chuck

Explorers - Jerry Goldsmith

My interest in Williams has lead me to many great composers that otherwise would have escaped me since they were primarily embedded in the film scoring scene. Goldsmith was amazing, and I really should spend more time with his music.

A marvellous and very important composer, and a phenomenally good reader of film. I truly wish he would have spent more time writing music beyond cinema; his dramatic instincts would have served him well in other fields, I believe. That being said, his film music legacy lives on, and is an inspiration to all of us.
I had the privelege of meeting him once in London, and he seemed a very sweet person, there was an aura of tremendous warmth about him; he seemed genuinely touched when I told him of a piece of mine that I had dedicated to him, and I feel he never quite got the recognition he deserved from the classical music world.
So much of his music works incredibly well outside the context for which it was written, there is a very unique sense of structure to all his scores, a kind of symphonic conception of the score entire. Very often, his scores will contain really only two or three main elements that are then separated and explored singly, before ultimately being joined to form what might serve as a "main theme". Goldsmith was actually a far more contrapuntal musical thinker than what one might suspect upon an initial listen; there is a deceptively streamlined quality to his musical surfaces, which got even more and more "simplified" in the last decades of his career. I say 'deceptively', because I think Goldsmith's "point" was often not the material at hand, but rather the exploration of what kind of mileage you could get out of these devices. There is a lot to be learnt from him!

But look at all of the other nominees there: Barry, Morricone, Corigliano, the Bergman's...
And I wonder why they've retired the category... Seems pretty much high time to resurrect it now, methinks...