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The Best Music in Film
Neil Brand
(Composer and silent film accompanist. Rescored South, Sir Ernest Shackleton's Glorious Epic of the Antarctic and Alfred Hitchcock's The Ring. Recently composed a new jazz score for E. A. Dupont's Piccadilly)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "For musicality, my favourite score is Alex North's for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) - the music is so deep inside the characters that every emotional twist is marked musically - you can play the score alone and see the shots in your head in real time, it's so closely integrated. Also jazz is the only language for that play in that location and, like all good scoring, it tells you so much more than you can see. I have learnt an enormous amount about both dramatic scoring and musical voicing by listening again and again to that score. For understatedness, John Williams's Schindler's List (1993) is superb - I came out of that movie convinced there was only a few minutes of music in it - when I heard the 75 minute CD every scene the music underscored came straight back to mind. Finally for minimalism the Howard Shore soundtrack for Cronenberg's Crash (1996) is a masterpiece, cold, mesmeric and stripped down to the barest essentials. It's always great to hear a forthcoming movie summed up in the first few notes you hear."
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "Good film music tells you more than you can see - as children we reacted to frightening things on TV by putting our hands over our ears rather than our eyes -and good music can fill in the gaps in a cheap set, poor performance or dodgy script better than any other single aspect of film-making. The good score is the one you hear when you need to. It doesn't chunter away meaninglessly behind the action or annoyingly announce its presence at the wrong moment. Nor does it simply dictate the cutting. At best it continuously opens up layers of insight to the complete film while establishing and detailing the changing world of the story."
- S&S: Which film either has music that you wished you'd written or is one you would like to rescore and why?
- "My choice of a film to rescore always gets me into trouble with purists - I would strip off the synchronised Hugo Riesenfeld score from F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and get the film rescored every ten years by the best film composers around. Sunrise is the highest achievement in silent cinema and, to my mind, it is dragged down by a plodding, pedestrian score which uses contemporary repertoire but flattens out all emotional complexity to the crudest broad terms. The greatest films are those which deal with the grey, problematic areas of human experience and Sunrise contains troubled, flawed characters whose emotional growth throughout the plot is totally believable and tracked in minute detail. The music was not planned with such an eye to detail - it couldn't be, since the music director was not the genius that the director was. Add to that the problem of the inclusion of a short piece of found music ('Funeral March of the Marionettes') that we now recognise for ever as the theme to Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the far greater consideration that a real virtue of silent cinema is its ability to be reinvented musically for succeeding generations, and we have, to my mind, good enough reason to rescue Sunrise from its suffocating score. As to a film I wish I'd scored it runs to hundreds. I would love to have lived inside the skin of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rózsa or Malcolm Arnold. I would go to my grave happy if I'd scored the St Trinian's films."