Re: Bias Towards Television Scores

On Mar 25, 12:28 pm, The Scarlet Parsnip
<The_Scarlet_Pars...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 25 Mar 2007 09:15:45 -0700, "Jaquandor" <jaquan...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Mar 25, 7:23 am, "gumdrops1" <gregoria...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Do you feel this way towards music for television?

What scores from television do you have in your collection?

The nature of TV scoring, with everything of necessity being
punctuated
by commercial breaks, makes them harder in my ears to musically
blossom. I don't own much TV music at all, except for that wonderful
"Truth and the Light" album of X-Files music (which was wonderfully
edited and where the inclusion of dialog actually enhances the
soundscape),

I just wrote that... maybe not as well, but.... (***)

the Millennium music released to iTunes a few years back (a friend
burned me a copy), and -- geez, that's about it, aside from some main
TV theme tunes that appear on various collections.

I have no issue with the fact that orchestras aren't used. I
understand
the reasons why, and frankly, it's a dumb argument anyway. Not all
music needs to be performed by a ninety-musician orchestra. There's
a reason why solo piano pieces, string quartets, brass quintets, and
small jazz combos exist. Same deal with synth music.

The 1960's THE AVENGERS, from England no less, was unique in scoring,
for the most part, each episode individually (American TV just reused
stuff)... and it had a wide variety of instrumentation... harpsichord,
xylophone (for action sequences), horns, strings, percusion... all
very inventive and ahead of its time.

But generally TV sound doesn't call for BIG music. It is only today
that we have these great sound systems... but crappy TV programs with
no music. 24, Lost? There's nothing there. ANd junk like Grey's
Anatomy ends the same way with a pop song montage and philosophical
dribble.

Ah, Grey's -- what a fun trashy soap opera that is. And I could look
at Kate
Walsh all day. Sigh...but the music tends to be crap, with
"underscore"
that's all plucky comedic stuff that's a carbon copy of what you hear
on
"Desperate Housewives" and the pop-song montage you mention, which
is a device that is (a) terribly overused on TV today, and (b) almost
always
better handled on Scrubs, anyway.


For some reason, Sean Callery's work on 24 is highly regarded, and
I've
never really understood why. It gets the job done, but I've always
found it
tuneless atmospherics except in the biggest of scenes, when he gets
to cut loose a bit. I haven't watched "Lost" since season one, but the
music
there made the same impression on me, which is to say, not much. But
then, Lost itself made little impression on me. Watching the slow
realization
dawn on that show's legion of followers is kind of sad to behold,
really; three
or for episodes into the first season I knew already that there was no
way
the producers were ever going to be able to wrap anything up in a
satisfying
way.

.