But it left me pondering the differences of viewing a film in the cinema with its soundtrack etched on the film stock, or watching in the open air while hearing the music performed live by a great orchestra in full cry.
The first thing to realize is that, in films created since 1929, the soundtrack is on the reel of film that runs through the projector or on a synchronized disc, so it is irrevocably linked in time to the film itself. Since the advent of talkies such tracks include the dialogue, the musical score, and sound effects. (In Jurassic Park the latter received special awards for “sound design,” creating the effect of dinosaurs roaring or the ominous thud of footsteps of an unseen 20-ton T-Rex whose footfalls make the surface of the water in an otherwise tranquil glass of water jiggle.
For a concert performance with live orchestra, the music must be removed from the soundtrack (while dialogue and sound effects remain), and orchestral parts are, of course, distributed to the musicians who will play them. Meanwhile, the full score on the conductor’s podium needs to be upgraded from a paper-and-ink score of the type conductors have used for centuries to an electronic form because of the special demands of live film performance. The first of these is timing: the conductor must know exactly when to begin any musical cue so that it will align with the film as it moves forward. And although conductors are usually entirely responsible for the pace of the music in a live performance, here they must stay with the film, regardless of whether it is gentle and slow (as in the serene, almost religious, music accompanying our first view of the brachiosaurus) or violent and intense (when the characters are trying to escape a T-Rex attack). The electronic score gives the conductor some kind of light cue to warn him to be ready for a new musical passage (so he can in turn cue the players). And there is a moving bar at the bottom of the score page, running from left to right, suggesting how much time remains for the music om that page. (Sitting in the Shed, it was possible to get a distant look at that moving page—as long as our eyes were not riveted on attacking dinosaurs, with open teeth-filled jaws!)
It is worth considering, too, that the exceptionally skilled musicians who record the music for the soundtrack never play the whole score at once. It is recorded, section by section, with necessary extra takes to be sure it is perfectly timed to the visual image, and then edited to the form put into the soundtrack. In a life performance, of course, the players have to keep going, in one long two-hour performance (with a single intermission here). I don’t know what percentage of the audience is aware of this point, but they should certainly appreciate the special demands of concentration and focus that such a performance sets up. And even more so because a score of this sort is not like a familiar symphony that professional musicians make play many times in their lives. Most will learn and play a score of the richness and complexity of John Williams’s music for Jurassic Park a single time in their lives.
The English composer Barnaby Martin has produced a number of video analyses of significant film scores, including “Why Jurassic Park’s Music is So Powerful” on his YouTube channel Listening In. He emphasizes the important point of “spotting” the music—where it should exist at all, which theme or themes might be combined and developed. His 16-minute discussion often superimposed the score over scenes from the film, which are very enlightening. (Even those who fear they cannot read music can get quite a lot of information here, because a vertical bar moves across the screen as the music plays to show exactly what notes are sounding.) He emphasizes the striking fact that the two main themes are heard so rarely in the film, that their emotional significance comes across with changing expressive possibilities.
I mentioned earlier this summer in a review of John Williams Film Night that performances such as this one—with live orchestra—have become quite common around the United States in the last decade or two. Audiences surely include many who rarely if ever attend an orchestral concert. This sort of event offers them a painless pathway to realizing the sheer excitement that such presentations offer, and the thrill of seeing a stage such as that in the Koussevitzky Music Shed, filled—stuffed—with a huge orchestra, making glorious sounds for two hours. Hurrah for Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops on this especially glorious occasion.