Promotional image for the 2024 “Connecting Chords Music Festival,” where the Silent But Deadly ensemble performed original scores to silent films at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum.
In Tuesday’s (11/12) Telegraph (U.K.), the newspaper’s classical music critic and film critic evaluate the pros and cons of orchestras performing music composed for film. Telegraph Classical Music Critic Ivan Hewett: “Everywhere you look in orchestral venues, film music concerts are mushrooming in scale and number…. Peer a little closer and you’ll spot small ant-like figures struggling to get away before they’re crushed under the chariot’s wheels. They’re the old-style classical composers…. The ousting of genuine classical music by the shiny simulacrum offered by film composers has nothing to do with aesthetic values, and everything to do with cash … Film music is fine in its place, and that place is—at the cinema. I’m as big a sucker for a lush melody by Erich Korngold … as the next man. And I love Bernard Herrmann’s fascinatingly over-heated score for Vertigo—when I’m sitting in front of it on the big screen. I was chilled and intrigued by Hildur Guðnadóttir’s music, too—but again, only when watching The Joker…. Film music has now acquired the cultural heft that classical music used to have. Its ever-increasing prominence in the programs of orchestras worldwide, and in the schedules of broadcasters … is evidence of this.” Telegraph Film Critic Tim Robey: “Film music has all but defined my relationship to cinema … The first CD I ever bought … was Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Alien (1979), before I’d even seen the film. The forbidding textures of those ten tracks created uncanny images in my head; Goldsmith’s dissonances spoke eerily of space, isolation and unholy terror. That score, like most of my favorite scores, is a work of art even detached from its cinematic context. I would kill to hear the whole thing played by an orchestra … The ever-growing popularity of film-music concerts, and airtime on the radio for these composers, is only to be lamented if the diet’s too narrow or homogenized … The more airtime, in an ideal world, the wider the pool of material…. It’s fair to say that a good chunk of film music is functional hackwork at best—there’s at least as many Salieris as Mozarts in the field. But this only makes exceptional achievement stand out more…. Prokofiev and Shostakovich … cottoned onto the medium’s potential in the 1930s and 1940s, and treated it no less seriously than ballet or opera…. [Film scores] deserve an afterlife beyond the screen.”
