What goes into the mak­ing of a great film score? And how does a director/composer team like David Lynch and Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, or Ser­gio Leone and Ennio Mor­ri­cone, form such a per­fect part­ner­ship? Sev­er­al days ago, we brought you video of Badale­men­ti in a spir­it­ed, detailed recre­ation of how he and Lynch com­posed the unfor­get­table Twin Peaks’ themes, with­out which, I’d argue, there may have been no Twin Peaks.

Like­wise, with­out the music of Mor­ri­cone behind them, Leone’s spare, styl­ish, hard-boiled-yet-com­ic west­erns may nev­er have spear­head­ed the almost clas­si­cal genre of the “Spaghet­ti West­ern,” known just as often for its music as for its visu­al lan­guage.

What does Mor­ri­cone have to say about this? Pre­cious lit­tle. Or so dis­cov­ered Steely Dan’s Don­ald Fagen when he inter­viewed Mor­ri­cone for Pre­miere mag­a­zine in August of 1989. Fagen is well known for his obses­sive knowl­edge of cul­ture high and low and his hip, the­o­ret­i­cal bent. Mor­ri­cone, we learn, works more intu­itive­ly. But the results are the same. We may equal­ly find our­selves hum­ming the refrain to “Peg” as the theme to The Good, the Bad & the Ugly.

And we may find our­selves plea­sur­ably ana­lyz­ing “Peg”’s iron­ic rede­ploy­ment of soft rock tropes, just as we may approach Morricone’s inim­itable style as crit­i­cal the­o­rists, as Fagen does when he asks the ques­tion below. Like­ly the most lead­ing ques­tion in all of music jour­nal­ism (with the excep­tion of this Bri­an Eno inter­view):

But isn’t it true that the Leone films, with their ele­va­tion of myth­ic struc­tures, their com­ic book visu­al style and extreme irony, are now per­ceived as sig­nal­ing an aes­thet­ic trans­mu­ta­tion by a gen­er­a­tion of artists and film­mak­ers? And isn’t it also true that your music for those films reflect­ed and abet­ted Leone’s vision by draw­ing on the same eerie cat­a­log of gen­res — Hol­ly­wood west­ern, Japan­ese samu­rai, Amer­i­can pop, and Ital­ian Opera? That your scores func­tioned both “inside” the film as a nar­ra­tive voice and “out­side” the film as the com­men­tary of a wink­ing jester? Put it all togeth­er and does­n’t it spell “post­mod­ern,” in the sense that there has been a grotesque encroach­ment of the devices of art and, in fact, an estab­lish­ment of a new nar­ra­tive plane found­ed on the devices them­selves? Isn’t that what’s attract­ing low­er Man­hat­tan?

Mor­ri­cone: [shrugs]

Fagen quick­ly adapts, switch­es to rapid-fire ques­tions to which Mor­ri­cone gives a breezy one-word answer. “Bel­lis­si­mo!” He’s a very busy man. He does­n’t live in the same world as those La Dolce Vita peo­ple, a “small group of peo­ple who got up at 11 P.M. and lived at night.” He wakes up at 5 in the morn­ing. Mor­ri­cone needn’t indulge us with sto­ries or bore us with the­o­ret­i­cal pos­es. His last words to Fagen, “I have always want­ed to com­pose,” tell us what we need to know about him. Every­thing else is in the music.

Hear that music above in a five-hour playlist of some of Mor­ri­cone best-known scores from his sto­ried past—The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, and non-Leone west­ern, The Mer­ce­nary.

And Mor­ri­cone’s still speak­ing through his west­ern scores, as he did just recent­ly in the work of anoth­er chat­ty, obses­sive, heav­i­ly ref­er­en­tial admirer—Quentin Taran­ti­no’s The Hate­ful Eight, also in the playlist above. Bel­lis­si­mo!

If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns, Start­ing with The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Major motion pic­tures almost always have music, and that music usu­al­ly comes com­posed espe­cial­ly for the movie. Every movie­go­er knows this, of course, and most of them will by now be hum­ming their favorite film-score music to them­selves: themes from Star Wars, Jaws, The God­fa­ther, the Indi­ana Jones or James Bond movies, and so on. But what about the music from more recent cin­e­mat­ic fran­chis­es? What about the music from the still-com­ing-out Mar­vel Comics movies, the most suc­cess­ful such fran­chise of all time? Why no mem­o­rable themes come to mind, much less hum­ma­ble ones, con­sti­tutes the cen­tral ques­tion of the new video essay from Every Frame a Paint­ing.

Its argu­ment points to sev­er­al dif­fer­ent fac­tors, includ­ing Mar­vel and oth­er mod­ern movies’ pre­dictable use and overuse of music, as well as their ten­den­cy to put dis­tract­ing lay­ers of noise and dia­logue on top of it. But the deep­er prob­lem, which has become sys­temic in the world of film scor­ing, has to do with some­thing called “temp music,” which is what it sounds like: music tem­porar­i­ly used in a movie dur­ing edit­ing before its real score gets com­posed. That sounds innocu­ous enough, but this video fea­tures a clip in which no less a pro­lif­ic and respect­ed com­pos­er than Dan­ny Elf­man describes temp music as “the bane of my exis­tence,” and after watch­ing it you’ll sure­ly see — or rather, hear — why.

Temp music usu­al­ly comes from the scores of oth­er movies. With mod­ern non­lin­ear edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, the direc­tor or edi­tor can pick out tracks that approx­i­mate the envi­sioned tone of the work in progress and sim­ply insert them into their scenes. But after hun­dreds upon hun­dreds of hours of watch­ing the project scored with the temp music, the temp music starts to sound like the one true score, espe­cial­ly if the edi­tor has cut tight­ly to it. “Make it sound like the temp music,” insist the orders too often giv­en to the com­pos­er work­ing on an “orig­i­nal” score for the film, which soon winds up as temp music itself on the next block­buster-to-be in the edit­ing room.

This musi­cal ouroboros, which Every Frame a Paint­ing demon­strates by play­ing a vari­ety of scenes first with their temp music and then with their final score (with more such com­par­isons to watch in the sup­ple­men­tary video just above), has robbed even Hol­ly­wood’s high­est-pro­file pic­tures — espe­cial­ly Hol­ly­wood’s high­est-pro­file pic­tures — of an essen­tial tool of evo­ca­tion and emo­tion. But only a tru­ly risk-tak­ing film­mak­er could break this cycle of bland­ness: a film­mak­er like Stan­ley Kubrick who, work­ing on 2001: A Space Odyssey, refused to use its com­mis­sioned score that (in Roger Ebert’s words) “like all scores, attempts to under­line the action — to give us emo­tion­al cues.” Instead, he decid­ed to score the movie with the likes of Györ­gy Ligeti, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khacha­turi­an and (speak­ing of mem­o­rable themes) Richard Strauss — all of which he had, of course, used as temp music.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Jim Jar­musch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

Music from Star Wars, Kubrick, Scors­ese & Tim Bur­ton Films Played by the Prague Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra: Stream Full Albums

Moby Offers Up Free Music to Film­mak­ers

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.