Ludwig
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Posts posted by Ludwig
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Is there some kind of resource for this besides film scores themselves, like books? I haven't found anything.
There really isn't anything like this. You can find bits and pieces of analyses, but they're scattered among different books and are not at all complete. The Film Score Guides by Scarecrow Press, which take a single score (or scores for a film series) always end with an analysis, but they're not always theoretical in their approach.
To me, what's unique about film music is its highly eclectic nature, that different kinds of "tricks" or idioms are often skillfully blended together from different styles - late Romantic, modernist, jazz, pop, rock, folk, you name it. Williams is great for studying these idioms because he is truly a master of them all.
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The version on "The Spielberg/Williams Connection" as played by Toots Thielmans is really nice.
Agreed.
About Williams' reasons for not allowing a release of the score, no one knows for sure, but I think a lot of composers look back at their early works and feel a kind of embarrassment because they have found more of their artistic voice since their early works. So even if those works aren't bad, I think composers themselves can feel that they are because they are often their own harshest critics. I would guess that Williams falls into this category given the things I've heard him say, like one thing he would change about his career is that he wishes he could have done some scores better (!).
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Whats a chord?
It's any simultaneous sounding of notes. It really can be anything, but most people mean it to refer to triads specifically, meaning notes separated by a scale skip like the F-A-C mentioned above.
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Not all triads are created equal, however. The fact that, say, F-A-C make up an F major triad is far less important than the function the chord has in context. That is, there are many chords that have basically the same function - tonic, dominant, or subdominant. And I truly believe that this is how we hear harmony - as a series of harmonic functions going one to the next and being drawn out by intervening chords. So in the key of F major, for example, F-A-C could have a tonic function (especially sounded at the beginnings or ends of phrases), or dominant function (especially in the second inversion C-F-A, which usually goes to C-E-G). If the music then modulated to the dominant, C major, the same F-A-C chord would then have a subdominant function in that key.
So even though the chord would have the same notes with each occurrence, if it had a different function, it would paradoxically sound different.
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He would have done GoldenEye if they paid him what he wanted. While I would have loved to see what he would have done with that film, at least he went out with a great score. Thanks for the right up, there's some good stuff there.
Yes, and he was in talks to do Tomorrow Never Dies as well, but they offered him a lower-than-top-dollar fee and also wouldn't have allowed him to participate in writing the song. So he was out once and for all.
Glad you liked the article. I really admire the simplicity of Barry's ideas. IMHO, the best pieces of music are always based on simple ideas.
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After THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS, John Barry left the Bond series because he felt limited by the constraints of keeping within the Bond style, but funnily enough, there are as many new and further developed ideas in this score as in any other, and perhaps even more:
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Maybe Vangelis can save the country!
Mmm mmm mm m mmm mm mmm m m
Mmm mm mm m mm m mmm
Mmm mm mm m mmm mm mmm m m
Mm mm mmm mm mm mmmmm
Do you know the song?
Alex
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I would add that musicians usually refer to the "tritone" rather than an augmented fourth or diminished fifth. It's just easier to say and it's not usually necessary to know if one means the fourth or fifth because it's generally clear from the context.
Also, you didn't mean the sharpened fourth of the scale rather than an augmented fourth, did you? The term could be interpreted either way.
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For all the James Bond fans, here are my thoughts on John Barry's Moonraker score:
http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/john-barrys-james-bond-scores-part-4-of-6-moonraker/
I thought it was a great score despite its comparatively limited use in the film. Your thoughts are welcome.
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For me, nothing trumps the slow introduction to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. He makes some of the most powerful music out of nothing but major scales, their continual rise feeling like exuberant joy bursting forth with emotional force. It's not just the scales themselves, it's how he uses them. Listen to how he builds up with a few coy statements from 0:38 before veritably exploding at 0:57. After a number of grand proclamations of the scales, you'd think he'd burnt himself out. Not at all. At 2:06 - another explosion. And that's not all. In the movement proper, there's another use of rising scales (minor this time) that again starts shyly and builds up to a huge climax that leads to the return of the main theme. Only genius can produce such magic.
Here's the movement conducted by Carlos Kleiber, one of the greatest Beethoven interpreters in the world. I post both the first and second parts of the recording because once you start listening, you have to hear it to the end. All timestamps above are for the first part.
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How about Wint and Kidd's theme from Diamonds Are Forever? Since I've been studying the score, it's been so catchy that it's had a way of staying with me (and the underlying ostinato is cool too):
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You would think that with the return of Sean Connery in DIAMONDS, the Bond film style and music would have returned to the previous Connery films. But this was not exactly the case...
Your thoughts are welcome...
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John Barry said of this score that he had "to do Bondian beyond Bondian". Here's my take on what that means to the score:
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I like JW's comment that the only thing he'd wish turned out differently in his career is that he could have written some scores better. Spoken like a true artist - always aspiring to the next level no matter what one has achieved.
- Pieter Boelen, Jarbas and Incanus
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well, since I have to do with symphonic film score (which is not atonal), I use the Roman numerals.
Then you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
ok Prometheus, so if you were writing an academic article and had to analyse the harmony in Williams' music (or other symphonic type film music), what symbols would you use?
Didn't you yourself used Roman Numerals in the Island theme from JP?
The Island theme is based on triads and seventh chords, so Roman numerals work there. The theme from Missouri Breaks is a blues piece, so probably jazz symbols are more appropriate there.
Since Williams composes in several different styles, there's no one-size-fits-all kind of analysis that will really work. That said, since you're looking only at themes, there is a strong tendency to have more classical-based harmonies, so Roman numerals probably work in most of them.
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well, added noted chords occur constantly in Williams themes too where we have a functional harmony (not just action cues).
That's why I asked..
(one example of the major-minor chord that comes in mind first, is the main title theme from Missouri Breaks.)
I guess what I'm saying is that Roman numerals tend not to be used for jazz and pop analysis. It's not so much a question of whether there is functional harmony or not, but a question of style. The constant altered notes in jazz run against the idea of a single key. And both jazz and pop use a lot of modes rather than scales, so Roman numerals don't really apply.
I mean, let's face it - Roman numerals were invented to describe music in a single key and without much chromaticism beyond secondary dominants.
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Still funny. -
In Latin sympbols, can't we use the symbol for the chord, whatever that is (I, IV, etc.) and the 9 for a superscript?
and accordingly in inversions?
To use a Roman numeral would mean that there is a key to which the chord belongs. These chords tend to occur in John Williams' action cues, which are usually polytonal and/or atonal, so Roman numerals wouldn't really apply.
and by the way, does anyone know how to we write latin symbols for added note chords?
Perscichetti's Harmony, doesn't show any symbols..
Maybe we just write the basic chord symbol, and we explain that it's an added note chord in the text?
Jazz symbols and Roman numerals don't really mix. You wouldn't see IVadd2, for example. If you see that kind of chord, it's probably more of a jazz context anyway, so the jazz symbols would probably be better. Where exactly are you thinking of?
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Wouldn't you say that the sonority you cite, C-Eb-Ab-B, is more of a post-tonal chord since it's essentially one of Bartok's "major-minor" chords (0347)?
I would, but is there a more concise way to write that?
I guess you could call it an Ab (add #9) in first inversion.
In jazz terms, I don't know, really. I agree Ab(add#9) is what it is, but then to get first inversion, you'd have to use the slash. I guess Abm/C would sum it up, but it looks rather odd.
As far as I know, there's no symbol for a combination of major and minor, say, C-Eb-E-G. And I can't recall seeing an add #9 symbol, though it does explain it. Let me know if you come across anything about this.
Edit: Just found this... maybe the add#9 is the best thing after all:
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Yeah, and whereas and John Barry and Bernard Herrmann tended to stick with regular mM7ths and mM9ths, Williams liked to flatten the sixth or raise the fourth. Sometimes even both.
You mean that the flat sixth and/or raised fourth are added to the chord, right?
Sometimes, sometimes not. I've seen a C-Eb-Ab-B plenty of times in Williams's oeuvre.
A mM7 has to have or at least imply the 5th as well, otherwise it's something else. Wouldn't you say that the sonority you cite, C-Eb-Ab-B, is more of a post-tonal chord since it's essentially one of Bartok's "major-minor" chords (0347)?
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Yeah, and whereas and John Barry and Bernard Herrmann tended to stick with regular mM7ths and mM9ths, Williams liked to flatten the sixth or raise the fourth. Sometimes even both.
You mean that the flat sixth and/or raised fourth are added to the chord, right?
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Viewing things from the opposite angle, there are also limitations from Williams' end as well. In an interview way back in 1980 for ESB, he said that he limited himself to two scores per year. That's a lot fewer scores than someone like Alexandre Desplat, for example, who has done as many as seven in one year. So it's not just that certain directors have their preferences, but Williams does as well.
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Part of the difficulty of this project is the unavoidable perception (whether it is true or not) that Scorepedia duplicates what is already present on Wikipedia. Perhaps the site's purpose is at present consumed by the soundtrack pages on Wikipedia. Scorepedia's name, look, and editable-by-anyone format may be too similar as is. And we've even talked about importing material from Wikipedia. What we have to ask ourselves is, what does Scorepedia offer that Wikipedia does not? If we can come up with something clearly different, we should focus on that and hopefully interest will again resurface. If not, perhaps we should focus on improving the existing pages on Wikipedia.
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Just to let you all know, I've started a new series of analyses on John Barry's James Bond scores, starting with Goldfinger:
http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/john-barrys-james-bond-scores-part-1-of-6-goldfinger/
As always, your comments are welcome!
Film music theory & 'tricks' resource? (for the composers of the forum)
in General Discussion
Posted
thared is right that it's called planing. It means using one type of chord in the same inversion throughout a passage. Because the voice leading remains in parallel, the technique is also called parallelism. People often cite Debussy as the first to exploit it, but it goes back further than that. Berlioz uses first-inversion major chords in the first movement of his Symphonie Fantastique (from 8:58):
Debussy was a big fan of it in root position, but Holst, like Berlioz, used a lot of it in first-inversion major chords in Mars from his Planets suite, as here (from 1:26):
And Williams uses the technique quite a bit as well - here's a form of it in root-position major chords from the mischievous "Parade of the Ewoks" (from 0:44):