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Posts posted by Henry B
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You're really short changing Copland though. Copland began with angular avant garde music and explored 12-tone serialism later in his career. He was a versatile, well rounded composer, not just an Americana specialist.In addition to Marcus' elegant and lucid comments, I would add that one thing that really distinguishes Williams from Gershwin, Copland, and Bernstein is Williams' broader stylistic boundaries. Whereas Gershwin and Bernstein represent a primarily jazz-informed approach to writing, and Copland invented his own brand of folk-informed classical Americana, Williams works with classical Hollywood, late Romanticism, atonality, experimental music, jazz, and popular styles, often with two or three of these fused seamlessly together.
In that respect, I view him as standing apart from the triumvirate Indy4 mentions and best understood as the "modern classical Hollywood" composer par excellence, a composer whose bread and butter is the Hollywood sound of yore, but is informed by concert music and popular styles to such a degree as to render him unique among his peers.
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This certainly has more of a pulse than Silvestri's other recent works.
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Why is it such a moral offense for posters not to fix their typos? We can understand them fine, and this is a discussion board, not a scholarly journal.
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Tom Newman studied with this guy at Yale, along with Jacob Druckman and Robert Moore. Exploring his work.
Oh, wow. I studied with Bruce MacCombie for a year at the University of Massachusetts. It was his last year - he died of cancer in 2012. Humble, warm hearted person, and a fine composer. He mentioned knowing Newman.
His most well known piece:
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Dm13(no 3) or Am9/D.
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A piece recently performed by my school orchestra. Yes, I took some cues from Debussy.
https://soundcloud.com/henry-buck/buoy
Tannhauser, I liked your film score. I wonder if you could find ways to fill the space a little more. It wouldn't necessarily take padding in a conventional sense, but something to alleviate the feeling of blockiness. You might look at blending instrumental layers more and staggering entrances.
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I don't think film music is better or worse than concert music. The visceral/nostalgic appeal is obvious; I grew up with movies like everybody here. But I will say that there's a technical reason for why film music is or can be interesting: it subverts expectations. Dedicated underscoring, particularly in the "mickey mousing" vein, is remarkably complex and unusual structurally. It's full of mixed meter, clipped rhythms and seemingly incomplete phrases. You know, the stuff that Thor hates. But this appeals to me, and what I think is cool is that it's an incidental outgrowth of film editing and pacing, rather than a sacrifice. Film composers have had to tear apart traditional musical forms and ideas of symmetry to jam their ideas into the appropriate time slots, but the results (when done well) have their own logic and beauty. Concert composers have been doing this for a hundred years, albeit usually with a less accessible harmonic language. In other words, I like some film music because you can't count "1, 2, 3, 4" to it. You can't easily rest.
Here's an example: the track "Map/Out of Fuel" from Temple of Doom. There's this gorgeous rendition of Willy's theme that we think is going to blossom, but instead Williams just hits the brakes and moves on. Now we all know the more familiar rescore of this track, in which Williams skipped the buildup, went right to Willy's theme and allowed it time to blossom, but I like the original. It's less expected!
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It really doesn't surprise me to read this. Stravinsky was an egomaniacal old crank and compulsive liar who was constantly on the offensive about one composer or the other. He didn't even come around to liking Beethoven until he was well into his 80s.
He was also a film composer himself. Most people don't know this because Stravinsky's music never made it into any released film. But in 1942, Stravinsky was watching jingoistic propaganda films and gunning for the composer position on The Song of Bernadette. He eventually was passed over for Alfred Newman. But all of these endeavors went into the Symphony in Three Movements of 1943-45. The second movement is a complete score cue intended for The Song of Bernadette.
Stravinsky went on to pursue a number of other film projects, none of which came to fruition. He did write The Flood: a musical play for CBS in 1962, but that was a project in which the music came first, so it's not really scoring.
What I take from Stravinsky's weird conceits is that artists are often not the most trustworthy witnesses.
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Oh, nuts, I missed it. In any case, the iTunes download still has excellent sound and goes, what, 70% toward the record company? Sorry for being typically 'Murican about this.
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Really wonderful music. 4 Memento Mori feels to me like a blend of Skyrabin and Satie. I'm going to buy this on iTunes (probably not the best way, but international shipping is expensive).
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My understanding of the continuum fingerboard is that it's simply a synthesizer with a unique keyboard that allows one to glide between pitches in a way similar to the ondes martenot. The quality of the sound is whatever synth patch is selected - a synth ondes martenot or theremin in the case of KotCS. It might have been used in place of a real ones martenot for cost effectiveness, or Williams/Kerber felt that the synth sound was more controllable than the real sound.
To be clear: the theremin and ondes martenot are not acoustic instruments; they are electronic instruments that use electricity to generate tones which are then amplified. They have been around for about a century. But they are not digital instruments; they can't be "programmed." (I should be crucified for the simplicity of that explanation).
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Let's not involve midichlorians again.
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Insteresting. If true it will probably mean that Solo dies in this trilogy. That is what Ford always wanted....
On a related note: http://www.theonion.com/articles/harrison-ford-begs-agents-to-just-let-him-die-now,34408/
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Nice post from dannthr as far as film music goes, but it's too bad he dismisses atonality as "insanity," as if fifty years of musical radicalism from Scriabin to Boulez was just the artistic equivalent of scratching an itch. Contemporary acoustic and harmonic/contrapuntal techniques are horribly underrepresented in film music. Jerry Goldsmith and Alex North were doing it fifty years ago; what happened? But we do have the occasional score from Corigliano, Greenwood, etc., at least.
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I know lots of female composers. My current composition teacher is female. There have been masterful (I hesitate to say "famous") female composers for hundreds of years. How about Clara Schumann or Barbara Strozzi? The fact that people even believe female composers are a rarity speaks to the implicit discrimination women face. Yes, I'm sure there are more male composers, but it's not one in a million by a long shot.
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Competitions can be worthwhile, if you win. But that whole world has a set of its own politics and problems, and everything I've ever heard from composers, teachers, and my own instincts tells me to stay away from them.
Maybe if there's an entry fee. If not, what have you really got to lose, aside from the nominal cost of printing and posting?
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Google "orchestra composition competition." There are actually quite a few opportunities. A few even give cash prizes.
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Spectacular. I bought it.
For those of you who just can't get into this sort of music - too archaic or courtly, you might say - I'd advise checking out the opening of "The Creation."
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Of course, my comment was referring to the fact that before Man Of Steel was made, people were like: "They wouldn't dare not use Williams' theme. People will be pissed if they don't use it". And what happened? The Big Z did his own thing, and most of the average moviegoers didn't give a shit about Williams' theme not being used. In fact, most of the average moviegoers seem to like The Big Z's theme just as much, if not more than William's theme.
So just don't think that they wouldn't dare do with Star Wars what they did with Superman. Nothing is certain anymore.
Of course, for the moment, Williams is still attached to Star Wars. But once we'll have reached Episode XXIV and Williams will be long dead, anything can happen...
Really? You're worried about the musical integrity of Star Wars films that will come out twenty years from now? Please, consider seeing a psychiatrist about that anxiety. Life is seriously too short for this crap.
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I love this new season. People are calling it a reboot, which I think is a misnomer, because it's the same old show, which is not a bad thing. Drew Carey's out, but he was always the weakest link. Aisha Tyler is a good host and wisely doesn't involve herself in the games as much as Drew did. Wayne, Colin and Ryan are perfect as always. Like everyone else, I'm not a fan of the special guest stuff. It pretty much makes the fourth cast member irrelevant.
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Yeah, I'm very cold to the idea of more Avatar at this point. This franchise has no staying power. I'm sure all the sequels will be at least moderate successes, though.
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I don't think the Insurrection OST needs remastering. It sounds great. Sure, you can always squeeze out a little more quality in a technical sense, but would it really make a difference to the listener?
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (JJ Abrams 2015)
in General Discussion
Posted
In a galaxy with magical energy fields, faster-than-light travel, giant space monsters and lightsabers, do we really need to pay such close attention to racial accuracy? People trashed the 90s Cinderella film with Brandy because of its obviously incongruent character races. But so what? It was a fairytale.