A Brief Note On The Music Soundtrack of Ken Burns's The War

Like much of America, we've been glued to PBS for the past four nights with its airing of the first four episodes of the heavily promoted Ken Burns seven-episode film documentary, The War. What we've found dismaying is the utter stupidity of much of the music soundtrack so far. In fact, last night's Episode 4 was the first episode of this mammoth documentary with a music soundtrack that made sense all the way through. The first three episodes were notable for having a music soundtrack that was perfectly idiot for a large number of segments; namely, '40s-style-jazz music that was quite appropriate for the "at-home" segments used, sans irony, for the bloody and tragic "war-zone" segments as well. Simply moronic. And that has to be the doing of series music advisor and composer, Wynton Marsalis. What's most astonishing is that Burns let him get away with it — Burns, whose use of music in his magnum opus, The Civil War, was pitch-perfect from first to last.

Is a puzzlement.