Virtual no more...
Scoring The Screen has shed its exclusively digital skin and entered the analog realm. Which is to say: a real book, made of paper, that you can take on the train, trans-continental flight, or to the local cafe (patrons will find anyone reading a book with a Saul Bass image on the cover irresistibly sexy). Most importantly, it can now be set on a bookstand below your display screen and in front of your controller keyboard so that you can follow along while you watch the film. This alignment of elements is what I envisioned when I first set out to write it. In a sense, you're "reverse engineering" the score, and so the picture should always have primacy, just as it does when you're the one doing the scoring. Music flows from story.
When I learned that Scoring The Screen was to published by Hal Leonard, one of the planet's top purveyors of musical primers, texts, and scores (among them, the orchestral suites from most of John Williams' greatest), I was both humbled and over the moon. Here was a publisher that could bring this book to the people and to the profession, and help to spark a new dialogue among scholars, fans, composers, and the producers who hire them about the importance of music in motion pictures. I received invaluable help in the editorial process from senior editor John Cerullo, assistant editor Lindsay Wagner, and the design team, who produced a great-looking book with crisp, clean reproductions of the score reductions. And then, there are the composers...