Film Composers And Me!

Poster. Fair Use.

 Recently I have been buying music in downloads, to add to my  vast CD collection. I have classical, Renaissance, early music, folk of various kinds, which I play when writing, to put me in the mood - for example, Irish music when writing about bushrangers. 

But most inspirational for me in recent years is film music.

Actually, I’ve been a lover of film music from childhood on. When I got a kid brother, he joined me in the love of film music. He still has his double album from the first Star Wars movie, only it’s called The Star Wars. I found myself able to identify a composer when I heard a snippet of music that I hadn’t heard before. I’m not kidding! 

I would be surprised at anyone who didn’t know John Williams, composer of Star Wars, three Harry Potter movies, Jaws and much more, but if you have seen Lost In Space as a child, you heard his music before any of those. In those days his credits showed him as Johnny Williams. 

In the 2000s we got Howard Shore, whose music for the Lord Of The Rings movies was the closest we got to John Williams in style. 

However, in my early years, I was loving the work of Miklos Rosza, a Hungarian composer who came to Hollywood in the 1940s, to score The Thief Of Baghdad, and stayed. Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis were his, as was King Of Kings and El Cid. I’ve even found some of his music was used in the 1950s Adventures Of Superman!

I grew up with the epics and their composers. I loved Alex North’s score for Spartacus, but only later found out he wrote one for 2001: A Space Odyssey, before it was decided to keep the temporary classical music score that was just supposed to give the composer an idea of what they had in mind. I have to admit, however good Alex North’s music was, there is just nothing like the beauty of Thus Spake Zarathustra as the opening theme.

I discovered Ennio Morricone not through the spaghetti westerns for which he is best known, but through a telemovie, Moses Lawgiver, for which he composed tunes I’m still humming to this day. Of course, I also love the more famous tunes. I’ve heard them played by orchestras on YouTube and they are glorious. 

There are so many amazing composers from the earlier years of cinema, such as Elmer Bernstein and Erich Korngold, but we will leave it there for now, because I want to talk about some more recent ones, especially those who have been composing for Marvel films and TV. I’ve bought some to play over and over.

Christophe Beck and Michael Paraskevas wrote a delightful score for Hawkeye, the Christmas themed mini series, in which superhero Hawkeye - archer Clint Barton - has to come out of retirement to help Kate Bishop, a fellow archer who might be killed without it. In the course of the series, we have character themes, but also adapted carols and Nutcracker music. I couldn’t help laughing when the villains’ van drove along to a sinister version of “Dance Of The Sugarplum Fairy”. I discovered that Christophe Beck also wrote for Buffy The Vampire Slayer. 

In the same show, there were two more composers, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who created a delightful song, “Save The City”, supposedly from a show called Rogers: The Musical. You can see a 37 minute complete version of the show on YouTube. It has half a dozen songs. 

British composer Natalie Holt wrote some gorgeous music for Loki, including a string quintet version of the main theme, and all the music except the main theme, for Obi Wan Kenobi - that was by John Williams, of course. 

I’ve recently discovered Laura Karpman, who did the music for The Marvels, Ms Marvel and What If…? I particularly enjoyed The Marvels, which had some very over the top themes and music to match. One scene had our heroines, Carole Danvers, Kamala Khan and Monica Rambeau arrive on a planet where people communicate in song, so you have a Broadway musical world and they are welcomed with a massive chorus. Carole is actually married to the Prince and has to dress as a Disney Princess and dance with him, singing along, to be able to warn him about the coming villain. 

A totally hilarious scene in that film showed alien kittens chasing down the crew of a space station and swallowing them so the entire crew can be evacuated in one small shuttle. And what was the music here? “Memory” from Cats! Sung by Barbra Streisand. I suppose the composer could have created her own tune here, but this one truly worked. 

The first woman to score a massive superhero movie was Pinar Toprak, who composed the score for Captain Marvel, in which we first met Carole Danvers. 

So, why do I enjoy film music so much? It adds to the story I’m watching and when I play the score by itself, it takes me back to the film. These days, so many film scores are mostly existing songs that don’t require a composer to interpret the story. Sometimes that works, as in 2001, but I mostly prefer those that are created especially to help tell the story. 

What about you? Do you have preferences? A favourite film score or composer? Let me know in the comments. I may consider writing about this theme in the A to Z this year.