Sharkissimo

Nice choice.
 
To me ears the trill figure plays like a cross between the Bbm/Am/Bmb Cloud City motif (ba ba ba ba ba buh baaaah) and the Imperial March (I-VI maneuver in the bass).
 
Now I've mentioned it...
 
 

It's amazing, isn't it? I think you're the first person to ever mention that.

I really can't abide by that sort of precious, ritualized approach to listening. I find the altered level of perception while dividing one's attention between music and another task (provided that it's not too cognitively demanding) can create its own unique frisson.
 
Good music should be listened to however the hell you want to listen to it. If you want to work out to Mahler 3 (as I did the other day), go ahead!
 
 
Why not? Perhaps the apparent mishmash between the two could provide an arresting sensual counterpoint.
 
 
Could you possibly be more vague?
 
 
Musical analysis of any variety only affords you an additional perceptual layer, further enriching the listening experience.
 
 
Would that it were so simple!
 
 
Depends entirely on the type of music, and more specifically, the role studio production played in the composition process.
 

Grey
Ludwig
Pubs
Quintus
karelm
 
Honourable mentions:
 
crocodile
Loert
KK
Richard
Disco Stu
dougie
Koray Savas
Alexcremers
Ghostbusters II
Blumenkhol
Cerebral Cortex
Mr. Big
Will
Woj
Incanus
Bilbo
Sweeping Strings
Datameister
Hilly
Falstaff
 
Out of service:   Hlao-roo BloodBoal tedfud
Jilal
 
 

Whatever the opposite of intuitive is, the DX7 is it. Created by computer scientists who couldn't play a C Major scale if their lives depended on it.

Or rather, on which level of musical craftmanship Zimmer has done it. Pragmatically, 'maestros' like Williams and Rózsa have/had a vastly better education in musical theory, counterpoint and orchestration. Which is, as we of all people should know, is not mandatory for a film composer.
 
But my point of view is that in an (often) narratively driven medium like film, having a good understanding of structure and how to do apply it to the music at hand is of great value. Zimmer does that, too, but he's much more limited when he's doing films that require huge and overarching/interconnected musical architectures.
 
As for Rózsa as Williams' equal: Rózsa was always a very strict classical composer (very german-conservatory) - Williams has the advantage of a more broad education especially in hipper american genres like jazz and blues. So he's certainly better at adapting newer styles and idioms but listening to his output, he too prefers to stay within musical confines established at least 60 or 80 years before.

I guess, but Elliot Goldenthal's (the true pioneer of this sort of approach) scores never really had that 'deafening sheen' to them. Neither do the scores of many other 'hybrid' composers.

Wow. This is the kind of thing this thread should be about.
Just listening to the opening of "The Hitcher" reminds me of what I love about Herrmann. His ability the conjure the scope of an entire drama within a single chord or vertical sonority, and to do so elegantly and economically. That's a very rare skill. One must recognise Herrmann's language is primarily vertical, not linear, like Williams, North and Goldsmith. It was his great strength but also his biggest weakness, as seen when the harmonic motion become more circumscribed in later scores (i.e. half diminished 7ths in contrary motion harp arpeggios, planing major thirds over pedal points etc.).

Johnny goes G-Funk.
 
 

5:47 - 6:58 (but especially the tutti section from 6:23 onwards)
 
Amid the hexatonic, blitzkrieg-ed ferment of the first movement, this is one those exalted moments that you wish lasted a bit longer.

Michael Tezla as Bernard Herrmann.

You know, it occurs to me that Williams never actually said "chordal seventh!" Part of our collective confusion may stem from misremembering, and the general truthiness of the idea that old-fashioned Steineresque villain writing involved 4/2-inverted chords. 
 
The actual quote from the interview I believe we're all referring to makes mention of seventh scale degree.

"We have the Nazis, you know, and the orchestra hits these 1940s dramatic chords, you know, with the seventh degree of the scale on the bottom. Which is kind of like an old signal of some evil militaristic doer." 
 
Seventh scale degree (^7) refers to a specific note within the governing scale (in solfege, ti or te; leading tone or subtonic in functional lingo). It's not the same as  particular configuration of a chord. I'm not sure where this slight mischaracterization came from, that he's talking strictly about 3rd inversion seventh chords. It may certainly be that this implies inverted chordal sevenths, if we assume Williams is thinking like a modern jazz improvisationalist, where local chord is often conceptually merged with "scale." And, of course, if we're restricting ourselves to tonic chords, than a tonic harmony with the chordal seventh in the bass is the same as a tonic chord with the seventh scale degree in the bass.
 
I almost wonder if what he was referring to is instead the even more emblematic way of depicting villainy for Williams and (Classical) Hollywood in general, of having the minor tonic locally flanked by the flattened minor submediant, but specifically in first inversion. So Cm => Abm/Cb => Cm. In which case we can forgive Williams for playing a little fast and loose with enharmonic names (though most musicians would call that Cb a B, and not be totally wrong since it does behave as much like a leading tone as it does an inflected form of the tonic degree). Theoretical minutiae aside, that is the progression actually heard in the interview clip exactly when he is talking (Abm => Em/G, from the end of Raiders 10m5 "German Sub"). Then the clip moves to that sequence from 4m1 that we know, despite being characteristic, does not feature any 7ths in the bottom.
 
That's the Vader progression -- or Tarnhelm progression if you prefer Wagner. [And LP(m) for all you neo-Riemannians]. It's an extremely well-theorized little harmonic topic that one can find countless examples of in Williams and other film composers.
 
 

Like Pallaeon I'm a little confused by your question. In the key of C, the (major) 7 would be B... I'm not sure why you would want to refer it as a downward minor second (?), especially if it puts you at risk of thinking of the actual second scale degree by mistake (D in the case of C). Is there a certain organizational hurdle you're trying to get through? 
 
 
 
 
Oh we know where he got the D!

RETURN OF THE JEDI underrated?
Not by me. Over the years, it's crept up to become my favourite Star Wars score.
I've posted before, and I'll post, again: everything from BROTHER/SISTER, FATHER/SON onwards, is sublime.

What Karim meant, I guess, is when JW goes more heavily abstract-like to create a sort of suspended atmosphere through the usage of colours and textures produced by light instruments (like celeste, piano, harp, high-pitched strings), usually enhanced by electronic timbres of the synthesizer. I think this could be totally defined as one of JW's own trope.
 
Several examples come to mind:
 
 
 
 
 
Listening to these, I realize that despite they're heavily textural in character, they're also very pianistic at their core. It's sort of JW's own take on impressionist-like writing. It would be interesting to investigate his process when writing these kind of cues.

You're nuts.

I'm sorry, but HOOK is one of the very, very few Williams score that does nothing for me.

I sometimes wonder if companies are just doing things like this to specifically cause outrage at this point, because I've never heard anyone complain about Aliens and some of the other movies the warnings have been slapped on to. I'm not denying that some people are too up their own asses to recognize what might actually be considered problematic, but based on how modern culture has evolved, this is reeking of corporate businesses knowing this will get attention and thus bring more awareness to whatever movie service this is. It's more likely just something they've done just to save face in case something happens, but it's hard to tell in these times.

Like honestly: tell me if you've actually seen a person rag on about how outdated Aliens is. If they exist, it sure as hell never popped up in my feed that shows me that sort of thing from time to time. The only people I've seen be in uproar, ironically enough, is all the people that normally mock outrage culture. Guess they gotta be angry if the "snowflakes" aren't adhering to the confusing "SJW" narratives this time.

I like Dylan too, although admittedly I'm not so keen on the Cult of Dylan, that like an overgrown tree, cuts out sunlight to other equally worthy songwriters, who for all their talent aren't as adept at the art of personal myth-making as he is.
 
 

Textbooks don't usually get into these kinds of stylistic details. I looked in several harmony and counterpoint books just now but to no avail. The music speaks better for itself. Take, for one famous example, Chopin's Prelude in A below. All the dotted figures except the last are half steps (as in March of the Resistance), and Chopin sometimes uses notes outside the scale to do that. For those who don't read music, it's always the 2nd and 3rd notes in of each phrase in the recording below.
 
 

Of all these "YouTube music gurus" out there, I'd say Rick Beato is one of the more pleasant ones. I don't go out of my way to watch him, but I like him, Adam Neely, and Underbelly.

of course it can. I always say you don't need to be a cook in order to talk about food.

Just to add my interpretation to @Loert.'s -
 
At the heart of this movement is a bitonal tug-of-war game between B minor and it's dominant, F# Major. Neither key centre quite wins out, and at the closing measures in a masterstroke of compositional of guile, Poulenc reinterprets the F# as the dominant of B Major, forming an elegant Picardy cadence. The chord you highlight is a G#7#9, which is just the II7 chord in F#, spiced up with a Stravinskian false relation. Note that we've been primed with the genuine article, a G#m, at :09, so when this more colourful chord arrives it feels somewhat uncanny. As the G#3 generates a D#5 in the form of the third harmonic, Poulenc chooses to omit the fifth (a common jazz practice), and this along with way the chord's voiced lends it an open, ambiguous quality, that could lead one to read it as an appoggiatura chord derived from the previous sonority. Both are valid readings I think, but I'd argue there's merit in viewing this passage in the wider context of an expanded functional harmony.
 
 

Serving pandiatonic realness. I wonder if Howard Shore has this somewhere in his record collection.