‘Temp Score’: Why do we live in an age of bland Hollywood music?
While writing, acting, direction, and cinematography are the four pillars upon which a great film is built, the score is a necessary binding agent between them. Framing the emotional or dramatic arc of any movie, the soundtrack is an undeniably important part of a film’s makeup. The legacy of the greats only confirms that Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer, and John Williams are names whose work exists outside the movies they have worked on.
But alongside the score-composing icons of the cinematic world are musicians who want to expand their craft and explore how their creative process works through the lens of a film. Arcade Fire, Nick Cave, and Thom Yorke have all scored movies, respectively, proving the importance of musicianship and its craft through the eyes of filmmakers.
For many, the retrospective release of the film’s score is an exciting event in itself, proving that the music has artistic value individually. The signature track of Zimmer’s Interstellar score, ‘Cornfield Chase’ earned him a gold single in the US and has over 350 million streams on Spotify. The song represents Zimmer’s finest hour as a score composer and came very early in the Interstellar process, helping to inform the film’s overall creative direction.
So why do we stutter when naming the latest great piece of film score composing in the modern age of filmmaking where Marvel and franchise series reign supreme? Albeit commercial and artistically simplistic, these commercial blockbusters that have taken up most of the big-screen real estate in the past few years have an obvious opportunity to create appropriately unique score compositions that can hang off of their very brand-focused characters and massive production budgets.
Instead, they’ve often treated music as an afterthought, using “temp music”. It’s essentially placeholder music made up of scores from different films, which is then used within the editing process after the fact and is often used to provide a basic mirroring of emotions. The temp music used in early cuts of the film is then used as a guideline for a very basic original to be recorded and placed on the film’s final edit. While the result is indeed an original by default, it’s very much a cut and paste, which provides none of the thematic nuance used so brilliantly in a track like Zimmer’s ‘Cornfield Chase’.
Legendary composer Danny Elfman claimed temp music as “the bane of my existence” in a roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He continued to say, “It’s my job to make the director forget everything he’s heard in the temp.” The composer’s approach begs the question, why does temp music exist in the first place?
In a video essay from Every Frame a Painting, the method is explained through a compilation of different ‘sad scenes’ used throughout (mostly Marvel) films, all of which have an obviously similar high-pitched string section backgrounding the scene. At best, predictable and, at worst, disrespectful to the film, the blanket approach to all of these emotionally driven scenes creates a stale interpretation of a human experience and subjects it to a sea of boring pastiche.
With temp music making you hear what you see, the natural nuance that comes from human interpretation of the film is completely negated. With the increased attempt to introduce further AI capabilities into the world of arts and particular movies, reducing the role of the score composer to nothing more than a cover artist feels like a stab in the back in the fight against singularity.
And if the growing box office and subsequent cult success of works like Interstellar and The Social Network, two fine examples of bespoke score composing that have earned the movies new fans through the film’s score LPs, then surely it’s in the studios’ best interest to wash one hand with the other?
