# The Amount of Music in Movies



## robgb (Jun 18, 2018)

I listen to a lot of soundtracks (as I imagine many of us do) and am surprised by how much more music is used in movies today. If you look back at some of the great movie soundtracks of the past, there's maybe thirty minutes worth of music, and music was used sparingly throughout the movie.

Today's soundtracks seemed to go wall to wall from beginning to end of the movie. I think it's fairly rare to see a music-free moment in movies today.

Why is this? Is it a lack of confidence on the filmmaker's part? Or is it simply a trend, similar to the lack of vertical writing or failure to create a beginning, middle and end in a soundtrack, or are we stuck with this wall of music forever?

There are always exceptions, of course. But today composers seem to be directed to do ninety minutes or more rather than the thirty minutes or less in past decades.


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## fixxer49 (Jun 18, 2018)

robgb said:


> I listen to a lot of soundtracks (as I imagine many of us do) and am surprised by how much more music is used in movies today. If you look back at some of the great movie soundtracks of the past, there's maybe thirty minutes worth of music, and music was used sparingly throughout the movie.
> 
> Today's soundtracks seemed to go wall to wall from beginning to end of the movie. I think it's fairly rare to see a music-free moment in movies today.
> 
> ...


individual scenes are now cut/edited in a vacuum (and often moved around), without context as to what comes before or after [edit] so each scene feels like it needs wall-to-wall music in the editing process.


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## altruistica (Jun 24, 2018)

I wonder if what we are seeing is the influence of video gaming on the film industry. In video gaming, there are very few occasions where there is no music. I'm watching a cooking game show (Bake Off -The Professionals)...there is hardly any place in the programme where there is no music...especially in the solely narrative parts. The spoken word isn't enough it seems.


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## Tice (Jun 24, 2018)

I think it might have something to do with the amount of stimuli it takes to keep one's attention. This has been slowly increasing over time, contributing to our shorter attention spans. Not only does it increase the amount of cuts per minute, but adding music to everything is also a way to cope with this phenomenon. Even the fact that a lot of people can't work without music on contributes, as music not being there becomes more and more unusual in many people's perception. We do our jobs to music, we ride our cars to music, we edit our movies to music, do our homework to it, etc.
If you strip music from movies that currently have it, I reckon you'll feel that the pacing has slowed down somehow, even though the cuts didn't change.


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## tmhuud (Jun 24, 2018)

Lack of confidence.


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## paularthur (Jun 24, 2018)

I would love to see a statistic on the average amount of music based on genre, will have to do some digging.


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## Erick - BVA (Jun 24, 2018)

It is a contention I have with the filming industry. Just bombarding you with stimuli --not just auditory, but visual as well. But I think the better approach is to use understatement, scarcity....to a point of course. It will leave those more dramatic moments even more dramatic. Everything is dramatic now! Yes, as you said, there are exceptions.
I'm not even advocating more "silence." Just more subtle uses of sound and music. Think of The Shining. A lot of that movie features some strange
leitmotifish underbeds, and unnerving pedals. It becomes subtle and almost more dramatic (at least more effective). Or one of my absolute favorites with use of sound --The Innocence (1967). You don't ever forgot the haunting, subtle use of sound and music in that one. Everyone should watch that movie. And there actually is a surprising amount of silence in it. It is strangely effective.
I think you're going to get the overload of stimuli with the more mainstream and blockbuster hits these days. People expect the overload, and so they (the filmakers) deliver. Or maybe the filmakers think that we expect it 
But I am sure there are filmakers and composers with more artistic sensibilities.


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## DynamicK (Jun 24, 2018)

Not just in the Film industry...television as well. One of my pet hates....wall to wall music in documentaries...totally superfluous. Seems producers and directors, haven't heard " dialogue is KING"


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## Tice (Jun 24, 2018)

I think it works in some cases, not in others. If it's leitmotiv driven music that tells the entire story it can work, for instance.


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## Ethos (Jun 24, 2018)

Tice said:


> I think it works in some cases, not in others. If it's leitmotiv driven music that tells the entire story it can work, for instance.



If you're Wagner maybe. But I think it's more an issue of quantity over quality. It's also easier with today's technology to have wall-to-wall music than 30 years ago. It's *sometimes* just poor spotting/lack of narrative insight/using music as a crutch.

Too frequently I'm asked by a director to put super cheesy, sappy music in a scene that technically wouldn't need ANY music if the acting and directing weren't so piss poor. And, you know, it kind of works. Put really sad cheesy music behind bad acting and people will probably tear up.


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## JoelS (Jun 24, 2018)

Isn't much of all the 'extra' music treated as wallpaper in the mix?

The most recent two movies I saw in the theater are Solo and Infinity War. I'm only going off of memory, and have no direct study or data, but in my recollection so much of the music in both was buried under the dialogue and SFX to the point of being nearly inaudible or just part of the chaos... and I actively try to listen to the score while watching movies. Both have solid scores, I liked Solo's a lot as a standalone listen. 

After one viewing of each movie, I was disappointed by a lack of consequential application of music, lacking instances where it really helped create moments that stuck in memory. Maybe the ubiquity of ceaseless underscore adds to that by depriving the 'big' moments of the contrast they need to stand out.

I'm still stuck on 70s-80s John Williams as the gold standard for style and spotting (and everything) and the trends now are not that... though they are closer to that right now than they were five years ago. It'll always shift again, but who knows to what.


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## NoamL (Jun 24, 2018)

What blockbuster film had less than half an hour of music? I'm genuinely coming up with a blank here...


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## will_m (Jun 25, 2018)

NoamL said:


> What blockbuster film had less than half an hour of music? I'm genuinely coming up with a blank here...



Cloverfield and Mother are two that spring to mind because they had no score at all, also No Country for Old Men but I'm not sure they'd be considered blockbusters.

As TV goes Breaking Bad also had very little music in some episodes.


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## robgb (Jun 25, 2018)

NoamL said:


> What blockbuster film had less than half an hour of music? I'm genuinely coming up with a blank here...


None that I can think of, and half an hour to maybe fifty minutes or so seems about right for the average two-hour movie. If you look back at one of the first blockbusters -- JAWS -- it had fifty minutes of music, while the movie itself ran two hours and ten minutes. And that's all the music it needed. Today, if it were remade, the music would undoubtedly run close to two hours, underscoring every scene. I get the sense that today's filmmakers are afraid of silence.


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## Henu (Jun 25, 2018)

Because it is nowadays more close to ambience sound in all it's wallpaperness than actual _composed music_.

I can see the comparison to game music in a way, and I really wish we wouldn't go to that direction on screen. If you ask me, game music is supposed to be more wallpaper-y and closer to ambience sound while movie music should support the picture, story and dialogue, scattered with leitmotifs and whatnot.

Call me old- fashioned, boring and whatever, but I can't stand anymore or the two options we're nowadays treated in movies, which are either grandiose zimmeresque 4- chord crescendo-diminuendos or some ultraboring arpeggiator/ filtered gamelan suspension. 

Hell, MAKE KORNGOLD GREAT AGAIN. /rant


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## robgb (Jun 25, 2018)

Henu said:


> If you ask me, game music is supposed to be more wallpaper-y and closer to ambience sound while movie music should support the picture, story and dialogue, scattered with leitmotifs and whatnot.


Exactly. The thing about games is that you can spend a lot of time doing nothing other than, say, exploring a room. So it's nice to have the music while you're doing that. The gamer is far more in control of what's happening. In fact, many gamers simply mute the music and play their own favorites. In movies, the music is only there to help tell the story. Period. And if you can't tell the story without having to rely so heavily on the composer, then maybe you don't know how to make a movie. Unless, like ET for example, the music is front and center as almost a character itself. But then not every director has the pleasure of working with the master.



Henu said:


> Hell, MAKE KORNGOLD GREAT AGAIN. /rant


Korngold will always be great.


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## Henu (Jun 25, 2018)

robgb said:


> In movies, the music is only there to help tell the story



Yes, and another thing is also that in movies the music is technically only heard _once_. Once it's gone, it's gone for good, opposed to game music which needs in 99% cases to loop and is mostly heard in many places/ context in it's original form it was introduced earlier with. This leaves the movie composer/director with way more creativity in their decisions, less restrictions and the chance to actually add something audially memorable and enhancing to the story.


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## MikeLG (Jun 25, 2018)

IMO silence is just as important as the music itself. I'm not sure if this is how it works, but I feel like a film's composer should have a say in where NOT to put music.

Wall to wall music has always bothered me, the story needs some room to breath.


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## Bill the Lesser (Jun 27, 2018)

It's cultural and something you just have to do. Otherwise people will be plugging in their earbuds to fill in the quiet.


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## Vik (Jun 27, 2018)

Not sure if this is something new... I made music for a documentary almost 20 years ago which had 28 minutes of music - in a 52 minute long film. I liked that decision.


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## tmhuud (Jun 27, 2018)

Can you IMAGINE a time as in when for “Coma”, Jerry Goldsmith told Michael Crichton “I want to hold the music for 28 minutes, so that when it comes in, it will be effective.” 

And wow, was he right. When Genevieve Bujold is in that parking lot all by herself at night you can FEEL the tension and vulnerability set in. It was like HERE, the movie begins.


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## GtrString (Jun 27, 2018)

If it is wall-to-wall, Debussy might not agree that movies are full of music, rather they are full of sound.


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