May 11, 2007

• The week so far

  It has been a crazy week which frequenters to this blog can tell since we were unable to post most of the week.  We had a creature stuck in our wall last weekend which carried over into Tuesday before we could get it taken care of and move on.  So we missed as a result the birthday of Brahms and Tchaikovsky this week. 

  Yesterday marked the birthdays of two of Hollywood's finest composers, Max Steiner and Dmitri Tiomkin.  So I guess next year I'll write about them.  Steiner is an important composer in a lot of ways.  His score for the original King Kong proved how important music could be to a film (portions of this score were used in Peter Jackson's remake for the theater scene).  Tiomkin's music is known to more people than realize it as he wrote the music for the perennial Christmas favorite It's a Wonderful Life.  But he also wrote a great science fiction score for The Thing, and created a unique sound for the Hollywood Western in the 1950s.

  The demise of box stores carrying music beyond the top 40 continues as two major chains have begun to clear out their in-store stock by holding sales for specific genres of music (first soundtracks, then jazz, then classical).  It is interesting that years of catering to a younger market has meant that many true music stores now have no customer base since they have alienated the older demographic entirely.  Remember when music stores carried everyhing and the sales people actually knew something about music?  Anyway I was struck by another problem that is at least plaguing the classical market.  That is the decision to try the pop music method of re-releasing recordings less than ten years old as "new" or "classic."  Is it me, or do the marketing people on the staff of the record labels seem to have no knowledge of music these days, a lack of marketability, and an inability to highlight product to grow their market?  If you just look at the success of a label like Naxos you realize that this area of music is still marketable with fine new recordings. 

  I'm looking forward to revisiting my LP collection soon with a special player that will let me record the music on to CDrs.  It will probably be a lot of work but I'm looking forward to musical favorites left unheard for at least a decade in some instances.

  I began watching the third season of Farscape this week and the series just gets progressively better as far as space opera goes.

  Just watched Almodovar's Volver too which features the most straight-forward (no pun intended) cast in any of his films.  This time we have a female ensemble piece which is actually fairly see-through plot wise and surprisingly the most mainstream of his films.  It also is one of the few Spanish cinema pieces that does not seem to have the cloud of the Spanish Civil War hanging over it.

  For some reason, I have been on the short list for Lakeshore Records scores.  I must have had most of their releases cross my desk this year.  Christophe Beck's Year of the Dog is actually quite nice.  I'm in the process of listening to Mark Isham's score for Next which is nothing more than a typical action score with the composer trying on Media Venture's styles.  It's not as bland as Shooter (Mancina) was however as Isham at least manages to stick in some personal touches more often in his score.

  Hope the weekend is good one.

  • 6:23 pm
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