I finished nearly all of Wierzbicki's highly readable work; that is, you will not be burdened by excessive musicological jargon. It is an entertaining and informative read. In certain terms, it is an experimental analysis, just as the Barron score is an experimental, unusual score for Hollywood back in that Golden Age years. It's what can be termed a good SPECULATIVE analysis; that is, there is NO written score to analyze, so Wierzbicki had to base his observations and conclusions "entirely on aural experience." So it was an exercise that was out-of-the-norm in terms of film score analyses/books that normally rely on a physical (written) score. He would in Chapter 4 make written transcriptions or versions of the audio. With great pitch discrimination, I would assume he could do an excellent job of putting-to-paper elusive sounds that can be rather hard to pin down (especially electronically generated sounds). So Wierzbicki did a fine job in his attempt to decipher and musically intellectualize and describe what essentially is a listening experience.
Chapter 1 is "Origins and Connections," and quite informative. Even more interesting is Chapter 2's "Compositional Techniques" that more squarely discusses the phenomenon of electronic music. Chapter 3 is a very nice read, "Historical and Critical Contexts." Chapter 4 is the technical or analytical musical meat of the book, and the chapter I was most interested in. Chapter 5 ("The Film Score") deal more generally in terms of how the "music" functioned in the visual layout of the film, etc. Chapter 4 included many written transcriptions/versions of the electronic sounds, providing an admirable cue-by-analysis.
Like the Id monster, the score is invisible-in fact, it doesn't exist substantially as a written document but only as an aural event/experience. Wierzbicki admirably attempts to make it less invisible in understanding, to make it more substantial in his precise (or precisely subjective) analysis. He was in a sense in the Krell laboratories, experimenting to decipher or translate this aural score into another level of understanding. This was a hard task given that there was no "physical instrumentality" (no written score) available to him. My main criticism is that there is no new in-depth interview with Bebe Barron discussing the issues presented in the book that would've been an important historical document.
Bill Wrobel 8-29-05
Website: Film Score Rundowns
