Tell us a little about your background, both personally and professionally. How did you first discover film music?
I grew up in northern Germany in a small city on the North Sea coast. In the eighties, I used to be a big fan of the synth pop of that era. I have to be honest. My family had no musical background. Therefore, I hated music lessons in school, never learned an instrument and didn’t come in contact with the world of film music until much later. Friends of mine introduced me to John Williams, John Barry and other composers in the mid-nineties. But I was still skeptical. My ears simply were not used to hearing orchestral music at all and while I liked some of the main themes of popular scores, I often struggled with the rest of the underscore, which more or less sounded like unrelated noise to me. That all changed with Jurassic Park and Speed (by Mark Mancina) in 1994.
I loved the majestic themes of John Williams and was impressed by the breathtaking rhythmic energy of Mancina’s action score. I started to take a closer listen and began collecting soundtrack CDs. During that time, I also spent many hours hanging around at a small local CD shop in my hometown. The owner was also a music enthusiast and a huge James Horner fan, and he knew a lot about music history. He introduced me to Golden Age composers like Korngold, Herrmann and Rozsa. That’s where it really started. In my life, I have always been driven by a curiosity to listen and embrace new music. So I was completely hooked by discovering the world of film music. Around the same time, I started to study computer science at the Kiel university. Little did I know back then that both worlds should collide a few years later.
How did you begin your career as a film music journalist? Tell us a little about that history, and what you do now in terms of film music journalism.
I started my own film music magazine, www.filmmusik2000.de, around 2000. To be honest, I did not know much about journalism back then. From my teenage years, I enjoyed writing little short stories and poems. But I hadn’t written any reviews until then. For me, creating the website was always “learning by doing”. Learning how to write and at the same time learning about the history of film music. Until then, I had only listened to contemporary film scores. My knowledge about film music history or great composers of the past was quite limited. So I had much to learn and to discover. Since then, it’s been a great and very rewarding journey.
Your website is celebrating a major milestone anniversary this year. Can you talk a little about how film music criticism has changed for you since you first started your site?
Thank you for mentioning the 25th anniversary. I am very proud that my website is still alive & running after all those years. It wasn’t always easy to maintain. When I started, my original plan was to provide CD reviews. So potential customers would be able to read my texts and make an informed decision whether to buy it or not. Often I would receive a promotional copy of a score from the record labels. That gave me a time advantage. And of course, it was nice to listen to the scores before anyone else could. But with the success of mp3-downloads, this whole system changed drastically. Often a film score was leaked in advance. And later, everyone who was interested could listen to a film score on the release date on one of the various platforms. So why provide CD reviews anymore? At the same time, my private life also changed. Having a kid and a work life consumed most of my time. I simply wasn’t able to keep up the update rate. But I also refused to let the project die. I still went to film festivals, film music concerts, attended conferences and did write some articles for the Cinema Musica, a German print magazine on film music. So it never really stopped. But it slowed down.
In 2016, I migrated my website to WordPress with hundreds of articles. And I started to focus to writing about film scores in the context of the movie, asking questions as „Why does it sound like it does?“ or „What does it or doesn’t do for the movie?”. Initially, I mostly wrote about the music only, and often I hadn’t seen the movie at all. Today, I don’t do that anymore. I need to hear the score in context, even if it means that I write an article years after a movie is released. Also, what has changed is that I choose my topics more carefully. In the first years, my articles were mostly based on which promo CDs I got. Today I do what I like. That’s much more fun.
What, in your opinion, are the things that are necessary for a film score to be successful?
I think for a film score to be successful, it has to add a layer to a film that hasn’t been there before. Ideally, the best film scores provide a musical identity to a movie, something you cannot separate from it. For example, if you listen to a few bars from a movie like Star Wars or Jurassic Park or The English Patient: You instantly will have all the images in your head. Only very few film scores have this ability. But when it’s happening, it’s always magical.
What is your opinion of the film music industry as it stands today, specifically in Germany? Can you talk a little about how the stature of German film music has grown over the last decade?
Unfortunately, I don’t think it has grown at all. Yes, there are some hardworking film composers in Germany doing interesting projects. But there are many problems: Still music budgets are very low. Producers and directors seem to be afraid to have good music in their movies. As a consequence, you have countless serviceable film scores which don’t transcend the movie they were made for. Don’t get me wrong. Often that’s perfectly fine, and European films tend to have their own sensibility which may demand a different kind of approach to film scoring. I really don’t want to sound harsh, but to make a point: How many outstanding German film scores of the last few decades can you name which really stood the test of time and are well known internationally? That said, I sincerely hope the film music industry here will benefit from Volker Bertelman’s Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. But only time will tell.
Who do you think are the best film music composers, historically and working today? What is it about their music that appeals to you?
Historically, I am really impressed by the work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann and Miklós Rózsa. Then, of course, Alex North, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone and John Williams. Personally, I love the work by Wojciech Kilar, Philippe Sarde and Patrick Doyle. I like to think of all these composers as “auteurs in music“ with a unique style which is easy to identify. That said, I think these personalities are missing in the film music world of today. When I started collecting, I couldn’t wait to hear the next Kilar, Doyle or Williams score. In my opinion, today, there aren’t many composers left with such a unique style and a high level of quality output. Don’t get me wrong: there are still some great film scores each year. We can find them on the list of IFMCA nominations, but times have definitely changed.