Lewya

Are there any more comments on the score? I have only seen two comments on is so far, the comment above and the other one who said it sounded like good Williams but didn't say more than that.

WILLIAMS! He is there.

Yep, Williams will be there. Mark my words.

None of the options above. It is good, but not a masterpiece. More than just ok.

Wow, over 36 000 signatures now.

A massive petition is doing rounds with the idea (too) of releasing Junkie XL's score with Zack Snyder's version, calling Elfman's score generic, lazy and his effort here very unprofessional. Well over 26 000 people have signed it. https://www.change.org/p/warner-bros-zack-snyder-s-director-s-and-tom-holkenborg-s-score-for-home-release-e90fef07-11c6-4a9a-9ae8-375c7717dafa?recruiter=91715253&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition

This is correct. The new Williams's piece will be dedicated to Bernstein (it is his centennial). NEW YORK - John Williams, the prolific film composer who has scored "Star Wars" and other blockbusters, will premiere a new work dedicated to Leonard Bernstein, the Boston Symphony Orchestra said Wednesday. The orchestra announced its 2018 season at Tanglewood, its summer home nestled in the wooded Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, which will be dedicated to the centennial of the birth of Bernstein, arguably the most prominent conductor ever produced by the United States. Tanglewood will on August 19 hold a memorial concert for Bernstein that will feature an original work by Williams for orchestra and cello, which will be played by Yo-Yo Ma . Andris Nelsons, a fast-rising star in classical music who is the Boston Symphony Orchestra's music director, will conduct the work. Williams -- the former conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra who remains artist-in-residence of Tanglewood, will conduct other nights during the season, including an evening of his film music. A separate concert on August 25 in celebration of Bernstein will feature prominent singers including Audra McDonald and Susan Graham as well as Ma and members of orchestras with which Bernstein was associated. Bernstein, who was born in Massachusetts, was music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 during which time he became unusually prominent for a conductor with intensely expressive performances and regular television appearances. Bernstein, who died in 1990, remains best known as a composer for the Broadway musical "West Side Story" but also wrote three symphonies. The New York Philharmonic on Tuesday wrapped up its own centennial festival on Bernstein that featured prominent artists including violinist Joshua Bell and actor Jeremy Irons. http://www.enca.com/life/entertainment/star-wars-composer-writes-bernstein-work-for-boston

I hope this is a joke. Williams is not a great conductor at all. He is FAR from one of the best contemporary conductors worldwide. Just because they know him does not make his skills great. He made his name in a completely different field. Williams is by no means a legend in the field of "serious" conducting. He is not even close of making substantial entry in the field like say Andre Previn has. Being a world-class conductor, no more no less, in a big, one of the best symphony orchestras in the world (say top 10 or 20) for at least a decade = substantial entry to me. To become a legend you obviously need a lot more than that. Bernstein and Boulez are two examples of two opposite legends and Toscanini, perhaps the greatest since he appealed more or less equally to both camps if I am not mistaken. Williams is a functionable conductor who can sometimes be good. He can get many jobs done pretty well (without any whatsoever impressive intepretation skill - it tends to be straight-forward), that's about it. Williams is a legend in the field of film music, but certainly not a legend in any field beyond that. His conducting skills = functionable, OK, can be good, but again nothing great or special - FAR from the best conductors. His concert music = professional, showcases solid craft and understanding of the medium, but no masterpiece(s) or even near or anything beyond professional for the vast majority of time (he has his moments). He could be considered a competent composer in the field of pure concert music, but certainly not great. A great composer must have quite a few great pieces under his name - preferably a masterpiece or two as well which helps a bit to help secure the "greatness" - Williams does not have that, he only has a number of less than good pieces and OK to pretty good pieces. Certainly not many or even a handful of great pieces. I guess a few of the pieces are open for debate a bit, but the point still stands. Herrmann was a better conductor, he was more than a functionable (sometimes good) conductor like Williams is - Herrmann was actually a throughly good conductor who could sometimes be great.

A: A.I. Artificial Intelligence Close Encounters of the Third Kind Jaws Raiders of the Lost Ark Schindler's List B: Same as A.

Born on the Fourth of July for score, not sure about movie - either JFK or Born on the Fourth of July - I voted for JFK but don't really know.

Listening now, not a good start.

Julie Taymor is directing a new biopic on Gloria Steinem. http://deadline.com/2017/09/gloria-steinem-movie-julie-taymor-memoir-my-life-on-the-road-june-pictures-1202177374/

I ask Villeneuve what caused Jóhannsson to leave the project. “The thing I will say is that making movies is a laboratory. It’s an artistic process. You cannot plan things. Jóhann Jóhannsson is one of my favorite composers alive today. He’s a very strong artist. “But the movie needed something different, and I needed to go back to something closer to Vangelis. Johan and I decided that I will need to go in another direction—that’s what I will say. I hope I have the chance to work with him again because I think he’s really a fantastic composer.”

I just saw this. Spielberg and Wannberg showed up apprently.

This may be difficult to sell. A fine piece of lounge/new-agey minimalism.

Good, but nothing really special. Not one of his weakest or strongest. 3.5 stars.

Alien for both. Aliens is good don't get me wrong, but it isn't close.

Sounds like a mediocre score and a bore to me.

http://slippedisc.com/2017/02/john-williams-is-85-tomorrow/ John Williams - The Magpie Maestro By Norman Lebrecht / November 20, 2002 John Williams has cornered the film-score market. But his patchwork soundtracks that borrow from the classics are an offence to the ear. The second Harry Potter film sets 20 easy questions for ardent concertgoers. As the London Symphony Orchestra's sound-track swells over opening titles, a half-phrase from Mahler's Second Symphony melds into a Ravellian sub-theme, twists back into Mahler and off into a Prokofiev-like horn chorus. The orchestration is textbook Rimsky-Korsakov and the roll-call of composers referenced runs on through Debussy ('Knockturn Alley'), Smetana ('Colin') and Holst ('Moaning Myrtle'). Playing spot-the-composer can be fun during a dull performance of, say, Tippett's Third Symphony. But a two and three-quarter hour barrage of classical shrapnel from gigantic cinema speakers leaves both ears numbed and the mind aching with frustration at the wanton reprocessing of symphonic treasures. Worse, a movie about young sorcerers is devoid of musical magic, the pastiche of flagrant derivations failing to endow J K Rowling's imaginary world with any element of the numinous. The patchwork music for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is credited to John Williams, who also composed its predecessor. Williams has, for three decades, been Hollywood's composer of choice. Hitting the jackpot with Jaws and Star Wars, he added a gloss of culture (known as 'class') to harum-scarum adventure movies. Some maintain he single-handedly saved the orchestral soundtrack from extinction by synthesisers. In the middle of his 70th birthday year, Williams is busy as ever with several movies on the go, the next being Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio). He also has an opera under commission for Placido Domingo; his next orchestral work will open Los Angeles' new Walt Disney Hall next year. His concertos are exquisitely performed by the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma, elevating Williams to the fringes of the classical parnassus. He is, beyond question, the most famous living orchestral composer. Posterity, however, is not so slickly secured. The word in Hollywood is that Williams is on the wane. He has not won an Oscar since Schindler's List in 1993 and the clothes that he stole from so many classical composers have been fashionably recut by a wave of Williams clones led by the British-educated James Horner (Titanic), the Canadian Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings) and the German Hans Zimmer (Lion King). They, with a greater or lesser degree of invention, apply Williams' methodology with impressive commercial efficiency. Horner, who extended his range to embrace some forms of ethnic music, sold 28 million CDs of his Titanic score. Zimmer, a former avant-gardist, makes ingenious use of electronics. But their musical material is seldom striking, let alone original. What John Williams did to the modern movie score was to reduce it to a string of cliches and strip it of musical character. Cast your minds back to halcyon antecedents. In 1934, a Viennese composer called Erich Wolfgang Korngold landed in Hollywood not as a refugee but as a highly-paid consultant to the director Max Reinhardt. Korngold had written an opera, Die Tote Stadt (Dead City), that was Vienna's biggest inter-war hit. He now devised a genre of film music that was both evocative and exhilarating, setting the screen for Errol Flynn swashbucklers (The Sea Hawk) and tender romances. His themes would run for 30 minutes continuously and while traces of Strauss and Mahler are often audible, the music has an unmistakable signature. Korngold, once heard, is not readily forgotten. His Hollywood followers, emigrants all, included Max Steiner (Casablanca), Franz Waxman (Sunset Boulevard), Dmitri Tiomkin (High Noon) and Mikos Rozsa (Spellbound). Each had his own sound, each added melodic and harmonic novelty. Some are remembered merely for an effect - Bernard Herrmann, for instance, for the mass-stringed chills he applied to Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers. Others, like Nino Rota, co-created with Federico Fellini the essential ambience of cinematic legend. Late in life, Rota plundered his own score to 8 1/2 for a theme that became The Godfather's; he also write 12 operas. Just how much a composer brings to a movie is heard in Hiroshima mon Amour (1959), where Alain Resnais' somnolent pace and flimsy plot are sustained by Georges Delerue's compelling soundtrack. Delerue, who died in 1992, wrote 294 film scores but never collected the million-dollar fee that is the Williams benchmark. A movie does not need to be a masterpiece to benefit from a good composer. Several Ealing comedies - Passport to Pimlico, The Lavender Hill Mob - were scored by Georges Auric, one of the group of Les Six who hung around Erik Satie in 1920s Montmartre debating the concept of background music. Close your eyes and shut your ears to the Ealing dialogue: Auric's music takes the sit-com of suburban London and into a fantasy realm where the outlandish is instantly credible. Auric, all told, wrote 119 film scores, including Moulin Rouge. He also found time to head the Paris Opera for six turbulent years. Movie music in the Korngold tradition made no distinction between composers of consequence and those of mere facility. What it required, above all else, was character and colour. In the years when Britain had a film industry worthy of its name, it also had composers like Malcolm Arnold (Bridge on the River Kwai), Richard Addinsell (Dangerous Moonlight) and Benjamin Frankel (Batle of the Bulge) who gave the output an indigenous undertone and, often as not, an original sonority. Now fast forward to the new James Bond film, Die Another Day, where credit is given to Monty Norman for the Bond theme and to a disc-jockey, Paul Oakenfold, for its remix. No mention is made of a soundtrack composer, presumably because none was involved. More's the pity, since there are still musicians producing fine work for the screen - Gabriel Yared, Jocelyn Pook, Wojciech Kilar, to name three of the best. But theirs is an uphill battle against the Williams method of plastering movies with bits of what we know, rather than revealing an unseen dimension. There is no denying the success of John Williams, any more than one can ignore that of Bill Gates. We may have to live with it, but there is no law yet that says we must like it.

Hollow Man - Jerry Goldsmith Um... this must be one of the rare instances where I just can't get into a Goldsmith score. It is not bad, but I just can't get into most of it.

Three takes on the score: Quick Takes on Rogue One: Michael Giacchino's Sacrifice By James Buhler 
Composing the music for Rogue One would inevitably be a thankless task. Though many composers have written Star Wars music for games, television, and animated features, this is the first live action theatrical release Star Wars film without a score by John Williams. Anyone taking on the task would know the music would be heavily scrutinized, and the chances of scoring a real success were slim. Two sorts of objections, difficult to reconcile, were almost certain to appear: those who thought it strayed too far from Williams’ sound, and those who thought it hewed too closely. Perhaps writing a score on a very tight deadline, where a composer would not have time to fret and be overwhelmed by the anxiety of influence, was the only way it was going to get accomplished in a meaningful way. In any event, that is what happened with Rogue One. The official story is that reshoots on the film caused a delay in postproduction that meant the composer originally hired, Alexandre Desplat, was unavailable. Michael Giacchino, who has been scoring the recent round of Star Trek films, had won acclaim reworking Williams in Jurassic World, has worked frequently for Disney, and was fresh off scoring Marvel’s Doctor Strange, had a window in his schedule and agreed to take on the task. In around four weeks he produced his score. The tight deadline resulted in a score that feels more reactive to the various situations than a score with a strong conception of what this film should sound like musically. The film has the requisite citations of Williams’ themes; besides the Force theme, which is the most frequently deployed, often in very striking arrangements, Giacchino calls on the Imperial March, less deftly handled, as well as numerous motifs associated with the Death Star that Williams had used in the original Star Wars film. Giacchino also devised a number of new motifs: a shockingly overblown main theme, evidently modeled on the original Star Wars theme though sounding like it came from a completely different kind of film, that accompanied the title card (Rob Deemer provides a fine analysis of the problems with this theme); and a few other themes for the various characters. None of these themes have the same problems as the main theme, though none are especially memorable. Of these Jyn’s theme is given the most attention, but as with most of the other material in the film, it consists of marked but simply constructed, even commonplace, motives situated in an allusive and constantly changing form that resists settling into a fixed thematic identity. Indeed, I initially thought that the bulk of the new material Giacchino composed for the film had that underarticulated quality typical of contemporary action film scoring. Having now spent considerable time with the score, I think the problem, if it is indeed a problem, is that thematic material is not so much underarticulated as rarely stated in a cogent form. That is, it's constantly meandering, breaking off, dissolving, striving to become something else so we can’t be sure what constitutes the core of thematic identity. The theme that accompanies the title is characteristic: it sounds curtailed, as though it aims at mighty bombast but loses steam and stalls as it reaches its all-too-conventional harmonic pattern. Deemer states that this harmony suggests “a much more mundane, banal science fiction musical environment.” And so it does: the music sounds grossly overinflated but before it can come to a conclusion or even properly unfold whatever promise it might contain, it dissipates. Then, too, for all its prominence at this moment in the film, the title theme seems strangely inconsequential over the course of the score, even though it recurs at several important dramatic junctures (if memory serves: the council debate, climbing the data column, the destruction of the gate). Giacchino also picks up and works motives and gestures from it, but the theme never achieves the form that its initial aspiration seemed to call for. I don’t have space to follow up on this thought, but other themes are treated similarly. (Giacchino’s Imperial music is different in this respect, with sharp thematic profiles that cleverly evoke Williams while remaining distinct.) 
 Perhaps the lack of definition to the themes captures a certain indefinite quality in the characters, who as Todd Alcott neatly points out begin as “one thing, but they yearn to be another thing, while circumstances insist on them being a third thing.” I’m tempted to draw an analogy to the music: themes start as one thing, but yearn to be another thing, while circumstances insist on them being a third thing. This gives the score something of a diffuse quality. The score, which is rarely absent from the film, is generally unobtrusive, as it settles behind the sound effects of blasters and explosions—sonic representation of the unrelenting violence of this world—but also the music does little to define the world, explicate or redeem its characters’ actions, or suggest that their actions have a larger meaning than the moment of action itself. The scale of this film is very human, and for all its ubiquity and occasional bombast, the music follows the film in exuding a mundane, down-to-earth sensibility that the desperate invocations of the Force seemingly cannot overcome. Aside from the awkward handling of Darth Vader (both filmically and musically) and the charming but problematic figure of Chirrut Îmwe who provides the film its mantra—the depiction of Chirrut is thoughtfully criticized by Tessa Gratton—the mythic world of Star Wars has evidently receded into the far distance, and Giacchino renders this distance in his music, where the Holst sound, so integral to Williams’s conception of Star Wars, is rarely in evidence. The film and its music may want to follow Chirrut’s mantra and become one with the Force so the Force is with them, but they, like the film’s characters, must settle for sacrifice. Myth is reborn, as it is always reborn, as the new hope that would redeem the sacrifice. But, as Gratton astutely notes, this new hope unravels because it is fated to be what it always already was. Moreover, the myth erases the sacrifice that made it possible, just as the main title from Star Wars, Luke’s theme, appears at the start of the end credits to recenter the Skywalker saga and to displace Giacchino’s mostly non-mythic music just after Leia receives the stolen plans that will segue neatly into the beginning of the original Star Wars film. After this musical nod to the ritual script of the Star Wars film, which always begins the end credits thus, the cue returns to Giacchino’s original music from the film for the bulk of the credits. But at the end of the credits, the original Star Wars music appears again, as though to bookend the Rogue One music and remind us that the original Star Wars saga and its myth will give this film its coherence and meaning. Yet, then, after the Star Wars music has found its ritual conclusion and hammered home the tonic, the high strings continue to resound, shimmering as though an impossibly extended echo of the final chord. Into this void beyond the end, Jyn’s motive delicately sounds, in memoriam, perhaps, of those who were fated to be forgotten. 
 - http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2017/01/quick-takes-on-rogue-one-michael.html ROB DEEMER· Musings on the Rogue One Score After seeing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story twice over the last two days, I was not only bowled over by the visceral world-building that director Gareth Edwards and his team have achieved, effectively sharpening so many details in this universe while pulling the audience much further into the environment than any previous director. The diverse new characters, the extensive nods to the film’s “sequel”, the simultaneous ground, air, and space battles, the dirt, the grime, the rain, and DARTH EFFING VADER all made my inner 9-year-old howl with excitement and glee. When I heard that John Williams was not going to be taking on the non-saga Star Wars films, I was not surprised – he has to pick his projects carefully and it makes the most amount of sense for him to focus on the big-dog story line and let someone else have a go at the stand-alone films. When I heard that Alexandre Desplat was to score Rogue One, that was a surprise - I’ve enjoyed his film scores for years, but other than his film scores for the last two Harry Potter films and Godzilla (another Gareth Edwards film - the primary reason, I assume, that Desplat was picked in the first place), there are little evidence that his compositional voice would be appropriate for this extension of film’s greatest space opera. When I discovered that Desplat stepped away from the project three months before the premiere and that Michael Giacchino had replaced him, my reaction was a combination of “Wow! Who would leave such a project?” and “Yeah, that makes sense…MG has been slowly becoming JW’s heir-apparent for years now” and “Jeez, he better not screw it up!” I’ve been really pleased with his Star Trek scores and LOVE his Pixar scores, but his latest score for Dr. Strange had several troubling instances of sounding too much like Star Trek, so going into Rogue One I was more than a little apprehensive. OVERALL THOUGHTS ON THE SCORE My primary reaction to the score to Rogue One are as follows Michael Giacchino is probably the only composer in Hollywood who could have pulled a score of this magnitude and detail off in such a short amount of time - he had to write and record it in FOUR #%$&*! WEEKS!!! All further comments made should be viewed through this lens. 65% of the score works really well with the film - there are many spots where the music is tailored exquisitely to the film and his craft as a film composer shines through. 10% of the score is freakin’ brilliant - the string glissandi that sound as Cassian investigates the cavernous space where the Death Star plans reside are as deep cut to A New Hope as Ponda Baba, and the choice to go slow and beautiful as the star destroyers collide and crash into the shield generator was as sublime a musical moment as any in the film. 20% of the score was lacking both in its fear of using the motives from the original trilogy and in its frustrating lack of thematic exposition. An example of where a thematic exposition of an established motive does occur happens when Darth Vader first emerges in his suit; we get the full theme head-on with no development or side-eye hinting at the theme. This instance was absolutely effective and the overall concept could have been easily incorporated in other areas of the film. Too many film scores hardly ever develop their themes…they just repeat them in different instrumentations over and over, but in this case the opposite is true and it doesn’t serve the film well. Star Wars as a musical world is based on melodies - full, mature melodies that have structure and sentences and phrases, and if we don’t hear that in a Star Wars score, we are left wanting. (There is a reason why these full-blown melodies are not introduced early on that I will discuss in a bit.) 5% of the film is not only frustrating, but discordant to the point where I have been wrenched out of the experience both times I’ve seen the film and every time I’ve listened to the soundtrack over the last two days. It’s not technically 5% of the running time of the film, but the importance of this particular theme and its placement within the film is such that it equals at least 1/20th of the film and stuck with me far after I left the theater. It was this last item – this small, 4-measure theme – that made me want to write this post. It’s very difficult to isolate what makes a composer sound a certain way, and even more difficult to determine what makes a particular set of scores by one composer sound fresh and unique from other scores by that same composer and yet are still recognizable as being from that composer. This one small musical nugget that sounded so discordant to my own ears made me wonder if I could figure out why it sounded “not-like-Star-Wars” so I could get a hint as to what makes Williams’ scores sound “like-Star-Wars”. “ROGUE ONE…IT’S A STAR WAR’S STORY!” Before we can figure out what’s tweaking my ears with the Rogue One score, we need to look at the beginning of the main Star Wars theme, presented thusly with a wonderfully-notated reduction by Brad Frey (specifically measures 4-12): Below is a very rough outline of the first eight measures of the Star Wars theme as it is notated in the score (transposed so that the melody fits on the white keys of a piano). For those of you reading who are don’t read music, that’s okay - the top line is the notated melody and the bottom line is the rhythms of the rest of the orchestra along with the harmony. Several things are notable here: The melody starts with a leap up from C-G, then soon after leaps down from a higher C back down to the G. The emphasis on these two pitches create a sense of stability within the melody as a whole and it is only when the melody ends on a D that it makes us expect the melody to move forward (ostensibly to go back to C in the second phrase); The harmony is both simple and complex. In a simple way, the chords underneath the melody vacillate back and forth on chords built up from those two important notes in the melody, C and G (I-v-I-v-I-V), making it seem as if the harmony is not moving forward but rather sitting still. However, the addition of chromatic tones (in the Gm11 and the Bb-Ab-Bb chords) that use the black keys on the piano makes that simple chord progression sound colorful. This combination of a stable harmony that sits still while at the same time constantly changing its color is an important aspect of JW’s music. Rhythmically, the melody uses very simple rhythms throughout the melody, but the grouping is more complex that we might first imagine. Looking at the music above, the theme is visually segmented into eight measures of equal length…which makes sense, because most music that we listen to tends to be broken up into segments of two, four, and eight. However, music can look one way on the page and yet sound differently when we hear it…and in this case, I feel that JW wrote a theme that SOUNDS like it is actually broken into unequal lengths! In the score below, I’ve re-written the theme in a way that I think many listeners would hear the theme, with the triplets in the melody acting as pick-up figures. Written out like this, it’s interesting to see that JW actually groups the melody in uneven segments of 5-4-4-3 rather than 4-4-4-4…he could have easily made it even, but he intentionally chose to throw it off (again, simple vs. complex). [UPDATE: It has been pointed out that some folks hear the triplets not as pick-ups but as strong beats; the fact that they are indeed on the written downbeat lends much credence to this, but it also points out the complexity of what John Williams has done with his theme. By simply making the first G in the example above twice as long as the other two G’s and shifting where the strong beats occur within the melody, Williams has created a musical statement that can be interpreted correctly in more than one way…this complexity is, unfortunately, not to be found in the following Giacchino example.] Alright, now to discuss the theme that’s bugged me ever since I first heard it: the melody that plays just at the spot where the ROGUE ONE title card bursts into view. Obviously I can’t show you the music in the context of the film, but the YouTube clip below has the theme in it at 3:37…feel free to listen to the entire clip or skip ahead to about 10 seconds before 3:37: As soon as I heard this theme. I was immediately pulled out of the film…I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it felt that we had jumped into another movie for ten seconds! So I listened to the score soundtrack this morning and wrote out in a rough format what MG had written in that spot: Comparing it to the “what it sounds like” version of the JW theme above, you can see the following: There are less notes…half as many, in fact (16 in the JW melody, 8 in the MG melody); The music is segmented simply in a group of 4 even-length measures; You can sing the words “Rogue One…it’s a Star Wars Sto-reeeeeeee!” to this theme. The MG melody starts exactly the same way as the JW melody…it might be related (more on that soon!); The JW melody I wrote out is only the first chunk of a much longer melody, much like a musical paragraph. MG’s theme, on the other hand, is only what I’ve written (we hear a longer version hinted at in the score but under dialogue and therefore we shouldn’t be listening to it) (more on this soon too!) Finally, the harmony. I-V-vi-IV. When I wrote out the chord progression for MG’s theme…I froze. I know that progression. I’ve heard that progression. YOU’VE heard that progression…so…many…times. Don’t believe me? I shall let The Axis of Awesome prove it: [UPDATE: Jim Buhler just reminded me of the other aspect of this passage that is so jarring - the music that happens before the theme is a perfect 4th below and in a minor key, so to our ears it sounds REALLY HAPPY to go from either a v-I or a i-IV in a not-so-awesome way.] Please note - no color tones, no chromatic flavorings, no black keys in sight. Just I-V-vi-IV. The more I think about it, I think that the melody (that puts a lot of emphasis on E, a note/chord tone that does not have much importance in the JW theme) over top of the same chord changes that you’d find in a Taylor Swift tune is what wrenched me out of the Star Wars universe and into a much more mundane, banal science fiction musical environment for about 10 seconds. WHY…WHY DID YOU DO IT, MICHAEL? (SPOILER: IT WAS KATHLEEN KENNEDY’S FAULT…AND THE RESHOOTS…AND ALEXANDRE DESPLAT…AND BASIC COMPOSITIONAL CRAFT…) First, I place the fault of not only the opening title theme but most of the issues with the score not at the feet of Michael Giacchino but at the feet of the film’s producer, Kathleen Kennedy, and for one very specific reason: NO TEXT CRAWL! Everyone and their sister has been bitching about the lack of the crawl because without it, the plot has the potential to be super-confusing for those not knowing the backstory of the Star Wars universe. What they’ve forgotten is by eschewing the crawl, the producers have also gotten rid of what was basically the “overture” to the movie! By having a huge chunk of time with nothing to line up to in A New Hope, John Williams got the chance to give us fully-formed mature musical melodies and introduce many of the motives that would come back in the film - priming our ears for what’s to come, so by the time we hear it again, we recognize it. This is why when people left Star Wars the first time, they were humming the melodies…because they had been exposed in the crawl and repeated enough in the film so that they became earworms of the best kind! Now in Rogue One, we only have the title card splashing up on screen for about 10 seconds, so that’s all that MG had to work with. Musically, the material doesn’t make much sense because, to be honest, the placement of the title card doesn’t make much sense and MG had to tailor his score to the film he had in front of him. Second, please remember what I said - MG only had FOUR WEEKS to write what could be described as the most challenging scoring gig ever. The fact that there’s only a four-measure phrase that makes me go “WTF?” is not bad considering everything else more or less stays within the JW musical lexicon. I still have no idea why Desplat jumped ship, but it very well could have been because there were massive reshoots over the summer that pushed back the amount of time the composer would have to write the score and that could have pushed Desplat into the time that he was supposed to be writing another score…or he didn’t want to risk his reputation taking on an extremely high-profile project with a less-than-optimum timeframe. Who knows, but both the reshoots and Desplat’s departure made it so that Giacchino did not have a lot of time to mull over each and every musical decision he had to make…sometimes you have to just pull the trigger and hope everything turns out okay. [TECHNICAL STUFF ALERT!!!] Finally, I look at the two melodies together and I get the sense that MG decided to build his new theme out of JW’s main theme - which makes sense! Take the building blocks, re-arrange them a bit, and create something new that is related to the original…I would have done the same thing. Below is both melodies that have been written in a way so that you can compare the two “side-by-side”-ish. Here’s what may have gone on inside the creative mind of Michael Giacchino: Gotta keep the first two notes - that perfect fifth is iconic and underlies the heroic nature of the main characters! The next three notes - can’t go down by step or else it will sound too much like JW, so we’ll pull out our compositional craft and use a technique called “retrograde” which lets me re-order those three notes backwards… The “high” C (3rd space up) is an important note and was used a lot in the JW theme, but we can’t just jump up there from the fifth note (a 1st-space F) because of some technical music theory that makes a leap in the same direction after two steps in the same direction sound lame, so the best choice is to save the higher C till the end… The now-retrograded D-E-F bit in the middle…our ear really wants the F to go back to E, but we also want this to sound different than JW, so let’s add an extra note (D) before it… Finally, the harmonies he chose are the most simple and clear-cut…they follow the melody super-clearly and it’s almost impossible for us to hear the tune without hearing the harmonic progression he chose. The issue here is that JW’s theme sets a trap for anyone trying to reconfigure it as MG has…if you don’t care whether or not people can recognize it, then it’d be easy to develop it into something else, but MG’s task here was to create a new melody out of the old melody as well as sound both uniquely fresh and organically linked to the vast musical world that JW had already created. To this end, JW’s melody – because of both the intervals he chose and the simple-yet-complex harmony he enveloped it in – is surprisingly difficult to re-work into something that sounds new-yet-related. If MG had time to consider his options, he may have decided that coming up with a new theme out of whole cloth might have been a better solution rather than try to make something out of JW’s original theme…but he had no time, so this is what came out and this is what he used. Final Thoughts Why is any of this important? From a compositional viewpoint, it’s fascinating to see what a composer with the skills of John Williams has done over the course of almost 40 years writing in the same musical universe - there are VERY few examples in film music and concert music that one could find a similar situation. At the same time, now you have other composers (Kevin Kiner with the animated series Clone Wars and Rebels as well as Giacchino) who are trying their hand at writing their own music within the language that Williams set up back in the 70s…all because George Lucas wanted to use pre-existing concert works like Stanley Kubrick had done and Williams suggested a score with ties to 19th century opera and early film scores by Erich Korngold and Max Steiner would be more appropriate. From a filmic viewpoint, it does point out the double-edged sword that comes with a film score that is both successful and is based on the “leitmotif” concept; the sustainability for such a score concept is going to be challenging the more films that get added to the series (we’ve already seen this with Harry Potter, while most of the Marvel super hero films tend not to have themes attached to characters because of the sustainability factor as well as the financial requirements of using a previous composer’s musical ideas). Ultimately, Rogue One is an “awesometacular” film that has so much goodness in it that I wasn’t sure how much nit-picking to do…but hopefully this exploration into a small chunk of the score has been as interesting for you as it has been for me! Some interesting comments on that write-up: And yeah, that Rogue motive was rather weak, and don't you think the build up to that moment, starting at 3:25... it's his Star Trek opening in reverse.Listen from 1:30:https://youtu.be/QxbJJ995VjoThat quasi-unresolved suspension, at the end of the Rogue title motive is George Kirk's death! :/ Totally pulled me out of the film! Thanks, Michael! I just added an update that a former teacher reminded me of…the music that happens on the title card is so shocking because it's preceded by a minor passage a P4 below, so it sounds either like a i-IV or a v-I…either one of which are SUPER SUGARY SWEET And YES, the last chord in the RO theme is straight out of Star Trek! Joe Kraemer Four weeks is no excuse. JW did ESB with 1 orchestrator and no assistants in 6 weeks Joe Kraemer I'd imagine R1 was temped with both JW Star Wars music and other MG scores by music editor and/or picture editor before MG started writing. So he would've had a lot of the decisions made for him already.... Joe Kraemer And I'm telling you, there was no time crunch Four weeks is plenty of time! Thanks - I may be trying to give MG the benefit of the doubt more than I should… Quick Takes on Rogue One: Leitmotivic Use vs. Mention By Frank Lehman When approaching franchises that boast networks of leitmotifs, I find it helpful to bring in the use/mention distinction from the philosophy of language. In everyday speech, the distinction is fairly straightforward, exemplified in the difference between the two statements: Leitmotiv enjoyed a resurgence in American film music following Star Wars. "Leitmotiv" is a German word that traces back to the 1860s (Gray 1996). While the first sentence uses the word "leitmotiv" to say something about film scoring practice, the second sentence mentions the word in a more abstract way; it points to itself. Mention, unlike use, draws attention to a signifier as such, its status as an utterance or element of a discourse. Can music do the same thing? Is there a difference between the following pair of melodies? G-G-G-E♭-B♭-G-E♭-B♭-G " G-G-G-E♭-B♭-G-E♭-B♭-G " Musical themes are, of course, not words, despite having word-like qualities (London 2000). The use/mention distinction is best applied as an informal heuristic rather than part of a rigorous theory of leitmotivic semiosis. Nevertheless, I believe it can get at that sense in which themes are sometimes deployed "in quotation marks," so to speak. This is opposed to Wagnerian musical prose in its ideal form, in which continuously varied and transforming motives constitute—and in a sense motivate—the entire musical fabric. Neither paradigm is intrinsically worthier than the other, though critics of leitmotif have tended to treat the propensity for "mere" mention as an aesthetic shortcoming, musical signposting of the crudest sort. But this overlooks the delights and complexities inherent in quotation. After all, a certain stripe of fan loves mentions, regardless of their tendency to breach cinematic immersion. Indeed, self-reflexivity has become an increasingly important aspect of modern media. Attentive filmgoers relish picking out in-jokes and callbacks, even (especially!) when not justified on storytelling grounds. Rogue One has more than its share of obscure references, and Michael Giacchino has elsewhere proven himself a the lover of compositional Easter Eggs (Godsall 2014), populating his scores with little nods to his own work or that of others. Film music is, of course, an extravagantly citational art-form, the original Star Wars: Episode IV score being a particularly famous example of this. As a skillful pasticheur, Giacchino captures the sound of Williams' musical heptalogy through, among other means, layered intertextual allusions. Note, for instance, the richly scored sonorities when the heroes first arrive at Yavin 4—this is a reference to Williams's earlier Episode IV references to William Walton's yet earlier references to Elgar's nobilmente style. And down it goes. The more internal history a franchise has, the deeper the well of leitmotifs it can draw from, the greater the temptation towards a mention-paradigm. But while there are a few instances of leitmotifs behaving in an entirely citational way in the Williams-scored episodes, most exist somewhere between musically-driven use and more allusive or memory-justified mentions. Giacchino, I believe, continues this balancing act. His new themes are well-developed, and rarely deployed in an excessively literal-minded way. Jynn's motif, in particular, is applied in a semantically loose fashion, acting more as an all-purpose "mythic" theme than a sonic calling-card for Felicity Jones. Giacchino's original themes are also capable of referring to earlier ideas, but do so indirectly, by working in small elements of familiar leitmotifs: a characteristic rhythm or interval here, a suggestive chord progression there. Family resemblances like these allow the leitmotifs for Krennic and Chirrut, for instance, to sound of a piece with Williams's originals—more remix than regurgitation. This is not to say Giacchino does not include some requisite iterations of established tunes—the Rebel, Death Star, and Imperial motifs from Episode IV are all well if sparingly represented. On the other hand, the Imperial March cannot help but sound citational, rather than musically integral. I believe this owes to four factors: 1) the theme's fame and iconicity; 2) its rarity (and thus markedness) in Rogue One; 3) its participation in a pair of narratively shoe-horned-in scenes; and 4) its treatment as a character leitmotif, rather than the more denotatively flexible way it had been treated in the prequels. The Imperial March is musical fan-service, its appearances surrounded by glowing red quotation marks.[1] One of the most effective moments in Giacchino’s score involves a shift from use to mention. The Rebels are preparing an offensive, to the accompaniment of a contrapuntal mélange of the Force Theme and a new march melody. This march is itself thick in allusions, tipping its hat to Giacchino's military style in mood, William's neo-Baroque style in texture, and several earlier Star Wars motifs in melodic detail. Despite its allusive density, the music does not draw attention to these citations, chugging along of its own accord, contributing to mood without screaming "reference!" This changes the second Bail Organa elliptically refers to someone he trusts. The score suddenly opens up with an expansive (though extremely truncated) variant of Princess Leia's theme. The moment is a big neon sign saying "pay attention, this is Leia!." For listeners familiar with the Star Wars motivic lexicon, the intended referent of that musical mention will be clear—and, with Carrie Fisher's recent passing, especially poignant. [1] It's not all so on-the-nose. Giacchino smartly reduces the Imperial March down to its harmonic skeleton for the choral version that appears when Vader cuts down the Rebels. Because of this act of compositional deconstruction, the sequence's score falls more on the side of use than mention. - http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2017/01/quick-takes-on-rogue-one-leitmotivic.html

Befriend Hans Zimmer.

Oh, nvm that was already posted...