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I enjoyed this thread because Nick kept saying don't feed the troll and proceeded to feed the troll. All Augie did was reveal how butt hurt people get when someone trashes JW in the most obvious fashion. Back to General Discussion!

When this Augie and Nick66 fight, it makes me wish that untouchables would show up. Then we'd have a real troll fight on our hands.

I'm gonna kidnap john williams, blume and inky. I'm making them worshippers in the new, hot, up-and-coming Great Church of Our Dear Lord and Savior Hans Florian Zimmer. all jwfanners shall love us and despair!

What he is saying is he puts the seventh of the chord at the bottom which emphasizes the dissonance. He does this frequently. It is also in Lando's palace. Example: in c major the 7th is a B. if you put the seventh at the bottom you hear the B next to the C (a minor second) which emphasizes the dissonance compared to when the 7th is on top of the chord where the dissonance is deemphasized.

To be honest over the time my appreciation for AOTC grew even more and more. I like that it is such a different and in some ways experimental score for the Starwars franchise. I still think it is worse than the other five scores but only because these scores have such a ridiculous high level of greatness. TPM certainly is the best of the prequel scores! But i love listening to AOTC! Discovering and rediscovering all these rythmic and motivic layers in the modern JW action sound creates tons of relisten value. I absolutely adore the "Chase through Coruscant" cues. It's the crowning achievement of modern JW action scoring. So if you like his modern voice it doesnt get better than that. Even the other action tracks like "The Jango Fett Fight" or the great "Padme Falls" are fun to listen to just because they are so different to the usual melody based action music. It happens so much on the rythmic side and the whole orchestra has a great kinetic energy. And then there are the completely unexpected creative parts with the insect like music in "On the Conveyor Belt", the unique melody in "Approaching Naboo Palace", the eerie harp chords for the Coruscant Night Club scene or the Asian flavoured Tatooine music heard in "The Jango Fett Fight". On this board all the creative stuff of AOTC that has to do less with melody and more with rythm or exotic scoring is criminally underrated! Many of you said that John Williams took a more relaxed approach and didnt give his best. In my opinion that cannot be true. Most of his more rythmic based modern kind of action music is probably harder to compose than the melody based tracks. He and George Lucas did their best to be different and more creative especially on the action side.

You make good points and analysis Blume. Williams does indeed utilize this very regal and refined sound in TPM to depict a certain feeling of sophistication, elegance and atmosphere of the Republic era. This same style is used to a lesser extent in the other two Prequel scores, perhaps because of the shift of focus on JWs and films' part. One could see it as gradual moving towards the times of the OT in sound as well, the luster of the Old Republic slowly fading away and giving way to a bellicose and dark age of the Empire but this could be reading too much to the architecture of these scores or Williams' conscious effort to use this shift in sound to depict it but it certainly illustrates it quite eloquently. There is a wonderful sense of scope and majesty in this style of scoring which while not exactly like the similar music in OT is certainly kin to it. Williams also succeeds in creating very effective individual worlds for TPM as Merkel says in his post. There is definitely a lot of effort and inspiration at work in all the worlds from Naboo to Coruscant as far as the musical style is concerned. In the later scores Lucas wanted Williams to try new things like the percussion heavy music for the night life of Coruscant or the noirish flourishes of Kamino or the raging march music of Mustafar. Williams still maintains a certain sparseness at Tatooine, clear lines and instrumental details, the alien feel of the insect planet of Geonosis and so forth. But I still maintain that the shift of focus left Williams less space to paint the planets as he had to focus more on the psychological subtleties and noirish subplots etc.

Actually, I think JW gave each planet and culture in TPM a very clear musical character, not a necessarly thematic one, but in terms of orchestration and color. Those Roman textures as you put it, are clearly associated with Coruscant and the feeling of this milenary Republic. You have many great examples of this in the scene when Padme calls for a vote of no confidence or when they meet Vallorum after landing on Coruscant. On the other hand, Naboo has a also very clear musical character, very evident in the scene when Padme confronts the Trade Federation by via com or the scenes in Otoh Gunga. The music sounds so green, ecologic, aquatic, verdant. It's endlessly fascinating