For Movie Music, It’s Time to Settle the Score

Leonard Feather’s dismissal of the film soundtrack as a viable source of listening pleasure--”Except for those written for musicals, few soundtrack scores have a logical raison d’etre”--is demonstrative of the cavalier attitude The Times has exhibited toward this exacting and very wonderful genre (“Bits, Pieces of ‘X’ Can Only Deliver Stirring Moments,” Dec. 13).

First, it is a rare film (feature or TV) review that deigns to even name the composer, much less intelligently discuss the music’s merits as an important and often pivotal aspect of the film. Second, I can’t recall the last time a soundtrack recording was reviewed--the exception being those that consist almost entirely of pop vocals, and which, not surprisingly, manage to catch the eyes and the ears of your reviewers. (Such recordings are only by the broadest definition “soundtracks.”)

When was the last time The Times actually reviewed the output of composers like John Barry, Elmer Bernstein, Paul Chihara, Bill Conti, Marvin Hamlisch, James Newton Howard, Maurice Jarre, John Williams, Hans Zimmer or any of the many others working diligently and creatively behind the scenes, too often in journalistic obscurity?

If Brahms and Tchaikovsky were alive today they and their classical colleagues would be writing music to accompany images on the large and small screens. If you listen to how today’s composers integrate the piano into their scores, you can’t help wondering how they would do were they to devote their efforts to piano concertos. (Of course there’s more money in films than in classical music, but that’s another story!)

It is said that soundtracks are often only noticed when they are bad and that the less one sees the better, so perhaps it is a backhanded compliment to the composer when your critics forget that they even exist. But that surely cannot be said of soundtrack recordings, which have flourished with the introduction 10 years ago of the compact disc. Several fine companies have made an art of packaging some of the finer compositions of these talented and hard-working composers.

The results on disc are exciting and not at all fragmented, nor do they seem, as Feather writes, as if they have been “converted from background to foreground music.”

This is beautiful and stirring music, standing on its own quite apart from the screen, and the greatest irritant as well as irony is that it is head and shoulders above much of the material that passes for music and is routinely given great and unjustified prominence on your pages.

RONALD D. HARDCASTLE

Los Angeles