Intrada Soundtrack Forum

I'm going to toss a strange little tangent out there that is related to this issue.

I just recently completed a short film; I directed a script that was co-written with me by my friend who is a music journalist. The protagonist of the film is managing his friends' band, so there would be a lot of rock music featured in the film. With music as such a central focus dramatically, the score would by default come across as being relatively prominent as well, so I decided that I wanted the score to sound very discrete from the songs. I settled with my composer on a jazz idiom, which ended up working out quite well to signify that the score was coming from a very different place than the songs were.*

My producer and I were able to license four songs from local bands for inclusion in the film, and he reached out to a few other musicians to have original songs written for two scenes. With six songs (which will actually now become seven; a scene had an actor improvising something on his guitar which he is now expanding upon for the album), it would have been a wasted opportunity not to put together a soundtrack album for promotional purposes at least, and indeed that was a consideration when licensing the music.

So now we come to the score. This is a short film, so if the score as it would appear in the film were to be laid out C&C, there would only be about eight minutes of music or so. I had to think not only about how best to present the score, but as an album producer I had think about the impression the score would make when set against the variety of the seven other songs that would follow it on the album. I therefore asked my composer to record additional material, expansions on music featured in the film, for the album so that I could assemble the score into a jazz suite.

The resulting sequence runs about twenty minutes. What appears on the album master is technically C&C but with additional material interpolated along the way to establish themes and develop them in a means more appropriate to an album than a film score. The centerpiece of the jazz suite is a five-and-a-half minute jam based upon the cue for the opening sequence. Certain cues were (designed to be easily) edited for the film, but the full length versions play out here. The entire score plays in order, but it is embellished.

Now, this is tangential for several reasons. The first is the most obvious: I'm not restoring a score that somebody has memorized from seeing the film. The second is because the album itself (a jazz suite followed by seven rock songs) is of a type that isn't necessarily what many people here would be interested in. The third is because it is the opposite situation to what we usually deal with; most of the time a film score is way too long and requires cutting down.

Nevertheless, what we were thinking about when putting the album together was, "how might Henry Mancini or Lalo Schifrin have done this?" It's a specific skill to take something written for another medium and make a purely musical program out of it. There are so many possibilities, especially if you're able to make allowances for the album at the recording stage of the score.

The relationship of a film to its score is what brings many people to the score, which is why when a presentation isn't C&C that there's always somebody commenting that "The new version of ____________ is great, but they left off_____________" You can fill in the blanks yourself (for me, it might include Star Trek: The Motion Picture/the transporter accident, The Last Starfighter/Alex playing the video game, E.T./the frog cue)… and a C&C score can often reveal details and an overall structure a truncated album version can't.

But on the other hand, the music is music too, and there are times when choices made by a composer or album producer for purely musical purposes yield great material. Ultimately, I've been most satisfied with the solution of presenting both. The original score of E.T. has many arresting moments in it, but it doesn't have the sustained warmth of "The E.T. and Me." The elements are there in the score, but the album track has a completeness to it that was impossible when conforming to the needs of the film. I like how Star Trek V plays out in full score format, but prefer how the individual tracks themselves were edited for the album. I like the restlessness of Outland and like to hear both the harsher film version and the album tracks with the interpolations of O'Neill's theme.

But the thing of it is that part of what attracts me to film music is how functional it can be at some points. Let's face it, if we wanted to listen to something easier to listen to, we'd listen to something easier to listen to. The mounting tension in this cue may not make great listening, but it sure is going on my Jenga playlist. Those short interstitial cues nobody else thinks are worth a damn can be a total gem to that guy over in Minnesota who caught the movie on late night television and just wanted the score.


* - I was actually blown away by the performances and the recording. For jazz more than most idioms, you really need an instrument in the room with a musician's personality behind it, and I'm glad that both myself and my composer stuck to our guns to record the score acoustically because our quartet was fantastic.

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Randy Wilson
Dallas, TX

I can't think of a single Thomas Newman score that isn't missing half the score in the film. What "every track" being put "oout"?

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All those great LP's of the 60's & 70's (all kinds of music), in fact I never think of favorite songs or tracks, always favorite albums. That's probably a thing of the past now with people buying downloads by the track. Oh well, I continue to enjoy mine.

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Randy Wilson
Dallas, TX

I honestly appreciate how much great feedback you people have offered. It's a genuinely important topic, especially now that record-producer attitudes & considerations/customer preferences & buying choices are all actually being brought together in conversation. This never happened in the "old days"!!

I also love how "swashbuckler" and his composer try to anticipate what Mancini or Schifrin would do in such a unique situation! It's a nice example of how composers & their producers sometimes try to appreciate what their audiences may desire - or actually benefit from when listening: Jerry Goldsmith did this perfectly with his HOUR OF THE GUN. While many accept his opening "pop" presentation of the theme as a typically sixties recording practice, Jerry once mentioned it was important to include the specially arranged track on the album because no other straight-forward statement of the theme appeared in the film. The main titles stretch it into long, subtly dramatic gestures, the subsequent action pieces give it riffs and quotes, the longest reading plays it quietly on flute under guitar and percussion during the climactic search... but only when the score finishes do you truly hear it emerge, very briefly, as a big tune. So Jerry wanted to get an arrangement of the whole theme on the record.

There will never be a perfect solution to the c&c vs. album situation. Sometimes both presentations can be done but steep costs, extra licensing requirements from multiple owners if the album was previously available on a different label, royalty and publishing fees for duplicate presentations and even time considerations themselves are all factors we have to deal with.

Personally, I just prefer the musical architecture available when a composer actually tailors the score for the best listening. People sometimes forget that film editors have a lot to say in the final score as used in the picture... and, in particular, people may not always remember that a 95-minute score often includes numerous bars that are literal repeats (known as coma sopras) of earlier sections, cues that necessarily include sustained bars held through certain scenes, pauses made during dialog and effects, beginnings and endings dialed in and out as needed, edits and changes made right on the podium at the last minute, all of these done irregardless of any actual compositional values intended by the composer. In other words, often there is no actual ORIGINAL version of a respective score.

Even really good c&c presentations are rendered unlistenable if record producers simply follow what the film offers. Musical cohesiveness is still desireable and some deviation from the exact picture useage is certainly warranted.
--Doug

Well reguarding "literal repeats", my own preference is "everything recorded" even if it means not strictly C&C, I assume you mean by the repeats that the same recording is heard more than once, rather than a different take of the same music?
I also preper as little repetition of the same recording as possible (preferably none at all). I have in fact specially avoided some releases because they include the whole 'album' version on top of the 'film' version...but others seem to enjoy the choice. I guess there's no satisfying everyone. But just consider that leaving something off may in fact mean leaving what someone really wants -- take Antony and Cleopatra by John Scott as a for instance: The second CD issue included a cue not in the first one that happens to be one of my absolute favorites of anything.

After years of annoyance, that a lot of my favourite cues were missing from albums,
our Limited Edition labels, were like a godsend, releasing C&Cs

I may not always listen to C&C versions from end-to-end, when I put them in,
but they sure is hell are likely to feature all of the cues that I was looking for

I think that whenever a great story is being told on the big screen, the score album will be better with the C&C treatment.
But when it's about capturing an ambience, the feeling of the movie, the strictly selected cues/arrangement/sequencing is obviously a necessary approach.

Also, the thematic richness of the score should be decisive in the choice of the C&C way. A very thematically rich score like Return of the Jedi, or Hook, should definitely deserve the C&C treatment. While a score like Jaws, which is basically the shark motif repeated in each action sequence, can be easily presented as a specially designed album.

I feel that there is also an important ARCHIVAL aspect to doing C&Cs,
restoring all the old music, before, in some cases, it's perhaps lost forever.

Also, for some of these score releases, this may be the one-and-only release that music ever gets,
so it's important to give us as much stuff as is available.

Let's face the truth : we all love the complete score presentation. If one day Intrada released a film score giving the choice to the score fans between 2 different discs : an album presentation or the C&C, everyone would buy the complete score without thinking, and some hardcore fans would probably buy the album as well. But who would only buy the incomplete album, missing all the extra cues ?