Ludwig

This to me is what binds Williams' music together regardless of style or genre. It always makes his music feel like a unified whole, even though we often end up on quite a different emotional level from where we began without realizing exactly how we got there.

I just have to say excellent work and a big thank you for taking on this monumental job, karelm. Absolutely right about the parallel chords. Funny thing, they're almost always minor chords - why is that? Perhaps they're better for creating a feeling of suspense or action?

Is that good or bad?

Here's part 4 of my analyses of the Oscar nominees, this time on HER, a score that not only provides effective moods, but also plays a central role in developing the film's main ideas: http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/oscar-nominees-2014-best-original-score-part-4-of-6-arcade-fire-and-owen-palletts-her/ Can't say I loved the score, but it was well suited to the film...

Yes, that Ab chord creates such a special moment that it boosts the cue from the "excellent" to the "genius" category. I suppose I would say that the chord acts as an enhanced subdominant (pre-dominant), essentially IV of IV, a substitute for an Eb chord, which still would have worked with the melody. In fact, if you play an Eb chord on the piano instead, you get a similar kind of sound, but the Ab chord doubles the effect of spirituality already associated with the Eb chords and adds a sense of the otherworldly, Ab being outside the theme's Bb major key. Although very different in character, the Star Wars theme's cadence is very similar harmonically (actually the same Ab major-F major is heard), and the function is pretty much the same. It's very much like the Ab-F in the opening fanfare, which you summed up pretty well in another thread: from: http://www.jwfan.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=22959#entry889348

I think the Hungarian minor interpretation is great. I'd like to say that's definitely it, but I need to study more of these kinds of passages. It just fits the given notes so nicely. I'll keep it in mind.

It's very close, but there's no G below middle C, but there is an Ab above middle C, so I get something a bit different: I would put the E below middle C together with both the lower Es because I think it makes sense to hear it that way, especially given that it's the cellos doubling the basses. As for the notes that aren't E or from the Fm chord, it's hard to say. I'm inclined to hear them as bristles because they create a cloud of dissonance that sounds more like clusters to me than added notes. Also, the vibraphone has the top four bristles and the score indication is "play as a chord", suggesting they are something on their own and not related to the rest. I know the B and G could well be add#11 and add9, but I'm just not getting that sound from the chord. Also notice that the upper winds are almost all on notes that aren't E or from Fm, which further strengthens hearing those notes as bristles. Even the C (which is part of Fm) and Fb (enharmonically the pedal E) might be interpreted as bristles too since they are in the same instrument family as the other bristles and hence could get "sucked in" to that sound world. Again, it's hard to say. Probably could be heard in more than one way...

The question is whether we hear the upper voices as added notes or as clusters. If we go with added notes, we're saying that we can hear the dissonances as chord notes in the Em chord below. Myself, I find it difficult to hear the bristling notes as chord notes because they form semitone dissonances with an adjacent note. I dunno, I guess I feel that added notes should have a distinctive "9th-ness", "11th-ness", or "13th-ness" to them and I'm not getting that here. That said, one could understand them as added notes in composing in order to come up with the final result. I'm just talking about a way of hearing it. Re the E.T. excerpt you quote, there I hear a polytonal setting of the E pedal against the Fm chord above, then with lots of bristling notes. The Fm triad is clear in the low register, where it's unobstructed and prominent in the trombones. But up above, it seems more like a cloud of dissonance against this Fm chord, so I call it bristling. But others may hear it differently.

Yes, I would say that's significant too. And in typical Williams style, it's not exactly the same as before. Now the cluster is sounded with closed rather than open spacing, and the fourth is completely filled in with semitones. The same, but different.

I think you're right to put the chord in a polytonal context. After hearing clear polytonal chords in the first eight bars, we're now primed to hear the last few chords as such. But there's an important difference. The last chords now include biting semitone dissonances that can't be explained strictly with polytonality. There still is the sense of an Em chord below and an Ebm chord above. It's just that there are semitones that are causing clusters. I suggested the term "bristling" for this effect, where semitone dissonances are added to triads, and I think it describes it pretty well - like thorns on an otherwise smooth vine. In this case, the semitones clash with the Ebm chord above or, later, the D augmented chord (Daug). The nice thing about this interpretation is that it allows us to understand a connection with the previous polytonal chords in the cue - and notice that the triads here are a semitone apart, just as in the previous chords. But here, we also have the dissonance with the Em chord below. So there are TWO dissonant factors at work: polytonality AND bristling. It's a nice way of ratcheting up the tension with clusters but still retaining triads to keep the cue sounding coherent and smoothly lead our emotional response from one nuance to another. In my analysis below, the chords are shown in the top two staves, and their analysis in the bottom two, where I use filled-in noteheads to show the bristling notes and whole notes to show the triads. I describe the C# in the bass as a kind of neighbour note that swings between the two statements of E. What do you say? Is this how you hear it?

We should probably hone the question to focus on one particular aspect of JW's music. Unique, innovative, and personal can be quite different things, so perhaps it feels a bit nebulous to some. In your initial post, you seem to be after those cues and works that are most original to JW. Of course, I wouldn't want to duplicate the "Unique Williams-isms" thread, so here why don't we focus on entire cues and/or scores rather than individual techniques that bear the most original JW stamp, and in what ways?

I'd go by the orchestration, which gives this:

One of my favorite Williams mannerisms is what I've referred to as his "tonalization" of atonal materials. In other words, his use of dissonant chords such that we still hear a tonal center, either through a bass pedal point that sounds like a tonic (ROTLA, "In the Jungle"), or through the use of a major or minor chord with dissonant notes surrounding it (ROTJ, "Luke Confronts the Emperor"). I've always been in awe of this technique because it allows a blend of the enormous tension and uneasiness that atonal materials can generate with the incredibly broad emotional palette that tonal materials can access. While Williams did not invent the technique, the way he uses it is all his own, and goes a long way in describing why his music can affect us so deeply and so powerfully.

At least it has a clear ending that way...

Two sites that are good for solidifying basics like identifying intervals, and chords, and developing ear recognition of these, are teoria.com and musictheory.net. But it sounds more like what you're after is something describing how harmony works. For tonal harmony, I'd go with Steve Laitz, The Complete Musician, 3rd ed, or Miguel Roig-Francoli, Harmony in Context, 2nd ed. And if you're after atonal music at all, Joseph Straus' Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, 3rd ed, is the one I'd recommend. None of these are cheap because they're used as university textbooks, but they're the best books out there IMO.

inimitable (ɪˈnɪmɪtəbəl) 1. incapable of being duplicated or imitated

Transposing instruments are just silly.

Are they obvious mistakes?

A quick aside: What was the reason was that the Prequels never had complete releases? One would think the OT releases would serve as a pretty good model. (Sorry if this was answered in an ancient thread somewhere, there were just too many posts to scroll through on the PT scores!)

A good point that I hadn't noticed before. I listened to the whole cue once again and found that the chords sound somewhere in between a polytonal and jazz chord interpretation. What makes their analysis so frustratingly elusive is that they don't sit comfortably with either solution. As you point out GreyPilgrim, there isn't enough of a tonal sense of each half to hear it as fully polytonal - another good point I'd agree with for most of the chords. On the other hand, a jazz view seems strained, as four of the chords lack the all important third or the seventh - the two most fundamental notes of any jazz chord. This reminds me of the controversy that surrounded the sextet, Verklärte Nacht, in which Schoenberg wrote a chord that looked like an Ab9 with the ninth in the bass (!). The Vienna Music Society refused to perform the work for that reason (!!) because they claimed that the sonority was a "non-existent" chord (!!!). Well, of course the chord exists, they just didn't recognize it as a classifiable sonority because ninth chords never have the ninth in the bass. My point is that once a sonority ventures far enough away from what is normal for a certain type of chord, we should probably consider using different terms to describe it. In Schoenberg's case, the ninth chord is only apparent and is formed by passing motion in almost all the voices. So it's a passing sonority - a contrapuntal chord, if you will. In the case of Goldsmith, we might search for a way to describe these strange chords in a way that best describes our perception of them, which for me lies neither fully in a polytonal nor a jazz context. An unusual analysis for an unusual passage would make the most sense to me. Now just don't ask me what that is...

Here's part 3 of my Oscar series on Alexandre Desplat's Philomena, a score that makes the most of its two most prominent themes in an appealingly melodic yet understated way. http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/oscar-nominees-2014-best-original-score-part-3-of-6-alexandre-desplats-philomena/ Your thoughts welcome as usual.

Lucky are the ones who live in L.A.!

Yes. I'm not a hornist, but I know from talking to them that even the most experienced players get nervous with certain passages because there's always a danger of flubbing obvious notes due to the way the instrument's made. It always makes me think of Peter Schickele's running commentary of Beethoven's 5th (@ 2:21):

I would say the aptness of the term depends on the context. Open cluster is a great shorthand to describe the phenomenon as sound, but if it's linked with other statements of the same or similar collections of notes (as we've seen in Williams), I would let the set theory label take the lead. For example, you could always describe the texture as an open cluster regardless of how it fits into the context, but sets show us more about the similarities between different chords. So while a passage may be rife with open clusters, but they may be different sets. Or the same set may be consistently spaced as an open cluster. I always prefer terminology that allows us to describe the music more precisely.

Here is part 2 of my series of analyses on this year's Oscar-nominated scores. Interesting that the Mary Poppins songs were not really a part of Newman's score - definitely not what I expected: http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/oscar-nominees-2014-best-original-score-part-2-of-6-thomas-newmans-saving-mr-banks/