Make Music Scores Melodious Again

Why are memorable melodies disappearing from film scoring, especially in films for grown-ups?

Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

In the recent documentary Music by John Williams, Steven Spielberg discusses how old-fashioned melodic orchestral scores were on their way out when he started his directorial career. He determined that they wouldn’t disappear on his watch, and given his many collaborations with John Williams in the intervening decades, he succeeded in keeping that tradition alive. However, I can’t help thinking that what Spielberg took issue with in the late 1960s is a situation we’re now facing again in cinema. Old-fashioned orchestral scores once again seem to have gone out of fashion.

As a lifelong cineaste, I lament the current dearth of melodious symphonic orchestral music scores. I’m no musician, but this has become a measurable and observable trend, and I’m rather alarmed by it. Melody seems increasingly unfashionable in today’s cinematic landscape, where rhythmic, tonal, or more avant-garde soundscape compositions, typically recorded without orchestras, dominate. I don’t necessarily disapprove of such an approach, but it seems to be fast becoming the only approach.