When I went back in retrospect to our discussion of the music before Paul Smith began the BEAVER VALLEY score, and when I began to consider the task of explaining some of our problems to an audience, I remembered an article by Robert U. Nelson published several years ago in The Pacific Spectator. Its title was: "The Craft of the Film Score," Mr, Nelsom pointed out that music for films and concert music are two different mediums
"The distinction is important. In writing concert music, the composer is all-powerful; he may write anything he chooses , . In the films, all this is changed, The composer is no longer a free agent; he must follow the split-second timings of the oue sheet and he must carefully subordinate his music to the dialogue. . . Film music cammot possible follow, excepting in spots where there is no dialogue, an independent, abstract development, Its form is necessarily less tiglit than that of concert music, its themes and motifs less rigorously worked out. The difference in structure between a film score and a symphony is so apparent as to cause some people to conclude that film music has no form. This is not true, yet the presentation of ideas in a film score is undeniably loose and fragmentary."
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