Third Concert of the 72nd Season

INTRODUCTION

Today's music is, with the exception of the Bassoon Concerto, music from the films. Even the concerto is by a composer best known for his film scores. I've had people ask why we commonly distinguish between film music and music for the concert hall. After all, isn't music just music? Actually, no. There is a difference, just as there is a difference between ballet music and opera.

Film music is part of a duo: the music, and the film, just as ballet is a duo: the music, and the dance. Is it possible to enjoy the music in both cases without the accompanying film or dance? Of course, but the experience is not complete, and it is difficult to judge its quality without having its counterpart for comparison.

Also, film music and concert music have very different origins and purposes. Concert music grew out of a need for self-expression, and was an art form from the start. Film music was originally totally unrelated to the content of a film; it was there to mask the noise of the projector and the audience.  Random pieces of well-known popular tunes and, later, European symphonic pieces were used throughout the length of the film, with no effort to relate them to either the mood or the action.

That, of course, changed, and film producers eventually saw the need to relate the music to the action. In fact, it was largely the result of individual pianists or organists who improvised while following the action on screen that led the producers to start hiring people to compose music for specific films. The first time that was done was in 1908 for the French film L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise by the well-regarded Camille Saint-Saëns.

I mentiont that Camille Saint-Saëns wrote "film music" because many critics look down upon composers of film music, and Saint-Saëns' reputation as a serious composer was well enough established that he is pretty much immune to such criticism.

Critical attitudes vary with time, of course. It was a truism for years that film music should not be "memorable" because it would upstage the drama. Sort of the way Bizet's music ruined Carmen!

Perhaps the first composer to become famous for his film music, and who helped his colleagues to gain a measure of credit for their work, was Max Steiner. He is "credited" with developing what is known as "Mickeymousing," that is, making the music punctuate every single action in the film. It can be heard in the first King Kong. When the ape is climbing the Empire State building, you can "hear" each step as Kong climbs. Steiner is known the world over as the consummate film composer, but critics such as Irwin Bazelon rant about his schmaltz, despite his many awards, including an Oscar. Other composers of that period, Erich Korngold, Dmitri Tiomkin, and Miklos Rozsam, for example, were equally vilified. In fact, the popularity of music from such films as High Noon and Doctor Zhivago Bazelon attributes to the ignorance and poor taste of the public. He means Us.

After the Golden Age of film music in the thirties and forties, written mostly by European concert composers fleeing the Nazis, the film composers fell on hard times. Films ceased to be an art, and became a commodity. Producers took control over the music, who new little about film-making, and less about music. One director insisted that for a movie set in France, French horns should be used. He refused to accept the composer's assurance that French horns were not French. The composer gave in, but in a different film, set in England, featured the English horn during the credits. The director missed the irony.

Star Trek has had an amazing run, first as a television series, and finally as a film series. There were eleven Star Trek films released, the last one called simply Star Trek (the first one was called Star Trek: The Movie). A number of composers were used for those films, Jerry Goldsmith for as many as five of them. Giacchino wrote the score for the final film, and rumor has it that he will be heard again in an upcoming Star Trek film.

For the end credits of the film Star Trek, Giacchino wrote a medly of tunes from the movie, starting and ending with the theme from the original Star Trek television series.

Giacchino developed an interest in both music and cinema at the age of ten in his native New Jersey. In his basement, he created short stop-action films, but found that the thing he enjoyed most was creating the music to accompany them. Later, he went to the School of Visual Arts in New York, and then to Juilliard School at the Lincoln Center.

His first job with the Disney organization was writing copy for publicity. Eventually, he became involved with their video game productions. He studied music at night. His first major work was for a video game, The Lost World for the Sony PlayStation. In fact, that was the first video game to have an orchestral score written specially for it. Giacchino (pronounced "ja-KEEN-oh," by the way) might be considered the Father of Video Game Music.

The director J.J. Abrams liked the music that Giacchino had written for the series of Medal of Honor games, and hired him to write for a new TV series just beginning: Alias. It lasted for five seasons. His next success was for the long-running, and very popular, series, Lost. In the six years that he worked on Lost, he continued to write music for video games, and got his first chance to write for a film with Pixar's The Incredibles.

By this time, J.J. Abrams was making feature films, and his experience with Giacchino's music for the television series led him to hire Giacchino for Mission: Impossible III. He won an Oscar nomination for his work on Ratatouille. His latest scores are for the upcoming Cars 2, Super 8, and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. He has been working for J.J. Abrams ever since, and Abrams has nothing but praise for Giacchino.