Annotations on The Death of the Film Score

Fran Magazine: Issue #140

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Methodologies

I always love when

BDM

writes a bit about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into crafting a review or an essay, and I am needlessly poaching this form to talk a bit about my film scores piece that came out two weeks ago. I am quite proud of the piece, even though someone on Bluesky called me “musically illiterate” — which is true, but in a different way than he meant it, I think.

As long time Fran Magazine readers know, I love both classical music and film music, and I’m always interested in how the two are — or are not — in conversation with each other. The inklings of a piece about the shift in score came last summer when I went to go see Hans Zimmer live at Madison Square Garden. I have mixed feelings on Zimmer and his music — his labor practices specifically — though seeing him live crystallized how essential his presence has been to the cinematic landscape for the past twenty years. Like Danny Elfman, for instance, Zimmer comes out of an independent music scene, and his score composition is a little more reminiscent of pop music. Like conventional classical music, there are motifs and recurring themes, but more specifically with Zimmer there are hooks.

I’m always saying shit like this

Despite that typical song structure, most of Zimmer’s work is for some combination of orchestral musicians (violins, cellos, etc.) and rock musicians (guitars, drumset, etc.) playing in tandem with one another, the combination resembling a pit orchestra that you’d see for a live musical rather than a symphony orchestra or a band.

To come of age seeing movies now, however, is to be exposed to work from composers whose backgrounds are far more similar to Zimmer than, say, John Williams — Jonny Greenwood, Mica Levy, etc. — but whose work is significantly more minimalist. When I was first conceiving the piece, I felt like so many scores for movies of any genre had become really similar to horror movie scores: atonal, unnerving, sparse. That argument didn’t really hold water the more I started to think about it, but what I began to consider was two-fold:

1. Most of the working film composers are self-taught musicians with significant side projects.

2. Most of the working film composers are adept at using computers.

The first point, which maybe sounds like a “new” thing, is actually very old. If you look at the waning days of Romantic music into the Modernist music of the early 20th century, you start to see guys like, say, Arthur Sullivan or Shostakovich balance their mainstream work for stage and screen with their passions in order to make money. Contrary to what Brady Corbet told Marc Maron, independent artists have always needed some source of mainstream revenue in order to continue to make art on the level they want.¹

When I interview people for a piece, I usually talk to at most two people and then get cracking. In order to work on this piece, I wound up talking to double digits folks, including several composers I like and respect: Daniel Blumberg (The Brutalist), Cristobal Tapia de Veer (The White Lotus, Babygirl, Smile²), Bryce Dessner (We Live in Time, Sing Sing), Kris Bowers (The Wild Robot), and Volker Bertelmann (Conclave). I also spoke to a handful of academics, including BW/DR’s genius Veronica Fitzpatrick, and I spoke to Phil, who makes music and lives in my home.

The main thing I wanted to know from these composers was if they perceived 1) a change in the way film scores were composed and 2) a change in the way film scores sounded. This is kind of a tricky task, because depending on the subjects, no one is especially keen or forthright in talking about other people’s work.³ That said, everyone was very game, and many said variations on the same thing which makes my job especially easy.

What felt most remarkable is almost none of these guys are sitting down with an orchestra a la Michael Giacchino or Howard Shore or whatever: they are either working with a small group of musicians in a studio — the way you would a band recording — or seeking out solo artists and piecemeal compiling music one part at a time.

From the piece:

Blumberg similarly eschewed typical symphonic tools in favor of a Brutalist score built around field recordings. To achieve the metallic tick-tick-ticking of the film’s construction scenes, he “spent a day putting pieces of paper and screws on piano strings.” For a staggering scene in which Tóth and his patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), visit a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy, Blumberg went to a valley to record ambient sound and later applied it to a saxophone part played by soloist Evan Parker. Fellow Best Original Score nominee Kris Bowers also used an environmental-first approach to his score for the Best Animated Feature contender The Wild Robot, a watercolor animated film about a well-meaning robot who learns to survive in the woods. Bowers collaborated with the Brooklyn ensemble Sandbox Percussion, giving them musical cues to interpret with the raw materials one might find in the film: branches, metal pipes. “I thought it might be like ASMR on top of the orchestra,” Bowers says.

Part of what makes methodologies like this possible is the influx of electronic music and post-production; “we’ll fix it in post” has kind of become “we’ll score it in post,” wherein composers build from the ground up in the same way, say, a Hungarian architect might construct a building in Pennsylvania. This shift into the electroacoustic has created a less “organic” sound — sure — but it has also allowed for some mutability and control for the composer to better sync their work with the images on screen, if not just outright have those images choreographed to the music rather than, say, backfilled.

I was surprised in the aftermath of publishing the piece how many people told me they don’t like how film scores sound now. I couldn’t disagree more. Obviously I have a penchant for the classical Hollywood film score, but I think the landscape has never been more robust and interesting. Sure, there’s some kind of hacky stuff in the mix, but I think a lot of the people working now are used to a scrappier methodology and do not feel burdened or beholden by a classical tradition that has otherwise fallen by the wayside. Most everyone I spoke to had work and music they liked to make outside of their film scores. Not unlike Brady’s commercials, most of these guys are happiest when they are doing their own thing — which isn’t to say they dislike their work for film, but there is a bigger picture to be painted as always. Bertelmann⁴ expressed (quite hilariously) that when he won the Oscar for All Quiet on the Western Front he was worried it would affect the ways in which he maintains a music career outside of film composition. He wanted the freedom to keep playing with his electronic outfit Hauschka at the scale he currently plays at, no stadium shows or concert halls — just weird small venues and his usual group of guys.⁵

Part of what I couldn’t really work into the piece is that film scores are also much LOUDER now — some of this I think can be chalked up to the Zimmer of it all, but multiple composers talked about Ludwig Göransson’s deafening music for Oppenheimer, a score that I think “works” but I don’t like much.⁶ Most composers said they work with the sound design team directly now in order to adjust how their music is heard, rather then being relegated to background muzak, and that there’s a greater willingness for things to go big. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross basically say this exact thing when they accepted the award for Challengers.

Not to go full DEI discourse or whatever, but I think the fact that film music — and contemporary classical music — has become somewhat democratized is only a good thing; I don’t mind that people don’t have conventional backgrounds. I have seen some really great new music premiere at the New York Philharmonic that uses a drum machine or lasers to the grumbling of people who sit around me. We don’t really have a functioning conservatory system in this country and who is to say it ever really “functioned” to begin with. Part of why classic Hollywood scores sound like classical music is because early film was scored with classical music for lack of funds or other options. That the film score canon has now built upon itself is only natural: how long can you go on repeating the same thing before it inevitably mutates?

What feels most thrilling to me as a listener and a viewer is that filmmakers are now seeking out composers for their particular sound, rather than using film scores like something to be plugged into the formula. It allows the music to take on a more independent life outside of its own context, and while some say maybe that’s bad, I say, hey, let’s just try a new thing out. When I was scrolling through the New York Philharmonic’s live score nights in the ‘25-’26 season — three Disney movies and three not-Disney movies — I was overcome with dismay and annoyance. What do you have to do to get, like, Phantom Thread live? But the answer, stupidly, is nothing. That music was not written to be played in the symphony hall, and any time it were to appear in that setting, it would be an anomaly. If rows and rows of string instruments are not sitting back of mind for today’s composers, then why would their music make it to the symphony hall? If you want to see what those guys are doing, you’re probably going to have to find a weird basement or cafe.

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Was this interesting? Do you care? What film scores from the past few years felt remarkable to you? Is the Oppenheimer score actually genius or am I right and it’s kind of annoying?

1. Okay, I’m operating in bad faith here, but part of what was remarkable to me about Corbet’s convo with Maron was not that he said he made “zero dollars” from The Brutalist (this doesn’t surprise me at all, by the way) but that he has to direct commercials in order to make any money. Okay… well… you and Terrence Malick and Jonathan Glazer and all these other guys. I’m not saying this is a good system — he made a movie about how bad capitalism is without proposing any other solutions <3 — but this is kind of just how it goes.

2. I’m too afraid for the Smile movies, but Tapia de Veer was like, “I love the work I do for the Smile movies more than anything.”

3. I mean, the composers are, but emailing PR people to be like, “Can I talk to your client about… uh, someone else’s client?” is a sticky puzzle.

4. Maybe the most fun person I spoke to, NOT THAT IT’S A CONTEST!!!

5. When Phil and I were in London last April, we went to Cafe Oto at the recommendation of his friend Jim. We saw a two and a half hour jazz show comprised of about four 45 minute long pieces. It was completely insane and one of the most memorable nights of my life. When I was on Zoom with Daniel Blumberg in January, I mentioned our night there, because he is one of the higher ups at the club, and he was like, “oh, well, half those guys you saw play on The Brutalist score.”

6. I don’t like that movie much either. That said, The Odyssey will be so yay.