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Trends in modern film scoring

I do feel a lack of melody is becoming the trend in this era of music. Composers have sort of become a mixture of electronic music producers, sound designers and orchestral composers. But I also wonder if it is the studios hiring composers that are pushing for this style of music, composers opting for this style due to its prevalence, or a combination of the two? In any case, to break or change a trend, it ultimately needs to come from composers pushing back on or suggesting alternatives to what is currently fashionable.

Anyways, with that all said, I think the music as heard in Tenet is a good example of what's popular in music today.
 
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Pier said:
What about minor seconds?
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Using Stravinsky-like rhythmic ostinati like Williams did for Jaws is one thing, whereas this craze of repeating a minor third the way Zimmer did in Batman Begins (fine btw when he did it in 2005; not fine that millions of other people have copied it) is entirely another thing.

Goldsmith also used rhythmic ostinati but would add or subtract beats or change the intervals. These days it’s like a locomotive that is on a track to nowhere. No change in meter, rhythmic division, or texture. Just a repeating figure that doesn’t add any shape or dynamism to the piece it accompanies. And it’s all at 120bpm.

An excellent example of rhythmic ostinati is Don Davis’ incredibly work on The Matrix series. There are some incredible driving figures but contrasted with advanced harmony and polyrhythms (not to mention colourful orchestrations). So to make it clear- Ostinati aren’t the problem. It’s the people who use them haphazardly which has created this syndrome.
 
dcoscina said:
Using Stravinsky-like rhythmic ostinati like Williams did for Jaws is one thing, whereas this craze of repeating a minor third the way Zimmer did in Batman Begins (fine btw when he did it in 2005; not fine that millions of other people have copied it) is entirely another thing.

Goldsmith also used rhythmic ostinati but would add or subtract beats or change the intervals. These days it’s like a locomotive that is on a track to nowhere. No change in meter, rhythmic division, or texture. Just a repeating figure that doesn’t add any shape or dynamism to the piece it accompanies. And it’s all at 120bpm.

An excellent example of rhythmic ostinati is Don Davis’ incredibly work on The Matrix series. There are some incredible driving figures but contrasted with advanced harmony and polyrhythms (not to mention colourful orchestrations). So to make it clear- Ostinati aren’t the problem. It’s the people who use them haphazardly which has created this syndrome.
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I was joking, but thanks for your reply. Very interesting read!
 
I think the audience drives the music. Not the other way around. Film and TV show score composers make the music that will appeal to the audience that watches it. Those old Hitchcock films and scores were made during the post swing / jazz bebop era. No internet, no cell phones, no social media audience. The slew of netflix action and horror shows are for an audience that never knew a world without internet, games, even social media -- they sure as hell will not click with a score that sounds like it was made for an 80s Merchant ivory production.
 
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Pier said:
I agree with all the trends you've listed, but I think orchestral music (or at least orchestral inspired music) is still the predominant form of film music.
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You make a good point that the orchestra is still a part of many scores, but I would argue that these are mainly hybrid scores.

So I should probably add 'hybrid scoring' to the top of the list. This is still a big part of the 'modern' sound (at least in Hollywood).
 
marclawsonmusic said:
Thanks for adding literally 0 to the discussion.
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If this is a recurring frustration, you can:

1.click [any] user name (to the left of a comment/post)
2. at the bottom of the new window, click 'Ignore'.

Helps to save bandwidth, both literal and mental! :)
 
kmaster said:
If this is a recurring frustration, you can:

1.click [any] user name (to the left of a comment/post)
2. at the bottom of the new window, click 'Ignore'.

Helps to save bandwidth, both literal and mental! :)
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Thanks, Kent! I am policing this thread more aggressively than usual because it could easily spiral into chaos. So far, it's been a productive discussion (at least to me) so I am hoping to keep it that way. :emoji_thumbsup:
 
I think the sky is the limit with musical instrumentation available to us today. In the past, orchestra was used because that was the widest sonic palette of timbres available at the time. Today we have all manner of sampling and synthesis and extremely wide sonic palette.

Film scoring should not really about trying to craft some musical work, it is about supporting the story according to the vision of the film’s director. From a pure artistic point of view thst is the reason the score exists at all. This could be in the form of classic melody based orchestra or could be droning dissonant synth filters or dreadfully boring and repetitive figures of any kind; according to the feeling the director wants to come out.

I think these days just about every possible musical treatment is fair game and if the director is getting the emotional story support desired then it is a success. Of course melodic orchestra is still the right thing in certain situations and the wrong thing in other situations and directors have their own opinion that fills a big grey area in between.

In my view there is unfortunately a hard reality about budgets and film producers have sought out electronic scores, percussive groove beds, etc as a means to save money. Lesser skilled composers have done very creative things with a few synths that made the director happy for a fraction of the cost. It remains a debatable point whether in some cases a more traditional melody based orch score would have created something bigger then life and better in some way. Melodic orch scoring has been around for nearly 100 years and there is a tradition in it that I don’t think is going away forever. Bu on the other hand that tradition also brings in many emotional prejudices based on previous works, so many people are trying to go outside the box to avoid that and bring in authentic feeling in a different way.

I have heard robotic ostinato based music that i considered dreadful to listen to, it in a way that also established a dreadful feeling and maybe the director was going for exactly that. I think some films are dabbling with concepts about quantum physics,time space distortions and various forms of nihilism that challenge our romantic notions of the meaning of life. These boring and robotic ostinatos then become a kind of anti-romantic machine-like thing that just pulls our senses into some kind of emotional place devoid of classic romanticism. And that may be the point.

I abhor with a capital A, the idea that music should follow current trends because that puts the music before the storytelling. I also am sad to see melodic scoring go away because after all i am a hopeless romantic.
 
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I'm hearing in some media a shift towards smaller string ensembles, even just solo strings, paired with effects and synths. I am thinking of Sicario, Joker, Underwater, Dunkirk, Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019 VG); these scores lay less emphasis on brass and woodwind (not to say there is none.)
 
marclawsonmusic said:
But it seems the industry is more interested in storytelling ability than musical prowess. Chernobyl was very effective scoring, even if it wasn't musical in a traditional sense.
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At a certain point, there's only so much storytelling you can do when you either barely use actual notes at all or you use the same 2-3 chord progressions in every single track you make. Film music is often little more than a four-chord pop instrumental arranged with orchestral sample libraries at this point. Of course that's fine sometimes, but I'd love to hear some semblance of a wider harmonic palette once in a while.
 
This is clearly dating myself plus it is recommended one treat it as a comment from the peanut gallery:

The first time I felt music came alive in a movie/play was Jesus Christ Superstar. What had been a dead genre (religious music -- at least to my teeny-bopper ears) suddenly came alive. The movie was cool; the music was bigger than the the movie as I regularly heard its songs on the local radio; Friday nights the whole LP was played on radio. "Hair" would have been the other example as bands (schools and pro) played charts from both productions.

It's certainly no desert scene now; however, the patient could stand some defibrillation: an Andrew-Llyod-Weber young gun to inject such interest into the film industry so its music spills outwards to the youth-teen-average_Joe listening worlds.

Happened before--it'll happen again.
 
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