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The Legacy of John Williams is proud to announce an exclusive online video event coming MAY 4, 2021 dedicated to one of the most iconic and beloved collaborations in the history of music. 'The Special Relationship: John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra' will explore the 40+ years collaboration between the legendary film music Maestro and one of the world’s leading symphonic institutions in a conversation featuring several former and current members of the LSO who performed under John Williams’ baton in many of his iconic scores recorded in London: CLIVE GILLINSON (former

To all members of JWFan, Long time board member @Incanus has decided to step down from his Moderator position. This leaves Ricard and Jason as the forum moderators for the time being. We do not have any immediate plans to add another moderator to replace him. Incanus is still a member of our forums, and you can look forward to reading his review of the new "Spotlight on John Williams" album on the main page soon. We'd like to extend our thanks to Incanus for a job well done for many years! Now onto more pressing matters. In recent times, the forums hav

Definitely NOT film stems, no. I was planning to save this story for an Odyssey Soundtrack Spotlight, but now I feel like I have to silence the speculation about sources... Varese searched high and low for complete session tapes and really did their due diligence. Warner Bros, Taliafilm, Mike Ross-Trevor, Bruce Botnick...nobody had more music from this score. Nothing in Goldsmith’s own archives either. All Varese had to use was their original Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 album masters (thankfully those had been preserved in pristine condition and sounded fantastic.) So Varese actuall

Sadly Williams didn't approve the original cover art.

I don't know wtf you guys are complaining about. You just need to zoom in a bit.

I'd like to throw my hat in the ring as the third moderator. Qualifications: Read multiple biographies of other famous moderators, including Stalin and Mao Tend to enforce rules consistently yet arbitrarily; fairly yet capriciously Will ban that one obnoxious Star Wars guy and bring back BloodBoal Will limit all posts about aspect ratios to six paragraphs Will expand Tolkien section and add sub-forum called "Famous Composer Follies" Bread and circuses for all!

My understanding is that the nature of the quotes in the original versions of the cues was such that JW felt it was a direct presentation of his music rather than an oblique reference to it. Basically, if the score to R1 was going to use actual pages from JW cues from other Star Wars movies, the credits for the music on the film would need to be rewritten (i.e. Music by John Williams, arranged and adapted by....), giving JW top billing on the music card. This would probably have also meant even more expense for Disney in the form of some kind of payment to JW. The easiest solution was to re

Looks like this is fairly recent: https://www.steinway.com/news/features/owners/john-williams Short, but lovely!

I somehow always feel both elated and exasperated whenever John Williams gets announced for a new project. God willing, he will be 90 years old by the time he scores this. I'm happy he's still writing movie music for Hollywood pictures. I'm happy to have another year walking around like a man possessed waiting for his soundtracks. All good things to this man.

Just to know JWFan has been given another Williams score to look forward to and to anticipate together is immensely exciting. I'm so thrilled. If you'd told me that in the span of 10 years, Williams would be working with the likes of Rian Johnson, JJ Abrams, and James Mangold, I would have called you crazy. It's so neat that Williams has gotten to spend what could have easily been his retirement era working with an entirely new generation of filmmakers that have all come to dominate the industry in different ways.

Mike was incredibly generous with his time and stories, and he was kind enough to listen to my first edit pass to ensure we had everything as he liked it. As you can expect, he gave good notes to ensure the most intelligibility and clarity. (Nothing was lost in some big cut! There is not some story he gave us that I had to remove. And we never asked him what soundtracks were coming out soon since he would not have been able to tell us anyway.) I thought about actually releasing the interview in two parts, but I did not feel there was an obvious break to do so. Everything just flowe

My theory about why the Indy box was discussed but didn't progress suddenly making more and more sense... I'm just glad we won't have a repeat of the TLJ situation where we didn't have confirmation until right before Williams saw the film. It shows how highly JW is rated by Disney/Lucasfilm he's up there with Harrison Ford on their announcement of the key 3. I cannot believe he'll be writing new Indy music in around six months time... what a time to be alive!

Another leak! This time for June!

some possible cue titles Jay's Theme Betrayal in Bespin's Thread The Bot Invasion and the Appearance of Bruce Marshall Bruce Marshall's Dark Deeds Jay vs Bruce Marshall Quintus's Tale Enter Lord Ricard Scherzo for Gruesome Son of a Bitch and Orchestra Ah, Politics!!!

https://www.starwarsnewsnet.com/2021/04/solo-composer-john-powell-talks-about-his-score-lord-would-return-to-score-a-solo-disney-plus-series.html

Well let this page of discussion be a shining example of why allowing politics, even siloed off into a specific area, just doesn't work. We're supposed to all be here because we like film music, and want to talk about it with other people who like film music, as well as everything else related to it - movies, shows, games, books, other types of music, etc It shouldn't matter if the person you are having a conversation with about these things is pro-Trump, ant-Trump, pro-Brexit, anti-Brexit, conservative, liberal, democratic, republican, left, right, up down, whatever

FWIW, I was happy to see the new rules. Granted, I'm largely a lurker, but I'd started visiting less and less (even swearing off the site entirely) because the content of some posts was really getting to me. I just felt increasingly unwelcome, even in the shadows. Here's hoping change is good!

Time until the LLL May flyer MIGHT appear: And the absolute deadline for the LLL May flyer, barring some inexplicable delay:

Jay changing his avatar at 11:59 PM like

Kudos for Yavar from bringing this up on FSM, but Bruce Botnick has revealed on the latest Goldsmith Odissey episode that he has just finished work on a Legacy expansion of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, clocking in over 160 minutes. You can hear it at roughly the 8 minute mark: https://goldsmithodyssey.buzzsprout.com/159614/8360054-odyssey-soundtrack-spotlight-along-came-a-spider-2001 Great, great news And Disney Music Twitter posted this a couple of hours ago:

Unfortunately the sequel trilogy didn't really allow for JW to let loose with a lot bombastic action music, but the music at the beginning of TLJ will always be one of my favourite musical moments, especially the complete version. It has basically everything: Reworkings of motifs and themes from the OT, the musical style of the prequels and the developing of themes from TFA.

Listened to that interview. Gosh I love Powell. Nothing really revelatory in the interview. However he did share how the film was just a breathe away from getting scored by Hans Zimmer due to Howard’s previous relationship with him. But Hans vouched for Powell and told Ron Howard he was in good hands. So glad Powell got the chance. And he didn’t disappoint! Sometimes good things can still happen to good people 😊. EDIT: Hadn’t finished the whole interview. Turns out John Powell intended to include the major key Imperial March recruitment music at the end of the OS

I've always loved this little melody. A surprisingly cute ballet of droid figures and characters in robes on all those stairs and passages

Memo to Mangold: Fucking finish your edit before you give it to Williams. DO NOT butcher his score. I hope Williams made it clear to Kathy that he's not going to stand that nonsense again.

Popular opinion (I think): John Williams is the best choice for both films

Btw, Gloria confirmed me that the piece is going to be recorded by the Albany Symphony next year.

And here's the official trailer for the event. Hope you'll enjoy

As a tribute to the late prince, who passed away today at age 99(!), let's listen again to John Williams' piece for him -- later renamed "Aloft....To the Royal Masthead":

Every time you guys tease it, it gets pushed back 2 months. Stop it!

@Thor will get a motif of course, but for inexplicable reasons Williams doesn’t include it in the OST program, and that makes everyone, except @Thor himself, upset.

I've never found R1 to be atrocious. In my opinion, it just doesn't really play to MG's strengths. As instrumental as Star Wars was in his growing to love film scores, his compositional style is just very different. R1 is straight-up pastiche, and it's hard to write really good Williams pastiche. On paper, R1 has what you'd expect from a Star Wars score, whether you know the jargon for it or not: the chromatically planing minor chord triplets, the long-lined romantic melodies starting with upward leaps of a sixth, the militaristic i-bvi chord progressions for the baddies, etc. But it doesn't f

“What the hell is this?” was also his reaction when he heard Rogue One for the first time.

This poll has helped me to better understand the three demographics of film score listeners that make up JW Fan, and for that I am truly thankful. Observe:

I hope this score has a really good, strong, memorable, long-lined theme for the film's macguffin. Raider's Ark Theme is amazing Temple of Doom's Shankara Stones Theme is great Last Crusade's Grail Theme is amazing Crystal Skull's Crystal Skull Theme is..... eh... it's fine Let's go back to the strong memorable themes that the biblical artifacts had! At the very least, I hope it's more like Tintin's Unicorn Theme, and less like the Call Of The Crystal...

I chose quite the juicy time to join this forum, eh.

My bank account is thankful today

I had the interview on in the background on Friday, and as soon as Powell said that, I immediately wanted to know what JW's 'diplomatic' version of “What the hell is this?” is

This is very sweet, thank you so much @mrbellamy. Nothing gives me more joy and motivation than seeing mutual JWfans happy with the work I’m doing. For me, it’s really a labour of love, done in the hope it will be useful material for any student and fan of John Williams’ music out there, to give possibly a wider perspective on his fantastic musical persona. Your support and appreciation means the world to me. Also, I consider myself very lucky to have a such a great collaborator and friend as Tim Burden being a real partner in this. He’s the best.

Happy to see this thread. The complete version of “Escape” is killer. (Especially the references to Poe’s theme). And I love how the “Battle of Crait” cue forms a great bookend/complement to it. When the panic/desperation/“ludlow” motif kicks in its just plain awesome. Shame that didn’t pop up again in RoS. What TLJ might seem to lack in new thematic material I’d say it makes up for with its ballsy set pieces. Probably the strongest set pieces of the three sequel scores IMO.

Well said @Alex, it's a brilliant fusion of all three trilogies, and the performance/recording is seriously impressive. You'd swear it was the LSO performing it at the ROTS sessions if you didn't know otherwise. It feels like a close cousin to the Battle Over Coruscant too. What a shame the JJ sequels afforded him so few opportunities to break loose with the orchestra in this vein (and thank fuck for Rian Johnson!) It is hard to fully judge based on the OST track though, because it's so frustratingly cut down (and there's even more unused material they deleted from the

Twenty years ago today, Howard Shore took to the podium in front of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at Wellington Town Hall for the first Fellowship of the Ring recording session.

Unpopular opinion: I care more about a new Indy score more than another Spielberg drama score.