Jerry Goldsmith interview excerpt...

Just read this Jerry Goldsmith interview excerpt posted by a member in another soundtrack forum which I found very personal and honest.

I would like to share it with you.


***Q: HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT FILM COMPOSING TODAY?***

JG: I think a great deal of the two Newman brothers, David and Tommy.

Also, I think another composer, Cliff Edelman, is a great talent with amazing potential.

Elliot Goldenthal seems very interesting to me as well.

Then there are the old standbys--John Barry, John Williams and Elmer Bernstein.

The newer ones I get a little scared about.

I'm not exactly thrilled about the direction we're going in.

I think the commercialism and the avariciousness of certain people has crept in and taken over for the art.

I'm frightened with this new assembly line way of doing music.

It's faceless, characterless, skilless, and sounds like the whole orchestra or somebody's playing between C above middle C and C below middle C.

They're all playing at once, and the horns are always playing at the top register.

That's the way it seems to go on for an hour and ninety minutes, and with that music it doesn't seem to make any sense either.

They're just loud movies.

It just gets so discouraging.

People are trying to become very efficient and this type of film music is not cheap.


***Q: HOW HAS FILM SCORING CHANGED OVER THE YEARS?***

JG: It's amazing today how many dual composers there are.

I never saw so many shared credits for composing before.

How many people does it take to screw in a light bulb?

On a couple of occasions, I've had someone to share the burden with me.

It was quite apparent why: the scoring schedule was impossible.

I'm not ever going to do it again--doing it twice was quite enough.

I've had enough flack for that and was never happy with it.

There are certain people now where it's a factory--a couple of factories grinding out music, and I think it's despicable and ruining the art of film scoring.

The music sounds the same.

It's a formula that becomes repetitious and is not ade with a lot of skill.

Here's a craft, an art that's been developed over years and years that's being demeaned for commerical purposes now.

Fortunately, not all filmmakers go for it.

I also think schedules have changed--they are very short now.

Orchestras and budgets are larger for music now.

That's nice, but it can also be abused and taken advantage of.

There are times we want 85 or 90 musicians, but sometimes forty will do.

Sometimes, composers' egos take over and it's a big track to stand up there in front of 90 musicians playing the music.

Serving the film is our first consideration and the responsibility of all film composers.


***Q: HOW ELABORATE ARE YOUR ELECTRONIC MOCK UPS?***

JG: There's a danger with these mock ups.

I think they're wonderful, but there are many orchestral things and musical devices you can't do on a computer ...

It can become very dangerous when you limit your creative ability to what you can accomplish personally on a computer.

I'm concerned with staying away from this.

I'll just write it out on paper like I've been doing for 50 or more years and be done with it.

You have to balance this all out.

That's why I find it's better to demonstrate the thematic ideas and the general overall approach with these mock ups, rather than try to demonstrate every single thing.

When the composing process is very slow and laborious, they're (electronic mock ups) very thorough.

If I've written twenty bars and after this I hit a wall, I'll go back and start putting it into the sequencer.

Sometimes I've written a whole cue out (on paper) and haven't even mocked it up, which is usually by the time I'm half-way through the picture and I don't do anymore because it takes too much time.

If it's a situation where the director can't be at the recording, then I will mock up the whole picture.

Normally I only do about half of the film because it takes too much time.

As I continue to do more down the line they get less elaborate to the point where there are no mock ups at all.

There's a danger with these mock ups.

I think they're wonderful, but there are many orchestral things and musical devices you can't do on a computer.

You can find yourself saying, "I'll do something else because I can make it work on a computer."

That's not right.


serifiot, July 20, 2006; 9:42 PM