Methinks Mike M makes arguments that are more weighty than the topic.
The only justification for this kind of appropriation by the reel
composers from the real composers is instant aural mise-en-scene,
through borrowing the context or intent of another work. (The reason
for the Williams quote from Mahler?) The rest is probably laziness. As
for the poor Mr. Boone, I am not clear on who chose the songs for which
he recorded covers (I would guess it was the recording company suits,
not his own taste), but he himself is certainly responsible for trying
to reinvent himself as a leathered, chained, spiked, page-boy'd
heavy-metal punker, which at least does not involve furta musica.
As the rabbis put it, "B'shem omro!" (Give credit for ideas!)
-- Vivian Ramalingam
Michael Morse wrote:
>
> > 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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