Knowing The Score: Film Composers Talk About the Art, Craft, Blood, Sweat, and Tears of Writing for Cinema

by David Morgan

This collection of interviews with Hollywood composers offers the most intimate look ever at the process of writing music for the movies.  From getting started in the business to recording the soundtrack, from choosing a musical style to collaborating with directors, including Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, the Coen brothers, Terry Gilliam, Kenneth Branagh, and Ken Russell, from learning to deal with editing to writing with time-sensitive precision, the leading practitioners in the field share their views on one of the most important  -- and least understood -- aspects of the motion picture art that's heard but not seen.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Film

336 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2000

Reviews

[Caitlin ~WordsAreMyForte~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only gripe I had with this book is that the interviews consisted on a super-majority of older, established (predominantly white) men who were interviewed. Although this is also a wider trend for the industry, so I can't entirely fault the author. Though, I still would have loved to learn anything about smaller, up-and-coming composers who might not be as established and how their perspective differs from these super-composers who are household names, like John Williams. I loved learning about Jocelyn Pook for the two pages she was on.

Other than that, "Knowing the Score" was an incredibly well-organized collection of interviews from some of the greatest film composers to ever live: Jerry Goldsmith, Alan Menken, Howard Shore, etc. I will warn though that the book is not exactly a guide on how to compose or specific music techniques; more so, it's about the actual politics and nitty-gritty of working in the film industry in a lower-optic position, where one's work is often at risk of being cut entirely and messed with for arbitrary, capitalistic reasons. It deals with passion in an increasingly non-passionate industry, which is continually driven by the tension between monetary gain vs. artistic ambition. Despite that, well-established composers stand out with their innovative compositional styles and champion music as an artistic companion of merit to film rather than simply background accompaniment.