They Shoot, They Score

We don’t go to the movies to listen to the music. And you’ve surely heard the one about the way to judge the worth of a soundtrack score: the less you notice the music the better. Neither old saw is, of course, accurate. They never have been, and especially not now.

Film and music--particularly classical music--have been married ever since the end of the last century, when the Lumiere brothers found they could assuage Parisians’ fear of silence and the dark by inviting a pianist to accompany their short films with comforting classical ditties.

It has been a rocky, often dysfunctional marriage. Any music lover with the temerity to set foot into a mall multiplex will quickly discover the manic sonic barrage that is the latest form of spousal abuse Hollywood is exerting on its classical partner. Still, listen hard enough through the excruciating sound effects of, say, “Batman & Robin,” and you will hear undisguised proto-symphonic Wagner written by an interesting, classically trained composer, Elliot Goldenthal, who divides his time between concert music, experimental theater music and the big screen.

What’s more, the movies have rediscovered real classical music with a spate of successful recent films like the Beethoven biopic “Immortal Beloved,” “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould,” “Touts les Matins du Monde,” “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” “Shine” and “Paradise Road.” And did you happen to notice that the plot of the recent “Fifth Element” revolves around a Space Age diva who still finds some futuristic life left in “Lucia di Lammermoor,” Donizetti’s opera?

Now more are on the way. “The Red Violin,” which traces a Stradivarius through history and around the world and which stars Samuel L. Jackson, has just finished shooting. Faye Dunaway has optioned Terrence McNally’s play “Master Class,” so that she can immortalize her stage portrayal of opera great Maria Callas. Even Madonna is said to be boning up on her music theory to play an inspiring urban music teacher in her next film.

In addition, the movies, which have a long history of enticing classical composers to the silver screen, have taken a liking to some of today’s luminaries. Grammy winner John Corigliano, whose “AIDS” Symphony has become a modern classic, is writing the music for “The Red Violin”; Chinese emigre experimentalist Tan Dun, whose “Symphony 1997” was premiered as part of the Hong Kong hand-over festivities, has completed his first feature score, for “Fallen,” which stars Denzel Washington; and famed Minimalist Philip Glass wrote the music for Martin Scorsese’s new film about the Dalai Lama, “Kun Dun,” to be released in December. Sally Potter’s “The Tango Lesson” will include Yo-Yo Ma on the soundtrack, and Potter has directed a music video of Ma as well, in conjunction with the cellist’s forthcoming recording of tangos by Astor Piazzolla.

Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the new respect that the classical world, in which “movie music” has never exactly been a term of endearment, is beginning to lavish on film composers. The Los Angeles Philharmonic helped pave the way last year with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s critically acclaimed and best-selling recording of Bernard Herrmann’s film music, and it hopes to be a leader in venturesome collaborations with film composers and filmmakers in its new series, “Filmharmonic,” that will begin next spring. Moreover, hardly a week has gone by this summer without John Mauceri and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra presenting some sort of film music in concert at the amphitheater.

And then there’s the classical record business. It is increasingly hitching its future to tie-ins with film projects. Philips Classics, the distinguished Dutch label, is said finally to be able to balance its books because of the soundtrack to “Shine.” BMG’s classical division is also getting rich off its recordings by the real-life “Shine” pianist, David Helfgott. Film soundtracks and compilation discs by Hollywood composers now regularly turn up among nearly all the major labels’ classical releases. And on Tuesday, the quintessentially hip Nonesuch label will inaugurate its film series with four stunning releases of classic movie music.

Hollywood’s new interest in classical music and classical music’s turn toward movie music may appear contradictory, but they have this in common: As we come to the end of the Postmodern era, the breakdown between high and low art is well on its way. With the barriers falling, it’s that much easier to see that the very best film music has always had a strong debt to classical music, and that the sweep and complexity of classical composing has always paid off for the big screen. What’s also clear is something newer to the age: Those works you’re not supposed to notice have begun to turn into a kind of classical music themselves.

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Invented by neo-Romantic European emigres in Hollywood, the movie soundtrack has its roots purely in classical music. For the likes of irresistible Viennese composers Max Steiner (who pioneered dramatic film scoring with “King Kong” and raised it to new heights with “Gone With the Wind”) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (who brought a new lushness to Hollywood with his generously melodic scores to “Anthony Adverse” and “‘The Adventures of Robin Hood”), film music proved the perfect vehicle for composers otherwise out of fashion in the modernist-leaning world of the ‘30s. Here they could gingerly use the dramatic style of Wagner’s operas and Richard Strauss’ symphonic poems to accompany action, to draw character, to evoke a mood.

And throughout movie history, many other classical composers have been drawn to film. Prokofiev wrote great music for Sergei Eisenstein. Virgil Thomson wrote some of his best-known music for the Pare Lorentz New Deal documentaries. Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, William Walton and even left-wing Modernist Hans Werner Henze have been memorably attracted to film.

But by the ‘50s and ‘60s, musical abstraction had fully established itself in concert life just as surely as Abstract Expressionism had pushed out representation in forward-looking painting. Film music and classical music found that they had little in common, although film did discover a new generation of talented and sophisticated American composers--Herrmann, Alex North, David Raksin. Those composers were rarely invited to create outside of Hollywood, just as Hollywood would have nothing to do with the academics and experimentalists.

Once biblical epics, spectacles of ancient Rome and disaster films had run their course in the ‘60s, however, robust, old-fashioned, melodic symphonic music went out of vogue in Hollywood as everywhere else, and movie makers turned increasingly to pop music to provide their soundtracks. It was thanks primarily to classically trained John Williams, first with his score to Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” in 1975 and then, two years later, with George Lucas’ “Star Wars,” that it became clear once more to Hollywood just how effective a symphonic score could be.

“It took a director like Spielberg, who really pays attention to music, working with Williams, to remind us of the power of music in a film,” Goldenthal says of “Jaws.” “It is not special effects or sound effects that makes ‘Jaws’ scary, but Williams’ music, just as it was Herrmann’s music in ‘Psycho’ that created all the terror in the shower scene.”

The unprecedented popularity of Spielberg and Lucas, who both continued to work with Williams (he scored all three “Star Wars” films and all of Spielberg’s hits from “E.T.” and “Schindler’s List” right up to “The Lost World: Jurassic Park”) drives home the point that the most successful films of all time have taken music very seriously and are as identified as much by their theme music as their characters, just like the “Tara Theme” and Scarlett O’Hara.

But as Hollywood began realizing more and more in the ‘80s that a return to dramatic symphonic music could have a wide appeal, classical music began to find out the same thing. Classical composers began taking inspiration again from Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius; they too returned to more traditional melodies and harmonies in a trend that has continued for more than a decade now.

Now we have Williams’ name on a Los Angeles Philharmonic symphony program (his Violin Concerto will be played at the Music Center in the fall) and a growing list of concert hall composers showing up again and again in movie sound studios, and not just for arty projects. Michael Nyman, a serious Minimalist, built his reputation through his scores to Peter Greenaway films (including “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”) and to Jane Campion’s “The Piano.” Corigliano, always an unrepentant romantic, composed the score for Ken Russell’s “Altered States.” More surprising, Glass’ film music has included not just independent films but also the two “Candyman” horror films. As for Tan Dun, who was primarily known only to New York’s avant-garde downtown music scene just a couple of years ago, he says that he too now wants to reach as many people as possible and that he jumped at the opportunity to score a Hollywood feature film.

But also given how strongly the tradition of soundtrack music relies on classical models, it has never been very difficult for Hollywood to incorporate the real article. The classics can work terrifically well to underscore a film (Korngold always said that opera, and in particular “Tosca,” was his inspiration).

Movies discovered this early on with composer and performer biographies and has never forgotten it. It hardly mattered just how clumsy at the keyboard Katharine Hepburn was as Clara Schumann (“Song of Love”), how bizarre rock star Roger Daltrey was as Liszt (“Lisztomania”) or how inappropriately manic Tom Hulce was as Mozart (“Amadeus”) or Gary Oldman as Beethoven (“Immortal Beloved”)--there was always the music to carry the picture.

And the movies reciprocated. It may have been hubris on the part of Walt Disney to have said, as he reportedly did, that “Fantasia” would “make” Beethoven, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The 1940 animated feature, with Mickey Mouse cavorting to classics conducted by Leopold Stokowski, worked so well that it did serve to introduce Beethoven, Bach, Dukas and Stravinsky to millions, as it does today via home video.

So does modern film. Classical pieces have time and again found their way into the public’s affection through movies. “Elvira Madigan” “made” Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21; “Death in Venice” catapulted Mahler’s Fifth Symphony to repertory status; “2001: A Space Odyssey”’ made the opening of Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” nearly as well known as the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth. And now “Shine” has worked film’s magic on the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto.

No one, of course, ever said Hollywood was actually sophisticated in its attention to classical music. The studio moguls of the past were famously doltish when it came to high culture. Andre Previn loves to recount the day, as a young film composer, he was called in by a studio head and told that since his assignment was to score a picture that took place in Paris, he should include lots of French horns. And given the endless struggle the Los Angeles Music Center has had attracting big Hollywood money to support L.A. Opera or to fund Disney Hall, not too much seems to have changed.

That lack of musical sophistication, however, has now reached a new low thanks to new technology. The THX’d sound, Dolby-ized and digitized to a glassy sheen then played back at deafening volumes, is hardly conducive to a symphonic score. Nor is anything about the present-day movie theater experience, one that includes the surround sound of crunching popcorn, slurping sodas and loud conversation.

Even Goldenthal admits to not having the stomach to subject himself to hearing his score for “Batman & Robin” in a theater, and he complains of filmmakers who use sound effects as “sucker traps,” pointing again to “Jaws” as a classic example of how the power of music, all by itself, will create an unforgettable sense of terror.

But Goldenthal credits technology--both to make the music and to time and match it to the film’s action--with also helping composers produce modern film scores more effectively.

“The use of the synthesizer and the computer has brought me closer to where I think of film as being equivalent to a live theater experience, almost a virtual reality,” he says.

“Through the computer and through video, I can find the precise second an actor creates an effect, the precise center of an actor’s performance. That was simply not possible with the bulky older equipment, when a composer had to run back and forth between moviola and the piano. Thanks to the computer’s exactitude, I actually feel more connected to the performances.”

Goldenthal also points out that ultimately it requires a director willing to give the composer some elbow room and to have a feel for music in order for a symphonic score to succeed, and these directors are not common. Neil Jordan, he says, is one, and Goldenthal’s intricate and moving score to Jordan’s “Michael Collins” was nominated for an Academy Award this year. Martin Scorsese is another, and Robert Hurwitz, the head of Nonesuch, which will be releasing Glass’ score to “Kun Dun,” says that Scorsese is actually cutting sections of the film to the music, not the usual other way around.

But such musical sensitivity does require bucking a business trend that may ultimately be unbuckable, or at least will increasingly require directors with the clout and musical devotion of a Scorsese or a Spielberg. It has become typical in the modern film business for studios to make tie-in deals with record labels for pop numbers by commercially attractive artists. The songs may be entirely irrelevant to the film, but it is a smart marketing ploy. If the song does well, it will draw audiences into the theater. If the movie does well, it will sell CDs.

Business just as surely drives the trend for classical musicians to play and make film music. What Disney thought he did for Beethoven was only continued by “Immortal Beloved”: That soundtrack, essentially Beethoven’s Greatest Hits, has sold upward of 900,000 copies. The “Shine” soundtrack and the Helfgott recordings have each sold even more.

Peter Gelb, the head of Sony Classical and one of the best-known figures in the management of classical music, is unapologetically aggressive in getting his artists into the movies and the movies onto his discs.

“The most important thing for new classical music is to get exposed, to reach its audience,” he says. “And there is nothing better than a film to achieve that.”

“The Red Violin” is the perfect example.

Gelb says that it was he who suggested John Corigliano to the filmmaker, Francois Gerard, the director of “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould,” for “The Red Violin.” That soundtrack, which will be recorded in London in the fall, will be a purely classical affair, with Joshua Bell as soloist and no less than Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.

But Gelb explains that there will be an even greater connection between film and concert music, since Corigliano is first writing a violin concerto that will serve as the basis for the film score. This is not without precedent. Miklos Rozsa turned the violin concerto he had written for Jascha Heifetz into the score for the fanciful 1970 Billy Wilder comedy “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.”

What is new is the making of film music into a genre of classical music. The intellectual embrace of popular culture is now such that you are more likely to find a college class deconstructing Disney than Debussy. Consequently some of the soundtracks that serious students of music once so scorned have come to appear downright prophetic.

The music that Bernard Herrmann wrote for “Citizen Kane” or “Psycho,” for instance, has finally been properly analyzed and understood for its ability to use original and sophisticated musical devices to intensify, even generate, drama. And check out the opening of “North by Northwest” if you haven’t seen or heard it lately. It almost could have been written last year by Philip Glass.

Gelb feels the same about the likes of James Horner, whose score to the upcoming “Titanic” will be released on the Sony Classical label this fall. And more and more Hollywood composers today, such as Jerry Goldsmith (who will conduct the Pasadena Pops Orchestra next weekend and who, like Williams, has been programmed at the Los Angeles Philharmonic by Salonen) are returning to their classical pasts.

But Tuesday’s Nonesuch release may well prove the ultimate distinction for the genre. The label has come to represent the most original thinking in the music business--Nonesuch made classical superstars of Dawn Upshaw and the Kronos Quartet; it is CD home to John Adams, Steve Reich and Philip Glass; it turned Gorecki’s Third Symphony into an international hit. And now it has given its full treatment (down to drop-dead gorgeous packaging) to these new discs, which include the music Leonard Rosenman wrote for “East of Eden” (with John Adams conducting), Alex North for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Toru Takemitsu for “Woman in the Dunes” and Georges Delerue for “Jules and Jim.”

Explaining why Nonesuch has entered into the film trend, Hurwitz says it is simply because he loves these movies, and that when the music and the film are both on a high level the effect can be transforming.

“It is similar to the impression that I sometimes have after hearing music that I know from a ballet by Balanchine,” he explains. “The music evokes the dance, and in these best film scores, the music evokes the scenes that they came from. You can easily visualize the scene in ‘Jules and Jim’ where they are riding the bicycles from Delerue’s score, and it is an extraordinary listening experience when that happens.”

But perhaps the ultimate connection between classical music and film is not the way the best music represents, complements and enhances film, nor that it is, apart from film, fine music in its own right, but the way film has insinuated itself into the very thinking of classical composers all throughout the century.

As early as the ‘20s and ‘30s, even composers who didn’t write for film were imagining film in their music. Schoenberg wrote a scene to accompany an imagined film. Berg utilized film, and the structure of film, in his opera “Lulu.” Martinu’s opera “The Three Wishes” takes place in a film studio and the plot revolves around the making of a movie. The unjustly neglected French Impressionist Charles Koechlin fawned over film actresses and in 1933 wrote a “7 Stars Symphony” as a love song to his favorites.

The trend continues in the most sophisticated and abstract art music today. In 1991, at Wien Modern, the annual modern music festival in Vienna, Claudio Abbado organized a concert of four works by Europe’s most uncompromising Modernists--Luigi Nono, Gyorgy Kurtag, Beat Furrer and Wolfgang Rihm--of music written in tribute to Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.

Even more extreme is the notion that an entire soundtrack--dialogue, music, sound effects--might be considered a musical event, apart from the film. And the venturesome German ECM label, best known for its recordings of Keith Jarrett and Arvo Part, has just made this experiment with Jean-Luc Godard’s 1990 film “Nouvelle Vague.” The French art film uses a wide variety of classical and pop music, from Hindemith to Patti Smith, and the effect is that of brilliant collage.

On the soundtrack disc, sound effects intrude and modulate into music and voices, like electronic music. Music becomes part of real life, and the music invades the dialogue. “That cornball music gets on my nerves. What shall do?” a woman asks in French. “Admire the architecture,” her lover replies. The booklet notes are the “visualization” of the film by a blind writer. Everything we have ever thought about what we see in film and what we hear in film is turned fascinatingly upside down.

One final way film music has infiltrated classical music comes courtesy of pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, best known for his elegant, unfussy Ravel and his translucent Rachmaninoff and Brahms. Thibaudet is young, French and stylish, and he has lately become enamored of American jazz pianist Bill Evans, who died in 1980, to the point of recording transcriptions of Evans’ improvisations (“Conversations With Bill Evans” on London).

One of Evans’ standards happened to be the love theme from “Spartacus,” written by Alex North (and included in its original form on one of the new Nonesuch discs). Thibaudet plays it with a firm, classical technique and employs a touch and tone color that are less the realm of jazz than of German romanticism, that very same romanticism brought by the emigre composers to Hollywood and by now so Americanized.

The circle is complete.