Doghouse Reilly visits the soundscape
Nominations day is tomorrow for the Peoples Pop Polls' World Cup Of Soundtracks, the caveat being that the track has to have made it onto a soundtrack record (album, single, official playlist) and that the record has to be the track's first appearance.
I get four noms but one thing I'm looking for in particular would be neither a movie theme nor a song but rather the moods and note patterns that make up the bread-and-butter background music for the world's movies and TV shows. Don't know if I'll find something with enough presence to actually work as a stand-alone track. And despite this kind of stuff being the bulk of what's on soundtracks, on soundtrack albums it gets middle tracks or doesn't appear at all.
Here's an example of what I have in mind, kinda sorta, except (1) there wasn't a soundtrack album and (2) it wouldn't work as a stand-alone track anyway. It's the first scene (not the credits, but the actual first scene) and the beginning of the second of The Big Sleep, scored by Max Steiner. For the first 1:55 there's music, strictly background, inserted for mood and tone, I assume - there's only some motif-ish stuff, 0:23-0:38 and 0:59-1:03. The second half of the first motif, where they repeat it in a higher key, lightens the original moderately heavy mood; I'm not sure the function of the second motif except it's the reason I went for The Big Sleep here - incredibly, since my general attention to sensory, nonverbal input can be described as inattention, I remembered this motif from when I first saw the movie age 18, remember it reoccurring in the movie and have remembered it ever since (assisted by my seeing the flick another six times or so) - though maybe that's a sign of its being more intrusive than intended.*
I don't recall if these mini-motifs follow particular characters throughout the film. My guess - though I haven't paid nearly enough attention to movie scores - is that Steiner writes a bunch of stuff, motifs and moods and tones, maybe not a lot of it, and the stuff gets inserted and reinserted, perhaps with different instrumental shadings, where appropriate. Is true of A Summer Place, which Steiner also scored and which has a soundtrack I listened to this week. (I assume there are articles and stories in libraries and the Web that go into detail about such things.)
Anyway, despite passively experiencing movie and TV music my whole life, it isn't something I've made an effort to understand, really. Now's the time! - at least a little bit of time. My impression has been that since - what? - the '80s? mid '70s? - when "soundtrack LPs" became more and more vehicles for selling songs (and the songs for selling the soundtrack LP), even less of the composed background music has made it onto LPs or tracklists or playlists or anything. But maybe countering that trend are specialty markets that just lap that stuff up and support the archival release of soundtracks that never made it onto record in the first place - e.g., the aforementioned A Summer Place (1959): it didn't get an actual soundtrack album in its time, but one got released in 2003. So there may be a banquet, a glut, a surfeit, and I've barely wiggled my toe in it. Btw, almost all TV commercials have music, and perhaps a few jingles make it into history. But most of the music in commercials isn't even jingles, it's several-seconds-long brushstrokes of some style or mood, one brushstroke following another.
Anyway, though I don't think it'll ever be poll fodder, I'm wondering if the label Sublime Frequencies has done anything with this - putting these composed - sometimes just barely (I'm guessing - again without much knowledge - a lot of addy music is some keyboardist or guitarist or other musician being told, "Play this sort of thing for a few seconds" [had a reed- and wind-playing friend in SF who was hired for a commercial and said that this is what it was like]) - putting these moods and tones and squibbles onto CD or into streams and playlists. Perhaps - another form of life I haven't really looked at - the large vague area called "techno" or "electronica" has some musicians appropriating these pervasive but lost sounds into their own musical landscapes.
*The bit that annoys me, though, is the falling riff that accompanies Carmen's falling into Doghouse Reilly's arms. Such music just gets in the way. I remember that in White Heat, right in the midst of a tense scene where a frightened Virginia Mayo is trying to hightail it out of her lover's house before her ex-lover comes to attack them, she hurries down the stairs and tiny notes descend with her, and this was so obvious and stupid that I laughed out loud.
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/387506.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.
I get four noms but one thing I'm looking for in particular would be neither a movie theme nor a song but rather the moods and note patterns that make up the bread-and-butter background music for the world's movies and TV shows. Don't know if I'll find something with enough presence to actually work as a stand-alone track. And despite this kind of stuff being the bulk of what's on soundtracks, on soundtrack albums it gets middle tracks or doesn't appear at all.
Here's an example of what I have in mind, kinda sorta, except (1) there wasn't a soundtrack album and (2) it wouldn't work as a stand-alone track anyway. It's the first scene (not the credits, but the actual first scene) and the beginning of the second of The Big Sleep, scored by Max Steiner. For the first 1:55 there's music, strictly background, inserted for mood and tone, I assume - there's only some motif-ish stuff, 0:23-0:38 and 0:59-1:03. The second half of the first motif, where they repeat it in a higher key, lightens the original moderately heavy mood; I'm not sure the function of the second motif except it's the reason I went for The Big Sleep here - incredibly, since my general attention to sensory, nonverbal input can be described as inattention, I remembered this motif from when I first saw the movie age 18, remember it reoccurring in the movie and have remembered it ever since (assisted by my seeing the flick another six times or so) - though maybe that's a sign of its being more intrusive than intended.*
Click to viewI don't recall if these mini-motifs follow particular characters throughout the film. My guess - though I haven't paid nearly enough attention to movie scores - is that Steiner writes a bunch of stuff, motifs and moods and tones, maybe not a lot of it, and the stuff gets inserted and reinserted, perhaps with different instrumental shadings, where appropriate. Is true of A Summer Place, which Steiner also scored and which has a soundtrack I listened to this week. (I assume there are articles and stories in libraries and the Web that go into detail about such things.)
Anyway, despite passively experiencing movie and TV music my whole life, it isn't something I've made an effort to understand, really. Now's the time! - at least a little bit of time. My impression has been that since - what? - the '80s? mid '70s? - when "soundtrack LPs" became more and more vehicles for selling songs (and the songs for selling the soundtrack LP), even less of the composed background music has made it onto LPs or tracklists or playlists or anything. But maybe countering that trend are specialty markets that just lap that stuff up and support the archival release of soundtracks that never made it onto record in the first place - e.g., the aforementioned A Summer Place (1959): it didn't get an actual soundtrack album in its time, but one got released in 2003. So there may be a banquet, a glut, a surfeit, and I've barely wiggled my toe in it. Btw, almost all TV commercials have music, and perhaps a few jingles make it into history. But most of the music in commercials isn't even jingles, it's several-seconds-long brushstrokes of some style or mood, one brushstroke following another.
Anyway, though I don't think it'll ever be poll fodder, I'm wondering if the label Sublime Frequencies has done anything with this - putting these composed - sometimes just barely (I'm guessing - again without much knowledge - a lot of addy music is some keyboardist or guitarist or other musician being told, "Play this sort of thing for a few seconds" [had a reed- and wind-playing friend in SF who was hired for a commercial and said that this is what it was like]) - putting these moods and tones and squibbles onto CD or into streams and playlists. Perhaps - another form of life I haven't really looked at - the large vague area called "techno" or "electronica" has some musicians appropriating these pervasive but lost sounds into their own musical landscapes.
*The bit that annoys me, though, is the falling riff that accompanies Carmen's falling into Doghouse Reilly's arms. Such music just gets in the way. I remember that in White Heat, right in the midst of a tense scene where a frightened Virginia Mayo is trying to hightail it out of her lover's house before her ex-lover comes to attack them, she hurries down the stairs and tiny notes descend with her, and this was so obvious and stupid that I laughed out loud.
This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/387506.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.