Ludwig

Film Music Notes is happy to announce the next set of lessons for Action-Music Harmony in Classic Blockbuster Films at the launch sale price of $99! Through these lessons, learn the most common harmonies for the two action scales of hexatonic and Hungarian minor. Then see how scales interact with planing harmonies and how octatonic, hexatonic, and Hungarian minor scales combine in sophisticated action music. Find out more on the courses page, where you can navigate to each group of lessons to see their contents, watch a preview, and enroll in the course. Hurry, sale ends Oct. 15!

How about the Ludlow Motif?

Yes, it came up as a result of an interview David Arnold did with Barry before Arnold scored his first Bond film. Barry claimed that he was the composer of the Bond theme. This wasn't the first time he had made such a claim publicly, but The Sunday Times ran a story sensationalizing it. This caused Norman to sue because he his royalties on the theme, according to Burlingame, is often in the hundreds of thousands of pounds each year, and Norman claimed that the Times "rubbished my career". Anyway, long story short, yes @Sweeping Strings is right. After a very detailed trial, a jury decided in favor of Norman, who remains officially credited for composing the theme to this day. Barry always was considered the arranger, though he wasn't officially credited as such, only his band was credited with the performance.

So a number of years ago, I compiled a couple of quotes on this question and posted the results over on Film Score Monthly. Here's what I wrote: Monty Norman, who is credited with penning the theme, was always adamant that he wrote everything in the theme as we know it, and Barry just helped flesh out the orchestration. But there's also Jon Burlingame's thorough book, The Music of James Bond, which states: There's much more to read in Burlingame, but you probably get the picture: Barry essentially took Norman's guitar riff (which was from Norman's "Bad Sign, Good Sign") and created what we know as the Bond theme. He never got the credit because he was new to film scoring and agreed to signing away the credit, not knowing it would become one of film history's most successful franchises ever. Brilliant composer, though. It's great to hear you've taken an interest in his film work. I think he was a master of using harmony as the primary vehicle for emotional expression. I also think this is why his music isn't as texturally complex as others - it allows the harmony to shine through and be the focus of attention. As I say, brilliant.

I hadn't considered it, but since you suggest it, I'll mark it down as the next post!

Just wanted to chime in with my two cents on this score. A number of years ago, a couple of JWFanners and I had a crack at analyzing this score to see how Williams worked atonally. What was interesting to me was that there wasn't any particular "system" he adhered to in the cues. In other words, it wasn't 12-tone music for example, where you take the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, put them in a certain order and use that as your main material. It also wasn't based primarily on any kinds of scales, like octatonic for example. Instead, it seemed to use small chords of 3 or 4 notes as the basis of most cues, and have those chords be of the same or a very similar kind as one another. I mention this because, although the score is in its harmonies vastly different from what Williams usually writes for film, the method really isn't different at all. Since I've been studying his action music, the name of the game there is variation. I've also studied and seen the same thing in his theme writing: variation is big there too. It's just interesting how you can take very different sounding musical styles and find that they were assembled using basically the same method of grouping together sounds that are mostly the same but slightly different. That's probably why Williams has never been 12-tone in his writing - it doesn't provide enough freedom to use different materials but insists on different forms of the same ones throughout.

Well, he did do this scene, though: Talk about cliché, I mean how many times have we seen a helicopter taking people to an island to see dinosaurs for the first time, all the while scored by the most glorious, awe-inspiring fanfare you can imagine, one that roots itself firmly into the history of film music as the centerpiece of one of the most memorable scenes ever to come out of Hollywood? Actually, on second thought...

I posted this in the thread @mrbellamy linked to above, but when I was writing a chapter for a collection of Williams essays a few years ago, I had a need to define his output into style periods. Although making such distinctions with hard dates and films is admittedly artificial and ultimately arbitrary, I think it still helps us to understand broad stylistic changes, which I think we all agree are there. Anyway, my breakdown looks like this: To justify this, I looked to major biographical events, changes in filmmaking techniques, and - the thing that was my focus in writing the chapter - the type of structure he used in writing the main theme of each film (which well supports these divisions). I go into plenty of detail in the actual chapter, which you can access here in case you're interested: https://www.academia.edu/37265666/The_Use_of_Variation_in_John_Williamss_Film_Music_Themes

@BrotherSound Thank you for this. So what does it mean that Part 1 of some titles are missing here?

@InTheCity Thank you so much for pointing all this out. This really is invaluable information and I'm looking into it right away! Thank you again.

The avoidance of this issue is all clarified in the course description. The Lesson 1 preview on the website demonstrates how this is all put together.

Scores and audio are absent. I direct students to the name and timestamps of the appropriate track on the soundtrack, then my analysis of a cue goes into the techniques and how they're used. So you get portions of cues transformed through analysis in order to demonstrate the technique. You'll see what I mean if you watch the preview on the course page of my site. Not silly at all! The way it works is that the course videos are all stored online and I link to them so they're streamed directly on my site. Streaming only right now, no downloads. And yes, once you enroll, you're enrolled for life! So watch as many times as you like! The flow of lessons generally goes: Theory --> Analysis --> Composition Tutorial --> Composition Exercises I'm happy to answer any other questions about the course here. Also, here's a link to an audio sample from a composer who's already taken the course and wrote music from what he learned in it: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/john-williams-course-lessons-1-3.108008/post-4807211 I thought it was great!

I am excited to announce Film Music Notes' very first online course, Action-Music Harmony in Classic Blockbuster Films. To see what's in the course, watch the video below and find out more on the course page, where you can view lesson contents, watch a lesson preview, and enroll in the course! Please Note: To avoid copyright infringement, this course contains no score excerpts or audio from film scores. Students are directed to find and listen to soundtrack excerpts while the course content consists of: 1. Music theory connecting the techniques to be discussed 2. Analysis describing the techniques behind Williams excerpts 3. Composition tutorials applying the techniques to original compositions, and 4. Composition exercises comprising abstract scales, chords, and original music

Yes, "Emperor" in the sketch was changed to "Nursery" in a later version. So that one is the same cue, it just got slightly renamed.

An early sketch of the Approaching the Nursery cue was originally titled Approaching the Emperor. So yes, the #2 seems to refer to the Approaching the Throne cue rather than a revision of the same cue.