For Randy Newman, it’s a familiar tune. The score and songs he wrote for Disney’s The Princess and the Frog will probably earn him multiple Oscar nominations.

“I’d like to talk about the Academy for about half an hour, if you don’t mind,” he says.

Maybe — but he won’t single out one song over another as the likeliest awards contender.

“I have no idea. I like Down in New Orleans quite a bit. The waltz turned out very well. But I have no preference or expectation. I had fairly explicit instructions. It’s what I asked for. You know, the type of a song is almost suggested by the assignment itself. It was obvious that (firefly) Ray is Cajun country and that’s the kind of thing that he would get ... I often gave them back what they put on the page, essentially.”

The result is a musical gumbo that includes jazz, Dixieland, blues and gospel.

Read more at TorontoSun.com...

ASCAP’s latest PR event “Why Concert Composers Should Write For Film”, a seminar featuring concert and film composer Paul Chihara, urges concert composers to become film composers. As if there aren’t enough issues with existing, experienced film composers trying to scratch out a living in a marketplace completely over-saturated with actual film composers not to mention songwriters and others calling themselves “composers”, the last thing we need is the organization that we pay to collect and pay us our royalties to be encouraging more people from other musical areas to become film composers when the marketplace for existing film composers is in such bad shape.

First, they encourage songwriters to “become” composers, and now it’s concert composers. This, from the organization that values a one-minute score cue in television or film at only 20% of what a one-minute song cue is paid. Thanks, ASCAP – it’s bad enough that you and your ruling songwriter cabal devalue our music, but now you want to encourage more people from other musical areas to enter the disastrously overcrowded film composer marketplace? I wonder how Paul Chihara and his concert composer colleagues would react if the massive numbers of unemployed and under-employed film composers decided to enter the concert music marketplace and compete for the limited number of grants and giveaways that fund those projects!

I don’t want to sound like a protectionist here, and don’t want to overlook the benefit of more orchestrally-trained composers existing in a marketplace where formal instrumental writing skills, and even being able to read music, have ceased to be requirements for being a film composer (even an A-list composer!), but there are some simple economics to be considered that affect every film composer working or trying to work today.

Read more at Filmmusicmag.com...

The little ditties that open TV shows keep growing littler and dittier, almost disappearing into Lost’s single sustained chord. The assumption may be that we’re just going to fast-forward through them anyway, but part of the charm of shows like Cheers, M*A*S*Hand Sanford and Son was the musical intro. Fortunately, not everyone has given up on the theme song. Here are 10 current shows with tunes that make us put down the remote.

Read the list at PasteMagazine.com...

"Whenever I get an assignment, I start out by renting a lot of old movies. The music that plays while Bela Lugosiis creeping around in a cape. The music in World War II dramas when the Nazis show up. Lee Van Cleef's music from those spaghetti Westerns. Film noir scores. Movies with Richard Widmark. Lots of Hitchcock. The music they play when the insane killer is about to leap out of the shadows upon the teenage girl. Get the idea?"

How would you describe this kind of music?

"Throbbing, unsettling beats, low tones, dissonant harmonies, minor keys, sometimes tremulous strings. Lots of cellos. No cowbell."

And this creates a psychological association, in the voters' minds, between the opposition candidate and old movie villains?

"If I've done my job well, when the voter goes into the voting booth and sees my client's opponent's name there, he or she will start hearing that music in the back of the mind. Then, ideally, he or she will nervously glance around in the fear.

More at Daily Press...

Google Inc. will be delving into the music industry next week, letting consumers preview and buy songs as part of its normal online search experience.  Google's music pages will package images of musicians and bands, album artwork, links to news, lyrics, videos and song previews in one place. It will also provide a way to buy songs through digital music services Lala.com and iLike, people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't allowed to speak publicly about the deal until next Wednesday's announcement.

Find Out More at The Tennessean...

Find Out More at The Christian Science Monitor...

Once, not all that long ago, TV theme songs were an integral part of how a show was presented on air. The best shows all featured memorable musical introductions. The recent passing of Vic Mizzy, the songwriter responsible for two of the all-time greatest themes, "The Addams Family" (snap! snap!) and "Green Acres," got us thinking about the somewhat sad state of his craft. Over the past decade, original theme songs have given way to shows featuring recycled classic rock tunes (the "C.S.I." franchise) or, worse, shows with no theme at all.

Still, many shows have risen above their peers and distinguished themselves by celebrating the fine art of the TV theme. Here, we reward them with our list of the Top 10 original theme songs from current shows.

Find Out The Top 10 from the Charlotte Observer...