[Schilkeman]

Pop art trains us to value novelty over craft. I don’t know what makes good film music. There’s plenty of it I find perfectly serviceable in the film that I wouldn’t cross the street for if they were giving away copies for free. I like western art music, and I like composers who write closer to that style. Does that mean Zimmer is a bad film composer? I have serious technical issues with his music. It’s much closer to pop music than art, but it works in the film.

Now treating the music as separate from the film, I am much more critical, and find deficiencies in almost all composers not named Williams or Korngold. As I concluded elsewhere, there’s a difference between film-composers and composers-who-write-for-film, and that one stands on its own much better than the other.