'Epic' orchestral/hybrid trailer music
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- KVRAF
- 1791 posts since 17 Sep, 2002
One thing about "hybrid" is that there are so many different types of it. There's the hard-rocking stuff, or there's the dubstep stuff, or there's the glitchy/IDM stuff, etc.
Music today seems to be about fluidity among genres, rather than inventing new genres entirely. So even if the big growly hits and excessive crescendos go out of style in the trailer music biz, I don't think either "epic" or "hybrid" music is going to go away, because it is just an example of available technology being refined while capturing some of the old aesthetic. Orchestral music has been prevalent in film/TV since the beginning as far as I know; it is ingrained in our minds as what music for picture is supposed to sound like, at least in a very general sense.
Synthesizers used to be just a gimmick, perhaps even a fad. But now any "epic" film score you listen to usually has synths in it to some extent, even if it's just a sine wave thrown in the sub range used to beef up contrabass and low brass parts. Before, they had to rely solely on acoustic instruments, clever composition/orchestration, and specific recording/mixing techniques to get that huge, bombastic sound. But nowadays we've just made simpler tools to achieve that hugeness.
Also, huge/booming/epic music is by no means a new thing. Look at (or rather, listen to) Wagner or Strauss... if they had phat synths and subwoofers and huge pseudo-percussion glitchy booms, there's no doubt in my mind they would have used the crap out of them.
(I understand I've named two fairly modern composers here, and while I'm not educated on the matter, I'd venture a guess that "epic" music had been around in some form long before even the Romantic period... what's war without some big drums?)
Given the fact that orchestral music hasn't gone out of style for hundreds of years now, I think we will continue to rely on it as a staple in the movie/TV business because it is so deeply ingrained in the history of "western" music. But now we have all these extra toys/sample-libraries to play with, so we can keep doing the same thing, but "enhanced," as we tend to do with other (non-musical) things in life.
Also, perhaps the reason we are hearing so much of it lately is that now the tools are accessible to a lot more people. You don't need to have access to an actual orchestra anymore, to write convincing orchestral cues and mock-ups. So without that bottleneck, we can be exposed to the ideas of a much larger number of "composers" (and I'm using that term loosely here), thus leading to a perceived sense of market saturation.
As for the "hybrid" part of it, as I said, I think it's just about technology catching up to (and at times, becoming the inspiration for) the idea's we've been trying to put out all along. Even the minimalist singer-songwriter stuff nowadays still has some pretty high production value, what with expensive convolution reverbs and digital tuning of the performances. And rock-and-roll songs nowadays often incorporate (at times not-so-) subtle synths and other modern "studio magic" to get a commercially-viable sound. So now, with music technology being what it is, we are conditioned to hear pristine, digitally-enhanced music as "the standard."
What I find interesting about this is how we've sort of reversed the role of dynamics. With everyone making this uniformly loud, epic stuff, nowadays it's the quiet, understated music that seems to jump out at me, reinforcing the old adage that "the notes you don't play are as important as the ones you do" or some other such philosophy.
Music today seems to be about fluidity among genres, rather than inventing new genres entirely. So even if the big growly hits and excessive crescendos go out of style in the trailer music biz, I don't think either "epic" or "hybrid" music is going to go away, because it is just an example of available technology being refined while capturing some of the old aesthetic. Orchestral music has been prevalent in film/TV since the beginning as far as I know; it is ingrained in our minds as what music for picture is supposed to sound like, at least in a very general sense.
Synthesizers used to be just a gimmick, perhaps even a fad. But now any "epic" film score you listen to usually has synths in it to some extent, even if it's just a sine wave thrown in the sub range used to beef up contrabass and low brass parts. Before, they had to rely solely on acoustic instruments, clever composition/orchestration, and specific recording/mixing techniques to get that huge, bombastic sound. But nowadays we've just made simpler tools to achieve that hugeness.
Also, huge/booming/epic music is by no means a new thing. Look at (or rather, listen to) Wagner or Strauss... if they had phat synths and subwoofers and huge pseudo-percussion glitchy booms, there's no doubt in my mind they would have used the crap out of them.
(I understand I've named two fairly modern composers here, and while I'm not educated on the matter, I'd venture a guess that "epic" music had been around in some form long before even the Romantic period... what's war without some big drums?)
Given the fact that orchestral music hasn't gone out of style for hundreds of years now, I think we will continue to rely on it as a staple in the movie/TV business because it is so deeply ingrained in the history of "western" music. But now we have all these extra toys/sample-libraries to play with, so we can keep doing the same thing, but "enhanced," as we tend to do with other (non-musical) things in life.
Also, perhaps the reason we are hearing so much of it lately is that now the tools are accessible to a lot more people. You don't need to have access to an actual orchestra anymore, to write convincing orchestral cues and mock-ups. So without that bottleneck, we can be exposed to the ideas of a much larger number of "composers" (and I'm using that term loosely here), thus leading to a perceived sense of market saturation.
As for the "hybrid" part of it, as I said, I think it's just about technology catching up to (and at times, becoming the inspiration for) the idea's we've been trying to put out all along. Even the minimalist singer-songwriter stuff nowadays still has some pretty high production value, what with expensive convolution reverbs and digital tuning of the performances. And rock-and-roll songs nowadays often incorporate (at times not-so-) subtle synths and other modern "studio magic" to get a commercially-viable sound. So now, with music technology being what it is, we are conditioned to hear pristine, digitally-enhanced music as "the standard."
What I find interesting about this is how we've sort of reversed the role of dynamics. With everyone making this uniformly loud, epic stuff, nowadays it's the quiet, understated music that seems to jump out at me, reinforcing the old adage that "the notes you don't play are as important as the ones you do" or some other such philosophy.
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- KVRian
- 524 posts since 26 Nov, 2009
With all these high quality and cheap sample libraries we will see even more epic hybrid orchestral, but it won't be for the oversaturated trailer market, but for the edm world (trap, dubstep, dnb, breakbeat, trance and so on).
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- KVRAF
- 5851 posts since 9 Jul, 2002 from Helsinki
A major difference is also that Strauss wasn't composing music for movie trailers. He wasn't hired to capture the attention and coax a maximum emotional response from an audience who just entered a theater in a very short time. He wasn't paid to compose pre-defined things to a pre-defined rhythm. These things are decided by the distributors and producers, perhaps the director gets to say a little.Vortifex wrote:Good post, funky lime. A major difference between the composers of old like Strauss and the 'epic' composers of today is melody.
And yes, current trailer music will be used for as long as it works, something else will replace it when it stops working.