Hello everyone!

[Bob the Composer]

<BR>Hi there! My name's Bob. I'm 18, and I moderate a Beethoven Forum. (it's attached to the site I listed as my home page; feel free to drop by if you like, we could use some new faces). I just discovered this forum, and it looks pretty good. <P>Getting to the subject of my post, I noticed a lot of discussion goes on here about film music. I feel this is a wonderful kind of music that can embrace many styles, and hope to be able to write film scores myself one day along with concert compositions. This goal has been encouraged by my recent acquisition of a Book entitled The Score by Michael Schelle. In it, he interviews many composers, such as Elmer Bernstein and Daniel Licht, among others. The interviews are very insightful, and I have learned a lot from them. Has anyone else read this book? I'd like to hear what you think of it.<P>Bob the Composer

[~Leslie]

<BR>Hi Bob, : )<P>I haven't read "The Score", but film scoring intrigues me mainly because it has to function on so many different levels. <P>I lifted this for you from another site:<BR>**********************************<BR>the challenge is to come up with something that sounds inevitable, that sounds like it unmistakeably belongs to that moment in the film. of course, that "moment" is a concoction, literally - and part of the fun of the process is the one of construction - there are major architechtural decisions that need to be made quite early on that are as mathematical as they are musical - but this infrastucture must remain invisible. in fact, for a large part of the time, the music itself must remain somewhat invisible - or at least transparent. <BR>***********************************<BR>Transparent though it might be, I am always impressed by how a good film score can often stand on it's own, and yet still trigger images of the movie within a mind, long after the film has been viewed. <P>~

[DR MIDI]

There are also some other good books on the subject of film scoring..."ON THE TRACK" and "LISTENING TO MOVIES", both by Fred Karlin. You might want to check-out these two books which take a close look at some very notable filmscores and include bios and actual excerpts from specific scores throughout. I also go to the Internet Movie DataBase (http://www.imdb.com) to look up a movie's soundtrack composer. There I can also link to his other soundtracks as well. Also, if you really like soundtracks, you might want to check into the Telarc series of recordings by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra: Classics of the Silver Screen, Star Tracks I & II, Hollywood's Greatest Hits I & II, Time Warp, Movie Love Themes, Chiller, Fantastic Journey and others in this series. Many of the performances are even better than the original scores ("Back To The Future" is a good example).

[Bob the Composer]

Thank you, Leslie and DR. MIDI. I shall look these up.<P>Bob

[~Leslie]

Hey yr welcome Bob. <P>Dr. Midi, I taught guitar at Munro Music in East Northport. Did a few jazz gigs at the Sail n Ale, is it still there? One time Billy Joel walked in while we were playin, good thing I didn't know who he was back then! LOL! Talk about droppin' beats and forgetting the changes.......... <P>Anyhoo, I just read something rather funny in an egroups forum about how the "air guitar" gene, located in chromosome Y of 99% of caucasian males, mutates into an "air violin" when these men reach the age of 50. <P>After contributing to these Beethoven discussion rooms<BR>for awhile, I'm not so sure anymore. My impression is there are alot more in the under 30 set than we gave this genre credit for.<BR>Hope springs eternal. ~#:^ <P>And you guys, pls don't get too rankled when I bash these pop performers. I've always been drawn to complex music, and it's really nothing personal, at all. <P>~~~~~~xxxxx's