James Guymon and Dr. Dennis Packard, Philosophy

Since its earliest beginnings film has been the subject of intense philosophic study. It has naturally followed that the industry has become a playground/battlefield for the creatively thoughtful, where a person’s rationale is often more important than her finished product. It is this environment that has nurtured a subculture wherein every successful director is a philosopher of sorts.

Surprisingly, however, score composers have thus far successfully avoided such toil by the oldest of all rhetorical misdirections – mystifying their craft. This tactic has made communication between directors and composers awkward and difficult, and surely has compromised the cohesive solidarity of many a promising film. This paper will lay a foundation for film composers whereon they may build their own personalized philosophical model. Within a structure such as this, artists of different cinematic disciplines could communicate well-formed ideas efficiently.

My research was conducted while apprenticing for a successful and thoughtful film composer and simultaneously working on hired projects of my own. As such, the conclusions reached come from practical experience in the medium rather than scholarly research. With this in mind, the reader is requested to grant a charitable reading; to turn a blind eye to the absence of certain scholastic conventions – references, graphs, test results, statistics, and so forth – understanding that this is a paper of a different kind.

First, we must discuss beauty as my research has uncovered it. Only people are beautiful – never objects. Surely no canvas or pigment harbors tiny magic beauty particles. Consider the child who marvels at the winged water buffalo in the sky. Of course, it is just a cloud whose form is loosely reminiscent of a four-legged barrel. The cloud is not the beautiful thing, but instead, the child. Beautiful people see their own intrinsic nature reflected off of the world around them. Thus, music is an echo of inner art.

Yet, whose inner art does it expose – the composer’s or the listener’s? Contrary to conventional thought, music, and any other art form, is an expression of the virtuosity of the listener. Thus, the composer’s craft is not an egotistical endeavor justified under the guise of “self-expression,” but rather an elucidation of the human condition – an invitation for the audience to participate in its own depiction. From this it is clear that a “note selector” who holds the masses in intellectual contempt is bereft of artistic merit – completely insufficient as a composer, and devoid of the inner beauty requisite to truly comprehend the audience – the appropriate subject of joint portraiture. Thus, he becomes an exclusive painter of self-portraits wherein form and likeness are alien, for what is more unfamiliar than a man selectively separate from all others? Since if there were any beauty in the work it would be in a person, and no beauty is perceived by the audience, and since the composer has indicated a severe lack of recognition of beauty’s standard, it can be inductively inferred that if any art were to be made by him, it would likely be of mediocre caliber. Therefore, the genius of the composer must include the ability to capture some essence of humanity while evoking an autobiographical response from the audience.

Prerequisite, then, to being an effective composer is charity for the audience. (Yes, the same charity requested at the beginning of this paper.) Since beauty exists in the listener, the more responsibility for interpretation that is placed upon him the more aesthetic effect that results. Consider still-life and abstract art. The former might depict exactly a bowl of grapes whereas the latter might consist of seemingly random lines and patches of color. The bowl of grapes demands, and expects, little of the museum go-er. Likewise, the art fan can only feel a marginal degree of pleasure from the piece. There is no room for personal interpretation. It is a bowl of grapes on a table. Surely, a great deal of respect for technique is likely, but this is an entirely different response. Conversely, consider the abstract painting mentioned. It, like the cloud, demands much of the viewer. It is extremely trusting and optimistic relative to the creativity and artistic sensitivity of the critic. As a direct result, the audience gets personally involved and sees in the piece as much beauty as it has resources to draw upon. It is my assertion that such resources are much more stocked than most artists would believe. Thus, the abstract painting has much more potential beauty than the still-life, for the first is limited to the technique of a single man, whereas the other is limited only by the imagination of the human spirit.

So, what of music, often considered the most abstract of art forms, and film? A common theme in film theory is one of showing versus telling. Characters are well developed, and therefore believable, only when consistent yet unique interpretations are present. This is in contrast to films in which the characters beat the audience over the head with their attitudes, leaving no room for question or speculation out of distrust of layman judgment.

This is true of a movie’s score as well. Often a composer will brag that he has the ability to make the audience feel whatever the director has in mind. This auteur approach is deceptively impressive, for it is clearly egotistical meandering of the aforementioned sort – mediocre at best.

Yet, this is the very stance most composers maintain, at least the ones doing ‘C’ and ‘B-list’ work. The primary conclusion of this study is that composers must find a way to allow the audience into the score, trust their (the audience’s) musicality, and tolerate the potentiality of unique interpretation while avoiding obscure presentation. This can be done through careful handling of the melody/harmony relationship, where the score acts as a kind of accompaniment to a melody the audience provides on its own. Also effective is a disciplined crafting of modulation towards cadence, where standard progressions are maintained, guaranteeing a degree of consistency in interpretation, while flexibility is achieved through orchestration and tasteful melodic variation.

Ironically, scores that accomplish this evoke more from the listener than evokateuristic ones. In addition to this benefit, the composer cashes in on the coherency principle, for the music-as-cattle- prod strategy often trades consistency of the whole for the satisfying of short-term needs by sporadic use of musical devices.

The question at present is how to further accomplish this with specific techniques that can be categorized and refined. Much could be done. Perhaps a fine-tuning of this part of the theory will be made possible by another ORCA scholarship. This is of relatively little consequence, however, since the important thing is for composers to begin thinking about these issues more seriously. The author trusts that when this happens the bar will raise, and film and its music will improve.