It seemed that success was never hard to come by for composer
Henry Mancini. Before his death in 1994, he left his mark on
countless classic films, contributing to the Hollywood pantheon
everything from the tenor sax riff of “The Pink
Panther” theme song to “Moon River” from
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
Yet with all his successes in the film scoring industry,
composer Henry Mancini was aware of its highly competitive,
cutthroat nature. Prior to his death in 1994, Mancini established
the Henry Mancini Scholarship for the Composition of Music for
Motion Pictures and Television Films to assist aspiring young music
composers studying at UCLA. Past winners have included composers
Christopher Young (“The Shipping News,”
“Swordfish”) and Don Davis (“The Matrix
Trilogy”).
But even with the extra support, the nature of the industry
means that soon enough, that scholarship could become completely
obsolete.
The scholarship’s diminishing importance has nothing to do
with its rewards ($5,000 and the opportunity to collaborate with
filmmakers and other composition professors). Rather, it has
everything to do with the changing field it attempts to promote.
Studios don’t need specialized composers as they once had,
and with an increasing desire to play it safe in an area already
more competitive than the acting business, the scholarship’s
moral and financial support does little to keep an aspiring
composer afloat.
“In this industry it’s all about rejection,”
said 2003 award recipient Albert Chang.
It’s no surprise that music students turn to film scoring
as a career path. In its 2000 Salary and Rate Survey, Film Music
Magazine estimated that in any single big-budget film feature
produced by a top studio with well-recognized actors or a
well-recognized director, professional film composers can make
upward of $1 million.
Major film composers are also afforded the Hollywood limelight.
Mancini became a pop icon after the box office success of
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” eventually setting the
record for most awards obtained by any pop artist: four Oscars and
20 Grammys.
But now film composers are not only competing with each other,
they are also competing with pop musicians due to a shift in the
age demographic of mass consumers.
“All you have to do is listen to anything by Justin
Timberlake and compare that to anything of Henry Mancini’s,
and you’ll realize right away, it’s not only that
we’re in a different era, but we’re in a different
generation,” UCLA composition lecturer Paul Chihara said.
With their names alone, pop musicians are attracting younger
audiences and contributing to the commercial success of films, and
film studios are taking note. Movie soundtracks now consist of
songs instead of film scores.
The shift from trained film composers to pop musicians has
further been provoked by the rise of MP3s in the last five years.
Pop musicians are finding Hollywood a more lucrative business than
the recording industry.
But it would be unfair to label the shift as a degeneration in
the film industry. What’s more important is that the schools
have been struggling to keep up. Film composition is still
classified as a field of study for the music department. But many
successful composers will admit their jobs will soon be to act as
technical consultants for pop musicians. Film scoring isn’t a
creative endeavor anymore, but a trade, and university-trained film
composers are losing the upper hand.
“I’ve been told by a couple of agents that the
future of film music will be that trained guys are nothing more
than support people to those who come from a pop world ““
(those) who have the sounds and the grooves, but don’t have
the technical knowledge to make it work for the picture,”
Young said.
For the student film composer, a college education in film
scoring technology is more important than a degree, especially in
recent years with the addition of digital technology. A dramatic
transformation in film scoring over the last 20 years has been a
result of new samplers and low-cost digital recording and editing
programs like Pro Tools.
The shift has been fostered by the lower cost of recording
digitally and also, according to Chihara, because this technology
creates a sound that the consumer majority or young people equate
with contemporary music.
The composition program of UCLA’s music department has
been fighting to stay updated with all the new technology. The 109
course series, a beginning-level, one-year undergraduate course
that taught students how to write music for film has been
defunct for a decade due to the course’s outdated curriculum
for film-scoring technology. And with so much machinery, composers
are finding it harder to exercise creativity.
“It’s so complex now, dealing with all the hardware
and software issues and all the changes from quarter to quarter
really that it gets to have too much emphasis on (technological)
tools,” said UCLA visiting associate professor of film
production, Scott Brownlee.
Paradoxically, the new technology has allowed film studios to
economize their methods of adding music to film. Major film studios
are restricting the innovation and experimentation of composers for
financial security, opting instead for a bulletproof, standard, no
frills score. Directors now insert “temp” or temporary
music into a film, and in the last stages of post-production will
ask the hired composer to create a score similar to it.
“People who make the film know what they want and often
will draw on what is standardly used for that given scene,”
composition Professor Roger Bourland said.
With “temp” music, directors present composers with
a fill-in-the-blank sheet of paper rather than a blank one. Film
scoring, in the traditional sense, and in Mancini’s sense, is
a dying art.
“I’ll probably get staked by my peers for saying
this, but, yeah, there’s a certain degree of
stagnation,” said Young, current president of the Film Music
Society. “And it has nothing to do with a lack of talent
here. It just has to do with a lack of support that composers get
in trying to do something different.”
The film scoring business, industry insiders will tell you, is a
product-based business. As Bourland says, whether a director hires
a composer is solely based on whether that composer can accomplish
what the director wants.
“They just want to know if you can get the job
done,” Bourland said.
What’s more, with newer, user-friendly technology,
creating film music is becoming easier for pop musicians. Pop
musicians may soon be able to write songs for film without any
collaboration with trained film composers. The demand for trained
film composers will go down when their technological skills are no
longer needed.
“With the computers and synthesizers, it doesn’t
require that you have spent the time in school,” Young said.
“You can at your finger tips create an orchestra, not really
having a tremendous understanding of what you’re actually
doing. But up come the sounds, and you put together something that
sounds good and that’s A-OK.”
In-demand pop musicians create songs heavily laced with
electronic and synthesized sounds for film. Like Mancini’s
jazz-influenced scores, the popular music in movies today strays
from the European orchestral tradition, but now it is at the
expense of job availability and creativity for trained film
composers.
“Sometimes there are people who really don’t have
talent,” Bourland said, “but have so much drive and are
so aggressive that they end up getting work because they are so
good at promoting themselves. Other people are tremendously
talented (but) are terrible at promoting themselves (and therefore)
don’t work.”
Today, directors simply lack any knowledge of film composition
and, according to Brownlee, film students learn
“virtually nothing” about film scoring. So for now,
with the added competition of pop musicians, aspiring composers
will have to adopt the “if you can’t beat them, join
them” mentality if they want to play any role in
the industry.
“You’re not going to beat them no matter how much
you bad-mouth it,” Young said.