![]() Steiner’s musical language was no more advanced than late Richard Strauss, although Brown believes it would have been sufficiently shocking: The musical language of both composers was relatively modernist, but never as modernist as concert music of the time. Orchestral imbalance meant brass and percussion overpowered the strings, but, without modern mixing techniques, Steiner compensated through orchestration – reinforcing the basses with tubas, using saxophones to avoid weak woodwind registers – and conducted without synchronisation aids by editing multiple takes together. In 1933 the standard setup was a three-hour recording session with a 10-piece orchestra and one microphone, but Steiner scored for 46 musicians with lots of doubling – six woodwinds played up to four instruments per cue, violins doubled on viola and one violist also covered the celeste. ![]() Musical complexity was balanced by the flexibility of digital recording, allowing for instant reviewing of cues and the adjustment of balances through careful mixing, while visual cueing enabled perfect synchronicity in single takes. Following a trend for larger and louder, Howard combined a symphony orchestra of over 100 musicians, a choir, ethnic solo instruments and electronics, with the aid of eight orchestrators and four conductors. The music of Kong … demonstrates, for the first time in the ‘talkies’, that music has the power to add a dimension of reality to a basically unrealistic situation… īoth composers took advantage of contemporary technology in utilising relatively large forces. King Kong was hugely successful and Steiner’s pioneering score demonstrated the potential of original music: Ultimately producer Merian Cooper personally funded the entire score, resulting in the first non-diegetic film score that utilised the methods of opera, music theatre and the silent movies to develop a musical illustration of the narrative that expressed all that the visuals could not. They told me that they were worried about it, but that they had spent so much money making the film there was nothing left over for the music score… thought that the gorilla looked unreal and that the animation was rather primitive. Steiner’s film was plagued by budget issues, but the animations had the filmmakers concerned: He composed for 18 hours a day with orchestrators and copyists working overnight, recording the next day and video-conferencing with Jackson to review each cue less than 24 hours after it had been conceived. James Newton Howard was hired after Howard Shore left the project, with five weeks to write three hours of music (compared to Steiner’s 75 minutes in eight weeks). Three hours long (compared 1933’s 96 minutes), it followed a tradition of modern-day epics lead by Jackson’s own Lord of the Rings trilogy, while motion-capture and CGI recreated the terror felt by 1930s audiences for cinema-goers of the 2000s with a believable and realistically-animated Kong.īoth scores emerged from troubled circumstances. The latter was from the blockbuster age of huge-budget cinematic experiences with mind-blowing special effects and technology merging fantasy and reality. The former came from the early Golden Age, when sound film was in its infancy – filmmakers wrestled with the basics of form and narrative and did not know how to deal with music, so movies would have one or two diegetic cues between the titles and nothing more. By examining the respective contexts that led to their composition, and illustrating the musical approaches and objectives of their composers, we will see how both scores respond to the necessary requirements of the films and the different interpretations of the same story.īoth versions of King Kong are products of their ages. Legendary for its developments in stop-motion animation and special effects, the film inspired Peter Jackson to become a director, remaking it for a modern audience in 2005. For the first time a sound film was accompanied by an original non-diegetic score that paralleled, supported and enhanced the narrative, pioneering the techniques and principles that have governed film scoring ever since. Film music was forever changed by Max Steiner’s 1933 score for King Kong.
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