>> If all you listened to was John Williams' music,
my friend, you're probably going to write second-rate John Williams music.
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Because I teach,
I've met a lot of composers whose understanding of music,
or at least dramatic music,
comes exclusively from watching movies.
I used to half humorously joke that
there was a generation of composers we can call the Star Wars Generation;
those composers who were hearing orchestra really for
the first time and noticing film music when they went into the theater and saw Star Wars.
For them, two things happened.
They were hearing orchestral music
for the first time and decided that's what they wanted to do,
and number 2, they decided they wanted to do it from movies.
For them, film music started with John Williams' score to Star Wars.
Pretty much from that moment on,
they spend their entire time gobbling up movies that have come out since then.
Then after Star Wars, of course,
there was the Indiana Jones group of John Williams' fans in the classes.
Then I guess it would have been the Jurassic Park and then the Harry Potter,
but usually, with some John Williams' movie that was in
the theater that they watched when they were in their early teens
that changed their life,
and I get that totally.
We don't hear orchestra music on the radio unless we go out of our way to hear.
We know what's on the radio,
it's rock and roll.
So that if you're going to become aware of the orchestra,
you have to go out of your way.
Most of the composers that I know,
most people that go to Berklee,
most of the people that went to UCLA,
most of the people I meet out all over the world,
their dream is to write for orchestra.
If your dream is to write for orchestra, yes,
there's nothing wrong with listening to what's going on in film music,
but please don't make the mistake of having that your exclusive diet.
For sure, you need to listen to film music that precedes Star Wars because
everything that John Williams is doing and so many of the composers post-John Williams,
that the language is certainly different than, let's say,
the score to Gone With the Wind or King Kong that Max Steiner
wrote in the '30s that define what film music was really all about.
The language has changed,
but the solutions are pretty much the same.
I totally encourage young composers who have fallen in love
with film music to spend time studying some of the classic movie scores.
Yes, they're guided by melody and melody is not hip anymore,
but so there, what?
Learn how to write a great melody,
learn how these composers who wrote great melodies held their scores together by melody.
Number 2 is, I would say,
and this is most important is,
make sure that you get away from movie scores.
If you're interested writing for orchestra,
go listen to the concert music.
I'm not talking about just Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart,
and Bach, and the rest of that gang,
or Tchaikovsky, or Berkovich,
Shostakovich, these are the names I usually hear,
but later stuff, more contemporary stuff,
stuff that's in the romantic world,
yes, but then the late romantics into the modern stuff.
People will talk about having heard Stravinsky,
but usually it means The Rite of Spring, period.
Or maybe The Firebird or Petrushka.
But keep listening.
Gobble this all up.
Why? Because it's ultimately going to open up
your mind to things that you otherwise wouldn't have heard.
It's better to have a full bag of tricks that you can refer to
than a shallow one,
because you'll have no other frame of reference.
If you stuff your bag with the experience of having listened to other composers,
and I mean out of the film music world,
even if you don't like their music initially, like for instance,
not a single composer that I've ever met that's in movies say,
I ran to Schoenberg's music because I loved it,
I ran to John Cage's music because I loved it.
Force yourself to spend time with it,
I promise you it's going to work to your advantage at some point in the future.
Not that you're going to write 12-tone music,
or you're going to be writing abstract conceptual music like John Cage,
but something about their way of thinking will probably conduct you in
making some decisions at
moments where you're stressing out because you don't know what to do.
As we know, 12-tone music has guided a handful
of incredibly profound and influential film scores.
For starters, Off the top of my head,
I can think of Planet of the Apes by Jerry Goldsmith,
and I can think of The Cobweb by Leonard Rosenman,
the first totally 12-tone score ever to be released.
Listen, make sure, my friends, that you gobble everything up.
When you're in your 20s,
you should be like a sponge listening to anything and
everything even if you don't necessarily like it.
If you're John Williams' fan,
remember John Williams isn't John Williams because all he
did is sit and listen to Erich Wolfgang Korngold,
Max Steiner, and Bernard Herrmann.
He knows that classical repertoire really well and he's a fantastic pianist
so he can throw four orchestra score in
[inaudible] and they can start picking out the parts.
He knows how it's put together,
and that's why his music is what it is.
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