dreams.”

Noted Danny Elfman, taking a cynical view of the voting: “Scores that are strong on the sentimental side are heavy, heavy favorites. Things that tend to be lighter or more frolicky but still very imaginative quite often are overlooked. Weightiness goes a long way, and an association with a very important movie goes a long way.”

Hence, Elfman’s prediction of a win for “Fourth of July,” which--as a “very effective, very simple, very memorable” score--is also, coincidentally, his own personal pick as the best of the nominees.

Bernstein, meanwhile, saves his greatest enthusiasm for Horner’s non-orchestral “Field of Dreams” nomination: “A lot of us who don’t use electronic music and are more conservative in that way have been either not wanting to admit it exists or sort of turning a blind eye to its possibilities. But when you hear the score to a thing like ‘Field,’ you have to say wow --there’s an extraordinary use of electronic instruments in what I thought was an amazing, very different sort of score.”

There are extenuating circumstances to explain the lesser enthusiasm for the other three nominees: Only that music in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” which was not reprised from the two previous Indie films is eligible, according to academy rules. Also, much of what people fondly remember most about “The Little Mermaid” or “The Fabulous Baker Boys” are actually songs , which are technically not a part of the score.

“I guarantee you that nine out of 10 people you ask who vote on the music will talk about these wonderful songs ,” says Elfman. “Technically, they’re supposed to distinguish between score and songs, but most people really don’t. I loved the songs in ‘Little Mermaid,’ but I couldn’t even remember the score when I left the movie, and I’m usually pretty receptive to that stuff.”

For many of the voting composers, it isn’t catchiness that counts on their ballots.

“What I look for in a score is simply something that helps me enjoy the picture more than I would’ve without it,” noted Bernstein, who won an Oscar for “Thoroughly Modern Millie.” Bernstein’s chief criterion is that a score make its film “more emotionally accessible.”

Said Kamen (“Lethal Weapon,” “Brazil”), “If there’s some bits of tune that stick in people’s minds, that’s great. Everybody walked out humming ‘Gone with the Wind.’ I try to do that as a composer too. I like it when melodies are recognizable, but that isn’t always the job. Sometimes the job is to make something scary or tense or uncomfortable, or to set a mood for a whole picture so you walk out profoundly influenced by the score but not necessarily humming it.”

And so, the great paradox of film-score appreciation: To enjoy or not to enjoy? To be consciously aware of the musical component, or let it work its subliminal wiles and get lost in the film as a whole? What of that maxim that if it’s a good score, you won’t notice it?

“I would have said OK to that 20 years ago,” answered Bernstein. “But music is much, much more a part of everybody’s life today, and therefore I think it has an effect on people’s awareness of film. You’re dealing with much more sophisticated audiences today, and it’s perfectly proper that a sophisticated audience should notice the acting, the cinematography, the costumes, the music, everything .”

Elfman, a rock singer/songwriter with Oingo Boingo and the scorer of “Beetlejuice” and the upcoming “Dick Tracy,” takes a more qualified view of how far a score should stand out.

“That depends on the movie,” Elfman said. “If it’s a movie about characters and emotions, then the score should maybe play a more subliminal role. If it’s a very visual movie, like Spielberg or Tim Burton or many people who work in the fantasy vein do, then I think it’s much more within the tradition for the music to stand up on its own and make a bold statement.

“In the movies I grew up on, the wonderful science-fictions that Bernard Herrmann scored, for me the music always stood out and stood up on its own, and I loved that. But the movies were able to withstand that. It wasn’t a film about two guys sitting in a bar and having a dialogue about their lives. It completely depends on the movie how much a score should stand out or not. Obviously, I went to great lengths to make the score to ‘Batman’ make a statement on its own, but in a movie like ‘Midnight Run,’ I was trying to stay more out of the way.”

The most obvious way to stay out of the way is to know when not to score a scene at all, points out Zimmer (“Rain Man,” “Driving Miss Daisy”). “The European tradition of scoring is quite different from the American,” he said. “We have far less music in a European film usually. In a way that’s part of the scoring process: Where are we not going to have music? Why do you have music when a guy walks down the street? If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense, so what are you trying to say with that? Sometimes it’s that you don’t score something; you leave it empty, and it has an amazing effect as well.”

Zimmer counts himself as a fan of Williams’ judicious “Fourth of July” choices: “This may just be that European thing, but the hospital scene wasn’t scored at all. I thought that was quite impressive, that they didn’t plaster the film wall to wall with music, which seems to happen all the time these days. So what he did write actually meant something.”

Film composers have their pet peeves and biases, like everyone else, and certain types of films rarely show up in their category.

“I think comic is a recipe for disaster if you want to get yourself nominated,” said Zimmer. “From what I can tell, the academy thinks comedy is cheap and not art, without realizing that if you really want to do something comic, it’s much harder than writing another big, sentimental number. It’s much harder to make people laugh in a non-contrived, non-manipulative way than it is to make them cry. We all know how to make ‘em cry.”

Most folks, of course, still aren’t consciously hit by film music at all. Kamen foresees a time not far off when sound-track albums are more actively promoted and “there you’ll find more opportunity to have people analyze the actual components of a score. Because really, when the whole film’s going on, it’s wonderful to not have to pay attention to what the strings are doing.”

Zimmer, for one, doesn’t mind the invisibility of his craft.

“In a way that’s the fun of it, playing and sneaking around in a movie, hiding behind the shots and hiding behind the sound effects--and then occasionally doing something which people do notice.”