Ludwig

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

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 "B

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

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 wri

@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

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

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.

I'd say that in ANH, the figure in the accompaniment that comes in before the theme is based on the Force theme itself, a kind of outline of it that even uses the same notes: A-Bb-D (see the boxes I've drawn in the music below). Williams also transposes the figure so it has a version that ends on G (the tonic) as well, so it doesn't get too repetitive. It isn't unheard of for Williams to do this in his golden-era Star Wars scores, either. What @Falstaft calls Heroic Descending Tetrachords, which generally ushers in Luke's Theme, is a faster version of the same figure from the B sec

Why so doubtful? They are Matessino's liner notes after all...