composers who score soundtracks for movies and TV shows. They have to be both intimately familiar with a great many styles of music and endlessly versatile, in order to come up with scores that are evocative without being overpowering, that lift the visuals above the banal into the unforgettable, that are the ultimate mood-setters for any piece of visual entertainment.
A bad score almost does more to damage the quality of a movie or television show in my mind than bad acting, bad scripting or bad direction can do by themselves. And a good one can do just the opposite; bring the mediocre up to par, make something that is good great.
A good portion of my music collection—about 15-20%, if we want to be obnoxiously precise—is made up of soundtracks. And I’ve been listening to and buying some more quite a lot lately, so this topic has been on my mind.
So when my sister wrote on her blog recently about Hans Zimmer’s score for the new Pirates of the Caribbean II movie, I thought I’d crystallize my thoughts on the subject here.
While I think Zimmer is talented, I’m not actually a big fan of his. He has an unfortunate tendency to overpower the scene with his score; his scores tend to be overblown and cheesy, to tell you how you should be feeling. And as that kind of thing takes me out of my absorption with whatever I’m watching, that’s a big negative point. Hans Zimmer did the score for Blood+, an animated TV show that premiered in Japan last fall, and I had this same problem with it. It often tended to overpower the mood of the scene, and really took away from the dramatic impact of the show.
By way of contrast, consider Lisa Gerrard’s score for Michael Mann’s The Insider, or for Whale Rider. Both were simply stunning. Beautiful, haunting, but never, never overpowering or taking center stage above what you saw on screen.
Consider also Michael Nyman’s score for The Piano—you will recall if you know me that I hated this movie—while the movie was flat-out terrible, the score was nothing short of sublime, and managed to lift the movie out of the morass of its self-importance for a few brief moments.
My favorite soundtrack composers, bar none, are both Japanese. Yoko Kanno and Hajime Mizoguchi are both immensely talented composers who are big names in the Japanese animation industry. And no wonder. Everything they respectively touch seems to turn to gold. They both are able to move between the classical (Escaflowne, Jin-Roh), jazz (Cowboy Bebop), electronica (Ghost in the Shell, TeXhnolyze) and pop (all of the above) genres with no apparent effort. Every time I listen to an example of either of the composers’ work, I am struck all over again by how very talented they both are. If you haven’t heard any of the soundtracks I’ve mentioned above, I highly recommend doing so at the earliest opportunity.