Hlao-roo

Did they rechain Desplat after post-production was finished? I don't think we want such a dangerous animal roaming the streets.

That never stops me!

Nicely explicated by Mikko, these differences -- and our attempts to apprehend and reconcile them -- are essentially written into the DNA of this site. Certainly Williams's return to scoring in 1995 with Sabrina and Nixon seemed to mark a kind of shift already, but a brand new Star Wars score in the late '90s sealed the deal. With AOTC and ROTS in the rearview mirror, TPM arguably represents a bridge of sorts -- maintaining a broad commitment to leitmotif and the longform melodic setpiece while trafficking in something increasingly episodic and fragmented in structure. In a way, if Williams had been more of a color commentator before, he was now increasingly invested in the play-by-play, in the immediacy, in the now. It's not that Williams became more of a mickey-mouser, but that as the propulsive rhythms came to the fore, they seemed to diminish a sense of continuity and provide less of a context in which the viewer could situate himself emotionally.
For the last fifteen years or so we've been debating these changes in terms of compositional maturation, artistic decline, cinematic technology, Lucas's insanity, and industry trends. With yet more Star Wars pictures in the offing and Williams ostensibly committed to all three, I pray we can continue do so.

'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' is maybe Sam Peckinpah's most relaxed western, a quiet, leisurely swansong to the Old West with Jason Roboards as prospector slightly off his rockers (and not always surefooted scatological interludes) - Goldsmith responds with what may be his most uncharacteristic, most hippie-ish western score, an eclectic mixture centered around an ironic country ballad 'sung' by the title character, a Pete Seeger-styled love theme and lots of scattered down home fiddle and harmonica stuff.
 
Songwriter Richard Gillis had a hand in developing the songs, probably the reason they are much more long-lined than Goldsmith's typically short and punchy main themes for the genre. The reflective tone yields some teary-eyed lyrical interludes and though it would mean bending myself to describe 'Ballad' as great score, it is a very simpatico addition to the often ballsy Goldsmith genre contributions like '100 Rifles' (probably the most ferocious western score nobody has ever heard of).
 
 

I love how Presumed Innocent's gorgeous title theme bookends the film, matching the symmetry of the opening and closing shots, with Williams subtly amplifying the reprise with a judicious array of accents and flourishes.

 
Got their Epic Holllywood/i] live recording of Rozsa music on Monday and Blue Max today. Listening to that now. It's spectacular.

Although especially arranged for concert setting, the suite feels to me a bit choppy as these thing sometimes do when done for concerts and taking the film cues as they are and putting them into a suite form, giving some extended cues but then there is a snippet of this and snippet of that in between and there are some sudden transitions where feel the arranger could have more smoothly passed from one piece to the next. Or perhaps it just takes a bit of time to get used to this sequencing for me as a listener. The short cue "Desert Burial" not found on the OST was a nice little inclusion. I also found that the choir is not as well balanced with the orchestra as on the OST. So while it is nice they made the effort it is not as stellar as it could be. Perhaps I am nitpicky as it is one of my favourite late JG scores and the original performance is pretty awesome. Jerry could mine gold even from projects he hated.

The KUSC John Williams can be heard here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t1b5q7227p5h7k8/JwOscarPreview-KUSC.mp3?dl=0

I got mine yesterday. The re-recording is a treat for those who have wanted to hear the score with modern improved sonics and I find very little to quibble about the performance. The second disc with re-recorded suites from various Goldsmith scores is a bit of a hit and miss in terms of performance as I felt some of the versions recorded didn't quite capture the energy of the originals. The main attraction is the disc 1 but I have to admit the disc 2 forms a wonderful 1 hour+ Goldsmith concert.

 
Was not aware of this word's secondary definition. From ephemeral to antediluvian I continue to learn more vocabulary from John Williams interviews than I do anywhere else!

 
Thanks, Kathy! Perhaps one day Ahmed Best will pay similar tribute.‎

Interesting discussion!

Happy 84th Birthday to the Maestro of Maestros John Williams!
 
You are ever an inspiration and your music a fount of joy!
 
May you enrich our lives with wonderful music for many years to come!

The more complex or daring music is, or the more different it is from what you expect/want it to be, the more time it takes to understand and appreciate.  Familiarity breeds fondness.  I'm sure we all love some music that at first hearing made us raise our eyebrows.  I love that experience, it's very rewarding.  This also makes it very exciting to be a composer in the 21st century.  Write whatever you want, or improvise freely, and listen to it repeatedly.  What at first might seem like nonsense starts to make sense.  Part of that is good underlying musical instinct dictating even our "random" choices, but even more of it is just this weird thing that happens when even the strangest or most incoherent things suddenly take on great logic and meaning once you're exposed to them enough.  I suppose it's because beyond the actual scientific, physical reasons for the "sense" of tonality, there's no inherent meaning in sound, only what we put onto it ourselves.  And we can do that with any sounds, as long as we're familiar enough with them.
 
Incidentally, I think that's the current key to writing fresh and substantial music: being willing to grope along in the dark a little bit, not knowing where you're going or what the heck it's going to sound like exactly.  As familiar musical structures become more and more saturated with equally familiar rhetorical/dramatic/psychological meaning, you have to be open to the unfamiliar to say anything new or different.  Just as verbal language evolves and grows to fit new expressive needs, so does musical language.
 
As a fun experiment for anyone interested, consider this piece I just posted in the classical music thread.  I reckon it'll be at least "challenging" to anyone on a first listen.  But listen to it a number of times, even just small sections since it's long, and see if it doesn't start to make perfect sense.  Maybe it won't, and I'm full of shit, but let's find out definitively.
 
 
 

 
According to a tweet from Frank (‏@fmlehman) on December 26, it wasn't easy to get the article published.
 
 
It's up to 1.4k shares in 9 hours so I'm glad he prevailed. It takes me back to the days of my music appreciation classes and the enjoyment of learning why a piece of music moved me so much.

The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross chimes in about Williams and his latest Star Wars score:
 
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/listening-to-star-wars
 
Very good piece!

 

For another viewpoint, here's Frank Lehman's take:
 
7 things we learned about Star Wars: The Force Awakens from its music