Posts By: willcwhite

Rewatching

Have you guys checked out my friend Will’s new podcast?  You should!  It’s called The Great Debasers [which may or may not be a song lyric] and the premise is Will and his friend Jeremy re-watch movies that they originally saw in their teens and then talk about where they were when they first saw it, what they remembered, how it was different this time around, etc.  It’s a great listen, especially if you’re a guy in your late 20’s and were into American movies/film culture in the late 90’s/early 00’s.  But really it’s for everybody!  In the latest episode (#7) I give my well-rehearsed dossier of the Ligeti-Kubrik relationship (a subject which well-nigh obsessed me around 2003, probably when I first saw this movie.)

Anyhoo, I’ve been doing some other re-watching lately, with Cincinnati friends: re-watching all the Disney Animated Classics, one by one.  Here are my assorted thoughts on the project so far, in order of the re-watched:

The Little Mermaid

Totally maintained it’s status as the best Disney feature in my mind.  Great songs (to which I still half-remembered the words), engrossing plot.  Lots of gags that went over my head on childhood viewings cracked me up this time.  The animation style was a big surprise though: seen from this post-Pixar world, it looks REALLY old.  Not that that’s a bad thing.  In a lot of ways, TLM struck me as the last in the line of the great hand-animated Disney productions.  But it was crazy – this movie could just as well have been animated in the 1950’s.

One thing I had TOTALLY forgotten, but which came as a pleasant surprise: Sebastian the crab is a self-styled conductor/composer!  Given the number of times I watched this movie as a kid (and given that he was my favorite character) I seriously think this may have had an influence on the path my life/career has taken.  This time around, my favorite character was Ursula.

Of all the great tunes in this movie, what’s my favorite?  The accordion jig on the boat.  I am seriously not even joking right now.  It’s a beaut’!

Beauty and the Beast

God I love Angela Landsbury.  And Maurice Ravel.  But it didn’t really make sense that she (Angela) played Chip’s mother – she should have been his grandmother.  But I guess that would have led to all sorts of questions?  I don’t know.  The songs in this movie are pretty good, but maybe not at the level of TLM.  The computer generated sets are cool and all, but I can’t help but feel the loss of the TLM animation style.  This movie (combined with 101 Dalmations) surely provided The Simpsons with its best musical fodder. (“See my vest”)

Aladdin

Aladdin is definitely the hottest of the Disney movie princes, and let us not forget that he was voiced by DJ’s boyfriend from Full House.  I had forgotten just how few songs there were in this score.  It’s really just Robin Williams’ gimmick song and “A Whole New World”.  Which, there’s nothing wrong with that exactly, but it sort of misses the point of the musical, and the movie dragged for me at points.  I forgot about Gilbert Godfried as the wise-cracking bird.  (Which, it turns out, is part of a long tradition in the Disney movies of hilarious animal sidekicks.)

The Lion King

Eh.  I remembered liking this one a lot more as a kid.  Shit is dark! Jeremy Irons, good on you.  [Speaking of The Simpsons: anagrams, anyone?]  Again, there’s barely a song to be heard in this movie!  It’s really just “Hakuna Matata” and “Circle of Life” theme song.  Question: is there a subliminal message about the inevitability of corruption in this movie?  Does “The Circle of Life” implicitly include the destitution/coercive power dynamics/enacted psychoses of the Scar administration?  Must it?  Musn’t it?  I think maybe. (But maybe I’ve just been reading this book too much lately.)

Lady and the Tramp

Sucked.  Seriously, I was really surprised.  It’s just a bunch of little vignettes, threaded through with the thinnest of plots.  The spaghetti scene is memorable, yes, but that’s about it.

101 Dalmations

Really enjoyed this one.  Great English character actors in some of the minor dog roles.  Or maybe they weren’t even really English – I questioned an accent or two – but they were great characters at least.  Again, it came as a surprise how little music there was in this one, but Cruella de Vil (both the character and the song) is an absolute winner.  In fact, I think CdV may be my favorite character in the Disney cannon.  This movie dragged a little though.  A solid effort, if not my very favorite.  (Also great Simpsons fodder.)

Sleeping Beauty

I really just love this score.  So 50’s, so choral (btw, almost all of these movies, including the more recent ones, have unabashèd choral finales in their scores.)  You can NOT go wrong with George Bruns, I’m telling you.  His incorporation of and variation upon the original Tchaikovsky ballet score is so masterful, and makes a mockery of Clint Mansell and Matt Dunkley’s adaptation of “Swan Lake” in Black Swan (which movie was a mockery of so very much anyway.)

More on dynamics

Dynamics in a score are like the camera angles written in a film script – they can only suggest the physical sound, much as a script can only suggest how the final picture will look. Conductors and musicians are like cinematographers with hundreds of lenses, lights, and filters at their disposal.

Crescendi and diminuendi are like camera zooms in and out.  I don’t know what the musical equivalent of a dolly shot would be.  Not to mention the famous Vertigo effect.  Unless it’s that great Bernard Herrmann chord.

On Dynamics

Dynamics are really a blunt set of tools composers have to shape and shade what is supposed to be the most ethereal of art forms.  Most of us regularly use about eight markings: ppp, pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff, and fff.  Brahms made a valiant effort with pf (poco forte) but it never really caught on.  Tchaikovsky made a valiant effort with fffff but now we’re all deaf.

Schoenberg had a great idea with marking lines “Hauptstimme” (main voice) and “Nebenstimme” (next voice), but the whole thing becomes too confusing when try you combine those with the traditionally notated dynamic markings on the page.

Poco forte, btw, is softer than mezzo forte. (I find that most musicians don’t know this.)

A composer has to figure out: at what overall dynamic level should the ensemble should sound? How prominently should x instrument sound within that texture? What effect will the natural acoustic properties of said instrument have in determining its volume? Should that even be taken into account, or should we just go for pure dynamics? Based on the entire history of the literature for their instrument, how are players of x instrument likely to interpret y dynamic?

Jennifer Higdon seems to have this whole thing figured out.

Tchaikovsky was really pretty bad at dynamics overall. Most of the phrasing inherent in his music is in no wise notated by the dynamics (though he did get a lot better at this as he progressed.) I just conducted the 2nd symphony, a charming piece with very sloppy dynamics. Let’s not even talk about the meters.

One of my first composition teachers told me that he would complete an entire piece and then go back and insert the dynamics.  This still boggles my mind.  Go back and refine dynamics, yes, I usually do that about 50 times.  But insert?  Interestingly, he believed wholeheartedly that “dynamics really make or break a piece.”

I just conducted Ralph Vaughan Williams’ cantata “Dona Nobis Pacem”.  I think the old man spent about 30 minutes TOTAL marking the dynamics.  Choral basses, stating the theme of a fugue are marked p with trombones and timpani marked f.  This is symptomatic of this piece, which feels hastily assembled and lumpily misproportioned.  There are some great passages though.

Schumann is so often criticized for his orchestration.  I came of age believing that old lie, and now I’ve totally rejected it.  Yes, there’s a lot of balance problems, but most of those occur because he wrote in block dynamics (like… just about every other composer at that time.)  Get a decent bunch of musicians together and they can usually figure out what’s going on with their parts.  Unlike Tchaikovsky, at least the blocks are correctly dynamicized.

When you’ve got, say, woodwinds playing a chord f and you bring in the trombones mf, how will they know what to do in comparison?  Should you write them a little note?

Sure!

Harps should always be marked f (and doubled or even tripled – what can I say, I just love the harp!)

I would much rather

listen to a short piece of music in which every moment has been crafted by the composer to add to the overall narrative/design/emotional content of the piece, rather than a long piece interlarded with “filler” used to pad the dimensions of the piece with pretensions towards grandiosity/seriousness/weight.

Shostakovich, I am looking squarely in your direction.  Lili Boulanger, je t’adore, girl.