Film Music
...musical score of a film has the power to evoke emotions upon the audience ranging from fear and sadness to exultation and happiness. The amazing factor in all of this is that one composition can have a wide variety of effects on a person in many ways. For example, in the recently famed City of Angels, the soundtrack to the movie contained several hit singles on the billboard charts. Although this is a direct indication of successfulness of the movie, the first inclination for writing the tunes was not to just create hit singles that would stand on their own, but to support and enhance the entire film while involving the audience at the same time. Subsequently, the selections used in this film controlled the audiences’ every emotion. Artists on this soundtrack included U2, Alanis Morissette, Jimi Hendrix, Paula Cole, John Lee Hooker, Sarah McLachlan, the Goo Goo Dolls, Peter Gabriel, Jude, Eric Clapton and Gabriel Yared. As of January 1999, the songs “Uninvited” by Morissete, “Iris”, by the Goo Goo Dolls and “Angel”, by Sarah McLachlan had become hit singles on the charts. When listening to these songs critically and watching the movie, one feels a sense of connection to the scenes in which they are contained, and almost a sense of actually being in the movie itself. Mark Isham, a contemporary film scoring composer states that: “ Any good composer needs to communicate with an audience. There needs to be an understandable musical vocabulary, but I believe that if you just give them what they’re expecting, then you’re not doing your job.” This statement completely represents the entire film scoring industry that their main focus is to: create something new, something better, something that captures the audience and plays with their emotions, something that touches them in ways other things can’t. It is that very principal which makes this market so competitive. Film Scoring giants such as John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Bernard Herrmann, Burt Bachar...