Kfigaro a écrit :Emissary a écrit :Ne cherche donc pas à te défiler et ramène-nous un Dom Pérignon bien frappé!
Diable, monsieur est exigeant en plus !
non mais sérieusement y'a en tout de même vraiment pas énormément (en tout cas de musiciens réellement pris au sérieux par l'élite européenne, exit donc Glass ou Goldenthal)... même un John Adams n'a, je crois, jamais travaillé pour l'écran, et je ne parle même pas de Messiaen, Scelsi, Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, Lachenman, Grisey et j'en passe...
si souviens toi kfigaro au moment du centenaire du cinéma en France, la grand mode du moment était de demander aux compositeurs officiels de plaquer leur musique sur des films muets, je ne sais pour ceux que tu cites mais c'était typiquement les compositeurs ircamiens, beaucoup de ces films passaient d'ailleurs sur artung à l'époque, (heu je veux dire ARTE), c'était le truc hyper chic du moment, hyper culturel, regarder un film muet avec un score atonal / sériel / expérimental / moderniste / progressif tout pourri
j'avais écrit à ce sujet il y a une éternité à Lukas Kendall, au moment où j'ai découvert le magazine FilmScoreMonthly, quand
The Taking of Pelham 123 de David SHIRE est sorti, il y avait un article sur la technique dodécaphonique, et ça m'avait inspiré une réflexion sur l'art officiel en France :
voici mon texte préhistorique (en anglais) :
That Passé Avant-Garde
...I think it's great to write about the controversial music of twelve-tone composition, which recently came up in light of its use in David Shire's The Taking of Pelham One Two Three [1974, released on CD last year, see FSM #68]. A small correction, though: Historically, the first twelve-tone theorist was the Austrian composer Josef Matthias Hauer (1883-1959). This obscure character decided that the only valid "scale" was the twelve equally tempered tones. You can read about this in his Essence of the Musical Fact (1920). His heirs were Hermann Heiss and Jef Golysheff. Arnold Schoenberg's serial system was in fact an extension and a generalization of twelve-tone music.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with that kind of music. I love it as a way to give dramatic depth in a film apart from the normal musical expressionist/impressionist language. That is why I love Leonard Rosenman's music (despite his repetitive and systematic style) and many scores by Goldsmith and Morricone (twelve-tone or atonal or serial). The good thing is that many of them still had a Hollywood touch, the goal to entertain the audience without being dry and "serious."
On the other side of that coin, twelve-tone music in film became an opportunity for many mediocre composers to break through in the realm of contemporary music (especially in my country; I don't know about the U.S.). The most radical styles were welcomed by intellectuals and teachers because of their revolutionary aspect.
Twelve-tone music certainly enriched film thanks to people like Raksin, Friedhofer, North, Herrmann and Rosenman, and current composers like Chris Young, Goldenthal and Goldsmith. Film music became perfectly balanced between tonal/atonal, and traditional/modernist.
The big problem is the theoretical basis of the music and what it became later with people like Pierre Boulez (I like his music anyway, because it really "sounds"). They wanted to kill emotion and sensuality in music because it was "anti-intellectual." This is just neglecting hundreds of years of music and the very nature of a human being: that is why it is unacceptable. It must be the taste of the French for abstraction and systems. That's why I like Hollywood musicians so much, they always keep the balance because after all, this is entertainment! There is no need to write "serious," dry and rational music. Isn't music rational enough?
And because Boulez doesn't like film music like a lot of composers of his time, one hardly hears any music by Rózsa, Korngold, Tiomkin, Steiner and co. on the radio. And no concerts of course to perform music by Williams. Can you imagine a concert of Spielberg's favorite composers in Paris, castle of the intellectual "elite"? And I've not even talking about "traitors" (to the elite) like Georges Delerue and Maurice Jarre who left the country. I totally agree with John Mauceri (#72): Thanks to Hollywood (and World War II), the Romantic tradition was kept alive somewhere on this planet.
This institutionalized, radical music in Europe (not only serial but all the rest, the weird rest) became a convention in scoring a great deal of silent films (the perfect cultural background of bureaucratic Europe celebrating 100 years of cinema). Some scores are awful nightmares, whatever the musical approach: Tabu (Murnau, 1931), Haxan -- Haxan (Christensen, 1922), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1919). They are fortunately challenged by more or less interesting scores for Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914), The Phantom of the Opera (Julian, 1925) and Destiny (Lang, 1921). I do not remember the composers' names, unfortunately.
Anyway, in Tabu's case, for example, Hugo Riesenfeld's nice and cute score was removed in the name of the abstract principle of modernism. The result is: can anyone stand more than 70 minutes of serial music depicting the exotic and colorful life (in black and white) of Bora-Bora divers? Even if set upon replacing Riesenfeld's outdated "cutesiness," couldn't a less "radical" score have fit better? With today's taste for ethnic music I don't understand why such an intellectual approach has been chosen. Is it all a question of politics and ideology? Just because in some people's mind silent films are very serious cultural stuff, one has to ask a "serious" composer to write the music? When a score is lost (Darius Milhaud's L'Inhumaine, 1924) or too traditional (use of Beethoven's music in Abel Gance's La 10th Symphonie), I understand the need to write a new score but does it hide anything? Like the opportunistic wish for some to be recognized through a cultural event? The score is so hard to listen to that one cannot appreciate the viewing of a film. I think silent films are fascinating to watch today -- even more fascinating with an appropriate score (the new music to Fritz Lang's Destiny is my favorite thus far).
). Et quand je lui ai dit que j'écoutais de la musique de films, il m'a répondu avec mépris un truc du genre : "Ah, ouais, et bien moi, je n'écoute que de la grande musique" Et de me citer Mozart and Co. Par la suite, j'ai retrouvé ce même état d'esprit auprès d'autres personnes, dont des musiciens d'orchestre de musique classique. 
même si heureusement il y a des exceptions comme mon ami Jean-Pierre, altiste professionnel et prof au conservatoire qui raffole tout autant de Bach et Pergolese que de John Williams ou Ennio Morricone.