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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