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WOW! John is open and wanting to compose the new Star Wars films?! What great news! A few things: - Star Wars would be dead to me without Williams. Sure, I'd watch them eventually... but... they'd be dead. Williams' music is the lifeblood of the series. The heart and soul. Without Williams, then what we know to be Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and the prequels would not have existed. Star Wars would have come and gone, forgotten outside of a few small pockets of avid sci-fi cult classic followers (aka virginal nerds in their forties playing dress-up). Without Williams' music, the first two prequels would have been almost completely horrid trash outside of a good lightsaber fight in I and seeing Padme in a tight suit in II, and the relentless latter half of Revenge of the Sith would have been far less impactful and moving. I am one who enjoyed the prequel scores as much as the original Trilogy scores. All six are masterpieces to me. To consider another composer with Williams alive and willing to do them would be blasphemous. I never was a big Harry Potter fan, but I stopped watching the Potter movies after Williams stopped composing for them. I may get around to them some day, but I lost a great deal of interest. Sure, some other composer could come in and do an adequate job - but Star wars would eventually become as meaningless as any other multi-film franchise that has multiple writers, directors, composers and stars. Just another movie series. - Uni?! Is that you? I haven't seen that name in ages! How great to see! - Wait... wha?! Since when did rude-@$$, ignorant-@$$ anti-Williams posters take over this board? They can't be trolls, because they aren't very funny or clever. Or is it just being an ignorant dick attempting to be "postmodern" funny? Hmm. Oh well... my interest has come and gone with that.

Odd. I have nearly zero interest in the actual score recording, but the LSO album recording is utterly fantastic.

Here's a weird thread! Does your normal every day member of society brain ever stop while listening to a really fantastic and incredible modern John Williams track and go..."this was written by a man in his 70s/80s?!?!" It happens to me mostly on the more streamlined and cleaner works John has written. Also some of the more aggressive and action music. "Everybody Runs," "The Hunt," "No Man's Land," "The Tide Turns" all come to mind. I actually just got it during the action music in No Man's Land. You don't, at least in most of our modern western cultures, associate a gentle old man with menacing bombast and almost rock-'n-roll level [orchestral] music. And yet there it is. It sends chills through my body imagining John in his old age sitting at a piano punching out notes that become "The Hunt" in the Lost World. Consider what a not-so-small role time plays in our ability to communicate with each other. Just look at the last 20-40 years. People growing up in the 70s and 80s have brains wired for a completely different musical language from those growing up in the 90s and 00s. The younger ones find the musical palette of the past strange and syrupy, the older ones find the new music overly emotional and like loud noise. And here's a man born closer to Tchaikovsky than to most of us and he can write music that is very much in keeping not only with that era, write music that is 80s, 90s, 2000s, and beyond. That's what makes my jaw drop. His 2000s music sounds completely modern, completely in sync with our modern sound palette, and yet completely out of sync, anachronistic with his own age. I have to believe that it's a conscious choice, that the great man behind the curtain chooses to connect with us with our modern language, to write cool music. To write music like No Man's Land. Music you wouldn't be embarassed to admit listening to to your cool modern friends. It's magnificent if you think about it. Wizard of Oz level magic. Imagine if an elderly author could write a novel in Shakespearean English, Victorian English, and Modern Colloquial English at will. Now imagine if he could blend all those iterations of the English language into one novel that makes complete and absolute sense. Because that's basically what John is doing. Anyways, cue Joey discussing how modern Williams and modern Williams suck.

Well, the Varese version ran 1:36 and this version runs 1:54, so its 18 minutes longer Plus Neil S Bulk says https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151250897337260&set=a.458899792259.251671.701952259&type=1

Very cool!

Funnily enough, the very thing crossed my mind when I saw this comment on Youtube for No Man's Land from WAR HORSE. So do I, but I can't help but have a daft grin across when I hear say 5:55 to the end of Visitor in San Diego or 1:44 in The Turbulent Years from NIXON - both written in the mid-late 90s, but still sounding utterly fresh and contemporary.

Digitmovies is premiering the complete score of Rosza's Providence, which has a planned release date of Feb 25th, and is available for pre-order on SAE.

Hell, John's probably giddy (like the rest of us) at the thought that meddlesome George isn't around to bastardize the movies any more. - Uni

I just played a gig last night in the Palm Desert with a bass player who was friends with Angela Morley... I asked her if there were any books that had been written about her. She said no because Angela liked to remain very much behind the scenes. But this person said that she was interested in writing a book herself, since she knows a lot of Angela's friends. I see this person a few times per year, so if any of this materializes, I'll keep people posted here.

I like it already Josh Broling In Sin City: A Dame To Kill For Alex

the original soundtrack version of Desert Chase is superior to me.it was ingrained into my dna before the dcc version was released. the other versions sound wrong once you're used to the original.

Jerry Goldsmith was the ultimate chameleon film composer, though even then, he does have his own distinct sound. Lyrical solo trumpet passages, i-IV progressions, low piano/synth ostinati, frequent metrical changes (i.e. 7/8 to 13/8 to 5/4), fondness for jazz harmonies (i.e. Lydian chords, major 7ths, suspended 4ths, minor 9ths etc...), string pizzicati (often with harp), studio echo (tape echo, MXR echoplex, or electric flutes w/echo and delay), septuplet and sextuplet runs in winds and strings, tutti horn triplet figures, fourths and fifths (i.e. the Klingon theme), snarling trombone glissandi, use of major 7ths and flat 9ths/augmented octave (intervals common in serialist works, due to them being inversions of minor 2nds), ad lib vocalistions from human voices, whole tone/augmented clusters (the harmony that opens the original Main Title to ALIEN), low horns playing 1/4 tone pitch bends, pizzicato and arco between bridge and tailpiece on strings, key clicks on woodwinds, tapping mouthpieces on trombones and tubas, col legno and snap pizz, guiro, cricket clickers, angklungs, cuicas, vibraphone w/ motor on, 1/4 tone vibrato on strings, various 'prepared piano' effects (i.e. wire brush glissandi, various mallets on the lowest strings, paper or staples to alter the sound), lowest octave of the piano, Balinese and Javanese gongs, muted strings, flutter-tonguing brass, rub rods, boo bams, bowed tremolo string clusters, static pedal point with shifting major triads above, clusters that aren't necessarily contained within one octave (i.e. the recurrent 'idée fixe' chord in THE OMEN - two juxtaposed quartal chords: G#-A#-C#-D# below and C-D-G-A above, or white note cluster in one octave, and black notes in the other) etc... The sheer stress of having to write so much music under short time constraints, or the appeal of the familiar, means that one will fallback on certain tried-and-true techniques and work methods. Yeah, that's pretty neat. I think it's Ab-Bb-B-D-E-G (octatonic cluster) to Bb-B-C-Db-F#-A (another one a half-step up, though this time that added B gives it a jagged 4-note chromatic cluster), and back to the first chord. Startling device - especially considering it never reappears again in the recorded score. I'd argue that it's not they don't exhibit stylistic variety, but that they don't have much of musical personality, or craft. A self-assuredness and mastery of their own idiom that the greats had in spades. To be honest, I think John Williams could do a Danny Elfman or Thomas Newman pastiche, and make it more compelling and re-listenable than the real thing.