Gloin the Dark
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The Red Shoes: one of the trio of main characters is a composer (though I’m not sure whether it meets the “modern and contemporary” requirement any more).
Three Colours: Blue: not a favourite of mine (and, from the trilogy, I like Red much more) but, still, it’s a highly regarded film about a composer focused on one of their major works…
Hangover Square with this wonderful concerto macaɓre for piano and orchestra by Bernard Herrmann. But this is rather about a piano Player and not a composer.
But I think that guy composes his own concerto, doesn’t he?
Oh yes, let’s do FILMS at some point! 😉
Haha – that will be my week down the drain.
The last time I made a list of favourite films I went to about a thousand.
As a compulsive list-maker, this is the type of topic that could have me wasting half a day compiling an ever-increasing list of favourites and having to force myself to stop at about 500. With film scores, though, I tend to think of them almost exclusively as components of their respective films rather than separate entities (I own very few OSTs), and so I find myself essentially just going through my favourite films and picking out the ones that have notable scores.
So: Taxi Driver, Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood, The Red Shoes…
Regarding the difference between dissonance and atonality, one of the best examples I know is Webern’s Symphony.
This is purely atonal – it’s an example of 12-tone serialism – but, to me, its sound could hardly be further from dissonance, let alone horror.
I’ve always been obsessed with potato chips, for example, since I was a wee lad. My whole family is…there must surely be some genetic thing going on there…
Maybe, but the commonality could also be explained by the shared environment. For instance, you all (I assume) understood Norwegian without any genetic involvement in the explanation, or any innate predisposition.
I find the idea of an innate attraction to the likes of sweet or salty tastes (whether we’re talking individually, familially or collectively as a species) much easier to buy, though, because these are perceived directly by our taste buds. There could be something vaguely similar in the perception of primitive musical phenomena such as the special intervals (octave, perfect fifth, etc.).
It took me a long time to really get into Ralph Vaughan-Williams…
Funny, that’s almost the polar opposite of my experience. As a teenager I found myself dissatisfied with nearly all music I heard, until a chance encounter with Vaughan Williams led me to an intense preoccupation with his work, and, in turn, to the standard orchestral repertoire in general. I still count his Symphony No. 6 among my three favourite pieces.
I consider APOCALYPTO one of the greatest films of the century
Yes, good example. It’s a film I also think is brilliant from a film-maker of whom I don’t have the highest opinion on the personal level.
I mean, lots of people have different views. It’s ludicrous to expect other people to have the same views and opinions.
True, of course, but a person’s moral and political opinions are legitimately subject to moral judgment themselves, and can inevitably influence one’s view of the person’s character. I’m sure we can all think of opinions which we find reprehensible (according to our own subjective standards), and there’s a spectrum of lesser negative views before we get to that extreme. I think that my responses to an artist’s work are mainly determined by the work in itself, but there is at least a certain extent to which the process is an interaction with the artist (or one’s conception of them), and, as a result, negative views of the artist can have an adverse impact on the experience of their work.
It’s always disappointing if an artist whose work one likes turns out to have unpleasant political or moral views. It would probably colour my attitude towards their work at least a little bit, but I can’t think of any cases in which that sort of issue has led me to abandon an artist’s work altogether.
It’s already been noted in posts above that the effect would depend on both the nature of the offending views and the extent to which they make it into the work. Even if they do taint the work, though, it’s not necessarily a deal-breaker. The prime example for me is On the Waterfront, a film originating from rather loathsome sentiments, but which is nevertheless truly brilliant.
The ten commandments is nice, but they could have cut a few.
Too many don’ts.
Yet nevertheless we all don’t learn to like something either.
Indeed – my argument is against assumptions of inevitability in any of these matters!
Who knows… we sure don’t.
Hence my scepticism about the “innate response” hypothesis.
One of the reasons I find the issue significant is that I sometimes see the opposite position brandished as though it were an established fact by people seeking to denigrate modern atonal or avant garde styles of music. I know from direct (and recent) personal experience that it’s possible to go from perceiving a given work as an incomprehensible jumble of random notes to hearing in it the sort of spine-tingling poignancy one might expect from Beethoven, or Mahler, or John Williams (or whoever the big popular musicians are nowadays – The Beatles, is it?).
I’m pretty certain I wasn’t born with an innate (but somehow latent) liking for the music of Milton Babbitt or Brian Ferneyhough; the responsiveness is something which developed over time through exposure to their works, because musical faculties (like linguistic ones) are flexible and adaptable. And, given that, I would conjecture that it’s quite possible something similar happened in my development of responsiveness to the elements of standard Western tonality, as an infant staring at Top of the Pops…
(Oh, wait – except for “Danny Boy”. I think I might have an innate hatred of that.)
…without an innate pre-disposition to music, mankind probably wouldn’t have bothered with it in the first place.
I’d make a distinction between:
- an innate predisposition to engage cognitively with music, and
- an innate predisposition to like specific musical elements or artefacts.
As I said in my previous post, I think it’s obvious that we have the former, and, because of it, we (or most of us, anyway) come to find pleasure in certain aspects of music. But which things we come to like are contingent upon our personal musical experiences (I’d guess mainly those from when we are very young and our neuroplasticity is high, but also to some degree – perhaps requiring a more deliberate effort – when we’re older), and hence upon the culture that we’ve grown up in.
What I don’t see is any reason to think that we have a “hardwired” predisposition to like a specific musical feature, like a plagal cadence, or the tune to “Danny Boy”.
Some people with practically zero musical education may be seized by the emotional impact of a piece of music, while others may have had even formal musical education but don’t actually appreciate music much at all.
Oh, sure. Like, in school I was taught various things about English vocabulary and grammar, but the essential part of my learning the language was something that took place, informally, long before that; mostly before I’d even started school. The essential part of musical “learning” is similarly distinct from formal education.
I just have to look at myself, I remember my “listening history” quite well…
Same here. Most of my landmark memories seem to involve learning to respond to some type of music in a way that I previously hadn’t.
from my first encounter with music
Oh… well, that’s certainly better than I can do. I’m told that I was a fan of Top of the Pops in my first few months, but I can’t say I have any memory of that.
On the other hand, there is also a visceral component, and immediate “gut reaction” to music, that seems to be more “universal”.
My first impulse was to reply to this with disagreement (or, at least, scepticism) but, on reflection, I may have been over-interpreting what you wrote. I certainly agree that there seems to be a (more or less) universal disposition in humans to try to process musical sounds, and to develop an ability to get gratification from them. And there are surely certain basic qualities to sounds (e.g., being loud or quiet) whose visceral effect is quite universal in nature; a sudden orchestral fortissimo tutti will probably have a startling effect that is independent of any learned musical syntax.
My scepticism kicks in when it comes to more specific components of music (intervals, chords, cadences, melodies, keys/modes…) and higher level structures built out of them. I don’t see any reason to postulate innate (rather than learned) aesthetic responses to these.
That would be good. Because already now the mathematics of music make it easy for AI to “calculate”. There needs to be a little Human mystery and extra within…
That should work out okay, then, because if there truly needs to be human involvement, A.I. won’t be able to replace it; and if A.I. can do it, that will mean that the human component wasn’t essential after all!
Major chords sound pleasing primarily due to physics and acoustics
I’m sceptical about the idea that notions of consonance or “pleasing” harmonies are primarily due to these physical properties, or the simple mathematical ratios which give rise to them, even though these clearly play a key role (no pun intended).
For one thing, there have been (or so I’ve read) examples of musical cultures in which these intervals – even the octave – are not regarded as being as natural, consonant or pleasing as we generally think of them, even though the mathematics and the physics are identical in these cultures.
For another, there are intervals that we hear as consonant but which do not correspond to particularly simple ratios. The most striking example is the (12 tone equally tempered) minor third – indeed, one of the component intervals of the major triad – where the ratio of the two pitches is the fourth root of 2: a number which is not close to any rational number as simple as 6/5 or 7/6, and yet which produces an interval which is more familiar and natural to us (or at least to me!) than the just minor third (ratio 6:5) and certainly than the septimal minor third (7:6).
My default assumption is that our notions of consonance come from certain culturally constructed expectations and habits, and are not intrinsically determined by mathematical or physical properties, but that the mathematical properties of certain intervals can give rise to physiological features which make them more easily recognisable to our perceptual faculties, and that this in turn gives them a much greater chance of becoming important players in any culturally constructed musical language, and hence of sounding “pleasant” to the people steeped in that culture.
Thus the perfect fifth (3:2), though it has a high chance of becoming a harmonious interval, is not guaranteed to, just as the minor third is not prohibited.
Now that’s the kind of dialog you don’t come across every day.
Not even every decade, in my experience!
The Drama (2026). I see this has been mentioned a couple of times earlier in the thread and didn’t go down too well, but I liked it a lot. Not quite as delightfully scathing as Sick of Myself or Dream Scenario, but, on the positive side, I felt that it was more consistently interesting (whereas its predecessors had sort of petered out towards the end).
One of my favorite works is Pierre Boulez “Sur Incices”.
Awesome! Sur incises is my favourite piece ever.
I have a some special connection to Stockhausen’s KONTAKTE
Me too; it’s another top 20 (possibly top 10) piece for me.
I think Lagaan is the only Bollywood film I’ve seen. It wasn’t my cup of tea. I haven’t seen all that many Indian films, for that matter; probably more than half of them would be Satyajit Ray films. The general reception for RRR a couple of years ago was so ecstatic that I have been somewhat interested in seeing it, despite my reservations about its style, but it seems the only easily available version has dialogue dubbed into Hindi…
I stopped holding the Oscars in any esteem in the 90s, starting with the victory of Forrest Gump, but I can’t deny that they’ve been on a roll for the last few years – Oppenheimer, Anora and One Battle after Another are all awesome, and would all be in my top ten (maybe even five) of their respective years. Sinners was pretty good, but I don’t think it would even be in my top thirty of 2025.
What are the others, in your view? I’ve yet to see Mascaro’s THE BLUE TRAIL and Bi Gan’s RESSURECTION.
I haven’t seen The Blue Trail, but Resurrection is extraordinary, especially its opening section (where I thought it was Michael Powell who’d been resurrected).
Two other favourites are Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee and Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, but of which have Bruegel-like visual sensibilities (though they look quite different from one another); I often felt I was going to swoon while watching them, especially in the case of Harvest.
I’m also in awe of the look of One Battle after Another, though it’s not as picturesque as the others.
Yeah, I’m not planning to watch that one.
I think I saw Serra’s name in the opening credits of Magellan, actually.
A funny thing about Diaz is that, while his films are usually described as “slow cinema”, the ones I know are not generally all that slow (by comparison with the likes of Béla Tarr or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, say); it’s more that they’re very long. In this respect, Magellan is maybe the first of his films that I’ve seen that really belongs in the “slow” category – a montage of long-held, immaculately composed and lit shots, with most of the human activity kept at a certain distance both visually, aurally and dramatically.
It’s been a great year for visually gobsmacking films!
Magellan (2025): Shorter and slower-paced than typical Lav Diaz films; it’s one of the most amazing-looking of the year.
31 in the cinema? That’s insane.
Yeah! Back then I didn’t have a DVD player, or a widescreen TV, so each time I saw the film I was thinking that might be my last opportunity ever to see it presented in an acceptable way. It just so happened that I was free most weekdays after noon, and the cinema was just ten minutes down the road, and the film was playing from December through to April or May…
Don’t think I know any of the Fifth Generation filmmakers besides the two obvious ones, but this film looks like a must-see (it has a remarkably high score on Letterboxd too).
I’m not absolutely certain, but there’s a good chance that the film I’ve seen the most times is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which I saw in the cinema 31 times. Odd, given that (for the first several viewings) my feelings about the film were decidedly mixed…