Jacck

They've just been recording Williams doing this:

Thought the music was very respectful to the themes and also gave each one a new spin we've never really heard Williams do with them. Plus the interwebs is littered with new comments heralding Williams as a genius. "To all those who say he's lost it, he just gave you a middle baton!" read one.
Would you rather utterly generic sampled noise like most trailer "music"? And I use the term VERY lightly.

It sounded like as if Michael Giacchino did the the trailer using Williams music. Liked it nonethe less.

Its cinebrass french horns...

And in case people need reminding of the most obvious:

I'm really really *really* missing the Raptor glissando trombones. Davis did a masterful job with that Williams idea I think, I especially adore this little passage of the Raptor call at 0:08

It's such a fantastic idea Williams had in the first score and Davis really had fun with it! In retrospect I'm really enjoying a lot what Davis did for JPIII.

Don Davis' score was miles better than this.
But that goes without saying.
I'm just allergic to those striing patterns, repeating themselves ad nauseam.

Indeed. They're noisy, they're messy, they're expensive. They smell.

Jurassic World is such an ugly looking film.

Thought we should have a thread for talking about any of Williams's chords that have you scratching your head. They can be tonal or atonal, tertian, quartal, secundal or mixed--just post them here.

First off is the compound chord in Cadillac of the Skies from EOTS, when Jim tells Dr. Rawlins 'I can't remember what my parents look like.'



The lowest three notes form an F minor triad while the E can be interpreted as a Major 7th. B-E-A-D forms a perfect quartal tetrad with Bb as a lone minor 6th. It could be reduced to an octachord (0,1,2,3,5,6,8,10) or 8-22, but I think that's missing the point. The way it's constructed vertically, with the clear separation between the bass, the augmented triad, the quartal tetrad and the Bb, it suggests a polychord to me, or least a mixed construction..

What do you think?

Coming up next: James Horner's musical self-portrait 'A Beautiful Mind'

For all ye who enjoy some good and challenging music, this fits the bell. Drops on the 12th of May.
http://www.amazon.com/Goldenthal-Symphony-In-G-Minor/dp/B00W4FTK78
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/goldenthal-symphony-in-g-minor/id989612045

The Bassoon Concerto is - together with the Horn Concerto - Williams at his most impressionistic. While the piece has a sort of programmatic nature, it never goes into any kind of illustrated territory. Instead, it seems to evoke landscapes of the mind and of the soul. As in many others of his concert pieces, the tone is very contemplative and ruminative, but here it wants to evoke a distant mythic past we all share.
It must also be said that it isn't a Concerto in the most traditional form (which is usually in three or four movements, with a very specific development of the thematic material), but it's more like a Suite, or a musical polyptych, that wants to bring the listener into its sylvan atmosphere--the piece moves from uncertainty to darkness and spright witch-like atmosphere, before going into a resolution of peaceful beatitude.
Overall it's a dense and layered piece, but it comes out also very lean in terms of harmonic language. There is a lot of chromaticism in the lines, but as usual in JW, it never feels too busy or distracting. The final movement contains one of Williams' most moving melodies, which to me always sounds like a chant-like tune for the trees he discovered in some ancient book.
It's an immense workout for the soloist, too. There are many moments where he/she has to play very long, tortuous lines.
It's a work that really pays off immensely every time I return to it. I still cherish the memory of seeing it performed live in 2007, with JW conducting the Chicago Symphony and David McGill as the soloist. The performance even outdid the one in the album with the LSO and Judith LeClair.

What?! I searched for both 'five sacred trees' and 'bassoon', but no hits. Is there really no proper thread for this concert work?
In any case, listening to this again now. It's been a while. It is without question my favourite of all of John Williams' concert works. It's not totally out there, like some of his recent works, but still modern enough to be a proper piece and not just a film music soundalike.
As a fantastic bonus, there's also Hovhanness' glorious "Mysterious Mountain" on the same CD -- an even more superior piece.

Not sure if this if this has been posted, Abrams on working with John Williams -

You will get your usual 120-piece orchestra playing interchangeable dime-a-dozen ostinatos for hours and tinkling piano and strings stuff for 'emotional' scenes. Not entirely Giacchino's fault, though.

Oh no, by nerd I mean someone who remembers every frame by heart and who says 'what the' when somebody else doesn't remember every little detail.

I'm noticing a strong anti-"noodling" vibe here! First let me explain noodling: I interpret it to mean playing around, experimenting, or trial and error. A generally low-cost/high reward way of finding great ideas and eliminating bad ideas.
Some anonymous quotes that demonstrate this strange stance against noodling and hold John Williams above such pedestrian practice:


And just a sample of the anti-experimenting mindset:



There seems to be a strange belief that great composers don't experiment. That it all comes to their genius brains in some great wave, in final form, and they just write it all down. That music written through trial and error and exploration is somehow inferior to this mythical music seemingly handed down by God.
My only explanation for this strange phenomenon is that people here are more likely to have watched "Amadeus" and mistook it for some kind of factual documentary? Because I see this belief crop-up in musical communities more than any other creative or even engineering focused community, where trial and error and iteration are generally held up as the most reliable way to do great work.
If you're learning to draw you're taught that you have to get comfortable with constantly using an eraser. When you're shooting a movie you're encouraged to do multiple takes and see what works. When you're engineering a bridge you're encouraged to prototype and test what works best before you build the whole thing. The idea in all cases is that the artist/director/engineer/architect does not miraculously know what will be best; their skill is in recognizing (via experimentation) when something works and when it doesn't. That's very different from knowing what the end results will be before starting. One process involves embracing trial and error. The other shuns it entirely, because you are only working towards a pre-defined end goal.
But for some reason there's a strange belief that when it comes to music, "gleich alles zusammen!" For those unfamiliar, it's a quote falsely attributed to Mozart (it's actually from a forged letter), where "Mozart" supposedly explained that all the music came to him all at once.
That's bullshit. The fact that he never said it is a testament to that is evidence of that. But if that's not enough, Mozart's remaining library of sketches, revisions and revisions, evidence of his musical experiments, letters describing his need for a piano to write, serve further proof.
Mozart was prolific and he worked quickly. He had an incredible memory. But there is no evidence that he did anything other than work hard, recognize when something worked, and iterate, iterate, iterate.
Fast forward to today, and a lot of JWFanners seem to be under the spell of this "Gleich Alles Zusammen!" bullshit, even going so far as to claiming that John Williams writes the same way as Mozart didn't! That he would never do something as pedestrian as work hard at getting to the music we know and love!
That's why John has expressly forbade a piano in his office, right?! Because everything comes to him all at once, and he doesn't need to sit at a piano and play things and see what works and what doesn't! Right? That's why he wrote hundreds of iterations of the Close Encounters theme, because it came to him all at once!
It's why John Williams explains his process as:
"I developed from very early on a habit of writing something every day, good or bad. There are good days, and there are less good days, but I do a certain amount of pages it seems to me before I can feel like the day has been completely served. When I am working on a film, of course, its a six-day-a-week affair, and when Im not working on films, I always like to devote myself to some piece, some musical project, that gives me a feeling that Im maybe contributing in some small way or, maybe more importantly, learning in the process."
Because he's not some noodler. He doesn't sit at the piano and play around to see how things work. He doesn't write bad music! He never has to figure out what happens next, it all just comes to him:
"For me if Im ever blocked or I feel like I dont quite know where to go at the next turn, the best thing for me is to keep writing, to write something. It could be absolute nonsense, but it will project me into the next phase of thinking. And I think if we ourselves as writers get out of the way and let the flow happen and not get uptight about it, so to speak, the muses will carry us along."
"The wonderful thing about music is it never seems to be exhausted. Every little idea germinates another one. Things are constantly transforming themselves in musical terms. So that the few notes we have, 7, 8 or 12 notes, can be morphed into endless variations, and it’s never quite over, so I think the idea of a block is something we need to work through."
He just takes the final works in his head and writes them down!
Yeah...because that's how real life works.

To be fair, the Giacchino music in the scene is already pretty comedic.

My God! It's calling for help!
Now that's comedy.

Elfman- Smile or I'll make sure you'll never work in this town again!

Remember 1999? The Phantom Menace. Even before I saaw the film months later I listened to the OST over and over again. You could sense that John Williams put a hell of a lot of effort into this score. He knew it wasnt just another project. It was a Star Wars score. It was a huge thing. Expectations were enormous and he needed to give his A game.
Sadly the movie was shot, and not only that. His music was really butchered beyond belief.
Natrurally he did the other two films, but it felt different, musically. More broad. More typically JW. I've always felt he wasnt giving quite as much as he did with TPM. He already knew that he didnt need to write anything for the climactic battle for the second film for instance. He didnt have to re-record the orchestra part of DOTF for the third film. And every one of the prequels has the exact same rendition of the main title.
John Williams still did amazing work for those two films, far above and beyond what one could expect from such appaling films. But it didnt matter as much.
For his seventh Star Wars films things seem different again. This isnt some score he's writing in between 3 other projects on teh quicxk, like AOTC. He's got loads of time, a director who, despite his faults does place a lot of importance on music in his films and hired John Williams rather then his regular composer for this.
Star Wars 7 matters something to John Williams, and he will once again give his A game!

You see, I have a directly opposite opinion of this - I feel like James McGill is very capable of leaving "Slipping Jimmy" behind- that, seeing the success of his hard and heartfelt work, all of it legitimate, in elder law, he was going the straight and narrow. Chuck is the motor that keeps Slipping Jimmy going, diminishing James' accomplishments and destroying his self-worth (secretly denying Jimmy's promotion after he gets his law degree, and destroying James at the end of the most recent episode).