Ron Jones. He did great work. So distinctive and against wishes he was fired. A shame, later shows which went back to large scores would have been a good fit for him.
Punctuation Music
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Ron Jones. He did great work. So distinctive and against wishes he was fired. A shame, later shows which went back to large scores would have been a good fit for him.
It’s too bad Ron Jones was let go before DS9. Although the music in later seasons improved.
I've always heard the term more as 'incidental music'. The best kind of it is the kind you don't quite notice the first time around. Then slowly you start to anticipate certain musical cues. 80s cartoons were exceptionally good at this, I think. He-Man had music that I hum to this day.
Roger Ebert was very much attuned to the visual. Movies that had tremendous cinematography/visuals often got otherwise unwarranted praise.
'Incidental music' is kind of a catch-all for all the bits of music in a play or show which aren't the overtures or the opening and closing themes.
I think 'punctuation music' is meant to be a subset of that: those bits which provide emphasis for dramatic high points and moments of (esp sudden) action?
Star Wars anyone?
"Stings" is probably the term we're looking for.
That’s true. I heard him give a talk in 1982 and waxed eloquent about the lens selection used in The Eiger Sanction.
Here’s a sample of Courage’s titles for some well know punctuation music, including “Stingers”.
These are found on La La Lands’s Sound Track collection, volume 12, sadly no longer available on Apple Music.
Yup, “stingers” it is. Bits of music that only last a few seconds.
Here’s a compilation of Steiner’s “zap” stingers.
Here’s a compilation of Steiner’s “zap” stingers.
Technically he wasn’t fired. All composers except McCarthy were approached on an episode by episode basis.
And which aren't diegetic music (music that exists within the reality of the story).
Composing style and influence did change in the bridge between the late 60s and into the 1970s, with many a composer moving toward less classical/symphonic scores, with some incorporating the then-experimental. If you listen to the work of Robert Colbert (Dark Shadows, The Night Stalker and every other Dan Curtis production), Andrew Kulberg (Starsky and Hutch), Gil Mellé (Rod Serling's Night Gallery), Billy Goldenberg (Helter Skelter), Mundell Lowe (Hawaii Five-O, Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan, etc.), you would hear a wide range of different musical choices / influences not at all sounding like the "big Hollywood" / classical stylings of the various composers for TOS.
...more of a leaning in TV than film. The same year TNG made its debut (1987), on the big screen, you had some very motif-driven, "punctuated" scores such as Morricone's The Untouchables, and a year later with Joe Jackson's Tucker: The man and His Dream or Horner's Willow.
TNG's Berman-mandated muzak instead of more noticeable, story-supportive cues was yet another indicator that he had no idea what made great Star Trek at all, and like most of the...stuff...in front of the cameras, the Berman-era music lacked any sort of heart, or purpose in being a character in the film. I could not imagine trying to listen to series soundtrack collections to TNG - ENT.
Have you listened to the complete soundtrack set?
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Ron Jones disagrees. He says he was fired a few times in the interview.
https://trekmovie.com/2018/05/28/in...se-emotion-for-star-trek-the-next-generation/
Ah, I'm going off of my memory in the liner notes for the Ron Jones Project, which I'll share here:
If anyone is a big fan of Jones' music as I am, these liner notes are great as they get into every episode in heavy details. In fact there's so much that Film Score Monthly couldn't fit the liner notes in the box set itself, so they posted them all online to share.
https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/notes/box05_intro.html
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