>of course they steal- should they have ideas? Michael Sahl
Folks like Hemingway and Stravinsky have made back-handed (?)
acknowledgements (?!) of the somewhat inescapable need for artistic theft,
and Harold Bloom (in)famously sensationalized the problem in the Anxiety of
Influence. Yet it does seem to most of us that the, ah, appropriations of
film composers have little in common with Brahms' nervousness about
Beethoven [plug here for Mark Evan Bonds' wonderful study of the problem in
the 19thc., After Beethoven], and much in common with.. what? If what gli
signori/signorine film composers do is not a function of artistic life and
influence, then what is it? Despite the voluminous discussions of such
issues (eg LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Blues People, and the huge literature
to follow it), it's never been entirely clear to me what the "cultural
appropriator" is doing. Roughly: the artistic side is (relatively) plain
enough, eg Brahms debt to Beethoven, Sonny Stitt's to Charlie Parker.
Likewise the economic motive of redirecting potential profits kinetically
to oneself (eg the Carter Family picking up folk songs while on the road
and copyrighting them, deriving thereby the mechanical royalties).
If it is easy to the point of facility to claim that Pat Boone is a[n
un-]musical thief -- a familiar view I only partly understand -- then what
exactly are these composers up to? [By the by, I'm circumscribing my
diction here, and recommend the practice to fellow participants in this
particular discussion.] I cannot readily accept that economic necessity
would make someone turn to Mahler or Prokofiev as a source. Or do these
composers see in such sources the same sort of economic potential Pat
Boone's managers saw in Little Richard? The source itself, as itself, is
not economically viable in the mass market, but it represents a potential,
a raw material.
Although this is the most plausible view of the matter, in my opinion,
it raises more questions than it answers. If it's, again relatively
speaking, not difficult to see the mass market potential in a music of
revitalized dance energy in 50s America, what constitutes the economic
attractiveness of a Mahler transition theme? It's the musical dimension
that's confusing here, or at least not plain to me. Of course N. American
composers have been paying offsite obeisances (not to mention abjections)
to their perceived European masters for many decades. In the pre-war period
especially, musically selling a love story a la Tristan or a medical
catastrophe a la Traviata worked jes' fine, thank ye. But now? Bluntly, why
bother? Spielberg claimed that he made Schindler to appease his mother, ie
he wanted to make an "important" movie for entirely traditional reasons of
mass cultural guilt. Could that still be what's eating the composers, too?
MWM
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