The current state of film music

Here is one example:

Zimmer is inclined to uses a lot of block chords, a lot.

And this is called "musically uninteresting" and "technically underachieved".

Current filmmusic is more vital and diverse than the 1940-80 scores. There are these days a lot of young composers who experiment with electronic,jazz,soul, worldmusic etc. There is more adventure these days, that's also the reason why filmmusic has become very popular. Filmmmusic has broken with 'the classical music' genre. The traditional epic approaches of the past are also renewed by people like Hans Zimmer who have defined a new epic sound in cinema. By this I'm not gonna deny the enormous influence (and quality) of some classic themes of famous composer. But the statement 'that the old days were beter' is a disease in music-criticism. I'm a positivist thinker who sees evolution in everything. You could say that filmmusic these days is different but certainly not worse.

I do agree with Timmer. Today composers are using many genres, but before a composer was really like a genre. A Jerry Goldsmith score was different than a Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein or John Williams score. Today everybody screams temp-track. And the fact that one score (from say Djawadi) is heavy metal, the other one orchestral doesn't in the end mean anything.

I'll settle for something I can whistle.

Unfortunately it's not "my" opinion. Read any Music Theory book and they'd tell you block chords are BAD and should be avoided.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_chord

Google is your friend.

Nonsense, there's not such a thing as a "mistake" in music. Even the "deadly sins" of parallel 5ths and 8ths or the chords with 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th that were to be solved obligatorily a semitone down, don't always apply anymore, especially a "block chord".

Yes, there are things which are way easier to do than others and save lots of time and effort for a lazy musician / composer and set them apart from the genius musicality of someone like Goldenthal for example but there's not such a thing as a "mistake". You can say one's music is musically too simple and thick on arrangements or you can say it goes with poor orchestration and limited chord scope or restricted melodic development as it usually follows the rock guitar riff translated for orchestra philosophy but a "mistake"? uh-uh, not good enough Saying that is like automatically cancelling lots of musical genres that are built on such approach, such as rock music or even pre-Baroque polyphony (Palestrina etc).

'Cause it probably hints poor musicianship for most, although i disagree personally. Good music isn't necessarily defined by complexity.

In the toilet, no, never. No matter what you do you always resort to the basics when you reach a dead-end or don't know what to do. The basic rules always apply 'cause this is where ALL the tonal music is built upon. But constantly altered and evolved in order to satisfy the needs and specific characteristics of new musical styles, yes.

Atonal music in the toilet by the looks of things.

Goldenthal and Davis aren't atonal composers. Their writing is is primarily within the tonal range and harmony but they use tremendously altered chords, augmented, diminished and atonal playing techniques that are mostly related with the reproduced sound and not so much on the atonal theory itself.

Atonal music per se, as in serialism and 12-note is quickly going out the window apparently, THANK GOD.

Yes, Part and Tavener are heavily inspired by Byzantine/Orthodox music, they even are/were Orthodox at a point of their life.

I guess I can at least expand on the problem of sound of Middle East and stuff.

Demetris, please correct me where I'm wrong, because I read it a long time ago on wikipedia, so you know

The Western sound is generally based on half-tones. Using the special unit that is called cent, each octave has 1200 cents. The unit is logarithmic, which is quite important regarding the curve that represents the difference between the sounds. (It's all on this wikipedia article. A half tone has 100 cents, in the Western scale, referred to as Pythagorean (Pythagorean school was responsible for a lot of musical researches in the question of tone and sound) and equally-tempered. That's what we know.

The problem is that we can see Eastern music as rather dissonant and odd to us, because the traditional Arabic scale uses less cents to define its sounds than we do in Western music. Traditional Arabic scale, called maqam, uses for example 24 equal tones (50 cents between each and it's called a quartertone) and has a lot of qualities referred to as microtonal, this term is used because it's smaller than a half-tone.

Byzantine scale also uses irregular tones and the chants may be regarded as odd to some.

But I guess that's a bit off-topic, sorry

I for one hope atonality stays with us for a very long time. Film music has benefited mightily from its sense of randomness. THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1-2-3, Goldsmith's PLANET OF THE APES, Fielding's THE MECHANIC, and more recently ZODAIC and ENDURING LOVE are among the many great film music moments we wouldn't have had without Schoenberg/Boulez.

(From Goldenthal, 'Toccata and Dreamscapes' from FINAL FANTASY has some atonal sections. But yes, primarily he's not atonal - he's more what they seem to calling post-Romantic like his mentor John Corigliano.)

I think it has a part to play, in modern concert hall composition, and in modern film music. The former, because it involves superb musicianship and can be gripping to witness, the latter, because even if you find the music inaccessible there is no denying to carries dramatic associations that are very useful for the film composer.