The Day the Earth Stood Still by Bernard Herrmann, and: Krull by James Horner (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Day the Earth Stood Still by Bernard Herrmann, and: Krull by James Horner James Buhler Bernard Herrmann. The Day the Earth Stood Still. Santa Rosa, CA: Neumation Music, 2021. [1 score (xxi, 89 p.) ISBN 9780578870489, $50] James Horner. Krull. Santa Rosa, CA: Neumation Music, 2021. [1 score (xxvii, 409 p.) ISBN 9780578967424, $80] The study of film music has long been hampered by the fact that printed scores were difficult to access. This situation left scholars, film composers, and the interested public needing to travel to research libraries and other archives to consult scores in manuscript, or relying on sources who had access to and were willing to share the socalled "grey" scores, xeroxed and now digitized copies of scores used during production that circulated among the working professionals in the industry, or creating personal transcriptions. Many main titles and occasional cues were available commercially as printed scores, but generally these were in a form that had been arranged for solo piano, standard orchestra, or concert band. Each of these solutions has significant drawbacks, especially for scholarly study. Recent years have seen a significant change in this situation. Three firms are now regularly publishing full film scores (or as close to complete as a printed film score can be): Chris Siddall Music (chrissiddallmusic.com) currently has six scores available in book form as well as over twenty cues from a variety of films available for digital download. Omni Music Publishing (omnimusicpublishing.com), the oldest of the firms, also has the most extensive [End Page 663] collection, with twenty scores and several cues currently available. (For a review of the score to Batman, see this journal March 2018 [74, 3] and How to Train Your Dragon, see March 2022 [78, 3].) Neumation Music (neumationmusic.com) is the newest of the firms and currently has three titles available, the first two of which are the subject of this review. Neumation Music has also announced on its website plans for publication of five new titles. All three firms follow a similar procedure, with scores printed on acid-free paper meeting library standards in a 9" × 12" format, usually sufficient for a full orchestra score, though sometimes making for tight fits in the case of film scores that use a larger than usual orchestra. Working with composers' sketches, the parts used for recording, and orchestrators' scores and then cross-referenced with the film and original soundtrack recording, the publishers have faced difficult editorial decisions. What appears in the written score delivered to the recording stage by the composer and the orchestrator team is frequently changed for the release version of the film, sometimes at the recording session, sometimes when the music is edited into the film (either because the composer, the director, or the producer requested a change or because the edit of the film changed). Some of these changes are incorporated into the soundtrack recording, but many of them are not. In addition, things like synthesizer settings are generally only vaguely specified (sometimes the model of synthesizer isn't even designated in the score), and if the composer is not using a factory preset what the synthesizer is actually playing can make for guesswork. (To complicate matters further, synth parts are also sometimes added outside the main recording session, and might not have ever had a fully written-out part.) The situation gets more complicated with recent so-called hybrid scores that rely much more on audio processing and mixing sampled instruments with the traditionally recorded studio orchestra. For instance, a Hans Zimmer score played on the scoring stage is often only material for a final mix that will incorporate many other layers, samples, and synthesizer, along with extensive audio processing. Rendering this music as a printed score will necessarily be incomplete. Often it will be inadequate enough that it is questionable whether a printed score is even a useful representation of what we hear on the film or on the soundtrack album (though it may still be a useful object for study). One of the challenges that Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) poses to publication is that, like much contemporary film music...