Do you ever wonder why you can’t remember any of the music from the blockbuster movie you just saw — or, for that matter, why so many movie scores sound the same these days? You’re not alone. There are three culprits: temp music, technology, and astronomical budgets — and they’re all interrelated. Join us as we take a deep dive into the evolution of the modern action movie score.
Temp Tracking
Using temp music in movies is not a new phenomenon; temp tracking a film is a practice as old as motion picture sound itself. Although John Williams’s iconic score for the first Star Wars installment (Episode IV: A New Hope) is, for the most part, eminently memorable (and hummable), temp tracks were used for the entire film. Before Williams came onboard, George Lucas wasn’t even sure he wanted original music in his sci-fi saga. His original concept was to simply use classical music, as Stanley Kubrick had done with 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is why some of the original music Williams ended up writing so closely echoes classical pieces such as Gustav Holst’s The Planets and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
Proven Formulas
While there’s nothing inherently bad about using temp music, there are several pitfalls to beware of. When a director lives with temp music for a while and becomes, effectively, addicted to hearing it, it’s a problem. Does it even make sense to hire a composer — ostensibly to write original music — only to direct him or her to copy a temp track? It only starts to make sense once you realize that film music is not about originality; it’s about new ways of working with proven formulas. Blockbuster films are huge financial risks because they cost a fortune to make. The bigger the budget, it seems, the more risk-averse the producers.
Shrinking Pool of Influences
Another issue is that the pool of influences has shrunk in the last two decades. Instead of temping a film with a broad range of sources, many current blockbuster films are temped with music from other, recent blockbusters — which helps to explain the preponderance of pounding, rhythm-based symphonic scoring (and the notable absence of memorable melodies) we’ve heard in the last decade’s spate of action movies. The genesis of that style can be squarely pinned on technology — and on one contemporary composer in particular.
The Zimmer Effect
Perhaps no composer has had a greater influence on modern film music than Hans Zimmer, who spearheaded a new generation of composers who use computers to write music. Coming up in the 1980s when sequencing software was in its infancy, Zimmer used a hodgepodge of available synthesizers glued together with MIDI and SMPTE time code to cobble together his early scores. For his first Hollywood film, 1988’s Rain Man, Zimmer employed steel drums and the Fairlight CMI (a high-end sampling synthesizer of the era) to compose a score that, in parts, would not sound out of place in an episode of Miami Vice. The next year, Zimmer’s score for Driving Miss Daisy included a disparate array of synths and samplers. Both films won the Academy Award for Best Picture. West German-born Hans Zimmer’s Hollywood career was off to an auspicious start.
MIDI and Computers
By the mid-’90s, with the computer power to make feasible software instruments not yet a reality, Zimmer had assembled a team of composers that was busy cranking out MIDI-sequenced television and movie scores that utilized dozens of rackmount sample-playback synths such as Roland’s JV-1080. For many big-budget motion pictures, the samples were ultimately replaced with real orchestras, but the scores for lower-budget films and prime-time TV shows were 100% synthetic. Producers must have been giddy as they calculated the money saved by not having to pay professional musicians for all those sessions!
The Braam Inception
Composing on a computer makes your music lean in different directions. Or, at least, it can. The intricate, driving rhythms that form the backbone of action films are amazingly easy (some would say too easy) to build in digital audio workstations (DAWs), which fundamentally facilitate looping techniques. Add this to the fact that, early on, the easiest sounds to sample were short, sharp ones such as percussion, brass stabs, and rhythmic strings — and this perhaps explains why we’ve had two decades of driving percussion and heavy brass in film music. We saw this trend reach a feverish (some would say ridiculous) peak with the “braam,” a massive, brass-heavy rhythmic construct forever associated with Christopher Nolan’s 2010 dreamscape psycho-thriller Inception. Zimmer, who scored Inception, is credited/blamed (along with others) for the invention of the braam; although precedents existed in trailers from Transformers in 2007 and District 9 in 2009.
Big Budgets, Safe Choices
Judging from the big-budget blockbusters and countless trailers that have come out since, Big Brass is not going away any time soon. Braams are hugely impactful, and they cut through anything, grabbing attention deficit-addled audiences desensitized by years of high-decibel theatrical abuse. But musically, they’re just a more intense, computer-enhanced version of the ostinatos Holst orchestrated for The Planets a century earlier. So, it’s a proven formula, and remember — producers like proven formulas. Because Budgets. 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (also scored by Mr. Zimmer) cost a cool $378.5 million to make. Happily, it grossed $410.6 million, so the bet paid off. They don’t always.
The Elements of Suspense and Action
The suspense and action cues written by film composers Henry Mancini and Lalo Schifrin in earlier decades contained the same elements as today’s blockbuster scores — disturbing textures, percussive hits, big brass, driving beats, etc. — yet they reflected the musical sensibilities (and technological limitations) of their era. Going back even further to the scores Bernard Herrmann wrote for Hitchcock films, we hear that driving percussion and discordant orchestral instruments have long been deployed to enhance and intensify the conveyance of simmering unease, urgency, imminent threat, or impending doom in a scene.
Franchise Fever
It’s instructive to consider that Lalo Schifrin famously composed the main title for the original Mission: Impossible TV series of the 1960s, and the theme lives on now that Tom Cruise has turned MI into a blockbuster feature-film franchise. Not that these movies are not incredible action flicks in their own right, but it only goes to show that proven formulas are alive and well. Because Budgets. Mission: Impossible — Fallout was made for a relatively paltry $178 million, but it raked in $791.1 million at the box office. Quite the payday, and with a main title theme that was written in 1966!
Filmmaking Revolution
It wasn’t only music production that was upended by the computer revolution. In the early ’90s, Avid’s computer-based Media Composer video editing system was making inroads into movie and TV editing suites, where it completely reinvented picture editing, streamlining the arduous process of assembling an edit into a series of mouse clicks and keyboard commands. Dissolves and other visual effects no longer required sending the film out to an expensive optical house and waiting a week to get it back. As it replaced the splicing block, non-linear editing freed directors to try out radically different edits — knowing that if they didn’t like it, getting back was as simple as hitting Command-Z on the computer keyboard. As you might suspect, the power of non-linear editing could either be a tremendous workflow boost or a colossal time soak, as editing crews dove down new rabbit holes, in many instances, only to circuitously end up — hours, days, or weeks later — with what they had before.
Non-linear picture editing, along with computer-based scoring and sound design, allows directors, composers, and sound effects editors to try out different approaches. Rather than writing with a piano and a pencil, working with an arranger and a copyist, and delivering sheet music to the scoring stage for an orchestra to perform; computer-based composers can have their music vetted by the director as they work. The director can request changes, if desired, and continue to edit the film at the same time. Conversely, composers can quickly adjust cues in their DAW to accommodate new picture edits. It’s a brave new world.
Brave New World
Faster, cheaper, and more efficient; computers have revolutionized the filmmaking process. The inherent drawbacks (if indeed, they are perceived as such) are surely a small price to pay; while the advantages have enabled out-of-this-world visuals and sonics that could not be produced any other way. Current excesses aside, the reality is that there is nothing about computer-based film scoring that is intrinsically creativity-stifling. Au contraire — it’s all in how you approach your craft.
Leveraging ever-increasing advancements in computer power, virtual instruments are incredibly realistic these days, while subscription services like EastWest ComposerCloud give composers access to any and all sounds they are likely to need to ace any scoring job. Meanwhile, audio interfaces are better and more affordable than ever, making it easy to supplement your samples with live musicians for adding the crowning professional touch to your scores. John Williams has said that he was, fortunately, so busy working that he never had the time to adopt a computer-based workflow. But the vast majority of composers today use DAW-based workflows — and for the most part, their work is the better for it. Computers have taken over, and there’s no going back.