New John Williams/Matessino 2017 Project Announcement!

[Jay 37,352]

7 minutes ago, publicist said:

 

'Journey to the Island' is one cue, there isn't really much forced except, if we're anal, the abrupt mood change when the jeeps drive to the Visitor center but again, that's just a change in a scene accommodated in JW's writing which i find is distinctly not the case in the ESB/ROTJ examples were cues with distinctly own beginnings, middle sections and ends are just piled onto another.

 

Wrong.  "Journey To The Island" is an album track that combines 3 cues together (ones that are also combined together in the film)

 

2M3/3M1    To The Island
3M2    The Dinosaurs
3M2    The Entrance Of The Park

[publicist 4,643]

6 minutes ago, Will said:

 

Technically, "Journey to the Island" is three cues segued together. 

 

I'm not familiar enough with "The Battle of Hoth" or the TESB film to fully understand what you're saying. 

 

A few cues on the Sony are needlessly joined together (3 and 4). Most others pla in their original form, which is from 2 to 5 minutes even on the Sony release.

[Will 2,215]

@publicist They don't seem to be appearing.

[publicist 4,643]

3 minutes ago, Jay said:

 

Wrong.  "Journey To The Island" is an album track that combines 3 cues together (ones that are also combined together in the film)

 

2M3/3M1    To The Island
3M2    The Dinosaurs
3M2    The Entrance Of The Park

 

Yes, but they form a complete cue where the end of the the first two logically lead into another, the third one is a bit more apparent. But basically it's no comparison to the examples in the Sony releases of ESB/ROTJ.

2 minutes ago, Will said:

 

They don't seem to be appearing.

 

Just go to Spotify.

[Will 2,215]

3 minutes ago, publicist said:

 

Just go to Spotify.

 

So you're referring to the segue from 3M3 The Snow Battle to 3M4/4M1 Luke’s First Crash? ... or the segue from 3M4/4M1 Luke’s First Crash to 4M2 The Rebels Escape Again? (EDIT: Oh, you're referring to the "Beneath the AT-AT" to "Escape in the Millennium Falcon," right?)

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

I have a wierd boot from empire that has the cues laid out and in proper order it is weird 

[publicist 4,643]

In this cue, pretty much all except the one at 07:40, which isn't great but okay-ish.

Funnily enough, they pretty much left the rest of ESB alone except the last 2 Cloud City cues where it actually works, whereas in 'Jedi' they segued like hell.

[Brundlefly 2,385]

There are medleys like "Journey to the Island", "The Ultimate War" and "The Quidditch Match" which are divided into several cues, because it is technically easier.

 

And there are cues that are connected to avoid a giant amount of tracks, or (in the case of the SW SEs) because they belong to one scene/because they are of the same mood (action), which is not always the best choice. Theoretically it would be impossible to segue the Battle of Hoth cues, how it was done in the movie, as you had to cut off the end of the first three cues.

[publicist 4,643]

Exactly. They just overlap the bass coda putting the unrelated beginning of the next cue on top.

[Brundlefly 2,385]

It's the same thing about the aforesaid TLW tracks that are also edited to play one after another. The last beat of the first cue is replaced by the first beat of the second cue.

[Will 2,215]

But isn't that how Williams intended it?

 

I don't think he ever intended, say, this to just end where it does!

 

 

It's clearly meant to segue right to "The Elevator Scene."

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

8 minutes ago, Will said:

But isn't that how Williams intended it?

 

I don't think he ever intended, say, this to just end where it does!

 

 

It's clearly meant to segue right to "The Elevator Scene."

Eh this is part of a boot so it may have a complete version but Lucas re edited something so it was made to end there

[Will 2,215]

Hmm... I don't quite hear what you are outraged about @publicist, but I can definitely see how you might like them separate. 

 

And I totally agree that Williams' general mentality in pieces like "The Battle Over Coruscant" is not that it's really a collection of pieces. If he wasn't doing that on purpose, you're right, the transitions seem rather sloppy sometimes! 

 

2 minutes ago, dillweed97 said:

Eh this is part of a boot so it may have a complete version but Lucas re edited something so it was made to end there

 

Huh? 

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

1 minute ago, Will said:

Hmm... I don't quite hear what you are outraged about @publicist, but I can definitely see how you might like them separate. 

 

 

Huh? 

That link it's part of a dvd rip 

 

[Will 2,215]

1 minute ago, dillweed97 said:

That link it's part of a dvd rip 

 

 

I believe it's from a video game. It's the complete cue. It was edited in the film but this is the full version. 

[publicist 4,643]

3 minutes ago, Will said:

Hmm... I don't quite hear what you are outraged about @publicist, but I can definitely see how you might like them separate. 

 

What? The Hoth cue?

[Will 2,215]

Just now, publicist said:

 

What? The Hoth cue?

 

Yes. 

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

2 minutes ago, Will said:

 

I believe it's from a video game. It's the complete cue. It was edited in the film but this is the full version. 

Oh I thought it was one of the FFSHRINE rips. Sorry 

[Datameister 2,042]

35 minutes ago, publicist said:

 

Of course he writes the pieces not independently, how could he. But they are still written as single cues, never mind segues in the movie (where you don't hear them, anyway).

 

I'm just making my point that James Horner wrote really long developed pieces and if he would have written a 15-minute battle cue for the Hoth sequence, it sure would have none of these start/stop thingies just because that is not really the way you develop such a cue, musically/classically. And since Williams isn't Horner's inferior by any means, i must assume he did what he did because he wanted to write a lot of smaller pieces with their own life and development within them. All what i know about Williams' career, and i know the most of his output, agrees with me that he just likes to write smaller sections as single pieces and rarely indulges in mammoth cues going on forever (anomalies like 'Hook' excluded, where the music just works overtime). 

 

That you can join them: for sure...i'm just saying no one is going to convince me that it makes a lot of sense, musically.

 

If you don't like how Williams wrote the music, that's perfectly valid, and I have no interest in convincing you to change your mind. But some of the things you're saying are simply not true. Hook's long musical sequences were written the exact same way as those in the Star Wars movies: multiple cues, generally around 2 minutes each, written with intended segues. (If you think these segues are more effective than the others due to musical concerns, that's a perfectly valid opinion.) Several of your posts also confuse the issue by using the word "cue" to describe longer sequences comprising multiple cues. Journey to the Island is three cues, not one. The Ultimate War is...god, I don't even remember how many. A lot, especially in complete form. 

 

As to the discussion of how the segues are editorially achieved, I'm a little confused...it's really pretty simple. With modern digital technology, you just line the two cues up and let them literally overlap, perhaps with some tweaking of the volume envelopes to achieve a smooth transition. Older films may have more abrupt cuts due to technical limitations. Not sure what the debate here is, or why @Brundlefly is claiming some segues are impossible.

[publicist 4,643]

1 minute ago, Datameister said:

 

If you don't like how Williams wrote the music, that's perfectly valid, and I have no interest in convincing you to change your mind. But some of the things you're saying are simply not true. Hook's long musical sequences were written the exact same way as those in the Star Wars movies: multiple cues, generally no more than 2 minutes each, written with intended segues. (If you think these segues are more effective than the others due to musical concerns, that's a perfectly valid opinion.) Several of your posts also confuse the issue by using the word "cue" to describe longer sequences comprising multiple cues. Journey to the Island is three cues, not one. The Ultimate War is...god, I don't even remember how many. A lot, especially in complete form. 

 

You just confuse movie sequences with musical cues. That was my whole point: forget for a moment the movies which you cannot let go, obviously, and listen to the bloody music. There are, of course, unnoticeable edit points where to put two or three cues together without noticing, say, the 'Ultimate War' in the old Sony album sequence (the rest should have had divided into two or three different cues, again for musical reasons). That just never would have been possible for the ESB cues for the Hoth battle. They just cannot be joined without sounding like awkward edits, i. e. one ends, the other clumsily enters.

 

There are also no absolutes for either score: some work in tandem, some don't. The JP example is an absolute OK edit of three cues that works, musically. If a producer gets that right, wonderful (like leaving the T-Rex trailer attack in TLW as single cues instead of slapping them together with hard glue). What is not wonderful is when 'Into the Trap' suddenly has tail beginnings and endings because it is a great cue in its own right. Score releases on separate mediums should always put the music first, not forcing bad edits on customers who then can't separate them anymore.

 

 

[Will 2,215]

21 minutes ago, publicist said:

 

You just confuse movie sequences with musical cues. That was my whole point: forget for a moment the movies which you cannot let go, obviously, and listen to the bloody music. There are, of course, unnoticeable edit points where to put two or three cues together without noticing, say, the 'Ultimate War' in the old Sony album sequence (the rest should have had divided into two or three different cues, again for musical reasons). That just never would have been possible for the ESB cues for the Hoth battle. They just cannot be joined without sounding like awkward edits, i. e. one ends, the other clumsily enters.

 

There are also no absolutes for either score: some work in tandem, some don't. The JP example is an absolute OK edit of three cues that works, musically. If a producer gets that right, wonderful (like leaving the T-Rex trailer attack in TLW as single cues instead of slapping them together with hard glue). What is not wonderful is when 'Into the Trap' suddenly has tail beginnings and endings because it is a great cue in its own right. Score releases on separate mediums should always put the music first, not forcing bad edits on customers who then can't separate them anymore.

 

Your approach doesn't seem very consistent. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, of course, but you seem to be arguing to take every piece on a case by case basis. Your argument seems to rest less on any sense of composer intention, film intention, or whatever and more on your own personal preferences (or your guess at Williams' intentions, which isn't really based on super solid evidence IMO, it's more speculative). Unless, of course, you are arguing for there to ALWAYS be separated cues (for instance, even "Journey to the Island" would be three separate tracks). 

 

Whereas @Datameister is very clear about an overall structure, which, whatever you think of it, certainly logically follows from Williams' original intentions. 

[Jay 37,352]

Matessino's methodology for the WIlliams scores he's worked on in the last 5 years is:

 

-Every cue in its own track

-Unless a track will contain 2 cues that weren't on the album that are both short

-And unless cues were already combined together on the original album, and play in that same order in the movie, leave them combined

[Will 2,215]

23 minutes ago, Jay said:

Matessino's methodology for the WIlliams scores he's worked on in the last 5 years is:

 

-Every cue in its own track

-Unless a track will contain 2 cues that weren't on the album that are both short

-And unless cues were already combined together on the original album, and play in that same order in the movie, leave them combined

 

Are there instances where cues weren't combined on the album, but were combined in the film? If so, what did he do?

[Jay 37,352]

Left them separated...

[Mr. Breathmask 555]

There would be a lot of lengthy tracks on The Lost World otherwise!

[Datameister 2,042]

1 hour ago, publicist said:

 

You just confuse movie sequences with musical cues. That was my whole point: forget for a moment the movies which you cannot let go, obviously, and listen to the bloody music. There are, of course, unnoticeable edit points where to put two or three cues together without noticing, say, the 'Ultimate War' in the old Sony album sequence (the rest should have had divided into two or three different cues, again for musical reasons). That just never would have been possible for the ESB cues for the Hoth battle. They just cannot be joined without sounding like awkward edits, i. e. one ends, the other clumsily enters.

 

There are also no absolutes for either score: some work in tandem, some don't. The JP example is an absolute OK edit of three cues that works, musically. If a producer gets that right, wonderful (like leaving the T-Rex trailer attack in TLW as single cues instead of slapping them together with hard glue). What is not wonderful is when 'Into the Trap' suddenly has tail beginnings and endings because it is a great cue in its own right. Score releases on separate mediums should always put the music first, not forcing bad edits on customers who then can't separate them anymore.

 

 

 

So again, we come back to this: for musical reasons, you like some segues and not others. I'm cool with that. There are segues I don't like, too, although I find that the snow battle cues work beautifully together - yes, as music, separate from the film. We're allowed to disagree on that. I also enjoy them separately, which is indeed a rather different experience.

 

You'll also recall I, too, prefer separation on albums. Like you said, if they're overlapped from the get-go, you're stuck with that presentation.

 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (one with or without overlaps), I just take issue with incorrect claims that the segues were never intended to happen. That simply is not true, regardless of one's musical tastes.

[Brundlefly 2,385]

2 hours ago, Datameister said:

Not sure what the debate here is, or why @Brundlefly is claiming some segues are impossible.

It is impossible to segue them how they are segued in the movie without omitting the end of the final chords/notes, because they are cut off in "Luke's First Crash" and "The Rebels Escape Again". So they are not even segued in the movie, which slightly indicates that they are not intended to be connected.

[Datameister 2,042]

11 minutes ago, Brundlefly said:

It is impossible to segue them how they are segued in the movie without omitting the end of the final chords/notes, because they are cut off in "Luke's First Crash" and "The Rebels Escape Again". So they are not even segued in the movie, which slightly indicates that they are not intended to be connected.

 

You generally don't hear hard cuts between cues like those in movies nowadays - I'm pretty sure they only happened in the olden days because of technical limitations. Not 100% sure on that, but I am 100% sure that the cues were written to segue together. I've seen Williams' sketches. He wrote out explicit instructions to segue between these cues.

 

With the preponderance of digital options available to us now, you can fully overlap the cues and achieve something that's quite musically satisfying.

[Docteur Qui 1,544]

I'm curious what you think of "The Quidditch Match" @publicist? I listened to it for years without realising it was multiple cues stitched together, and even after the sessions leaked and I got used to each cue separately I still hear it as one piece.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Because it is one piece, really. Williams wrote it that way and broke it up in three for practical reasons.

[crumbs 14,307]

6 hours ago, Jay said:

Matessino's methodology for the WIlliams scores he's worked on in the last 5 years is:

 

-Every cue in its own track

-Unless a track will contain 2 cues that weren't on the album that are both short

-And unless cues were already combined together on the original album, and play in that same order in the movie, leave them combined

 

Which is the perfect methodology really. I want to be able to listen to High Bar and Ceiling Tiles on its own without having to go through The Raptor's Appear (although arguably this might have been done for music rights/ownership reasons). Overall, his track formatting of The Lost World is perfect (and it's totally understandable that he combined Fire at Camp and Corporate Helicopters given how short the former is).

 

If he could have his time over, I doubt he'd put Leia is Wounded, The Duel Begins, Overtaking the Bunker, The Dark Side Beckons and The Emperor’s Death into one track again (at the very least, the last two tracks work brilliantly on their own). It seems antithetical to his current methodology.

[Jay 37,352]

It is interesting to think about how he'd handle The Battle of Hoth and The Battle of Endor on a new edition.  I doubt he'd have any limitations since the same company owns all the rights to all the music, so it would come down to how he thinks its best presented, along with Williams' wishes (if he has any about those sort of things)

[publicist 4,643]

7 hours ago, Datameister said:

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (one with or without overlaps), I just take issue with incorrect claims that the segues were never intended to happen. That simply is not true, regardless of one's musical tastes.

 

Yeah, but in the movie, certainly not an a separately released album.

8 hours ago, Will said:

Your approach doesn't seem very consistent. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, of course, but you seem to be arguing to take every piece on a case by case basis. Your argument seems to rest less on any sense of composer intention, film intention, or whatever and more on your own personal preferences (or your guess at Williams' intentions, which isn't really based on super solid evidence IMO, it's more speculative).

 

I wrote several times what i think is proof what is time-honoured proof: that Williams MOSTLY doesn't write sequences beyond a length of 6 minutes (exceptions confirm the rule). So to me presenting a Williams album with several 10-minute plus cues like the Sony Star Wars'ses is madness. That there can't be a consistent approach: well, d'oh. You see alone in this thread two or three distinctly different opinions about how one, or rather four cues from a certain score should be presented. Of course it's a case-by-case basis.

 

It's good to see though that it still needs hoary old subjects like this to engage people that severely. Hitler's micro-penis didn't do the trick.

[Amer 2,099]

OK guys some more update from Mike Matessino on his posting on facebook:

 

 

Mike Matessino Wow, that's a lot of response! Down the road if I say what I was working on there is bound to be disappointment. It was just nice to clear that stale 2016 air away with some John Williams on New Years Day. There are some great titles in the pipeline, of course. Thanks, everyone.

 

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

2 minutes ago, azahid said:

OK guys some more update from Mike Matessino on his posting on facebook:

 

 

Mike Matessino Wow, that's a lot of response! Down the road if I say what I was working on there is bound to be disappointment. It was just nice to clear that stale 2016 air away with some John Williams on New Years Day. There are some great titles in the pipeline, of course. Thanks, everyone.

 

So we are overthinking must be something older.... I wish I knew mike or had him added on facebook so I could see this stuff....

Earthquake maybe?

 

[Amer 2,099]

1 minute ago, dillweed97 said:

So we are overthinking must be something older.... I wish I knew mike or had him added on facebook so I could see this stuff....

 

 

 

Must be JFK/ TOWERING INFERNO or THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK?  I guess he is far from STAR WARS at this point. 

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

Have any of those been expanded before? 

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

The Towering Inferno was expanded by FSM in the early 2000's.

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

2 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

The Towering Inferno was expanded by FSM in the early 2000's.

Was it a good one? I never heard it.

 

[Mr. Breathmask 555]

The songs are cheesy as he'll,  but it has a killer main theme.

[Incanus 5,714]

2 minutes ago, Mr. Breathmask said:

The songs are cheesy as he'll,  but it has a killer main theme.

Yup. Especially Main Title and Planting the Charges are ace!

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[crumbs 14,307]

Damn you MM, getting our hopes up like that! We wanted our deluxe 20 disc box set of the Star Wars saga!

[Amer 2,099]

33 minutes ago, dillweed97 said:

Was it a good one? I never heard it.

 

 

Yes, I had it but I gave in to greed and sold it for mega bucks! The LLL reissue could be greatly  improved on the sound front as well as add the LP rerecording. You will have to dig in to a separated devoted thread.

[RICHARDSTRAUSS68 107]

Mike said more JW to come though right? SO there still may be hope after this one 

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

17 minutes ago, BloodBoal said:

Damn. So he's probably working on some boring rerelease of an old 60's jazzy score no one cares about except Thor!

 

How anticlimactic!

 

Story Of A Woman!!!!

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[Bespin 8,480]

Story of a woman.... story of a woman....

 

First, who is this woman, and second, what's her story in point of fact?

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[Joni Wiljami 1,206]

Shit!!! Zero interest in anything pre 1977 here!!