Leaderboard

The Empire Strikes Back is probably my favorite score and I have always wanted to study it in depth. The sketches are floating around but are cryptic and difficult to read due to extremely small handwriting, short score conventions, parts switching staves, and the fact that it was designed to quickly get the ideas on paper rather than readability. I have some downtime so thought I would typeset the music. My first effort is “R12P1 - Losing a Hand”. Typesetting this music has made me reach a few conclusions since it forces detailed examination of everything on the sketch: 1. Being an orchestrator for John Williams must be the easiest job in the world. All the details are already in the sketch. Not just the notes but also the phrasing, dynamics, string bowings, the voicings, instrumental doublings, hairpins, percussion, ornaments, etc. It is actually unnecessarily detailed. Just by typesetting the music as JW sketched it, the music we hear in the final recording is clearly revealed. This is a far cry from most working composers today who either use samples or extreme short cuts (to be kind). 2. JW likes parallel harmonies, chord substitutions, sequences and many other classical and jazz techniques influences. Basically he is extremely fluent musically in a wide range of techniques deployed with skill and craftsmanship (yes, I knew this before). 3. There are mistakes in the sketch but they are obvious. For example, in vader’s Imperial march, there was a note indicated as F natural that should be an F#. What he has in the sketch seems to have been fixed in the recording but any professional orchestrator would have caught this minor error I am sure. Occasionally there are missing accidentals or a missing beat, but this in no way detracts from the quality of the score it is just so massively accomplished. 4. I used to hear a pretty big style evolution between “Star Wars” and “Empire Strikes Back” but see that “Empire” is more of a direct evolution than I previously thought. The strange music at the start after Luke looses his hand and before Vader says "I am your father" reminds me of the music when Ben Kenobi was deactivating the tractor beam. 5. Interestingly, tempo is not indicated but rather timings are. This means that he didn’t conduct statically but conducted in musical gestures as long as they lined up at important moments with pops and streamers. This results in a more “operatic” quality with molto rubato. The phrases are sometimes stretched or compressed though it still lines up at important moments. I can imagine this was a complex recording to perform. 6. There are a lot of great melodies that only appear for specific events – for example, what is the “dramatico” theme in the horns at bar 44 when Luke is hanging under cloud city? Where did that come from? It is a great theme but isn’t heard before and not related to another theme as far as I can tell. Empire is full of that and I just love the pedal and how this all gradually evolves from dramatic to heroic. I wonder why JW didn't just use a tragic version of the Luke theme here rather than something entirely new? It takes me about one hour to typeset a full page of sketch which consists of two 8 bar staves. The music is very tiny and extremely thoroughly detailed and I am trying to capture it all with reasonable results. Next I will either try to tackle “Hyperspace” or “Clash of the Lightsabers” two favorites of mine since I first saw the film in 1980. We already have some of the other music such as “Han Solo and the Princess”, “The Asteroid Belt”, “Yoda” but were missing a lot of the final dramatic musical moments. I hope to have the entire third act typeset in a month or two. So this would be everything starting with “Carbon Freeze” to the end. Score and MP3 (not realistic quality, just a straight output from Sibelius so don't get too hung up on sound quality) can be downloaded here.

Hey everyone, Brand new to the site...but I can tell already I'm going to love it. I'm a huge JW fan (obviously), and I have a couple questions. -What's the deal with "The Sugarland Express" soundtrack?? Is it available ANYWHERE? -What's the best way of getting a hold of some of his harder to find albums (Dracula, The Reivers etc.) I've gone to places like Amazon.com and they're quite pricy. Any suggestions?? I could probably dig deeper on the forums to find the answers...but I just wanted to do my first post. Here's a top 10 just to give you an idea of my taste: 1. The Empire Strikes Back 2. A.I. 3. Hook 4. Close Encounters of the Third Kind 5. Superman 6. Raiders of the Lost Ark 7. The Witches of Eastwick 8. Heartbeeps 9. A New Hope 10. Earthquake This list could change tomorrow...but currently these are my favorites.

I would say that long action sequences offer Williams a chance to show his generosity and sense of rhythm (two of his strongest qualities in my opinion) more than a piece such as Yoda's theme but I love it all. Empire is certainly special. I have listened to it hundreds of times over the years and my favorite cue has changed several times. My current favorite is the third track on the Special Edition cd: "Wampa's lair/vision of Obi-Wan/Snowspeeders take flight". It's a great example of what I stated above. Williams does things in these eight minutes of music that no one else has ever done in a hundred years of film music. Any one else singles out that particular piece? If I remember well most of the "Snowspeeders take flight" cue is not even heard in the film and was replaced with a section of Hyperspace. I've wondered why since 1980. It's such a great melody.

Plagiarism isn't really the issue, the musical substance just isn't that high. The complete score betrays even more formless droning and when Horner gets operatic like with the tree destruction, it's not only the xth regurgitation of TROY and ENEMY AT THE GATES but also an inferior cue taken on its own. There are fleeting moments of brilliance, however, like the touching violin solo in the ultimate cue but what good does it do in a sea of thin ethno yodelling and lackluster action writing? ALIENS is a good workmanlike sci-fi score that is hugely overrated by fans of the movie, an opinion i hold since i got the old Varése in the mid-90's, always wondering what attracted so many listeners to it (even disregarding cribs and all).

Frozen's songs are pretty overrated. It's a mishmash of various genres that just don't go together well, especially in film. The score is largely insignifcant. Pleasant enough, functional in the picture but unremarkable. It lacks interesting thematic or textural features, relying on the song tunes but not integrating them as intelligently as Beck's predecessors in the Disney animation genre. Some of the Norweigan vocals are kind of cool, but are never consistently used to give the score a voice or flavour of its own. As it is, it's rather anonymous and will be forgotten by the next year.

I also feel this to be at least partially true. But his work does stand on its own as a listening experience but he is a very different composer from John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith or even his father Alfred Newman. Newman by his own admission is interested in working with smaller ensembles and unique sonorities of various specialty instruments in trying to track down that sound of the film.This makes his scores sometimes feeli delicate or even insubstantial as he relies on few voices instead of an entire orchstra. But he has shown that he is capable of writing in the more conventional idiom of Hollywood's orchestral scores and scores like the above mentioned Angels in America, Little Women, Shawshank Redemption, Oscar and Lucinda, Meet Joe Black, The Good German (love letter to the film noirs of the past) and indeed Road to Perdition for the most part illustrate this very well. And yet he handles such sound with his own unique way that still sets him apart but it is the most relatable work for those who love bigger orchestral sound. His work for films is also less leitmotivic than of e.g. John Williams' or Jerry Goldsmith's or Elmer Bernstein's although he does write very strong melodic identifications for films. Newman seems to prefer to create individual musical moments rather than a quilt of thematic interaction with his music and he most often focuses on the mood and underlying feel of a scene rather than enforces its emotions with straightforward thematic statements. But when he does the effect is often beautiful and powerful. I feel that few can convey the feeling of longing and bittersweet yearning melodically as well as Newman does. His thematic statements are sparse in most of his scores and he usually sums up these ideas in his finale and end credit pieces. You can take almost any Thomas Newman score and invariably the ending has the most fleshed out version of his main idea(s) for the score. One rather irritating thing on his album can be the short running time of the cues. Newman can make a quick statement in a minute of time but sometimes this choppiness, indeed his loyalty to the individuality of the cues, makes for a 40 track album with many shorter tracks that might not have room for development. In this he is also different from older generation of composers in that he does not often combine his music into longer suites of cues containing related pieces or cues with similar moods and that may create feeling of jumpiness and underdevelopment in his music. Newman can also noodle with soundscapes and sound design type of atmospheres for long sections of the score but I luckily feel that he does it better than most "sound designer/composers" working Hollywood today. Listen to e.g. the Murder in 4 Parts from Road to Perdition, such unique orchestrally created atmosphere for clashing sonorities.

The score is like a hipster's pastiche of Eric Satie.

From JAKMS twitter:

Ive met Steb74 actually. He's cool!