Returning to the inferiority aspect that it may or may not have, i’m often concerned that my enjoyment of film scores is filtered through a kind of ‘making allowances’ for inferred shortcomings due to the demands of the movie industry. Calling them ‘mood pieces’ would be to sell them short, yet there’s more than a whiff of truth to that. In other words, they no longer necessarily follow the chronology of the film’s storyline (many soundtracks, indeed, are not arranged in ‘story order’ but are configured for a satisfying aural experience), offering instead a sequence of portraits, sonic windows into its characters and their situations. But the best of them don’t merely survive such decontextualisation, they thrive, providing an analogue of sorts of the movie, embodying a more intangible yet no less cogent kind of transposed narrative. In this respect, it’s perhaps unreasonable to expect a film score to prove engaging when heard in its own right, away from these elements. To clarify, i don’t believe that film soundtracks, by necessity or nature, are inherently inferior there’s certainly no reason why they should be, despite the fact that they are, first and foremost, serving a very clear functional role, working in conjunction with visual elements, mise en scène, sound design, narrative and the like, elements usually irrelevant within the concert hall. There have been notable exceptions, and some invariably find their way onto my annual best album lists, but i often find myself pondering whether, despite my love for them, there’s usually something qualitatively inferior about them. Despite being a complete movie addict, as well as having nurtured a fascination with soundtracks since i was a boy, movie scores rarely get discussed on 5:4.
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