8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Polite Applause, but No "Bravo", September 1, 2005
This review is from: Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Film Score Guides) (Paperback)
Leinberger's film score guide is probably not intended for serious musicians. This guide spends rather too much space on the film's plot and production history, the actors and director, and not nearly enough on actual musical analysis. To be fair, the analysis is generally good and to the point (my only qualm being that Leinberger seems to say that changing the tempo of an ostinato results in a new and different ostinato), there's just not enough of it in enough depth.
Almost all of the analysis falls within one chapter. Leinberger could easily have done musical analyses of all three Man with No Name films had he skipped the background information that is bettered covered by Christopher Frayling, among others. Perhaps he was overly constrained by the series format and his editor's intentions.
The musical samples are well printed and cover most of the text points, but all are presented as melodic lines without any of the supporting harmony or percussion rhythms - even though Leinberger does discuss Morricone's use of modal harmony and novel percussion effects. There are no details of the percussion instruments used. More information about the recording sessions and matters of timing would also have been helpful.
I had already done a more thorough analysis of this music in my head, and all I really expected from this guide were the musical samples to confirm what I thought I heard. Musicians will not find much else here that they haven't already figured out themselves by listening. I recommend this guide mostly to non-musicians who want a complete library on the films of Sergio Leone or the music of Ennio Morricone.
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
This book is terribly written, March 1, 2006
This review is from: Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Film Score Guide (Scarecrow Film Score Guides) (Paperback)
The previous review nailed on the head Leinberger's lack of in-depth focus on the score itself, despite being touted as just that, and so my comments will rather focus on the writing of the book, which is just plain awful.
In general, the book relies too much on repetition. Leinberger has no sense of how to develop an argument; he divides chapters into smaller sub-sections, never caring whether or not there is a logic to the order of chapters, and often repeating statements or ideas within these arbitrary sections. Chapters 2 and 4 in particular, "Morricone's Technique of Film Scoring" and "The Music and Its Context," contain sections that are almost identical.
The writing itself is even worse. The structure of the book gives Leinberger ample room for commentary on the historical and cultural contexts surrounding the film, filmmakers and score, yet his analysis is rarely insightful and too often full of fan-style appreciation. He never fails to include telling adjectives such as "skillful," "bold," "imaginative," "innovative," and the like, avoiding objectivity in moments where he reflects critically on Morricone's influence and reception. Instead of drawing larger conclusions from the presence of diverse musical elements within Morricone's score (popular music, electronically-amplified instruments, human voices, minimalism, musique concrete, etc), he merely mentions their presence within the score (many times over, in fact), expecting us to be struck by their importance merely thru his simple act of observation. Often, he combines these faults, writing sentences like "Although minimalism was used in later film scores...such a device was still quite rare in the 1960s and is evidence of Morricone's inclusion of modern elements in his film music." No commentary on where Morricone might have encountered minimalism, how it affected portions of the score in which it appears, or how it might work in juxtaposition to other stylistic elements contained within the score. Please. A particularly choice example arises over a quotation by critic Laurence MacDonald, who calls Morricone a "musical chameleon." Our esteemed author's analysis? "MacDonald's comparison of Morricone and [Jerry] Goldsmith with a chameleon no doubt refers to that reptile's ability to change color, not necessarily to its ability to blend into the background." Huh? When has that expression ever meant the latter?
In short, save for some factual information it wouldn't take long to find other places, Leinberger's book holds little of value. It's simply not worth anyone's time to wade through the mediocre writing that borders on Freshman-comp bad. You'll find little good, much bad, and the rest painfully ugly in Leinberger's study.
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