Happy 85th, Maestro!

[Naïve Old Fart 9,516]

I appreciate the all effort that you must surely have put into your little video. Just do it better, next time...and with the OSTs. If you want to post to the world, you'd better make it good. 

[FC4L 87]

42 minutes ago, Richard said:

I appreciate the all effort that you must surely have put into your little video. Just do it better, next time...and with the OSTs. If you want to post to the world, you'd better make it good. 

 

It's not my video.

 

Plus there's nothing wrong with it. Using 1 consistent aspect ratio is done all the time when cutting together video from various different sources. It is an artistic choice made by the creator to be consistent through the entire presentation. Something I did do when I made this video, and I don't give a crap what your opinion of it is.

 

 

Your criticism was just "old man yelling at cloud" internet dick wagging, and not called for. Talking down to someone in a condescending manner is also very petty and childish. 

[Disco Stu 15,495]

5 hours ago, FC4L said:

Talking down to someone in a condescending manner is also very petty and childish. 

 

 

And unfortunately often the norm on the forum.

[FC4L 87]

2 hours ago, Disco Stu said:

 

And unfortunately often the norm on the forum.

 

It's the norm on many forums. Hence why I try to stay out of posting and be more of a lurker. 

[Gruesome Son of a Bitch 6,488]

It's been 84 years.

[Will 2,215]

JWFan is actually pretty good about avoiding put downs. 

 

I certainly feel positively about other people when visiting here a lot more than I feel negatively. And if I do feel negatively, it often repairs itself over time. 

 

I think part of it is the powerful basis of mutual respect that every JW fan gives to every other JW fan (mostly). 

[Wojo 2,453]

Will, you respect most of us.

Will you respect all of us? 

 

@-/---

 

Happy 85th time around this hellhole, Maestro! 

[Dixon Hill 4,234]

You have bled with Willace.  Now bleed with me.

[FC4L 87]

Why the (mostly)?  Kind of defeats your argument, no?

 

There's good posters on any board. Unfortunately those who feel they need to act like a-holes to get attention tend to do so with a loud voice and will do anything just to get under the skin of the decent posters. This thread is a prime example. People posting positive wishes to someone we all admire (I think) and yet someone had to show up and put down not 1 but 2 tributes because they weren't up to that person's idea of "good". Now instead of good wishes being posted to Mr. Williams on his birthday the thread has delved into a completely different and not relevant topic all cause by 1 specific troll. And it's not just local to this thread either. I mean acting like a bullying whiny child got the orange pumpkin elected.

 

And JWFan isn't a very big board, all things considered. Just go over to a big board like Blu-ray.com where 8-10 people try to run the show with purely negative posts and if you say anything counter to their opinion rather than jump on board with them you are shouted down to the point you either give up or do something that causes you to get an infraction. It's pathetic and sad.

 

[Lewya 360]

http://slippedisc.com/2017/02/john-williams-is-85-tomorrow/

 

John Williams - The Magpie Maestro By Norman Lebrecht / November 20, 2002

---

John Williams has cornered the film-score market. But his patchwork soundtracks that borrow from the classics are an offence to the ear.

The second Harry Potter film sets 20 easy questions for ardent concertgoers. As the London Symphony Orchestra's sound-track swells over opening titles, a half-phrase from Mahler's Second Symphony melds into a Ravellian sub-theme, twists back into Mahler and off into a Prokofiev-like horn chorus. The orchestration is textbook Rimsky-Korsakov and the roll-call of composers referenced runs on through Debussy ('Knockturn Alley'), Smetana ('Colin') and Holst ('Moaning Myrtle').

Playing spot-the-composer can be fun during a dull performance of, say, Tippett's Third Symphony. But a two and three-quarter hour barrage of classical shrapnel from gigantic cinema speakers leaves both ears numbed and the mind aching with frustration at the wanton reprocessing of symphonic treasures. Worse, a movie about young sorcerers is devoid of musical magic, the pastiche of flagrant derivations failing to endow J K Rowling's imaginary world with any element of the numinous.

The patchwork music for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is credited to John Williams, who also composed its predecessor. Williams has, for three decades, been Hollywood's composer of choice. Hitting the jackpot with Jaws and Star Wars, he added a gloss of culture (known as 'class') to harum-scarum adventure movies. Some maintain he single-handedly saved the orchestral soundtrack from extinction by synthesisers. In the middle of his 70th birthday year, Williams is busy as ever with several movies on the go, the next being Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio).

He also has an opera under commission for Placido Domingo; his next orchestral work will open Los Angeles' new Walt Disney Hall next year. His concertos are exquisitely performed by the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma, elevating Williams to the fringes of the classical parnassus. He is, beyond question, the most famous living orchestral composer.

Posterity, however, is not so slickly secured. The word in Hollywood is that Williams is on the wane. He has not won an Oscar since Schindler's List in 1993 and the clothes that he stole from so many classical composers have been fashionably recut by a wave of Williams clones led by the British-educated James Horner (Titanic), the Canadian Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings) and the German Hans Zimmer (Lion King).

They, with a greater or lesser degree of invention, apply Williams' methodology with impressive commercial efficiency. Horner, who extended his range to embrace some forms of ethnic music, sold 28 million CDs of his Titanic score. Zimmer, a former avant-gardist, makes ingenious use of electronics. But their musical material is seldom striking, let alone original. What John Williams did to the modern movie score was to reduce it to a string of cliches and strip it of musical character.

Cast your minds back to halcyon antecedents. In 1934, a Viennese composer called Erich Wolfgang Korngold landed in Hollywood not as a refugee but as a highly-paid consultant to the director Max Reinhardt. Korngold had written an opera, Die Tote Stadt (Dead City), that was Vienna's biggest inter-war hit. He now devised a genre of film music that was both evocative and exhilarating, setting the screen for Errol Flynn swashbucklers (The Sea Hawk) and tender romances. His themes would run for 30 minutes continuously and while traces of Strauss and Mahler are often audible, the music has an unmistakable signature. Korngold, once heard, is not readily forgotten.

His Hollywood followers, emigrants all, included Max Steiner (Casablanca), Franz Waxman (Sunset Boulevard), Dmitri Tiomkin (High Noon) and Mikos Rozsa (Spellbound). Each had his own sound, each added melodic and harmonic novelty. Some are remembered merely for an effect - Bernard Herrmann, for instance, for the mass-stringed chills he applied to Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers. Others, like Nino Rota, co-created with Federico Fellini the essential ambience of cinematic legend. Late in life, Rota plundered his own score to 8 1/2 for a theme that became The Godfather's; he also write 12 operas.

Just how much a composer brings to a movie is heard in Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), where Alain Resnais' somnolent pace and flimsy plot are sustained by Georges Delerue's compelling soundtrack. Delerue, who died in 1992, wrote 294 film scores but never collected the million-dollar fee that is the Williams benchmark.

A movie does not need to be a masterpiece to benefit from a good composer. Several Ealing comedies - Passport to Pimlico, The Lavender Hill Mob - were scored by Georges Auric, one of the group of Les Six who hung around Erik Satie in 1920s Montmartre debating the concept of background music. Close your eyes and shut your ears to the Ealing dialogue: Auric's music takes the sit-com of suburban London and into a fantasy realm where the outlandish is instantly credible. Auric, all told, wrote 119 film scores, including Moulin Rouge. He also found time to head the Paris Opera for six turbulent years.

Movie music in the Korngold tradition made no distinction between composers of consequence and those of mere facility. What it required, above all else, was character and colour. In the years when Britain had a film industry worthy of its name, it also had composers like Malcolm Arnold (Bridge on the River Kwai), Richard Addinsell (Dangerous Moonlight) and Benjamin Frankel (Batle of the Bulge) who gave the output an indigenous undertone and, often as not, an original sonority.

Now fast forward to the new James Bond film, Die Another Day, where credit is given to Monty Norman for the Bond theme and to a disc-jockey, Paul Oakenfold, for its remix. No mention is made of a soundtrack composer, presumably because none was involved. More's the pity, since there are still musicians producing fine work for the screen - Gabriel Yared, Jocelyn Pook, Wojciech Kilar, to name three of the best. But theirs is an uphill battle against the Williams method of plastering movies with bits of what we know, rather than revealing an unseen dimension.

There is no denying the success of John Williams, any more than one can ignore that of Bill Gates. We may have to live with it, but there is no law yet that says we must like it.

[Incanus 5,714]

Norman has mellowed over the years as he says this in his preamble to his old rant:

Quote

 

Happy 85th birthday to the most successful film composer of all time.

I have not always been an unqualified admirer. Fifteen years ago, I attacked him for eclecticism.

But beside many of today’s film composers he sounds like a classic.

 

 

[crumbs 14,307]

All it took was a glance at the state of modern film music for him to realise that Williams ain't so bad after all.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Eclecticism?

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

7 hours ago, FC4L said:

Unfortunately those who feel they need to act like a-holes to get attention tend to do so with a loud voice and will do anything just to get under the skin of the decent posters.

 

Agreed!

[Bespin 8,480]

Spotify released this new playlist for John Williams's 85th:

Composer Weekly: John Williams' Non-film Music

 

And I did this one:

 

John Williams: A collection of singles and guest appearances

 

[Naïve Old Fart 9,516]

On 08/02/2017 at 11:19 PM, FC4L said:

 

Wish the author would do another and include as much of his other works as possible, but this is still a very go-to video for me.

 

 

 

FC4L, it seems that I owe you an apology: I failed to realise that were reposting another post. My criticism of you, was, therefore, unjustified, and I ask your forgiveness. I sincerely hope that you do not think I am a troll (I don't think that I am), however, I can understand your reasons for thinking it, after reading my posts. Once again; sorry. No harm done, eh?