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Are people still complaining about Daenerys? I thought it was as well-handled as it possibly could’ve been, and the best part about the last season. If they’d laid any more breadcrumbs about her ultimate fate it would’ve been labelled too obvious and predictable. I genuinely think a lot of people were just upset they’d been rooting for a self-aggrandising genocidal maniac for the majority of the show. Which was the entire point.

John Wheeliams! I just saw the video of the Devil's Dance, from which this clip is taken. Is he repeatedly saying "wow" while conducting?

Shut up. WWTLFIW (OF)? STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK I'll defend this film, to my dying day, and it's still my second favourite ST film. It may not have the Sturm und Drang of II, nor the heartwarming coziness IV, nor the fantastic set-pieces of VI, but it has a quiet beauty that weaves its way into your consciousness, and never let's go. Allowing Nimoy to direct was a masterstroke, as it's apparent that he both knows and understands what makes Star Trek tick. It's not an underestimation to say that this film is made with real love: love for the subject matter, love for the lore, and love for its audience. As both the middle part of a trilogy, and a third film, it works, surprisingly well. No matter how well other ST films are made, I'll always return to III, if I need to "turn death into a fighting chance to live".

And here it is: Morricone's final composition, written for the victims of the collapse of Ponte Morandi in Genoa in 2018.

This was announced in the Vienna thread, but I am guessing that is not regularly checked by many. The piece is extremely good--so why not give it its own thread. Here you go: DG has now released a video of the performance:

Stop complimenting him, then he'll never stop!

By "score" they're probably referring to the sheet music, not the recording sessions. I'm not aware of any session leaks for TLJ.

Not to mention the outrageous time constraints he had to write it. Insane that he turned out the score he did.

Tons of great points in this post, but this is something I feel is overlooked. One of the best parts of an otherwise disappointing credits suite is that big, almost march version of the Anthem of Evil. I don't remember many other uses like that in the film at all. That, plus probably most of the deeper Sith stuff got lost in having to make two movies and a finale to 9 parts in one film. That's why I chose Revenge of the Sith this time.

How can anyone think that a person who believes it is her " birthright to rule the 7 kingdoms" is a benevolent character? She was always in contrast to Jon which made the ending even more tragic

I really dislike that the discourse around TROS's score has been so negatively focused on the reuse of Yoda & The Force, as if 35 seconds of returning music was more salient than the 2 1/2+ hours of new material. I also regret that I contributed to this discourse by criticizing the scene in a podcast earlier this year. Though my point was not so much the music, which is obvious and fitting enough, but the unearned nostalgia of the scene proper. Oh well. Any way, my opinion on the ST scores continues to evolve, but I'm pretty comfortable saying I think TROS is my favorite of the bunch now. TLJ has the most satisfying dramatic highlights but weakest new themes. TFA the best themes and finale, but its underscore is the least interesting to me. TROS, messy and frustrating as it is, is overall the most impressive. I love it.

Sincerely cannot disagree more basically everything you say!! Long post, too much BS to even argue to but to say Solo is the best SW score since TROS is just..... No comments. They will ban me. It's not even a SW score

The biggest stretch of missing music was between Rodan and Mass Awakening. And it didnt sound that necessary to me anyway.

The Amazing Spider-Man by James Horner. It might not necessarily be the greatest thing ever but at least you get a sense you're in a hands of someone who knows what they're doing. So many of those superhero scores don't really sound like anything at all but Horner managed to fulfil both the requirements of the modern blockbusters as well as sneak in some human emotion into this tentpole extravaganza. Unlike many of these things, this score really is centred on characters and their relationship and it actually feels like it goes somewhere dramatically. What's interesting, the majority of music is very intimate and personal which is quite unusual. The obligatory heroic main theme is actually very catchy, and well developed throughout, and I'm surprised they didn't keep it for the sequel. I've seen this film only once and the music almost made it good. Say what you want about where it ranks among Horner's other works, but this score is an example of his masterful storytelling abilities. He knew how to apply modern trends with skill and taste beyond most of his colleagues' capabilities. For all his idiosyncrasies, he was really a treasure. Karol

Better you than some of the other morons here!

It's called "The Queen" on the Varese DE, or "16M1 Egg Chamber" in the Blu Ray

Say what now?

Funny you mention this. WAY back in the late '80s, I saw BEETLEJUICE on video and remember thinking the opening title music was so original and fresh and (quietly) lamenting that JW didn't really write music like that. Then I saw WITCHES OF EASTWICK and was blown away! That it was written the year previous was just icing on the cake. WITCHES was the first CD I ever bought and is still one of my favorite Williams scores.

Sometimes, film music is the closest remedy! (Again, kidding, I've been down that particular road, but with less success finding the exit. I guess being German complicates everything...) Be well, Bespin!

That's "Jerry 'the master' Goldsmith", to you, sunshine.

It's Jerry Fucking Goldsmith. Nuff said.

Alexander would burn cities to the ground if they didn't surrender. Sound familiar? But, if they " bent the knee" he was relatively benign. Napoleon was seen as a liberator and champion of human rights in his initial years of rule. He disbanded the Italian Ghettos, where Jews were forced to live. Sound familiar? Both despots, ALL despots , share one universal trait; they do not tolerate any dissent or opposition.

This rounds up the score's assets rather well:

Amoeba Records is having a Gofundme drive.😰 'Thank you', Generalissimo Newsome.😠😡

Right# Fans wanted a " happy ending" where two unelected monarchs rule over their kingdom - after taking it by force , and massacring thousands of innocent civilians. This isn't a fairy tale for children

because the same question is asked every six months and people grow tired of picking of the obviously correct choice.

I admit I wasn't very aware of Alan Parker, but I've seen a couple of his films over the years and as far as I remember always liked them (when can we finally have a Blu release of The Wall?) David Arnold posted a few anecdotes about him on Twitter:

I appreciate The Lost World didn't rely on the 'Journey to the Island' and 'JP' themes. But all the different themes in Temple of Doom are just untouchable. Nobody can make a score like that anymore. Nevermind his ABSOLUTE GRIP on the Raiders March in ToD. 2:45-end.

I don't know answers. Who does? Superman always acted out of noble motives. Whatever he may be perceived to be, one thing he is not, is crazy. Yes, he was responsible for incurring a lot of damage, in both MAN OF STEEL, and SUPERMAN II, but he did to try to protect people from something far worse. Daenerys, on the other hand began to believe in her own invulnerability, and that was the beginning of her downfall. Even when she got taken down a few pegs, and ended up among the widows, she still believed in herself, and I admired that, but she was never going to let it rest, there. Her pride and overreaching ambition got the better of her. She's the quintessential example of good people doing bad things, for what they believe are good reasons. I don't think so, Mike. The seeds were sown right back in S1E1, when her brother suggested that he'd use her body to get back the Seven Kingdoms. Daenerys then stood back and let Khal Drogo murder her brother, when she realised that he was no longer any use to him. She was never a woman without ambition. Whatever Cersei was up to in King's Landing, had it's mirror image, in Daernys.

Very nice! These are the covers I grew up with and you did a great job framing them in the square format. Oh, and you even followed the LLL's frames for the first three but went different for the rest! That's attention to detail not all ambitious custom cover designers have.

She has a really great arc in A Dance with Dragons which takes her from a compromiser to a conqueror—and she’s still a very sympathetic character. To be fair, it’s obvious now in view of the show. And to be fair, now that people know that’s the whole point of her—to be a truly sympathetic villain—it will be easier to stomach whatever happens in the book. But I think in GRRM’s hands she will never not be somewhat relatable and sympathetic. I don’t think she will ever snap in a way that will leave the reader like WTF. I don’t think she will ever be just insufferable and haughty, cartoonishly demanding people “bend the knee”. I think it was just sloppy writing on the show, and unfortunate that both she and Cersei ended up as distastefully and incompetently and irredeemably power hungry (and honestly Sansa was not much different).

In the books, the Daenerys story could very well be (or could have been) a "the signs were all there and have been building up, everyone just jumped on the wrong boat that already sank once" deal, but as it is in the series, it was more of a "no matter how much you try to be a good person/ruler and be better than your forebearers... you'll just... snap one day and go evil kookoo because your daddy was mad and evil too." as I saw it.

I think people disliked them for different reasons. People didn't like the Man of Steel destruction because it seemed a) to ignore the collateral damage of such an affair, and b) out of character for Superman specifically to dish out such collateral damage. I think GoT didn't pull any punches, and the character as written was hellbent on dealing what she delivered. I think people's bigger problem with that episode of GoT was not necessarily the mayhem, but the character changes and the rapidity of such to get Dany to that point .

A great assessment of the ST! I would agree with it as well. I think the most damaging aspect of the film to the score is how much the film must have changed in the month before release. It really seems that Williams wrote a score for a very different movie, so it seems that Williams' conception of the score remained scattered and fractured at best in the end. Things like the reordering of scenes, cutting of scenes, substantial edits to scenes, etc. make it very hard to hear Williams' intended arc for the score. And yet... the new themes, especially the three for the good guys (Friendship, Victory, Heroics) are all quite strong, the underscore for action scenes is top-notch (we even get an old-style thematic action cue in the Speeder Chase), and somehow, instead of feeling like the thematically-attractive-but-less-interesting-underscore-type score for TFA or the emotionally-exciting-but-low-density-of-new-themes-type score for TLJ, the score for TROS manages to be both attractive in its themes and exciting in its underscore and still hang together in the film. The prominence and frequency of the Friendship theme throughout certainly helps, as does seemingly not overdoing it on temp track references / old themes. Even so, an expanded score I think would be the most revealing of any in the ST because of how much the film seemed to have changed. The Anthem of Evil, for example, I would guess had a larger and/or more important role in the original film than it ended up having - was the choral bit ever part of the film, for example? And as @Falstaft pointed out when the film was released, the Speeder Chase motif is a kind of variant of the Heroics theme, and Ben Solo's theme (aka the Kylo Ren redeemed theme) was foreshadowed near the start of the film. So it seems that Williams had a more overarching conception of the score and how the themes would appear throughout, creating a more unified score than what we heard in the final film. But I love the score, too, even with its current frustrations, and likewise consider it the best of the ST for all the above reasons.

I have also said that the Luke and Leia theme represents incest in the Star Wars universe. So it was perfect for Leia and Like and perfect for Lando chatting up his daughter.

I like this, but please; call it by its proper title: THE DANCE OF THE WITCHES.

Abed. Karol

@mxsch The ESB Yoda Uses the Force reuse in TRoS seemed like a perfect moment to do so. How is it questionable when it's intentionally referencing the same actions from ESB? It makes that scene much stronger.

I mean, it's sort of a battle of semantics. In my opinion, Williams' Fiddler is not simply a re-orchestration and putting in a few transitions; it even presses the boundaries of arrangement into "reinterpretation" at times. That being said, all of the source material is from the original score with all melodies and vocal lines preserved 99% of the time. It's really the supporting material in the background that is the most different and adds a lot more virtuosity and he changes some keys. A simple crescendo in the broadway book gets incredible treatment from woodwind runs and miracle of miracles turns into this incredibly sweeping piece that puts the broadway version to shame from an orchestration standpoint. Everything from the original score is just brought to a different level of life with his additions, but Williams is tasteful and rarely alters the work structurally. Dances may be the exception to this, but the original book had TONS of dance music that isn't on albums that he may had pulled from. Been a while since I've played the show. The violin melody is from the original show, but he takes a lot more liberty with the development. As karelm mentioned, the entre'acte also has a lot of material that isn't necessarily composed, but has really imaginative combinations as well. The show has so many great classic melodies and motifs, you don't really need to "compose" much.

Thanks @Jay and @BrotherSound, have updated the spreadsheet. Shame that 5M38 Robert at the Hospital wasn't included on the FYC, it's certainly the meatiest of the 3 unreleased film cues.

We'll rerecord it, I think I still can play clarinet if it can help!

I liked the first three episodes or so of S7 just fine, including most of the battle (edit: the first one, at Winterfell). The show took its time to build up an atmosphere and focus on the characters for (as it turned out) one last time. Daenerys' ultimate madness was also justified and always a clear danger, of course. And the overall points of the ending mostly work just fine as well. But most of the stuff in between, i.e. the pacing, the (non-)characters, the actual story telling, or the ultimate abandoning of any time/spatial relation of location and any semblance of logic (if it's behind the camera, the characters can't see it, even if it's a huge fleet with free sight to the horizon and they're actually flying above it) is really beyond any justification.

You're canceled.

Personally, I think these were probably the most important concerts in the history of film music. I really mean it. Why the most important? Because John Williams was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic playing his music in Musikverein. And it was filmed.

That's probably the real reason she was there.

Cookies?

I heard that from an austrian close to Musikverein management. I don't think Mutter charged them that, though. It's not the Wembley stadium so they couldn't recoup 200k by two gigs with a hall small like that. Though i will say one thing that seems to me more important than all the (expected) adulation of JW's music: it's where your stuff is performed that matters. I had Williams at the Barbican (and Desplat), many others (among them JNH, Morricone and Zimmer) played in awful commercial venues that simply sounded like shit. They were amplified by stadion speakers and the orchestra and percussion was often mixed abominably. It's a testament to these classical locations (that are a dying breed) that this concert sounded as good as it did.

I loved it because my childhood hero was finally treated like one.

I collect many things Godzilla related. And every Godzilla score. It's just that important to me.

No KM, the Marine Band could sight-read this better than most professional orchestras could perform it. They really are THAT good. The problem with this whole performance and recording is the fact that it is recorded at an outdoor concert. There are very few outdoor venues that offer proper acoustics, and even then they typically only sound great if you're there in person. Some outdoor places like the Hollywood Bowl go out of their way to mic every single instrument (or section) on the stage, and even then it's still not as good as indoors. It never will be: you won't get overtones from the brass, many of the string and woodwind sounds just die away without resonating, etc. There's a million reasons this didn't sound great, but it's not because of rehearsal time or group ability. Frankly, it won't be on my top play list either, but I'd love to hear it one day from an indoor recording.