Friday Night at the Movies with Adam Kiss

Hi, I’m Adam Kiss,

ADAM: Marc and I share a love of movies. Today he and I are going to be talking about a super exciting topic which is the subject of music in film! For me, music is literally one of the most important aspects of any film. Great music can absolutely elevate a scene or it can really bring it down. A lot of times when I'm watching a movie the score is really one of the things that I'll pay the most attention to, especially because I'm a musician and have a musical background. I was classically trained in opera and musical theater and both my parents are pianists (my mom Christina Kiss is a world-famous concert pianist and specialist in the music of Franz Liszt) so music has always been in my blood and a part of my life. Even going back a few generations on my mom's side her mother was a concert pianist and her father was an operatic tenor.?

But on to the subject at hand—the subject of music and film and in particular what happened to great music in film! So let me start out by saying that just generally I love older movies—that’s just generally my taste—I particularly love movies from the thirties to the sixties. I would say I would say that's my golden age of film. Then after that there was this whole other era which was the seventies when more independent things started getting made and the studio system was collapsing—so that was definitely a time that I appreciate as well, even if it’s not my absolute favorite era.

Once the the talkies started (the sound movies) around 1927, suddenly people didn’t know what to do with the music in film. So they brought in these great classical composers of the day like Korngold who came over from Europe and he did the score for a movie in 1936 called Captain Blood. He did an incredible classic score for that film with a great melody. Nobody has ever told me this but for some reason I think that everyone after that started copying Korngold’s style—in other words using these lush orchestrations and amazing melodies so that the score of a film really sounded like a symphony.

I just love the melodies of all those great old films—people like Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, Alex North, Miklos Rozsa, and Victor Young all composed incredibly lush symphonic scores for their films—in most cases the scores could absolutely be played apart from the film as symphonies. In the meantime, movies today seem to have evolved into chords in the background or melodies that you can’t remember.?

MARC: Hey, Adam, I’m going to have to push back a little on that one. I can tell you that my favorite movie comedy franchise of all time is The Pink Panther. I loved the comedic gold of Peter Sellers and the priceless dynamic between his character and that of Herbert Lom. But I can’t think of any Pink Panther movie without Henry Mancini’s music bouncing around my head.

Besides that, who could forget the music from Star Wars? John Williams' score is out of this world (pun intended). And it goes beyond just being a catchy score. The movies simply wouldn’t be the same without it. The way he gave each major character (like Darth Vader) his or her own leitmotif reminds me of a Wagnerian opera. John Williams, of course, has had a brilliant, decades-long collaboration with Steven Speilberg.

And don’t get me started on Lord of the Rings. I mean, if I get Howard Shore stuck in my ear, I’ll be humming it all week.

ADAM: Thanks for the debate! So in the first place from what you said I actually don’t think we have very differing views on this! The Pink Panther (the original) was in 1960, which is exactly the era of music I was talking about (1930s-1960s)! It may not be as symphonic and is more of a jazzy score but I think it’s one of the best out there–Mancini is definitely one of the best and he did amazing music. The Pink Panther (the original) is definitely one of my favorites–funnily enough Peter Sellers was originally just supposed to be a supporting character in the movie with the focus more on David Niven and Claudia Cardinale. And believe it or not, I’ve never seen a Star Wars movie, but I of course know the music. There again, John Williams is amazing and continues to do amazing movies. But not every film score can be done by John Williams. I guess my point is that there is still great music in films today, but it’s the exception not the rule. John Williams followed exactly in the classical tradition I was talking about from great composers like Miklos Rozsa (Ben-Hur), Alex North (Spartacus) etc! If you listen to them you will definitely hear the similarities! I think what I was pushing back against was the modern movies where you don’t hear any melodies and the whole score is just low ominous chords, or movies where they just solely use pop music!

And so I ask—what happened to great movie music? Well I’m trying to bring it back myself!

In my film “My Last Words” which is coming out soon, I opted to return to this classical style for an all piano score performed by my mom Christina Kiss comprised of her own original compositions and the music of Franz Liszt. I went back to an old tradition but updated that musical tradition by making it so that the score was entirely made up of piano music.

In other words, in my opinion the music in a film is just as important if not more important than the picture and I hope to make more films with great music in the future!

As I mentioned, both I and my mother are musicians. If you'd like to hear me sing So In Love from Kiss Me Kate, (accompanied by my mom Christina Kiss) click this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpPhs2dHA8Y

And if you'd like to watch my mom play Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, check it out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k4ZPAkEet4