July 2006
Apple iTunes update

We first reported on the availability of online downloads of music by Dimitri Tiomkin from iTunes in May 2003. Since that time, there has been a substantial increase in the amount and variety of song and score material for MP3 players, such as the phenomenally popular iPod. The Apple iTunes Music Store now lists some 100 songs by Tiomkin that, if downloaded, would take a whopping 5.5 hours to listen to. Tiomkin’s output for Westerns is disproportionately represented on iTunes, a reflection perhaps of popular interest and availability, since much of the content is in the form of cover versions of songs or rerecordings of soundtracks. The entire Marco Polo Film Music Classics CD of the score for Red River—mentioned in our March 2005 news—is available for purchase, along with a smorgasbord of material ranging from The Alamo to Wild Is the Wind. A suite from The Men, selections from Alfred Hitchcock films, and the main title from The Thing are also on the playlist. Among the hard-to-find are tracks from a 1988 Telarc CD (88801) featuring music from It’s a Wonderful Life, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Newman as part of the short-lived Sundance Institute Film Music Series. Since our last report, iTunes has expanded beyond the Mac OSX world and is fully functional with computers running Windows. And more good news: the price has remained the same, US$0.99 per track.

The new technology is already revolutionizing the music and recording industry. As an invaluable resource and outlet for music, iTunes has many benefits; however, it also has contributed to a growing problem in semantics. In the popular culture, all MP3 tracks have misleadingly come to be called “songs,”regardless of their content. Television composer Dan Foliart (7th Heaven, Roseanne), president of the Society of Composers and Lyricists, in his Summer 2006 column, “Taking Pride in What We Do,” for the SCL quarterly The Score, writes that he often has been introduced as a songwriter. Even though he has written songs, Foliart points out that ” the way that I have made my living for the last twenty-seven years is as a composer and my output is referred to as cues and underscore.”

Tiomkin usually is not branded as a songwriter, even though he wrote music in song form. He wrote close to 200 songs over the course of his career, but this output is dwarfed by the thousands of music cues he composed as dramatic underscore for film. By lumping everything into one category, iTunes implies that even the “Suspense at Dawn” cue from Red River is a “song.” Does this matter? Yes; it matters to composers interested in raising awareness of, and recognition for, the film-scoring profession.

Several cell phone ringtones based on Tiomkin’s music are now circulating on the Internet. An instrumental arrangement of “Rawhide” can be found by selecting the “Polyphonic” category and searching for “Tiomkin” at www.mp3-search.us/ringtones/en/index.php. The site iFilm provides a link to a downloadable High Noon ringtone. Unfortunately, you have to provide your cell number in order to preview it.

This entry was posted in 2006 and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.