Titan Line Music

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Since attending the AMCL meeting last month there have been quite a few questions rattling around in my head – and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, given the amount of chatter among my fellow SCORECasters both online and at studios, restaurants and coffee shops around town. Unfortunately podcast No. 24 failed to shed a great deal of meaningful light on the subject. And in fact, in many important ways I found it to be profoundly counterproductive. So I took a step back to consider and calibrate my thinking a bit. The general “vector” that I’ve been reading and hearing has been the following: In the past, the music making part of the film and television business was much better, and therefore the music was much better. And over the years both the conditions under which that music was produced and the resulting quality of the music has been undercut. You’ll even see some numbers on the AMCL site that echo that sentiment. Long ago=better; recent=worse; now=disaster. Simple and direct, it’s easy to grasp and difficult to argue against. Or is it?

As I spent more time considering this, I started “hearing echoes” of some earlier writings I had encountered while in school. I had received a research grant to study the work of Joseph Schillinger as part of a larger project. One of his more quixotic notions was the existence of a linear progression in art and music that paralleled the linearity of technological and cultural development. As each step is made along the way, previous models and philosophies are discarded in lieu of a newer, better replacement. Likewise, as the culture reached its zenith of development, so would the art – and from that zenith point the culture would cease to create *new* artwork and would be consumed solely with the creation and re-creation of art in its ultimate form. On a certain level it has a satisfying ring to it. Things have a beginning, middle and end – simple, direct, and easy to understand. And everywhere we see compelling evidence that Schillinger could be right. The most obvious example to our community is the practice of “sticking to the temp” that pervades every echelon of the business – fitting Schillinger’s definition of re-composition to a tee. The examples of orchestral works from the classical repertoire being ripped off in film and TV scores are too numerous to mention. Also in today’s music industry, you’ll see evidence of Schillinger’s prescience. In jazz circles, “standards” are constantly being worked over, and rock-and-roll classics get “covered” time and again. Of course orchestral music is certainly not immune. There are constant re-interpretations of the classical repertoire, many times discarding historical precedent on interpretation and sometimes even directly contradicting the express instructions of the composer. And finally, and perhaps the most “textbook” example – one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time is Wendy Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach”, a compendium of classic works re-imagined in an electronic medium. So Schillinger was on the money, right? Well, not necessarily.

This is something that nagged at me for some time, until it finally dawned on me – there are many (in fact, too many) important factors that must be discarded in order for his line of logic to hold up. You don’t have to go far into the music history texts to start showing cracks in the edifice. Re-composition is not a recent phenomenon, in theory or in practice. In the Medieval period, the parody mass was an essential component to the development of music (the humorously evident use of bawdy popular songs in certain liturgical settings notwithstanding). In further opposition to discarding the past, the entire precept of the Classical period was to re-capture what they considered to be the purity and essence of ancient Greek art and philosophy. And then there was the influence of Nadia Boulanger exhorting Aaron Copland and other American composers to mine their own historical resources to re-discover new material for tonal composition. So in order for the straight-line model of musical development to be valid, you have to discard too much that’s essential to music while picking up certain ‘accidents of history’ to fill in the gaps in order for it to “make its own kind of sense”. Looking at the current dilemma confronting film and television composers today, I’m seeing many similarities (and familiar problems) in the postulates that have been presented so far.

This takes me back to another important resource that helped shape me as a college student – a paper by Fred Brooks entitled “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” which as you would expect discusses various topics in and around software design. One of the most striking points that Brooks makes is the importance of separating accidental problems from those that are essential to a system. His conclusions aside, those specific “tools” have become very important to me in helping understand large problems as a set of smaller issues that can be considered on their own merits, and dealt with or discarded accordingly. So let’s take a very high-level look at the history of film and television. If the model presented to us is to be believed, music in previous generations of film and television are necessarily better than anything produced in recent years. As far as I’m concerned, that’s fairly easy to knock down. I’ll see your original “Star Trek” theme and raise you the opening title from “Deep Space Nine”.  I’ll match the memorable tune from “The Andy Griffith Show” with the theme from Showtime’s “Dexter”. And I don’t care what you call out for orchestral themes in TV. I’m taking Snuffy Walden’s opening for “West Wing” against all comers. Do we really need to do this exercise for film, too? “Lord of the Rings”, “The Matrix”, “The Incredibles”, [insert name of anything that John Williams has scored] – even scores from slightly lesser-known films (and perhaps *especially* the lesser known films) like Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the “The 13^th Warrior”, James Horner’s work on “Legends of the Fall” – I could go on and on – and run the risk of running afoul of any great living composer by not naming them here. The general working conditions of composers today might be radically different than a generation ago, but I think that attempting to correlate any diminution in the quality of music production is dubious at best. Certainly, there’s a great deal of weak music going on air – that cannot be argued. But it strikes me as more of an accidental side-effect of the proliferation of channels and content. I don’t believe that music from Snuffy Walden would necessarily transform the viewing experience of the unscripted shows that air on MTV. I think that this whole line of logic is based on a convenient ignorance of the “filter of history”.

Now, let’s take a look at the larger picture, and I mean that literally. The film business runs decades longer than the TV biz – and so it begs the question: was it all peaches and cream until the composers lost their right to bargain collectively with the studios – then it was a steady vector downward? Well, not really. In fact there’s a really instructive historical example of the pratfalls of the film business, particularly in the context of dealing with the studios. United Artists was created in 1919 by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith (along with an attorney as a fifth partner) to in essence create a counter-balance to the control that the studios were exerting over the stars of their film productions. It can be argued as to whether it was a failure, but one thing cannot be argued – the outcome was certainly different than the founders had originally envisioned. The careers of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks didn’t survive the transition to pictures with sound, and it’s been written that Charlie Chaplin was set well enough financially by that time that his interest in his film commitments waned. So it could be said that both essential and accidental issues derailed their plan. It was an over-committed film slate and the advent of sound in film that sidelined the first generation of United Artists.  But UA rebounded, and there are likewise several “golden ages” of film and television that have come and gone that show the industry as more of a roller-coaster ride than a speed run on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

So from my perspective the real challenge here is not to dumb-down the way we view the situation in order to “justify our plight” (whatever that might be). The *real* task is for composers to look at the broader situation dispassionately to separate the essential problems from those that are accidental. And likewise, for those situations that are accidental to our situation, separate those that must be dealt with from those that can be safely ignored or discarded. That was one of the important lessons from Fred Brooks’ later work, “The Mythical Man-Month”. There are times where ‘accidents’ that, when confronted, lead to essential portions of the solution, and I believe that some of those certainly exist here. The approach becomes something akin to the Covey quadrant model and can be a useful tool to show what composers can, should, and must deal with. Another important lesson from Brooks’ later work is the concept of the “second system effect”. His contention is that an architect’s most dangerous invention is the second one s/he creates – because it typically includes the full laundry list of all the things that couldn’t be added to the initial solution, and invites a great deal of unnecessary/accidental complexity. Honestly, I see that problem here in spades. To be fair, I believe that everyone on the board of the AMCL comes to the task with sincere and earnest intent. However, I look at the history of past failure, the scattered messages, the dearth of consistent hard data, and the constant mythologizing of past transgressions (both fantasized and real) as big indicators of the second system effect in the current regime. This is something that the composer community can ill afford.  We need to narrow the focus to the most salient points that matter to today’s working composer, and then decide whether, how and with whom to proceed.

That’s the final irony of this – even if we’re 100% successful in zeroing in on the core issues, and outlining those things that must change versus what we’d simply like to change – it may at the end of the day lead to a conclusion to not proceed with unionization. I still believe that it’s a worthy exercise to fully understand the issues and come to grips with the essential problems, because they may well be resolved without union/guild affiliation and/or a collective bargaining agreement. But let’s say that the decision is to proceed with the AMCL – as with Brooks’ final conclusion it should be well understood that there’s no silver bullet to be found. The most obvious reason for this is that there’s no werewolf. There’s no Hollywood ending to this story where some big hairy monster is slain and the dawn comes and everyone smiles. I certainly don’t believe that the studios are the big monsters that everyone makes them out to be. As Deane Ogden has asserted previously, just like the composer community, they’re mostly good people trying to figure out this business as they go along. I remember reading an article where Universal head Jeff Zucker mentioned that “75% of profits come from the core cable networks” which I found surprising. And by virtue of the fact that he’s having to repeat it in interviews often enough that it’s called out means that certain aspects of today’s media business model that *everyone* is still attempting to fully grok. And let’s not forget that all of this discussion *might* be subsumed by yet another over-arching “accident of history”. In the situation where the current health care reform bill that’s before Congress passes with a meaningful public option attached, it may well satisfy one of the core issues facing the composer community today – health coverage. It’s all conjecture at this point, but if on balance the cost of a public plan versus the benefits offered are roughly akin to what could be had through a union/guild affiliation, then that could substantially change the tenor of the discussion throughout the community. I’m *not* saying that we should all sit on our hands and hold our breath to wait for that outcome. But we should all understand that there are many factors at play, and that dispassionately understanding the present and considering the future is nearly impossible if we indulge ourselves in ignoring, misinterpreting or misrepresenting the past.