Richard Penna

It's an all time favourite for me and I wouldn't say that, no. I don't think the general public would recognise anything from it, not even Now We Are Free. And lots of people don't like Zimmer's approach to the action scenes.

I just looked Phipps up and I realised he does The Crown and some other TV. I agree that he's not an 'unknown', but if like me you don't watch any of the TV he's done, he's not a name that's very recognisable.

I'd be fine with Streitenfeld as I'm one of three people on the planet that likes The Grey, Robin Hood and Prometheus. Although I'm curious as to why HGW had to come in and do the theme for the latter - was Scott not happy with what Streitenfeld was producing? No one's going to do a proper successor to Zimmer's score so I'd rather they just went with someone new and made a totally new score.

I'd say with significant confidence that Zimmer won't do this. They've never worked together since HGW took over on KoH and Scott has been giving very high profile projects to other composers lately - a composer I've never heard of is doing Napoleon. I do get surprised when someone's interest in a movie is so heavily affected by who is scoring it - it can be a chance to discover the work of a new composer. I've literally never heard of Jed Kurzel until he did Covenant, and I love that score.

This is probably closest to my approach. Regardless of how I discover a score, whether it be a concept album on Spotify or watching a film and liking the music, I'm listening to the music as music. Sure, I might be remembering scenes along with the music and picturing what's happening if I know the context well, but I'm not in the mindset of reliving the film scene by scene - more enjoying the story/atmosphere at a macro level. Something I also strongly do, at least for well-conceived music, is picture places, situations or scenes for piece of music, such that an innocent piece of underscore can take on a strong meaning even without my having seen the film - it just has to be pressing the right buttons, mentally for me. Even if I've seen the film I can often still apply my own imagery because the emotion of the music is working on a larger level.

The only area of film music over which I lament at the moment is when directors decide they want a more droning, RCP-flavoured score, and don't want any themes, but (this is the crucial bit) they still want original music. Why bother? There's enough pre-existing 'atmospheric' music out there that you don't need a composer to come up with another drone or percussion beat - just search through some libraries. Now maybe I'm judging that wrong, and perhaps after a composer has done an exhausting orchestral masterpiece they rather like the task of trying to improve a film with a more textural approach. However, I'm certainly in the camp that would prefer composers worked on projects that were musically interesting. Having said that, I like, for example, much of Bishara's horror work, despite quite a lot of that literally just being 'noise'. It provides work for a composer who must get something out of it, but the films don't need it. Although I got into scores via electronic music and I certainly got attached to production music way, way before any indications that I was into soundtracks. This no doubt explains why I tend to like a lot of electronic or atmospheric-driven scores.

Particularly, if you line up the shot of Gandalf wrapping up with when the percussion stops, the fanfare lines up with the shot of Orthanc, and the crescendo ends just before Viggo's line. All it would take would've been shortening the Uruk Hai bits by a few shots to make the difference.

I think that's a pretty big thing against it, plus the tone of the entire scene is the end of a long day, finding a place to sleep. I find it hard to see a grand, positive fanfare in that moment. I would absolutely go for the idea that the rarities cue could have been written for a different edit, based purely on how strongly it seems to me that it doesn't fit that moment.

Have two or three musical categories so you don't end up treating this horrorfest the same as a comedy score. --- I only just noticed that the primary musical device in the first track sounds like a dot matrix printer.

Perhaps the section needs to be under a certain length and they have to decide on less prominent people to not include? Must you see absolutely everything through that filter?

Certainly they're missing sound effects, etc, but I think they are a good representation generally. The intended Weathertop reveal for example, I could've sworn was for Gandalf's reveal 20 seconds earlier, and I don't think that even if you removed the choir (as on the OST) or turned it down in the mix, that it would be any more appropriate for the scene. I have a more lenient approach to that - I don't actually mind if a section was the intended cue or tracked or is an alternate if it creatively achieves what they wanted. In fact, yesterday was the first time I realised that the tracked Weathertop reveal was actually tracked from Sword... because it's not obviously an edit in the film mechanically, and creatively it strikes just the right tone. I think all it means is that some of us have fun recreating those film versions as if they were alternates in a bonus section, and others just settle for the original cue.

I didn't even realise that the intended Weathertop reveal was at the end of the rarities track. I found some of those additional cues far more interesting than others, and that just fell under the radar. The 'score restore' videos are academically very interesting, but I do think they highlight for me, especially based on the Weathertop example, that PJ did a lot of sensible tracking. Of course, not to suggest for a moment that those bits should have been on the CRs, but I see so many occasions where either the film has silence or tracking, and I hear the original music and think.... yeah... that doesn't work.

I'd have thought it was obvious why it matters... the video has to be done by a certain date, so if someone dies after that, tough. Not an issue with those who died months ago, clearly but I'm sure I've read that the Memoriam section is as politically complicated as all the other bits.

Brokeback has that guitar theme that is sort of nice, I grant you. Babel will forever be a monument to the academy's near parody that year, when it essentially managed to give the award to one of the year's worst scores. I can't even remember what element of that film drew voters in - we weren't yet at that point where socio-political issues were almost entirely defining winners as they are now.

Nah, Santaollala's scores were the least deserving. Social Network isn't for everyone but it's a creative score. It's just not orchestral.