Reviews for Music and cinema

The average rating for Music and cinema based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-13 00:00:00 Bryan Cline Irwin Bazelon is a film music traditionalist. He's pretty upset at pop music's tainting of the traditional film score. He doesn't consider most film score composers as actual composers. That film music is often of lowest importance to a film is condemnable and he is more than ready to condemn. Too often musical decisions are under the control of incompetent producers and directors. Yeah, he's got reason enough to be upset, especially when you note that the book was first published in the mid-70s when Hollywood's scoring habits were at a generally embarrassing low. Bazelon isn't all ranting and wailing, and even when doing that he is making a fair point - he's just sometimes a bit over the top and is naturally super sympathetic to the composer. An implicit point of this whole book seems to be that filmaking is really stinking hard. Even making a bad movie can be hard, so we could sometimes stand to be a little more forgiving when a movie struggles. It's a real balancing act between all the different departments and factors that go into a completed film. While I think film music has changed considerably since this book was published, it is still a good, clearly written read. Bazelon's ultimate wish was for people to be trying to find new creative ways of scoring films. That's a good goal and I think we've seen it happen in how the traditional score and pop music have come together in the last 30 years.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-30 00:00:00 Randall Kushell Interesting but dated of course, written in the 1970's. The composers interviewed are no longer with us, apart from John Williams, and it was a little too early yet for him to be associated with Steven Spielberg, so it felt like quite a lot was missing, Jaws, Indiana Jones, etc. Also the author seemed a bit paranoid at the time about pop music taking over from genuine film scores,although plenty of good film composers have come along in the intervening years to stop that happening. Plenty of opinions, which made it an interesting read, unlike another, more recent, book I read on the subject lately which was crammed with facts but somewhat dry.