film music

very interesting to see scorsese talking about film music the other day martin scorsese l'émotion par la musique. i'm not at all well-versed in scorsese. and so i have to say that his use of music has never really struck me, with the obvious important exception of taxi driver's fantastic score by the incomparable bernard hermann. my other main memory of scorsese's film music is from casino and his reuse of george delerue's gorgeous music composed for le mépris (this music, as beautiful as it is, pop's up with annoying frequency everywhere to wink faithfully at you like an old friend). scorsese, it turns out, is more than a simple visual-ocentric film historian and knows the history of film music very well. in this doco he talks at length about his passion for hermann and appears to know his career very well. apparently for cape fear the decision that they should re-use hermann's original score was a simultaneous de niro/scorsese light-bulb moment. (interestingly, delerue isn't cited at all in imdb listing. not even in the triva. nor for casino.) i think the idea of taking film music written specifically for one film and planting it straight into another is just going to far with the intertextual game. there's something that makes this sort of intertextual play really heavy handed, as though the music carries too much of the original film's connotations into the new context. if the idea was to pay homage to the original the result is more likely to be laughable, something straight from a scary movie skit. or maybe it’s more like woody allen in bananas wondering where that music’s coming from and then looking the cupboard to find a man playing violin… an unrelated example of the horrors of tampering with the original score of film is afro dizzy act's unspectacular idea of playing new music live over a screening of alphaville. i was never sure what the purpose of this was. was the music meant to function in a typical film music manner? clearly not, since the band assembled on a stage in front of the screen, blocking the spectator (now turned concert-goer)'s view, no doubt with the music too loud to appreciate any of the other original sound qualities of the film. if the band had wanted some nice visuals to go with their concert they could have done this with any range of different films apart from alphaville. and this film has had other attacks as well, such as ambient electronic "artist" scanner's attempt to 'share in the spirit of alphaville'. why this film? why not one of the maoist revolutionary films? or how about asian dub foundation's attempt at music accompaniment for la haine. let's bring it all back home... delerue did the music for the screen adaptation of r-g's les gommes. r-g however was not involved in its production (delerue does have r-g connection however, writing music for r-g's l'immortelle). i wonder if this music was reused for the film, perhaps from le mepris. if anyone knows how to get a hold of this film, i'd love to see it. unfortunately, it's not in r-g's biblio at imec.