Christopher Young’s Words That Stuck With Me

Like everybody else I tune into my favorite NPR station and a couple of times a year I hear the pledge drive and I’m like, not this again.

So forgive me that I will be plugging our 35th Anniversary Kickstarter every day until July 10th, but it’s the only way to make it work!

It’s funny how certain things stay with you...above is an excerpt from an interview with Christopher Young which I did circa late 1992. (It’s in this issue.) I think I did it from home on Martha’s Vineyard—I remember hearing Chris’ voice on the phone while in my old bedroom. I must have been on Xmas vacation my freshman year of college? Sounds right. (I was 18.)

I did two interviews on the future of film music, one with Chris and the other with John Scott—and if you want to read them, download the issue.

But something Chris said stuck with me, and it was about the importance of film music journalism. The exact quote is screencapped above. It was about how 200 years from now, scholars will want to look back and see how a film score was received at the time, and they’ll only have a handful of sources.

I remember being struck by the fact that I was curating one of those only sources, and the importance of doing the best job we could—to be fair, accurate, truthful, etc.

And I was also mindful of the legacy of it, of maintaining an archive, so that those sources were always available.

Which brings me to the Kickstarter! We presently maintain a pdf collection of all the print editions of FSM—for free—on our site, but it’s not organized in any usable, logical way. The only way I can find something is because I dimly remember when and where it was!

Our new website will fix this. The plan is to convert all the print image scans into text (which will require a lot of clean-up work) and have it all be logical and searchable.

And this is why I’m pushing this fundraising every day. I know from experience it’s going to be a ton of labor—probably more than we realize—and I’ll need to fund additional people to help.

It may look like we’re raising a good chunk of money—and we are—but believe me, it goes fast.

Every little bit helps and we’re truly grateful for your support. Thanks!