Quote:
Originally Posted by Serrart
I don't know. You mean he can orchestrate effectively enough for a whole soundtrack
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Absolutely. I think he has (or had) the musical intelligence & the abundance of ideas to have composed entire scores. He certainly can't orchestrate in the traditional sense -- he can't notate parts for the various instruments of the orchestra -- but neither can a lot of score writers & it doesn't stop them from scoring on a single instrument (say, a synthesizer) & then handing it over to an accomplished orchestrator. I doubt Randy Newman wrote out the orchestration for his score for "The Natural," & I know even orchestra-literate composers from the old days, like Stothart & Newman, sometimes would turn over orchestration duties to someone else. (Even John Williams let someone else orchestrate much of his "Close Encounters" score.) But Lindsey could have written good scores for other combinations of digital, electronic & electromechanical instruments & just avoided traditional orchestration entirely -- or "faked" traditional assignments of instruments on a workstation. I have no doubt he can find his way around a workstation, & that's all it takes to write all sorts of music these days. (I'm thinking of compositions like "Christian Zeal & Activity" or "Hoodoo Zephyr" by Adams. Lindsey will never write a "Shaker Loops," but he might have written the either of the former.)
But beyond the technical ability to have done so, he had the musical ability as well. I wonder whether the idea ever occurred to him, or whether someone else ever pitched the idea to him & he declined. We're so used to thinking of him in terms of the pop song format because that's virtually all he has worked in all his life. (We used to think that way of Danny Elfman, too, back in the "Only a Lad" days.) I'm puzzled as to why he kept returning to that format over the years, to the exclusion of other formats, especially when he usually couldn't acquire the audience he probably wanted. Even without movie scores, he might have tried lengthy suites the size of an entire CD (which of course has already been pioneered by pop musicians from ELO to Kate Bush).
I think the old folkie ways circa 1962 die hard in Lindsey.