Joni Wiljami

Yeah, it's strickly forbidden to be enthusiastic about JW's music in this forum.

Lalo Schifrin playing 4 handed piano improvisations during the rehearsal break:







Bullitt signed:

A full set of all my photos can be found in this Flickr set.
I've been thinking about doing a "caption this" thread with these pics anyway.
What was really cool was seeing Schifrin improvising live. He's rather slow on foot and in conversations (not surprising, given his age), but he seemed very much in his element when seated at the piano. I hope some of the videos the others were shooting end up on YouTube soon.
He'll be playing the solo part for the Mannix theme at Monday's concert.

That's really great to see! A lot can be learned from this one minute of footage...just imagine seeing hours of this from various films throughout his career. A real model of professionalism, craftsmanship, and talent in perfect balance.

have you watched the two new extra's. Some amazing stuff there. For all the love the movie gets for Williams score, you cannot overlook the absolutely stunning performances by all the primary cast. Thomas' Elliott is still IMHO the greatest child performance of all time. The performance by a 6 year old Drew Barrymore is just unbelievable, and it needs to be said that Dee Wallaces' portrayal of their mom is so on spot. She is damaged, hurt, and struggling as a single parent to fill the void of her children and make sense of her own postion. At it's core she makes this foursome a real family, believable and true.

Sorry KK but I don't think it is not enough for a case, if two cues are both in minor and using similar sounding instruments.
For me Hook and Sorcerer's Stone are totally different.

The Drunken Zod Trio FTW!
Alice, Me & Wojo that is.

John Williams is a class of his own and the last surviving master of composition. To even use the word bad in the same sentence is an insult.
To criticize him with being too complex is of course bullshit. Some members here have no clue or don't have the "ears" to enjoy complexity and change of style in his music. They always prefer the John Williams of the 80s. They dismiss his modern action style (maybe even gone now with War Horse's new action style) and are angry about the rythmic instead of thematic/motific approach.
In their blind/deaf anger they fail to recognize recent masterpieces (Prisoner of Azkaban, War Horse, The Phantom Menace, Harry Potter 1) and fail to understand the brilliance of his modern action tracks (Best one is "Chase through Coruscant" from AOTC).
I recommend to ignore these members in regards to John Williams because they probably joined the board for other perfectly understandable reasons (It is one of the best forums on filmmusic on the web). I am glad that they are here but i am disspointed when they dismiss or fail to understand John Williams excellent work of the more recent years...

.

.

Show of hands...who clicked the link just because of the girl unzipping her top?

Incanus, thank you for answering my question. You always provide such tremendous insight. I think you are right about the idea that if the music doesn't speak to you, no matter how genius or terrible it is, you're not going to be able to love it.
About Howard Shore's music for LOTR, as far as iconography goes, he really accomplished that mission. The music for LOTR is as iconographic as anything out there, probably more so if you add in the reality distortion field of rabid fantasy fans. As a result, the music essentially has become much more than the sum of its parts. I don't feel that my thoughts on the music do anything to belittle it. I suppose I just wish that I could love it more. It definitely has its moments. Anything underscoring the elves, I think is pretty great. I do enjoy the otherworldly quality of some of the textures that Shore manages to create.
It's funny, I'm writing this trying to think of a specific reason why it doesn't work for me. I do understand Shore's approach to leitmotif, and I understand and hear the technical aspects that went into the construction of the score. However, such things don't really impress me, as I am a firm believer that music shouldn't take longer to explain than it does to play. I suppose, regarding the leitmotif idea, overall, the score seems (pardon the phrase) leitmotif heavy... Most of the motifs, though short, are well put together and capture the essence of what they are trying to convey, but only temporarily. I always walk away wishing there was more depth to them. Also, when a score is leitmotif heavy, it loses its sense of musical storytelling. When listening to the score on its own, I don't find myself following parts of the story at all because the motifs happen so often, that they convolute where we are in the story. Perhaps it would be better if the transitional elements of the score were more cohesive. I'm not really sure.
It's also possible that I am biased in the sense that I'm really not a huge fan of the "modern" film score. Perhaps this is even more true when it comes to fantasy scores. One of my favorite fantasy scores is Willow, written by James Horner, who, I think was a major driving force in ushering in the modern film score in the 90s, therefore somewhat killing off the classic romantic film score. I don't really care for his modern scores, other than maybe Braveheart and Ransom. However, those I like because they were dealing with something fairly new at the time. Back in the 80s, though, he could really write: Willow, Star Trek II, etc.... With the LOTR score being so modern, it just seems like the sandbox has been shrunk. I'm not sure if it makes any sense, but though the goal of the modern film score seems to be to push the limits of what we hear, it seems like it is required to follow an even stricter set of guidelines than something neo-romantic where the sky is the limit.
Either way, creating iconography with a more modern style is a difficult task, and Shore manages to do it somehow. I guess I just don't find it fulfilling in the end. It reminds me of how I feel about the scores for Harry Potter 4-8. Same idea.

They're making this drink at the concert tonight. Maybe I'll get it.

I can understand how the film might not appeal to all Jwfans but the score is a rarity. John's productivity is now low and we're not assured of any more scores at this point. Each score should be treasured from this point forward.

In my very humble opinion, none of the scenes in War Horse are overscored. Sure, there's some pretty big music accompanying several scenes, but I never had the feeling of "this is too much". I found it absolutely in line with the film's aesthetic itself (good or bad, you be the judge). It's certainly music that harkens back to an older Hollywood scoring style, with lush themes played by a full symphony orchestra. And nowadays many people are just put off by such a stylistic choice and find it phoney or insincere. However Spielberg and Williams are champions of this kind of approach, especially in the movies that acknowledge very clearly a nostalgic, naive attachment to the good ol' days of Hollywood movies--like War Horse.
What really impresses me is that many people are ready to point the finger at Williams for "overscoring" the films for which he writes the music and don't realize that A LOT of other Hollywood composers/directors are doing just the same, if not worse. Recently I saw Scorsese's Hugo and I noticed that Shore accompanies the film in most of the scenes with busy, melodic music. But nobody stood up and slapped the composer for putting "too many notes" in the film. That's not to beat on Shore (the music is really lovely and fitting), but it's strange that film critics and part of the audience seem to have become allergic only when it comes to Williams. And what to say about Zimmer's constant drumming and droning during The Dark Knight Rises? The music is playing for 90% of the film's duration, even accompanying dialogue scenes--and it's also really LOUD! But I didn't read a thing in film reviews lamenting that Zimmer "overscored" the movie.

I'm sure this score will still beat the shit out of the new Hobbit score

It goes both ways. Many Americans adore Japanese anime and other aspects of their culture.
And many rock bands in Germany and Sweden make music as if the era of 80s hair metal never ended.

Ricard: ET was not written by JW!
Miguel: Neither was CEOT3rdK!
Stefan: ?_?

Those guys are the real assholes. What a stupid rant

I've never listened to any of Shore's scores away from the films. That answer your question?

Ha hah.
You are so Americans. Nothing beats the physical book. I mean the real one , the Book.

SawDark Knight Rises yesterday...appeared to be a three hours documentary on terrorism - not exactly my thing. Batman didn't even have the chance to shine, being beaten twice by Bane (who's appeared to be a whining puppet in the last moment). Screenplay big chaos. Music as generic as it comes. Very low entertaining value. All pointless.
Disappointing, 5 out of 10. BB I would still rate 8.5 out of 10.
Yet he hated her father because he was expelled from the League?? No logic.

A marvellous and very important composer, and a phenomenally good reader of film. I truly wish he would have spent more time writing music beyond cinema; his dramatic instincts would have served him well in other fields, I believe. That being said, his film music legacy lives on, and is an inspiration to all of us.
I had the privelege of meeting him once in London, and he seemed a very sweet person, there was an aura of tremendous warmth about him; he seemed genuinely touched when I told him of a piece of mine that I had dedicated to him, and I feel he never quite got the recognition he deserved from the classical music world.
So much of his music works incredibly well outside the context for which it was written, there is a very unique sense of structure to all his scores, a kind of symphonic conception of the score entire. Very often, his scores will contain really only two or three main elements that are then separated and explored singly, before ultimately being joined to form what might serve as a "main theme". Goldsmith was actually a far more contrapuntal musical thinker than what one might suspect upon an initial listen; there is a deceptively streamlined quality to his musical surfaces, which got even more and more "simplified" in the last decades of his career. I say 'deceptively', because I think Goldsmith's "point" was often not the material at hand, but rather the exploration of what kind of mileage you could get out of these devices. There is a lot to be learnt from him!

Well I just saw the film and on the whole I liked it quite a bit. The most obnoxious thing about the film was the music though. It was mixed way too loud (as was the whole soundmix in general) and Zimmer's endless rhythmic crashing threatened to turn me deaf several times.

Newman is damn good with this and Wall E. I like the guy.

"Damn, I shouldn't have bought my welding apparatus used on e-Bay!!"