I beg to differ. Ideally, It should work the other way around! Composers' primary responsibility is to write the score for the movie though they can also contribute in writing few songs. Director explains the shot to the cinematographer and shoots the scene. Then the composer watches the scene, writes the cues wherever needed to carry the emotions of the scene to the viewer. Songs with the lyrics ideally should be used to convey a message, some times the story itself, as needed by the movie. The amount of plagiarism in Indian music industry sometimes prove that a song with the tune composed by someone else fits so perfectly in the movie. But it will never workout with the score because, i feel that's where the primary responsibility of composer lies in; to understand what the director has to convey to the audience and to compose accordingly. Again, since in Indian movie industry there is a traditional approach of incorporating at least 5 songs in a movie, music composers most of the times are forced to limit the major themes (scores) to the base tune of the songs. Moreover, since each song has it's own emotions, they put in all their effort in composing the songs and then they produce main BGMs by composing the base tune of the songs in different octaves with slight variations in the tune itself or by playing them using different instruments. Director and the music director in the presence of cinematographer place these major themes in various parts of the movie. The other smaller cues are composed by watching the movie. It's totally subjective and I don't know whether this way of composing the score is right or not.
Even if there is a "Song master" and a "Score master" as you refer, in Indian film industry, scores are always written with the help of base tunes from the songs. If you consider the movie Kisna as an example, AR had to use some tunes of the songs written by Ismail Darbar in the BGM's. I would love AR to continue writing great scores for the movies and slowly change the tradition by composing more songs independently and releasing them as own albums, sell those songs to movie producers if they want to use them in their movies!! Wouldn't it be awesome?? On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:00 PM, V S Rawat <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I want to understand the connection between songs in a film as against > BGM of a film. Does it, and how does it help in improving the quality of > the music and/ or the BGM if the same person composes songs as well as > BGM, or if they are composed by different persons? > > Normally, I think, songs-directors are quite busy and a song has to > sound unique, different from his and others' other songs, songs should > have instruments and style in tune with the time and place of the movie, > the lyrics should reflect the psychological profile and social > background/ religion/ caste/ maturity/ education of the character > singing them on the screen, so songs in a film, I think, should be > requiring more efforts, and as they also get sold to public, this > commercial angle also requires more efforts to be put in the songs to > make people shell out money. > > However, BGMs could be general. Human brains are not so much attuned to > find similarities between BGMs of two different films, the reason could > be that BGMs are sadly not sold nor made available to public so almost > all of us happen to get to hear them only once or twice when we see the > film and then we tend to forget them. Another drawback could be lack of > lyrics in BGM. Lyrics in a song act as place marker, an aid to remember > and repeat music, so when we memorize the lyrics, the song of those > lyrics gets etched in our brain, but as there are no lyrics in BGM, it > is mostly hard to memorize the BGM. > > Thus, BGM could be general. A BGM director can even prepare a BGM bank > that he can keep on giving them to different films and people would mind. > > So, I think songs and BGMs are quite different area, having quite > different requirement. Then, how would it help when a songs-master > creates BGM or when a BGM-master creates song. > > In fact, I think a songs-master is more busy so he might not pay more > attention in creating the BGM for the film so it might reduce the > quality of the BGM if a songs-master creates them. Or, a songs-master > might tend to create BGMs as "lyrics-less songs", that is, in > independent, individual patches like he was creating a song for a > situation but just didn't add lyrics to them. > > I want to know whether you think ARR should concentrate on creating > songs and should leave BGMs to be developed by others, :-) even though > we love BGMs or any piece of created by our man? > > -- > Rawat > > > -- Cheers, Madhavan.R Be a Music Fan; not a Music Pirate!
