[Nick Zwar]

The contention I have, and I strived to make that clear, is not that most film music is “unimportant” as pure music, that it is mostly secondary to the images or story, that a lot of it is clichéd (as in overused tropes) and in many ways “banal”. That is the status quo “as is”, and I don’t disagree with that.

The contention I have is that you cannot “reverse engineer” the argument. While you can say that a lot of film music is clichéd and banal, you cannot say that that being clichéd and banal is a (necessary, implied, or needed) pre-requisite or characteristic of film music.

Likewise while you can say that film music is often composed to sync to specific scenes or images — which obviously is true — you cannot derive particular musical characteristics from that, or distinguish it musically from works that do not have to sync to specific images or scenes. Hence my example with the animated sequence up there. It’s impossible to say if the image syncs to the music or the music syncs to the image, unless you have contextual knowledge. (Obviously, the music was composed long before the movie.)

There is a wonderful Jerry Goldsmith score, one of my favorites, A PATCH OF BLUE. I picked up the LP sometime in the 1980s and it became quickly one of my favorite film scores ever. There is a cue in there, “Bead Party”, which I always particularly loved. It was jazzy, upbeat, and very syncopated. Now it’s a great piece of music as music, it’s excellent. When I eventually saw the movie, I noted that every syncopated click with the castanetes/wood blocks literally synced with an image of a beat on a string. Now this is hyper-synchronized music with sometimes three or more “sync points” within a second, I have no idea whether the music was composed to accentuate every beat, or the film was edited to take advantage of every syncopated “click”, but that’s the thing: without contextual information it is impossible to know, because the cue is absolutely musical (and terrifically so, the music just “flows”), yet also perfectly synced to the image. You can’t “reverse engineer” how it was done, because whether a film is synced to the music or the music is synced to the film is not a characteristic that can be readily asserted without contextual knowledge.

As far as exceptions proofing the rule, I would have to say that first of all, since I consider the vast majority of film music comparatively bland and uninteresting, the very scores I focus on tend to be “exceptional”. By their nature.

Secondly, the exceptions are part of my argument. I readily (and literally) conceded that some of the “idiosyncrasies” Thor mentioned can be perceived as tendencies, but, and that is what I said: “a tendency is basically just a statistical count of frequency and not suitable to actually distinguish one piece of music from another”. Let’s not forget the exceptions abound, there are plenty of such “exceptions” in my collection. So many in fact that it is easy to demonstrate the impossibility of “reverse engineering” a “framework” from statistical tendencies to examine individual film scores, because that framework would be distortive and by its nature would probably not do justice to the music. That’s my actual point.