Failing to score

Though I've mentioned film soundtracks in passing on this blog, I'm surprised I haven't posted directly on the subject. This may be because the quality of musicianship in cinema seems to have tailed off markedly in recent years.

There are any number of reasons for this: I suspect the main is budgetary; there is continued reliance on found, usually pop, songs; a lot of the work is formulaic; some - art-house - films often don't have any score at all, or I may not be going to the right movies. For instance, though I'm a fan of composer Max Richter, I haven't seen the last film to which he contributed a soundtrack, Sarah's Key, despite his faintly terrifying contribution to Waltz with Bashir (2008).

It can't be coincidence that one of the greatest of all directors, Alfred Hitchcock, worked with some of the greatest composers in the genre: Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrmann... One soundtrack I would highlight in the last few years is that for Tom Ford's Christopher Isherwood adaptation A Single Man (2009), which not only includes vintage hits but also mixes work by two composers: Shigeru Umebayashi and Abel Korzeniowski (plus a touch of Herrmann).

Composer Michael Nyman, notable for his work on such Peter Greenaway films as Drowning by Numbers (1988; pictured) and The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), as well as Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), is especially scathing on the state of scoring in cinema, citing derivative work and general condescension. At the root of his argument seems to be a lack of respect for the art of a composer to which, I would add in what seems to have become an increasingly (visually) stylised medium, the role of a great soundtrack.

For the record, one of Nyman's favourite bits of his own work occurs, perhaps surprisingly, in Michael Winterbottom's determinedly contemporary London movie, Wonderland (1999). He told a Time Out screening earlier this year, of the scene in which Gina McKee takes the N171 home late at night, with all that entails: 'The bus sequence is the best combination of music and image I've ever been involved in.'

UPDATE The same day I posted this, the wonderful Letters of Note site featured a letter from Audrey Hepburn, thanking Henry Mancini for his score for Breakfast at Tiffany's. It includes this succinct appraisal of a good film soundtrack: 'A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel. However beautifully the job is done, we are still on the ground and in a world of reality. Your music has lifted us all up and sent us soaring.'

Hidden London: stuffed, pickled, embalmed

When considering the form of your final peace, you may wish to heed the indignities suffered by these mammals in our rationalist capital:

Stuffed

Forest Hill's Horniman Museum is famous for its overstuffed walrus - filled by a taxidermist in the 1870s unfamiliar with the beast's multiple folds.

Pickled

It's not the first thing you expect to see on entering a museum: a jar full of pickled moles, reminiscent of a competition to guess the number of sweets. UCL's Grant Museum boasts all sorts of zoological curiosities but don't, as I did, go immediately after lunch. (Thank you, though, to the enthusiastic woman who encouraged me to smell inside the cabinets!)

Embalmed

UCL has an even stranger corpse on its premises, however. Jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham instructed that his body be preserved upon his death in 1832 and there he is, perched in a glass cabinet. The head is made of wax - the real appendage having suffered all forms of humiliation - but his dressed body remains, at the end of the south cloisters in the university's main building.

'You have to be Hungarian'

I've always had a certain fascination for the exposed insides of demolished buildings (pictured below). This is due to the revelation of secret spaces, as well as the abstract patterns they create (above). It took a photograph by André Kertész, however, to show me how to capture these sites properly. In Landing Pigeon (New York, 1960), which features in Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century, he sets off the angles of vanished stairways with a bird in flight.

The Royal Academy's show concentrates on five big names: Brassaï, Robert Capa, Kertész, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkácsi. You sense the curators have tried their damnedest to draw themes from the displayed work, though they struggle to explain Capa's joshing maxim, 'It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.' This is especially so when for much of the period under review, photography was severely restricted in Hungary, leading most of the names here to practise their art abroad - how to separate Brassaï from his views of Paris or vice versa?

Opening with a folkloric vision, notably espoused by Rudolf Balogh, the exhibition comes full circle in Miklós Rév's Straight Road (Inota, c1955), which pitches a rural idyll against industrial reality. (Tibor Schoen's Ravens - Az Erdekes Ujság, 1915 - is another picture of two halves: a dead soldier in a Christmas card scene.) There's a predictable cavil: the most recent work here is from 1992 - a shame the Royal Academy didn't throw open one of its free rooms to bring the story up to date.

Eyewitness runs until 2 October and the bumper catalogue is now only £14.95.

Five things I'm looking forward to this autumn

ART

Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama promises to be a major retrospective of the 80-year-old German artist, to rival MoMA's 40-year survey in New York one decade ago. From 6 Oct 2011-8 Jan 2012.

Look out also for Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, at the Royal Academy 17 Sept-11 Dec, the V&A's latest blockbuster, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, which opens 24 Sept to 25 Jan, plus Tacita Dean takes over Tate Modern's Turbine Hall from 11 Oct.

BOOKS
Haruki Murakami's last big novel, Kafka on the Shore, disappointed despite its heft. Seven years on, the cult author's latest, 1Q84, was so well-received in Japan, he added a third volume to the work's original two parts. They're released here in two books on 18 & 25 Oct respectively.

FILM
Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) tackles John Le Carré's classic novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with a rattling cast, which includes John Hurt, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch, headed up by Gary Oldman (released 16 Sept).

Hurt also stars in the latest from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, Melancholia, alongside Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Rampling, in cinemas from 30 Sept. Other stand-outs this month include Nicolas Winding Refn's James Sallis adaptation, Drive (23 Sept), and Mademoiselle Chambon (same date), with Sandrine Kimberlain and Vincent Lindon as a couple suddenly drawn to each other. Lynne Ramsay's take on the Lionel Shriver novel We Need to Talk About Kevin opens 21 Oct, boasting a stand-out performance from Tilda Swinton.

MUSIC
I haven't been excited about a new album by Björk for some time, but Biophilia sees the Icelandic pop pixie embracing nature, and technology. Out 10 Oct.

One year after Dust Lane, it looks as if Yann Tiersen is back with a new album, Skyline (pictured), out second half of October. Then there's Erasure entering Tomorrow's World, from 3 Oct.

TV
Danish crime drama The Killing was the cult hit of the winter, and I can't wait for the arrival of follow-up The Killing II on BBC4. Star Sofie Gråbøl promises the 10-episode series is even darker than the first.

A voyage around my bedroom

At the start of the summer I moved my desk (dining table) into my bedroom. A friend remembered that an ex used to warn never to do this as it affects your sleep but my bedroom is at the front of the flat, which gets sunshine most of the day - when it's sunny - and gives me a sense of the bustle on the street when working.

This set-up does mean your bed is soon covered with reference books, scraps of paper and magazines - it's like being a student again. But at least it's not like Proust; in his book How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997; pictured), Alain de Botton quotes a friend of the writer, Marie Nordlinger: 'The apparent discomfort in which he worked was quite incredible; the bed was littered with books and papers, his pillows were all over the place, a bamboo table on his left was piled high, and more often than not, there was no support for whatever he was writing on (no wonder he wrote illegibly), with a cheap wooden penholder or two lying where it had fallen on the floor.' Thank goodness for my laptop.

Five years later, de Botton touched once more upon writing in bedrooms, in his book The Art of Travel. He recounts the tale of 27-year-old author Xavier de Maistre who, in 1790, undertook a Journey Around My Bedroom. Eight years later the Frenchman ventured a little further, to the windowsill, at night, in Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom. It is a genre de Botton dubs 'room-travel'. De Maistre, de Botton writes, 'particularly recommended room-travel to the poor and to those afraid of storms, robberies and high cliffs.'

I've been fortunate to venture a little further this summer but then I did have to pack more than de Maistre, who needed only 'a pair of pink and blue cotton pyjamas'. I do, however, possess such a pair of stripey pyjama bottoms, so perhaps I'm not as ill-equipped for this lifestyle as I feared.

Britain's oldest purpose-built mosque

In the week of the anniversary of 9/11, and amid continuing controversy over the siting of a mosque near New York's Ground Zero, I find myself reading about France's oldest mosque in a beautiful book, Paris Between the Wars (Thames & Hudson). Author Vincent Bouvet writes about the Paris Mosque, construction of which began in 1926: 'The building was intended as a symbol of friendship between France and the Islamic world and as a homage to the Muslims who died fighting for France in the Great War. The city provided the land and the architects drew their inspiration from the mosques in the city of Fez, designing a structure in reinforced concrete decorated with traditional materials from the Maghreb.'

Britain's oldest purpose-built mosque was constructed nearly 40 years earlier, in 1889, by the Hungarian-born Orientalist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner. The Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking was commissioned by Shah Jahan, the Nawab Begum of Bhopal, alongside the Oriental Institute Leitner had established six years earlier. Leitner's parents were Jewish; when his father died his mother moved to Istanbul where she married a Jewish convert to Christianity. Leitner studied in a madrassa in the city and is said to have spoken eight languages fluently by the age of 15; he was made a professor at King's College London six years later and, aged 24, was appointed head of the Government College, Lahore. His mosque is Grade II-listed and still in use.

Sofie Gråbøl on the writer of The Killing

200th POST

In July I was lucky enough to interview Danish actress Sofie Gråbøl in Copenhagen for an article in this month's Voyager. The conversation revolved around the hit series in which she stars, The Killing, including some lovely jumper philosophy. When we met, shooting was about to start on a third series in Denmark; The Killing II (pictured) is set to screen on BBC4 after the current repeated run of the first series.

After the rigours of the original, 20-episode season she said she'd mainly been tempted to revisit her character, detective inspector Sarah Lund, by the collaboration with writer Søren Sveistrup. Gråbøl was great company; here's what she said about working with Sveistrup, with whom she'd also previously worked on an Emmy award-winning romantic comedy called Nikolaj and Julie:

'I enjoy acting and the basic work but I also enjoy the whole skeleton of the character. Those meetings we have - the collaboration I have with the writer - are really interesting, they’re just as interesting as the actual acting. I like the construction of the character and the script, building the whole skeleton of emotions and he allows me to be involved in that.

'It works in the way that he writes a script that's almost finished and then we gather and we read it and the actors have meetings with him afterwards and you can say whatever you want, you can comment on whatever you want. It allows him to be in a constant dialogue with the project and to me that's extremely fulfilling.

'To me it's a sign of great self-confidence that you are so confident in yourself that you allow other people to influence [you]. You pick the good ideas. People who aren't confident, if you're insecure, it's very easy to say no. To say yes, to be open is frightening at times - also in my work, to throw yourself into a direction you’re not sure of. To me he's very good at that.'

UPDATE The Killing II screens on BBC4 from 19 November 2011.

Related: tracking down Danish band Gangway (100th post)