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By the way, Karol, let me repeat my recommendation: Aaron J. Kernis' Symphony in Waves. There's only one cue of it on YouTube it seems, and that's not the one that sounds like Davis' Matrix, but the "rippling" lines in Davis' scores are pretty much straight out of the first movement. Cool stuff.

I'm not sure it's possible to know exactly what's being played in these eerily dissonant passages. What I will say is that they really don't sound entirely atonal despite the harshness of the dissonance, and I think part of that is due to Williams heavy reliance on sustained pitches, whether we call them pedal points or not. In other words, there always seems to be a note or set of notes that is being held while dissonances shift above or beneath. That kind of sustained-note writing can give the sense of what they call "centrality" to the music - a kind of pitch centre that seems to move around with each chord. I think it goes a long way in explaining why these passages always have a feeling of clarity to them, like we know what's going on even when the harmonies are wrought into twisted chords. In short, they give comprehensibility to harmonies that would otherwise be rather incomprehensible. Like the non-tonal chords that he makes sound tonal. Brilliantly done in both kinds of cases.

I believe they were talking about "A Beautiful Mind", and Horner wanted to demonstrate how it was less about a theme than about constantly shifting harmonic centers without any one firm base, comparing them (unsurprisingly, knowing the track titles) to a kaleidoscope. And I concur, the organization team absolutely has to have it on their mental checklist to always keep a piano ready in the future. Then again, any prior preparation for demonstrations or the like where hindered by the fact that, unlike Bramson, who had prepared his own talk, Horner's session was more of an interview/discussion, the topic plan of which was obviously planned by the moderators, not by him. This went to the point of him being somewhat surprised by some topic shifts on the program, remarking that he found it funny that after him rambling on about his increasing dissatisfaction with blockbusters and wanting to work on smaller, more intimate projects, they insisted on showing a clip from Avatar, obviously to get on with their pre-planned list of topics about the big scores. But then he really opened up towards the end, getting into an entertaining somewhat cynical mood of telling some anecdotes. Continuing irritations about his compositional habits notwithstanding, my opinion of his character really improved a lot this week.

I love the fun Galician overtones of this. I wonder if it's based on some folk melody from there.

Anyway at its core Gravity is an exceedingly simple and lean thriller set in space, with a dose of human spirit. The entire film is made up of setpieces, and there's nothing that suggests the ambition of, say, 2001: ASO. It's a superbly tense and technically marvelous thriller. That's it. I do think the praise being heaped on it at the moment is a bit much though, as good as it is. I'm also doubtful that movies in the near future will try to mimic the camerawork here.

Ah, Venice.

That would be fantastic! A deserved nom and win, in my opinion.

I don't like using Wikipedia. Too many mistakes in there... and I know of friends who tried to correct entries and its corrections got deleted, so... Not on your listing, don't get me wrong, but on another pages. No sure what you mean by my sources being checkable. I've been collecting information on John Williams for over 25 years and counting and the list I mentioned early is the result of lots and lots of double checking. I've contacted people in the record business to confirm some of those entries and all. Not sure if that is good enough for checkable. Anyway, my list, which is currently containing over 150 entries on different recordings will be made public when I feel it really covers all the stuff we do know about.

There has been no additional CDs, or unreleased cues (at least not on his current site) released. There was about 26 minutes if Jack Lenz rejected score on his old site, but that's gone now (thankfully I saved that), and there has been nothing from Lisa Gerrard's rejected score, either.