Musica42

Good enough for me. Thanks a ton!

Who played oboe in the Return of the Jedi recording sessions? Anybody happen to have the answer?

"Meet my ghostwriter for The Last Airbender." "E.T. phone homo."

Milton Babbit dies on Saturday and now John Barry a mere day later... Why do great composers always seem to die in clusters?

Oh, thank you so much!! I didn't know that! and it's complete free? hard to imagine! Yup, totally free. A really nice service they provide and something I wish more publishers would pick up on. As for Barber if you're looking to really dig into his catalog I'd say there really aren't any duds to be found. However (and I base this on absolutely nothing but the nature of your original request) I would shy away from his Second Symphony and his Essays for Orchestra. All great pieces, but far more modernist in their approach. Some others of his work that may interest your are his Summer Music and Medea and certainly give his First Symphony a listen all the way through.

You can get access to just about everything by Barber using the free Schirmer on Demand, which is basically G. Schirmer's online score perusal service. Go to http://digital.schirmer.com/ and follow the directions and you should have unlimited access to a ton of great stuff including a lot of John Corgliano's works as well as Elfman's Serenada Schitzophrenia.

A few things come to mind. Erich Korngold's Symphony in F. The 2nd and 3rd movements in particular. The 2nd is a brilliant whirlwind scherzo that only lets up to get interrupted by a heroic theme for the horn. Simply electrifying from beginning to end. As for the 3rd movement, if you're looking for music that evokes a child lost in a magical forest, then look no further then this. Samuel Barber's First Symphony. This is actually all written to be one continuous movement so some recordings reflect that while others break it up across multiple tracks. What may be of particular interest to you is the slow 3rd section, which begins with an achingly beautiful oboe solo over strings that would also be a good candidate for that lost in the magical wilderness sound. While we're on the subject of Barber, if you aren't familiar with his Overture to School for Scandal, then definitely check it out as well. It's a brisk and exciting work with a slower section toward the end that has one of the most instantly singable themes I've ever heard.

Heartbeeps. I've tried several times. Never get further than 3 or 4 tracks in. John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! I keep this around only to show the occasional person how awful Williams could be in his early career. The Lost World. I keep this around to remind myself that John Williams is completely capable of phoning it it. The rest get pretty frequent play.

Any movie scored by Williams that nobody has heard of. Except Heartbeeps.

I'm going to agree that all in all the wide-release movies this year were pretty disappointing, particularly in the music department. Edge of Darkness - still can't get over John Corigliano's replacement, even for someone as great as Shore. Alice in Wonderland - liked the tracks that prominently featured the main theme but it, like the movie it accompanied, was a turgid mess Clash of the Titans - as rarely an epic mythology-based film comes out I was livid at how generic and unlistenable the score to this one was Robin Hood - another film I excepted great things from, especially given the director, sadly another boring wash of musical wallpaper Prince of Persia - etc The Twilight Saga: Eclipse - etc The Sorcerer's Apprentice - etc Be it a wasted opportunity or a composer I respect not quite delivering, there just wasn't a lot this year that excited me. The only scores I've enjoyed this year are Last Airbender, HTTYD, Inception, Kick-Ass, and Dinner for Schmucks. And for me the only knock-out was HTTYD. Clearly I need to hunt down this Ghosterwriter score though.

This is disgustingly self serving, but... Every film I've ever scored. Edit: So obscure they're not even worth mentioning.

Being a child of the 80's I've wasted entire days just listening to music from this site. Also, a friend of mine put me onto this track from the StarCraft 2 soundtrack. Get past the opening few seconds of homage and it gets incredibly awesome. The first slow theme even feels a bit Goldsmith-y. Sadly I don't know whose actually responsible for this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJA5mc3pCBE

On a whim played through the Harry Potter and The Halfblood Prince game and was amazed at how much better the score was than Hooper's. James Hannigan demonstrates more talent in the first 30 seconds of this track than the entirety of Hooper's tragically underwhelming score. Game sucked, but that's another matter entirely.

fixed

It's come to my attention that many of my favorite scores by many of my favorite composers happen to be within the feature length animation genre. Powell - How to Train Your Dragon, Bolt Giacchino - The Incredibles, Ratatouille, UP Goldsmith - The Secret of N.I.M.H. Horner - An American Tail, Land Before Time Desplat - Fantastic Mr. Fox Zimmer - Lion King, Prince of Egypt Hisiashi - Miyazaki films Thomas Newman - Finding Nemo David Newman - Anastasia Coulais - Coraline Kamen - Iron Giant Silvestri - A Christmas Carol JNH - Atlantis Elfman - Nightmare Williams - ...Mr. DNA? There's a certain willingness to accept unique musical approaches and Romantic-era music sensibilities within this genre that I just don't find to be the case in most other genres anymore. Where does this willingness come from? The directors? The inherent need to sell the oft fantastical settings? Its a strange albeit welcome habit of Hollywood and I'm curious what everyone's thoughts are on the subject.

Your point that there's only room for a single genre of music at any given point in time? It's not that I don't get the point. I just don't agree with it.

Since when has film music been hip?

I feel it pertinent to point out that those trying to compare Desplat's score with Williams' entries in the series are completely disregarding the fact that even PoA was six years ago. It was a VERY different Hollywood back then, e.g. Goldsmith was still with us (albeit it for just a month longer), practically nobody knew who Giacchino was (The Incredibles was still about half a year off) and the bland Media Ventures sound wasn't nearly as ubiquitous then as it is now. Looking at the Best Score Oscar noms from that year we have Finding Neverland, The Village, The Passion of the Christ, PoA, and Lemony Snicket - all five expert orchestral accomplishments by composers with very distinctive compositional voices (although I'm sure some would quibble about some of those entries). And of course it goes without saying that after 2005, we've only gotten a single John Williams score, so the last half decade has been all be devoid of his sound (sadly his influence hasn't been much felt either). Like it or not by this point the established Harry Potter sound has to include the past six years and that means Doyle and Hooper's entries as well as the trend of less melodic/more understated film music. At the very least Doyle can wield an orchestra and for that I'm happy with this entry. I do miss the brilliant set pieces of composition that Williams provided in his scores, but given how abysmal most film music is these days I'll take quality in whatever form it comes in.

Agreed. Of all the John Williams scores I own, when it came down to choosing the one I wanted to try and get signed, I chose A.I. I like to think I'm the only person on the planet with a signed A.I. CD, thus putting me in some special bracket of super fandom.

No question. Prisoner of Azkaban. Although this being a hypothetical why not a boxed set of the complete Potter scores I-III?

01. Citizen Kane 02. A Clockwork Orange 03. Psycho 04. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly 05. The Neverending Story All great scores in their own right, but all very unique in approach. I'd love to know how Williams would have handled them.

I understand the reason for shying away from featuring the instrument. But given the nature of what I'm doing I need to try nonetheless. And again we need not limit this discussion to just Williams. Edit: Alex North's Love Theme from Spartacus has a nice exposed viola (doubled in solo horn) melody about 27 seconds in. Hot damn, they do exist!

Having spent the last year or so doing some heavy manuscript trading on this site I've now begun the process of cataloging excerpts for all the instruments of the orchestra as an addendum to the orchestra texts I study (Forsyth, Adler, and Rimsky-Korsakov/Alexander). Right now I'm simply documenting the passages that feature an individual instrument, but I plan to take this further and have sections that follow Rimsky-Korsakov's book with instruments on the melody in combination, instruments on the harmony, etc, etc. So far the violin section is coming together very nicely so I have moved on to beginning work on the viola section and here I'm coming up against some difficulty. Having spent a little time going through about a dozen Williams Signature Scores I've noticed that Williams very rarely features the violas by themselves and when he does it's in the low to mid-low register noodling around with a rapid mostly scale-wise or arpeggiated pattern (opening of Battle of the Heroes being a typical example). Every example I've found of the viola carrying an upfront melody has it being doubled with some combination of violins, cellos, and basses. So my question is can anyone point me to a section of any significant length (at least a couple seconds or more) where the viola's quality of sound can be specifically heard? Examples can be from any film composer of course but I'd prefer they come from the score manuscripts that are floating around these forums. It doesn't necessarily need to be a section where the violas have the melody (for example the cue "A New Beginning" from Minority Report features the viola in a very exposed accompanying role). Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Also if anyone is interested in seeing the work I've done up to this point with cataloging the violin excerpts, feel free to PM me.

I gave The Last Airbender a listen last night and I was so happy with what I heard. I've been looking forward to The Last Airbender score ever since I caught wind of the project. I love JNH's fantasy writing and I've been silently annoyed that he's spent the past few years pursuing relatively uninteresting projects. Thankfully my waiting was worth it and I love what he's managed to come up with here. It's epic and and I completely disagree with the folks who are dismissing this. Are there moments of big drums and french horns? Well yah. But if that's all you hear in this score I have to seriously question your musical literacy. There's a number of themes I picked up on and only ONE of them is Zimmer-ish. But thankfully JNH does something few composers are want to do these days and he actually takes that simple theme and does all sorts of clever things to it throughout the score. Yes he goes full blown R/C with it a few times (but that may account for 30 seconds of an hour+ listening experience). Let's not discount what I assume to be the Fire Nation theme which feels like Shostakovich encased in a layer of awesome. And the final track of the CD is simply transcendent. It's stuff like this that makes me love film music and accept being a social pariah at parties because of it. Anyhoo, there is so much to appreciate here and I boo every single person who says this sounds too much like a JNH/Zimmer baby.

I couldn't even make it through the first track. I decided to listen the original Firebird instead.