rocnathan

David Yates ;-) Hmm....Ridley Scott for the visual bigness. Except for Blade Runner. George Lucas 'cause he's a cheapskate and his movies could do with some good music. Anybody Zimmer ever woked with, because they desperately need to see the light. Takeshi Kitano, because that would be plain interesting. And I would SO like to see some animated/CG movie scored by Williams, so, for lack of a more generalizing name, John Lasseter.

The only reason I can see why Williams is, or would not be, considered the genius that he is, is (as has been already mentioned) that minamlism and unfathomable chord progressions are considered quite the thing in the hypocrite circles otherwise known as informed (note that I'm trying to avoid quotation marks here =) ). Personally, I never saw what's so hot abouit Mozart, except that he took the musical laws/customs of the time to their limits and slightly beyond - which still makes it sound like elevator music. It's the equivalent of 80s guitarists turning their nose up at you if your solo isn't made up entirely of sweep arpeggios. :-P Brahms called Bruckner a hack. Stravinsky was booed off the stage. Personally, I find the distinction between serious music and film music offensive. A good song is a good song is a good song. And for counterpoint alone, JW could wipe the floor with Mahler's ass. Plus his orchestra can do the job with a mere 120 players, it doesn't need 400. =) If the aforementioned circles consider prokofiev and shostakovich greats and Williams not because his ratio of film music to concert works is greater, I will feel fully justified in hating everbody with small square glasses and a dark turtleneck sweater on sight. :-P

I'm missing Embeth Davidtz in this thread...who might be all motherly now, but surely wasn't at the time they shot schindler and army of darkness. Also, there's no lecherous smiley.

That's a great site! Shame about the copyright issues, but then again, they got prokofiev and stravinsky (for some reason), so it works for me. Sadly, no holst - didn't he die 1935?

Was he working without an orchestrator at that point? (I never really quite figured that out, when exactly they'd use orchestrators or generic action-music-guys to write the tedious parts for them.)

Well, since all the obvious names have already been dropped (and my personal favorites are natalie portman, what's-her-name assassin from Clones and, being the pederast that I am, emma watson), I'll go for embeth davitz in Schindler's list. Although of course she looks much better in AoD and the Bicentennial Man. And, since I already admitted to being a pederast, I'll also add the girl who plays parvati in PoA. Sweet...

Merry Christmas everyone! And for those who, like me, drive the icebreaker of disdain through the waters of political correctness, here's a christmas song that's part of a little project I'm doing. (Not for the faint of heart, but I daresay it has some nice overblown orchestration :-) )

I agree with The Mummy returns - because I'd love to see Williams take on a (previously) Goldsmith score. It's kind of like having an alternate universe in which Spielberg directed the prequels. (Not that they'd necessarily be any good)

I think they just wanted to fix the lacking high end there. Why they c ouldn't get hold of the digital masters of half the cues I have no idea, but I still think that, going by the LSO's performance, it's the finest SW recording. Even though the timing isn't always right, they play with a confidence that's lacking in the first two, and an energy that's entirely absent from the prequels (possibly excepting TPM).

I agree that ET is one of the finest recordings, although for other reasons. I go with (from those that I know) ET, Jedi and Chamber of Secrets, because those have the best-sounding halls. I like small halls with rather, but not too, short reverbs, and the room they recorded ET in is amazing. Jedi may suffer from a narrow stereo field, but the reverb for instance you get from the brass stabs at the beginning of "The return of the jedi" are great. That same quality I hear on Chamber of Secrets, although that has a longer reverb tail.

I'd like to agree to that, only I have no idea what soundtrack "prayer for peace" is from... :-) Anyway, horn/cello is one of the most *frequent* doublings in orchestral mussic, not unique to Williams at all. Tuba/piccolo, for obvious reasons, is quite rare, but I dare venture that Stravinsky and Ravel did it somewhere.

On a completrely unrelated note to the posts just before, I have a question for the sound engineers with orchestra experience around here: I've been recording a musical number consisting of full orchestra (silver edition) and two male voices (who are actually the same guy but made to sound different). What I'd like to know is, is there any very obvious method of putting the voices firmly into the mix by eqing the orchestra, say, by taking something out of the violins and violas? Or do you just eq the voices around the orchestra. I'm asking this because I really like the natural sound of the orchestra and would hate to do anything more drastic than add a little low end and sparkle. I'd post this at the vsl forum, but alas, something's screwed up with my account there. :-P

I don't know Howard's soundtrack, but thinkign of the direction the first movie went, I'd think Silvestri or Debney, if he can let a little End of Days creep into his style again. Possibly Graeme Revell if he lerns to write a theme and comes off the synths - at least the crappy sounding ones...:-P

I'll go against the grain here with the main theme. It was spoofed and disco'd to death even before 1980, but personally I think it remains one of the most majestic themes ever. 1812 can't hold a candle to it, zarathustra sounds like elevator music next to it, and Beethoven was deaf by the time he wrote the 9th, 'nuff said. :-)

Cool. On the plus side: Pony tail, ape mask and the younger woman (whcih I didn't know about). On the downside his bashing of The Mummy (which in my opinion is one of his best scores). He almost but not quite made it to sub sero in my book, but I just remembered that he scored Airforce One, the second worst movie of all time.