Why do human beings create art? What kind of art do we really want to make? These questions have been pondered for thousands of years, and, I fervently hope, will continue to be asked. It is my belief that the search for meaning and values must be a part of the creative life, and all the more so in times of great change and turmoil.

In our times people have access to virtually every kind of music, for any kind of purpose, more so than in any society throughout history. And we don't have to play music, or be in the presence of musicians playing, to hear it. Music is available for "consumption" in every televised show, in every film, on the radio, in the supermarket, the airplane, the elevator, the cafe, the doctor's office, and now, in computer games and multimedia products. It is almost impossible to walk in an urban center without hearing music; from the headphones of the person sitting next to you on a park bench to the boom box being carried by a guy half a block away.

This situation appears to be a fortunate one for composers. Audiences are available everywhere, any time of the day or night, anyone can listen to music and reap the benefits of composers who are working in our culture. In one sense, this perception is accurate. But in another sense I question whether the awareness of music is evolving at all, and whether our economic alliance with media has another side which is having an adverse effect on music composition.

What factors determine the kind of music that is being created and heard by a majority of Americans? How is musical content, structure and development influenced by contemporary media?

In composing music for visual media, which can provide musicians with a prestigious and lucrative career, music essentially becomes a deferential art form. But what purpose is music really serving? Whose vision and what values is the composer contributing to? Stravinsky made the comment that it was his duty to compose music. This sense of duty, which seems deeply connected to individual conscience, is vital to the composer, and is further complicated when one art has become economically subservient to another.

Music's relationship to film and television is ironic. Music has been a part of human culture for at least 30,000 years, while film has been in existence less than 100 years, and television only 50 years. It is odd that such new mediums should dominate an art which has so much more in terms of tradition, history and culture. I often hear musicians, and would-be musicians, express the desire to score a film. I wonder why this medium holds such attraction given the numerous artistic and personal compromises that are necessary to work in the world of entertainment. For most, it is probably the power of money, the lure of celebrity, or the intoxication with technology, for others perhaps it is a creative challenge, a call to action. But are these motivations in proportion to the spiritual and aesthetic needs of the creative personality? Music composition is a passionate expression of the inner life, but all too frequently it has become nothing more than a commercial endeavor, where people with little knowledge of music tell the composer what the music ought to sound like, how much time it should take, and how it should influence the audience's emotions.

In film and television production, the composer is expected to create music that is governed in length, style, development and structure by non-musical elements. Often, sound effects engulf much of the detail and subtlety of the music (if there is any in the first place), or dialogue limits the music's purpose to a simplistic manipulation of the audience's emotional response. The development and variation of musical thought and structure--which for most composers of genius is the most challenging and joyful aspect of composition--is generally limited and controlled wholly by the visual medium.

I am not saying that music has no place as a collaborative art. Indeed, in many artistic collaborations involving music, the composer is vital, if not essential, to the direction of the project. For example, in opera, ballet, musicals, and songs, the composer's unique vision is not subservient to the vision of librettists, choreographers, conductors or lyricists. While conflicts between colleagues can occur, these art forms share a common assumption: Music is a primary language of communication. In visual media, music is not the primary language. When music is coupled with the visual image, its impact on the listener is always associative: If the music is effective, but the overall scene is not, the music stands out like a self-conscious adolescent on a first date, whereas if the music is poor and the scene works well, the music (which may be outdated, trite or melodramatic) can distance the audience from unselfconscious involvement very quickly and have an effect the director did not intend. Soundtrack engineers must always consider pacing, dialogue, sound effects and overall sound design, with the resolution ultimately in the hands of the director. One of the remarkable and rare things about an effective soundtrack is how these elements work together, each in its own aural "space", each contributing to the scene, each playing its own part. I sometimes wonder while watching a film how much of the music is being masked by these other sonic elements.

Making feature films is an expensive enterprise and every year the cost of production goes higher. Movies are often created in a profit-motivated corporate environment where people invest tens of millions of dollars to make money. Many movies are produced with the strategy that they will be of interest to people with dissimilar intellectual, social, and cultural values. Other films seem to be produced for people who seem to have no interest in values at all. As millions of people have the same aesthetic experience, perhaps a kind of cultural catharsis happens, but I suspect it is far more common that the victory of market-driven values over sensibility is the consequence of mass-produced entertainment. Occasionally, I'll glance at the "Top 10 Grossing Films" column in the newspaper. What does this mean? A film's value can be measured in dollars? Have we become so entrenched in the energy of money that we use it as the standard for artistic expression and achievement? The absurdity of this kind of thinking does not stand up to reason, yet we continue to make judgments from the economic paradigm. Maybe the equating of mass entertainment with fine art is irrelevant--I'm not sure whether I am cynical or naive on this point--but the widespread assumption that market-driven exchange values define what is of true worth to people seems to be one of the tragic illusions of our culture. It is not that fine art cannot exist in the marketplace, but that real art always has intrinsic psychological and cultural value which unquestionably transcends any economic value it may or may not possess. In our age of mass-advertising and mass-marketing, the means and ends of artistic experience and artistic works are confused. As the ever-larger corporations of entertainment continue to swallow up smaller groups, like a cancer cell unchecked, how will diversity of values, and more important, the evolution of values, be played out in a culture where money is used by the ignorant to measure the value of artistic products?

If a film costs $35 million to produce, and is expected to gross $80 or $100 million, you can bet that someone is making sure this film will be of interest to a lot of people. And these producers are not in the mood to take the artistic risks necessary for creativity to flourish. Name-recognition wins out over originality, and proven formulas eclipse experimentation (except in matters of technology, where experimentation is the norm). These factors have a strong influence on a composer's creative direction. Hence, contemporary film scores sound all too similar: If film A is successful in the marketplace, then film B ought to have the same musical "sound," whether a different style (or different composer) may work better from a dramatic or musical perspective. Many of these production decisions are made by executives whose abilities and training are in business and marketing, or by half-trained musicians who have won a place in the corporate entertainment hierarchy. It is difficult for people to agree on what constitutes a good piece of music based solely on artistic standards. In our culture we impatiently sidestep the entire question and allow the success or failure of mass-marketing to be the arbitrator in these matters. Since economics is one of the great mythologies of our civilization, it is no wonder that we do this and not see the uselessness and shortsightedness of our judgments.

The composer's role in film, therefore, is influenced by two powerful factors: First, as a craft, in which structure, development and style are governed by non-musical elements, and second, as a contributor to a medium which is, in essence, controlled by money, and has its central aim the realization of large corporate profits. Perhaps this is why many of our most gifted composers are either indifferent about, or antagonistic toward, the messy business of commercial scoring.

Part of the purpose of arts education is to encourage, support and develop the process of individuation and to help people express their humanity through the arts. There is little in contemporary media that is achieving that goal. If we are learning many of our values, ideals, and metaphors via the products of the image-makers, and image-makers have made the acquisition of money their primary goal, how is this tendency affecting our cultural life? What kind of impact do the commercial arts have on the development of individual conscience? The idea that entertainment is an end in itself--a drug, an escape, rather than a medium to foment the mind and heart--is a widely accepted one. And this idea has its roots happily planted in the soil of advertising and mass-marketing. Perhaps in the future we will recognize these cultural weeds for what they are and pull them so as to make room for that which is truly beautiful and useful.

Art is a laboring to express ultimate reality from the limited perspective of the finite personality. The artist's role is to blend the spiritual with the material, the intellectual and the sensual. The will and the conscience are far more connected than we would like to believe and no amount of cleverness, be it intellectual, technological or marketing, can compensate for empty entertainment which, like junk food, leaves people gratified for a moment but in the long-run contributes nothing to their well-being. Far too much music, and the inane uses of music, are doing just that.

In a mature society commerce serves the fine arts, that is the arts are the end and commerce the means. By viewing everything cultural through the eyes of the economic paradigm, I think our society sees it distorted. The arts are important not because they serve the politically correct rhetoric of attracting tourism, providing jobs, selling products, etc., but simply because we express our hearts, heads and hands through art, and this in itself is a cultural and psychic necessity. Entertainment for the sole purpose of distracting people from their own solitude and inner life is about as far from real art as you can possibly get. The confusion between what is vanity and what is true individuality, and the conflict between community and conformity has to be clarified within the consciousness of the artist if even the possibility of creating art is to exist. It is not that the usual rhetoric about the social purposes of art is wrong, it is merely designed to explain art to people who otherwise don't get it in the first place; it is designed to justify a human endeavor that ought not require justification at all.

As the visual image is pervasive in media, so is the accompanying music score. Television sitcoms, movies, advertisements, computer and video games, MTV and news broadcasts each use music for their own purposes. I frequently observe how often people habitually associate music with images, and wonder if this is a kind of culturally induced hypnosis. There is so much to be gained by encountering music as its own language, as ideas in themselves, independent of visual association. Many people experience dramatic instrumental music only in the form of the latest, biggest and loudest film or television score. Meanings and values which are unexpressed, or under-expressed, through the combined visual-musical experience are often conveyed better through music alone because of its abstract nature. It is this capacity to be abstract which makes music so marvelous, while the visual image tends to be quite specific. In film, music usually means something definite and concrete--a character's state of mind, a setting, an event or an incident about to occur--hence music's meaning is literally defined by image and story. The composer can bring his own insights via the music, but nonetheless, those insights are reflections of the story. Music without the visual image can exist as an abstract experience where the listener plays a crucial role in discovering meaning by how perceptively and imaginatively he can listen. It is this abstract nature of music which fascinates me as a composer, and holds my interest and curiosity as a human being. Because music is an inherently intangible and abstract medium, the listener is free to ponder and discover much through his own listening skills, without a literal or visual point of reference.

I am aware of and support the outstanding work that has resulted from the combined efforts and talents of directors, screenwriters and composers. I have had enjoyable and productive experiences composing music for film, television and digital media, yet I find the deepest artistic pleasures in composing music in which structure and styles are self-contained, and not associated with images. The rewards of individual expression are immeasurable, and the joy of making music that is governed by its own inner laws is profound. Of course there is room in the world for both the multimedia arts which involve music with other media, and music as an art form by itself. My intention is not to deprecate the use of music with images, but to affirm music as an art in its own right, with its own inherent purpose: The greatness of musical expression and artistic achievement is not guaranteed one whit by the availability of technology, the enticements of mass-market success, or the adjunct of the exciting or seductive visual image.

The role of music in dramatic scoring is complex. Music can be a response to, or an expression of, character psychology, action, conflict, stress, plot or values. Music can express time and place, or suggest the timeless and the infinite. Often, music may set up a contradictory mood or pacing, to suggest conflict and mystery in what could be, without the music, a scene in which only the "surface" meaning is apparent; and thereby revealing a deeper understanding. It is gratifying to a composer when a scene to be scored calls forth the composer's richest and deepest sensibilities and there is the opportunity to add his own genius to the scene. This capacity to bring musical excellence to a given scene depends of course on the composer's dramatic talent, and on the potential inherent in the scene itself.

The composer's life experiences and sensitivity play a key role in how a given scene will be scored. I wonder if the more well-read a composer is, the broader and deeper his education, and the more conscious his life experiences are, the more able he is to create an effective film score. I cannot answer this question because there are too many complexities and contradictions in human nature to link creative talent with such conscious processes or events. Besides, it is usually in the most unselfconscious moments that our best ideas are born. Love is a far greater motivation than ambition, at least when it comes to artistic creation. But one thing is true: If the director is confident in his vision of the film, and understands what music can and cannot do, he won't ask the composer to compensate for other elements of the film that are not working well, but rather to let music do what it does best--enhance drama, evoke meaning and heighten audience involvement with all the elements of the film. The relationship between the director and composer must be one of two equal visions if the music is going to really make any kind of impact on the film.

Film is a complex art, and there are countless ways to explore the relationship between music and images. For the most part, composing music to picture is a craft rather than an art. A craft requires talent, skill, and experience, while art requires all of these and a profound personal commitment to see an idea through to its ultimate conclusion; a work of art is an affirmation of what the artist believes to be the truth of his own nature. If an idea originates in one creative mind, craft is elevated to art when creative minds working together can transcend socially approved hierarchies and concepts of success, results and goals, and find a way to give expression to a common and sincere vision. When this happens, an authentic collaboration exists, when it does not, we have the commonplace commercial music score we hear so often.

The difficulties of creating art in a society in which money is overvalued and people are temporally impoverished are fierce, but not insurmountable. As civilization becomes more complex, the need to realize values becomes increasingly important to the individual and to society. There are many inner obstacles to overcome, traditions to question, trends and misguided fads to ignore, attitudes to change, and symbols to forsake. It is my sincere hope that composers--for that matter artists of all mediums--take the psychological risks that are necessary to create art that feeds the spirit and not just the stomach and the bank account. Our culture needs this kind of art far more than it realizes, we need it for ourselves, and for those who come after us and inherit what we've left behind.

There is a Russian saying, "It is nice to sing songs once you have eaten." I believe this simple common sense to be true, but I am concerned because in late 20th century American culture, many people are eating well but few are singing their own song.