Lewya

Only ONE critic out of 122 critics wanted Williams to win for The Rise of Skywalker while 40 critics wanted Joker to win. Surprised Desplat was only 5 votes away from Joker to be honest: Best Original Score 1. Hildur Guðnadóttir, “Joker” (40 votes) 2. Alexandre Desplat, “Little Women” (35 votes) 3. TIE: Randy Newman, “Marriage Story” (23 votes) / Thomas Newman, “1917” (23 votes) 4. John Williams, “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” (1 vote) https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/which-movies-should-win-oscars-2020-critics-vote-parasite-1202209448/

LOL. I just don't get it. Now she is even called out for helping to redeem film music's reputation by a recent Pulitzer prize jury member. This professor who wrote this article was one of the five jury members for the Pulitzer prize for music two years ago or so: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/hildurg-gudnadottir-music-profile/ Her scores for HBO’s Chernobyl and Todd Phillips’s Joker bring soundtracks into the realm of high art. Few insults hit a serious composer as hard as saying a piece of work “sounds like movie music” or, worse still, like “mood music.” The background function of a film score has stigmatized the genre as something insubstantial and inclined to cliché since the days of piano players tinkling away as silent pictures flickered in early movie houses. Mood music took hold as a genre with the introduction of the long-playing record, when albums of lush strings and sonic faux-exotica by schlocksters like Les Baxter were pitched as aural lubricants for bachelor-pad sex, and the contemporary variations on the form found on Spotify’s “chill” playlists are still considered less-than-major works by nature of their functionality as ambiance. Hildur Guðnadóttir, the composer from Iceland best known for her scores for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and Todd Phillips’s comic-villain thriller Joker, has emerged from years of noble obscurity in the darker corners of the art-music world to help redeem the reputations of both movie music and mood music. In the past year, she’s won an Emmy and a Grammy for Chernobyl and a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for her Joker score. As the headline of an Esquire piece on her newfound prominence announced, “‘Joker’ Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir Is Shaking Up the Industry.” More accurately, the mainstream entertainment industry is shaking itself up by allowing Guðnadóttir to do, in a high-profile way, the kinds of things she’s done in avant-garde circles for years. Now 37, Guðnadóttir has been creating bold and imaginative music on her own and with a variety of collaborators since the first decade of the 21st century. In fact, she’s been performing publicly on her primary instrument, the cello, since girlhood, encouraged by her parents: her mother, the classical vocalist Ingveldur Guðrún Ólafsdóttir, and her father, Guðni Franzson, a clarinetist, composer, and conductor. After experimenting in various art-rock ensembles throughout Scandinavia and in Berlin, where she studied at the Universität der Künste, Guðnadóttir made her first solo album, Mount A, in 2006. Though it was released under the pseudonym Lost in Hindurness, Guðnadóttir made every sound on the recording, from the nonverbal vocals to the cello, piano, zither, vibraphone, gamelan, gamba (a Renaissance-era stringed instrument), and Mongolian khuur, which I’d never heard of till I read the liner notes. Recorded partly in a New York studio and partly in a house in the village of Hólar, Iceland (because she liked the way her cello sounded there), Mount A was rereleased in 2010 under Guðnadóttir’s own name. It is an exceptionally assured and strange recording debut, a DIY collage of sonic textures and tone colors by an artist open to the moment and hungry for surprise. “I think there shouldn’t be limits to what we’re allowed to say or express, as long as we don’t hurt anyone,” Guðnadóttir told an interviewer in an “All Access” video. “Music should be a form of free expression.” Her willingness (or eagerness) to venture into under-explored areas of emotionality was a hallmark of her music long before she gave voice to the brooding rage that festers into gleeful sadism in Joker. If her music won’t hurt anyone, she’s happy to conjure the sound of someone, like Joker, who will. After Mount A, Guðnadóttir worked as a cellist or composer on more than a dozen albums made in collaboration with electronic, art-pop, classical, or category-defiant musicians in Scandinavia, from established figures like Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, and the Swedish group the Knife to acts little known outside the Nordic world, like the short-lived Iceland band Rúnk and the Finnish techno duo Pan Sonic. What’s readily streamable of this output today, such as Muhly’s Speaks Volumes (2006), Frost’s Theories of Machines (2006), and Tu Non Mi Perderai Mai (a collaboration jointly credited to Guðnadóttir and the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, also from 2006), only hints at the imaginative force of Guðnadóttir’s solo music. By 2009, when she released her second album, Without Sinking, Guðnadóttir was fully formed as an experimental composer and musician. As on Mount A, she played multiple instruments and sang atmospheric, nonliteral sounds but added a trio of musicians—Jóhannsson on organ, Skúli Sverrisson on bass, and her father on clarinet and bass clarinet—to bring more colors and fuller body to the music. It is, in concept, programmatic music intended to suggest an encounter with a body of water in a place like Iceland, which is to say a place like no other. The 10 selections have simple titles such as “Elevation,” “Overcast,” “Ascent,” and “Into Warmer Air,” and the tracks feel at first like conventional ambient music. But unexpected things happen as their sounds unfurl. Acoustic instruments are overtaken by electronics, twisted around, and transformed. The familiar is disrupted by the unnamable. To take this as mood music is to allow your mood to spin and sink and land somewhere you’ve never been before. The essence of Guðnadóttir’s music as an agent of mood was recognized early as suitable to film scores. Beginning in 2011, she was commissioned to compose music, alone or with collaborators, for a series of European films, including Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking and Saul Dibb’s Journey’s End. When Jóhannsson died suddenly in the midst of writing music for Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene, Guðnadóttir completed the score. Her music for that film was celebrated for its deft mingling of classical sonorities and electronics to bring timely resonance to characters from deep history, and Chernobyl and Joker followed. For Chernobyl, the British-made miniseries about the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster, Guðnadóttir tapped her skill with nontraditional sounds and constructed a full musical score with no music. To evoke the grim, oppressive atmosphere of the film’s time and place, she toured the decommissioned nuclear facility used in the film and had a specialist in field recording capture the sounds she encountered there, the hums and buzzes and rhythmic clanking of the machinery. Then she processed those sounds and edited them as if they were instruments and made a grimly hypnotic anti-musical kind of music from them. For Joker, Guðnadóttir also worked unconventionally, composing the score from the shooting script rather than a rough cut of the film. She wrote the core themes on a halldorophone, an electro-acoustic instrument that is played much like a cello but facilitates the creative manipulation of feedback and other effects. Phillips, when shooting the film, would play Guðnadóttir’s music on the set, allowing the score to drive the action. With the background music foregrounded in the filmmaking, Guðnadóttir’s score is as elemental to Joker as Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. The music, a slow-acting poison formula of acoustic instruments and electronics mixed and overheated, brings to life the Joker’s degeneration into madness and bloodlust so vividly that you could watch the movie with your eyes closed and the vocals muted and still have the Joker experience. Reflecting on the darkness of the score in an interview, Guðnadóttir connected it to her work outside film, music that deserves to be more widely heard. “My solo music started as a way to really look inwards…without any outside dialogue,” she said. “A lot of my music is kind of contemplative, and somehow that always tends to tilt on the darker side. My inner conversation is apparently quite dark.”

Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker wrote that Desplat's score for Little Women was a mere step above a score for a Hallmark holiday movie, maybe just half a step better: He also liked that comment someone made about the score being awful and Desplat phoning it in.

An anonymous Oscar ballot from a member of the directors branch critizised the nomination of Williams, here is what he/she said: Original Score “Joker” will win for Hildur Guðnadóttir. I can’t deny it’s a great score. “1917.” However, Thomas Newman has never won. The music for that flaming village scene and the end cue of the movie are both extraordinary. I may vote for this. “Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker” is the only bullshit nomination. John Williams has done some amazing work, but not a single cue in this pops at all. https://www.indiewire.com/2020/01/anonymous-oscar-ballot-2020-director-best-picture-1202207110/

A statement from JW himself on Kobe's passing in NY Times: Williams said in a statement Sunday that Bryant’s death was “a terrible and immeasurable loss.” “During my friendship with Kobe, he was always seeking to define and understand inspiration even while modestly, and almost unknowably, he was an inspiration to countless millions,” Williams said. “His enormous potential contribution to unity, understanding and social justice must now be mourned with him.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/sports/basketball/kobe-bryant-oscar-award.html Edit: Oh, I see it was already posted in another thread, oh well...

He took over a big Spotify playlist with many followers where sometimes a director or composer picks their favourite film music, it has since been removed, but the user I posted above saved the tracks before it got removed. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-04-03/composer-hans-zimmer-talks-musics-starring-role-in-movies/

I haven't seen this list posted before on the forum - it was shared in april last year. Elliot Goldenthal and Jerry Goldsmith are the two film composers with the scores in Zimmer's list, the only ones with three scores each in Zimmer's top 40. A bit surprised Zimmer didn't pick more scores by Morricone, as he is Zimmer's #1 film composer of all time. Hans Zimmer's top 40 film scores of all time (in no order): Titus Victorius from Titus composed by Elliot Goldenthal Adagio from Alien 3 composed by Elliot Goldenthal Alcoba Azul from Frida composed by Elliot Goldenthal Main Title from Alien composed by Jerry Goldsmith The Reactor / The Hologram from Total Recall composed by Jerry Goldsmith Main Theme from Basic Instinct composed by Jerry Goldsmith Wild Signals from Close Encounters of the Third Kind composed by John Williams Washington Ending / Raiders March from Raiders of the Lost Ark composed by John Williams The Mission from The Mission composed by Ennio Morricone Main Theme from Once Upon a Time in the West composed by Ennio Morricone Love Theme from The Godfather composed by Nino Rota La Bella Malinconica from La Dolce Vita composed by Nino Rota Titles from Chariots of Fire composed by Vangelis End Titles from Blade Runner composed by Vangelis Theme from Back to the Future composed by Alan Silvestri Main Title from Predator composed by Alan Silvestri Theme / Isandhlwana from Zulu composed by John Barry Wednesday's Child from The Quiller Memorandum composed by John Barry Avalon / Moving Day from Avalon composed by Randy Newman The Natural from The Natural composed by Randy Newman Malcolm Is Dead from The Sixth Sense composed by James Newton Howard Can I Trust You? from Red Sparrow composed by James Newton Howard Test Drive from How to Train Your Dragon composed by John Powell Dedication from United 93 composed by John Powell Main Title from King Kong composed by Max Steiner Main Title from Gone with the Wind composed by Max Steiner Coronation from Kingdom of Heaven composed by Harry Gregson-Williams Main Title Theme from The English Patient composed by Gabriel Yared The Umbrellas of Cherbourg from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg composed by Michel Legrand Theme from Midnight Express composed by Giorgio Moroder Dawn / Buck Up - Never Say Die / Smile from Modern Times composed by Charlie Chaplin Prologue and Main Title / Castle Plunkett from High Spirits composed by George Fenton Main Title Theme from The Last Emperor composed by David Byrne Ballad for Mathilda from Léon composed by Éric Serra Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto Future Markets from There Will Be Blood composed by Jonny Greenwood Main Title from Laura composed by David Raksin Main Title from Taxi Driver composed by Bernard Herrmann Tsurumaru's Flute / Azusa Castle In Ruins from Ran composed by Toru Takemitsu The Shawshank Redemption from The Shawshank Redemption composed by Thomas Newman

I just found their picks. Thomas Newman's top 5 film scores of all time: 1. Chinatown - Jerry Goldsmith - ”For its mood — it fits the time and place perfectly.” 2. To Kill a Mockingbird - Elmer Bernstein - ”Very effective, it just works.” 3. Psycho - Bernard Herrmann - ”Unique and utterly unusual.” 4. The Wizard of Oz - Herbert Stothart - ”Sure, I love the songs, but the score itself is excellent.” 5. King Kong - Max Steiner - ”There's a total sense of popcorn fun. It's a fountainhead score - the beginning of something new.” Elliot Goldenthal's top 5 film scores of all time: 1. Cape Fear - Bernard Herrmann - ”He was the first minimalist. The score was played at a volume where it wouldn't compete with the movie's sound effects.” 2. La Strada - Nino Rota - ”It brought together the carnival and sensual elements of the church.” 3. Altered States - John Corigliano - ”With this soundtrack, he reinvented orchestration in film scoring.” 4. On the Waterfront - Leonard Bernstein - ”His only score had the sky-soaring melodic beauty of the American school.” 5. The Informer - Max Steiner - ”This has both Irish and Celtic folk melodies combined with a sweeping orchestral tapestry. It's brilliant.” Leonard Rosenman's top 5 film scores of all time (in no order, although we can assume the Herrmann score is his #1): Psycho - Bernard Herrmann Jaws - John Williams Gone with the Wind - Max Steiner Patton - Jerry Goldsmith East of Eden - Leonard Rosenman He included himself among the 5 best film scores of all time. Hans Zimmer's top 5 film scores of all time (in no order, although he has said at another time that the Morricone score is his #1): Once Upon a Time in America - Ennio Morricone Blade Runner - Vangelis Midnight Express - Giorgio Moroder Close Encounters of the Third Kind - John Williams The Shawshank Redemption - Thomas Newman Thoughts on their picks?

I would never go for the poor Titanic or a relatively mediocre pastiche score like HP 3. Neither of them are "essential" nor do they represent film music at its best. You could argue that Titanic is even a score that gave film music a bad reputation. A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden would be two good candidates to begin with though I think. Why? Because they used modern music and both of the scores contain music that represents film music at its best. At their best, they have never been surpassed in the field. Both by two of the most formidable composers to ever work in the field as well.

Yes, I don't like Alfred Newman's music much - I said more original and individual - not more late romantics. Oh, I prefer T. Newman almost any day over Williams.

Of course, these days I don't feel that attracted to Williams's music. I prefer more original, individual and inventive composers over him. Newman for instance, I feel far more attracted to and close to. There hasn't gone by a month where I don't listen to any of Newman's music, but there have gone months where I don't listen to Williams. Too much of Williams music is way too bombastic for my taste. My taste in music is generally more alternative, experimental... ambient music. Almost the opposite from the stuff Williams usually does. And when I listen to Williams, I easily prefer things that aren't any of the Star Warses or E.T. Close Encounters and A.I. are my two favourite JW scores.

The Wind and the Lion is top 20 Goldsmith material and the best one of the three, The Mummy, I am not sure would crack his top 20. It is a solid score and one of his best of the 90s together with Mulan and Basic Instinct, but a bit too cheesy for my taste, I almost never listen to it. Never had any affection for The Ghost and the Darkness, but it isn't bad, it is still a decent score. But overall, none of these three scores is something that I listen to, even if especially the first two are good.

I don't think my preferences are very realistic, I admit that. But I still wish he went beyond the predictable for someone else. I am tired of Zimmer automatically being the go-to man for your promising blockbuster. Goldenthal would have certainly been up there among my top choices, but I admit, it is not very realistic. Same with Brian Eno and Cliff Martinez (he is more realistic than Eno) if it is an electronic score, I tend to prefer their more ambient sounds over Zimmer who is usually more bombastic. Shore in more alternative/experimental mode or Newman (who doesn't seem like a good fit on paper, but who usually delivers) would also interest me far more than Zimmer. I agree with some of these, especially Goldenthal, Shore and Martinez. Maybe Vangelis too, but he is almost retired now. Gabriel would interest me too, at least if he could deliver something like Christ again. I prefer Zimmer over Murphy, Young and Jones.

Zimmer. Hopefully it won't be another horrible Dunkirk score. His Blade Runner score was just OK. The most recent Zimmer score I really liked was Inception. Not a big fan of Zimmer at all though.

Boring pick.

It is extremely rare that a film composer receives this kind of attention from leading concert composers, so Rosenman must have done things right. Both John Adams and John Corigliano are fans of him, especially of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause with Adams favoring the latter and Corigliano the former. Rosenman himself considered East of Eden his best score. Here is what John Adams wrote about Rosenman in liner notes in the East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause recording he conducted: Leonard Rosenman is an important transitional figure in the history of film music: a highly skilled composer whose best work evolved during a critical period between that of old school Europeans like Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin and that of the later, more pop-oriented composers of the 60s, 70s and beyond. Rosenman was doubtless one of the most thoroughly schooled musicans ever to work in Hollywood. Before making an acquaintance of director Elia Kazan in New York in 1954, he studied composition and theory at the University of California, Berkeley with Roger Sessions, the most serious of all serious composers. He was thoroughly familiar with all the latest modern techniques in the works of Stravinsky, Bartók and Schoenberg. Most importantly, he possessed one thing Sessions lacked: the common touch, an ability to mirror the American vernacular experience in his music. This was an essential ability for anyone hoping to make a successful foray into commcercial film music. East of Eden, Rosenman's first score was an ideal vehicle for his talents. The John Steinbeck story combines homespun simplicities of mid-century American social realism with the darker, more symbolic themes of filial disobedience and Oedipal search for his the lost mother. Set among the lush and irresistible beauty of the northern California coast, this 1955 film took the young James Dean into almost instant celebrity in the role of the tormented, misunderstood and unappreciated brother and son. The story, with its consciously Old Testament motifs acted by an ensemble of exceptionally gifted performers, including Julie Harris, Raymond Massey and Burl Ives, is one of the better examples of what a major Hollywood film could achieve. Rosenman's score is, when required, appropriately evocative of a "simple" American past (the story takes place during World War I). He utilizes both the widely spaced harmonies and simple diatonic tunes made famous by Copland, but Rosenman's ideas are never whole-cloth borrowings. His music has its own originality. The famous "Main Theme" with its innocent, almost childlike 3/4 lilt is one of the most memorable melodies in all American cinema. The music matches the qualities of Steinbeck's prose with uncanny exactness, at one moment being simple and plainspoken to the point of rusticity, and then modulating abruptly to a suppressed brooding that is far more sophisticated and self-aware than any earlier example of music for the screen. Written a year later, Rebel Without a Cause was musically even more successful, although the film, with its portrayal of misguided, troubled American youth, lacked the depth and richness of the Steinbeck story. While East of Eden was a period piece evoking for the American viewer an already lost idyllic past, Rebel Without a Cause was harshly contemporary and showed a strong influence of film noir in its treatment of the subject and characters. It may well be the film that created the whole "Fifties" stereotype, with its pompadour male hairstyles, car fetishes, and gangs of disaffected teenagers given to casual violence and unable to communicate with their uncomprehending elders. It is perhaps not insignificant that his film predates the premiere of West Side Story by two years. For the film, which provided another starring role for James Dean and an early appearance by all-too-worldly Natalie Wood, Rosenman created a complex score that moves effortlessly between the urban big band jazz of Stan Kenton and the moody atmospheres of Bartók and Stravinsky. Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, hardly known to the general public in 1955, makes a particularly evocative model in film's "planetarium" scene, during which the 50s' newfound preoccupation with outer space and extraterrestial events is eerily worked into the film's existential themes. The fractured rhythms and polytonalities of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring are felt in the scenes of violence and terror, although here, as elsewhere, Rosenman never loses his own original voice. Unlike many a lesser film composer, Rosenman managed to avoid resorting to hasty pastiche or overt borrowing. The two scores show what could actually be achieved when a skilled composer and a director sensitive to the powers of music were allowed to work together under conditions of artistic freedom, unimpeded by the crush of market forces - a rare moment in an industry in which art and money always maintain a difficult equipoise. - JOHN ADAMS During Sunday's pre-concert talk, conductor John Adams – who recorded Rosenman's East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause suites for Nonesuch in 1995 – described the composer as "one of the most important, skilled and knowledgeable of all film composers." "Adams took the microphone during the concert to extol Rosenman's virtues, calling him a "sophisticated composer" who helped to bring "psychological depth" to 1950s films like Rebel Without a Cause." John Corigliano: "East of Eden with Leonard Rosenman's music, is a great film on every level. It's like a combination of Berg and Barber and it's beautiful, and it has a simple American melody also of pure innocence. That score is great. It's so powerful, and in addition to that highly chromatic and nervous, wonderful sinewy beauty he also has an innocence like Copland. It should have a symphonic version played by major orchestras".

https://michaeldaughertycomposer.com/interviews/michael-daugherty-discusses-his-creative-process-with-robert-raines/

Blade Runner by far in both categories. Both the score and film is top 10 of all time material.

Michael Daugherty: "The wonderful music of John Williams is old school: you hear counterpoint, counter melodies, great orchestrations, changes of tempo and rubatos. I must say, I miss the old days of film music; the scores of Alfred Newman, Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann for example. That way of composing virtuosic film music may come back someday, but at the moment we are in a very technologically driven world of film music, that, in my personal opinion, has inhibited the creative possibilities."

He did (and yes, I know that there are more modernistic elements in his score, but still that is not what most of the score was about, it was retro).

Another poll, I need to know what people here prefer - for fun. The Shawshank Redemption for me on both counts - Shawshank is one of my top 25 scores of all time, Schindler's List wouldn't even make my top 100. The Shawshank Redemption is simply a stunning score, Williams himself singled it out as one of the most impressive scores he had heard from the younger generation. The Schindler's List score may be good (I easily prefer Jurassic Park from the same year though), but it was never one of my favourite Williams scores and I feel it is probably even overrated. I find the score too maudlin and sentimental - the obnoxious choral moments are easily the worst. Newman's understated, moving and elegant effort is clearly the superior score for me. I still listen quite regularly to a handful of tracks from Shawshank - and it is a joy, but pretty much never feel the need to revisit the Schindler's List score. Which film and score do you prefer, The Shawshank Redemption or Schindler's List?

Lambs for film. For score, it is more even, I made a mistake and voted for Seven, it should have been Lambs.

Tricky question. I am not a big fan at all of JW's concert works, but if pressed for a favourite, then Five Sacred Trees and Trunks, Branches and Leaves from Treesong is maybe my favourite movement, but since that doesn't count, then I am not sure what my favourite movement is, so I voted for the same work there too. My least favourites ones that I have heard are probably the flute concerto and trumpet concerto, the latter being warmed over Arutiunian which is crappy to begin with. I don't feel any urge to revisit any of JW's concert works though, I never listen to any of them. Most of them are why did you bother kind of dull. There is just so much other music I'd rather listen to. These days I am mostly just into Close Encounters and A.I. when it comes to JW.

I also found this about Andrew Norman and his connection to Williams - Star Wars in particular - perhaps the leading American composer of his generation. LOS ANGELES — When Andrew Norman was growing up, “Star Wars” was the only film his family owned on video. “We watched it every weekend for, seriously, years on end,” he said in October, during a short hike up a steep hill near his home. Fascinated by John Williams’s classic score, Mr. Norman decided when he was young that he wanted to be a composer. Little on the surface of “Split” resembles Mr. Williams’s scores, but Mr. Norman’s symphonic works are suffused with cinematic scope. “It’s all swirling around in my head,” Mr. Norman said of his childhood fascination with “Star Wars” and video games. “But I think it has more to do with storytelling, now, than the actual musical gestures.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/arts/music/andrew-norman-on-loving-star-wars-and-pushing-musical-boundaries.html ["Norman was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but grew up in Modesto, California. His father was an evangelical pastor; in childhood, Norman played keyboards in church bands. It was repeated viewings of Star Wars, with John Williams’s thrilling score, that first attracted him to the idea of composing. Lush neo-Romanticism infused much of his early work, which received performances at the Modesto Symphony. As his education proceeded, first at USC and then at the Yale School of Music, he underwent a crisis: His encounters with masterpieces of modernism caused him to reject what he had done up to that point and to doubt his forward path. In an interview with William Robin, for the New York Times, Norman recalled telling a professor: “I would rather quit composing, period, than be viewed as a neo-Romantic, or a reactionary, or a naïve composer.” The problem is a common one among young composers: how to find a voice that absorbs contemporary currents while retaining the expressive urgency that drew you to composing in the first place. In a series of works in the first decade of the 21st century—the orchestral piece Sacred Geometry; Gran Turismo, for eight violins; and an extended trio titled A Companion Guide to Rome—Norman not only solved this problem but found a voice singularly his own. He is the rare living composer whom you can recognize from just a few bars of an unknown piece. At the heart of a typical Norman passage, you find straightforward harmonic or melodic materials. For example, the final movement of Play is based around a bright little squiggle in the key of A major. But such half-familiar fragments are thrown into a kaleidoscopic swirl, fragmenting and reconstituting themselves before one’s ears. An almost childlike simplicity is folded into musical processes of dizzying energy and complexity..." https://www.musicalamerica.com/features/?fid=321&fyear=2017] Should be *it I think.

Just found this, some old comments on Williams by Nico Muhly: "Movies with scores by John Williams are always satisfying; it’s always just interesting enough that you don’t want to kill yourself and always splashy enough that you feel like you are In the Movies. So, that’s fun. I think he’s the only person who can even come close to doing an okay job of ytt.]" "I do like those John Williams scores because he knows his way around the orchestra, and he knows his way around character development through music." I can't find the exact comment right now, but I also think he said something among the lines that the Star Wars scores work fine in the films, but on their own, he is not really eager to listen to them.