Thirith on 16/2/2015 at 09:22
It's one of the things that irritates me to no end about the documentaries (and some of the less savoury TV) that my wife watches: how they use music that I strongly associate with the films they were written for. It's not a particularly rational irritation, but throw music from American Beauty or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford into your doc on some poor family struck by economic crisis or a Marine with PTSD returning from Iraq and you take me right out of your film.
Then again, there are film makers who make this work, e.g. Tarantino, who doesn't just use existing music as a kind of acoustic wallpaper.
faetal on 16/2/2015 at 09:57
That Futurama one is great :)
Thirith on 16/2/2015 at 10:22
Quote Posted by DaBeast
Is it possible that the irksome feeling you get is because you were aware of it first?
That may be there, but added to it is this: music in films tends to be charged emotionally and at least I associate the music very specifically with the characters and their situation in the movies. For instance, that tune from
The Assassination of Jesse James isn't just 'generic wistful', it's the sorrow that comes with a charismatic man fated to die at the hands of a friend, the end of an era and the knowledge that little good will come of the fated act of murder for anyone involved. If the music is then used exactly because it sounds kinda, sorta wistful, this ends up feeling... disrespectful is the word, I guess.
That's why I mind less if music that isn't specific to a certain context is used like this: existing pop/rock tunes, classical music, that sort of thing.
froghawk on 16/2/2015 at 14:40
Most orchestral film scores heavily borrow from existing classical music - if not outright copying themes, then stylistic copying. James Horner is particularly guilty of this with his pseudo-Wagnerian fanfares. John Williams is frequently guilty of this as well, drawing from multiple different composers with such frequency that most of his work seems rather imitative.
Now, I think the extent to which this is a problem might be overblown. Classical fans will often claim that the music is being stolen while ignoring all the instances of borrowing or paying tribute within the classical music world. For example, the extremely similar themes Beethoven's first symphony and Mozart's Jupiter Symphony - but no one is about to accuse Beethoven of being unoriginal. Of course, it's also a question of how the material is used - for example, Stravinsky and Bartok integrated quite a lot of folk music into their style (and were such great imitators that it was impossible to tell which folk songs were quoted and which were invented without doing some research), but the way they used it was truly novel. Film music, on the other hand, takes snippets and themes and divorces them from the larger developmental context that made each piece what it was.
Since the themes are repurposed as accompaniment, I don't think this is necessarily a problem, but it certainly has made it more difficult for people to get into classical music today - people have become so used to hearing tiny, out of context snippets that they groan at the familiarity of certain things and don't understand how to listen to a larger developmental form, trace the themes, and pay attention throughout. Even as a classical fan, I can't listen to Wagner and Strauss, likely as a result of having heard decades of ultraromantic film scores copying and cheapening that style. It's made the source material sound cheesy, overblown and disingenuous to me today. Loony Tunes scores may be the pinnacle of decontextualizing and recontextualizing classical music in extremely tiny snippets. So this may be why classical fans get up in arms over this - these themes were never meant to be listened to out of context, and having that shoved at people for decades has made it harder for most people to hear it in context and appreciate the original works.
rachel on 17/2/2015 at 18:00
I really hated how "Battle Without Honor Or Humanity" popped up everywhere after Kill Bill, especially football matches anouncement. I really strongly dislike football and it simply ruined that track for me. :(
