Ludwig
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Posts posted by Ludwig
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Well, it seems odd to me to mix together Roman numerals, which are used for analyzing classical music, with the Arabic numbers of jazz and pop. What I mean is that iv6 looks like a classical chord symbol meaning iv in first inversion because the 6 is an interval above the bass. Em6 of course is the jazz/pop symbol meaning an E minor chord with added 6th above the root, not necessarily the bass.
I think that there's a limitation in talking about the function of a chord in jazz/pop music because the chord symbols used there don't include that information. Only the Roman numeral does that, but then that's classical. It's just too bad that there is no way to discuss harmonic function using only the terminology of the jazz/pop world. It seems that we need that classical "iv" symbol to talk about these things in a general way.
Thanks for some more good examples - it really is a common device.
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Great point, Prometheus. I think we can take the idea of iv giving that sense of romantic longing and extend it to the half-diminished ii7 chord, also borrowed from minor. That chord is actually the second chord we hear in Marion's theme and is also the second chord of Princess Leia's theme, another wonderfully "longing" piece of music. In both cases, the melody goes to scale degree 2 against the notes of a iv chord to give the ii7. And the sense of "longing" is brought on by the flat-6 degree common to both.
Interestingly, Williams does not leave this flat-6 as a gimmicky cliché that disappears after a bar or so, but works it into the entire theme in both pieces as it returns again and again, even to the final cadence, which both use the borrowed ii7 to remind us once more of that wistful flat-6 degree.
I have a soft spot for Princess Leia's theme in particular, which works incredibly well as a standalone concert piece - not that that's any criterion for good film music!
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Maybe they were thinking of the Bond accompaniment figure that we hear at the beginning of the Bond theme and that appears around 0:52 of the Goldfinger theme, the one that slowly slides up and down chromatically on the scale notes 5-b6-6-b6-5. The same thing happens in the accompaniment of Marion's theme if you listen to the harmony in its opening bars. But it's not in the melody and it's not very prominent, so I wouldn't say the two have melodic similarities or that Williams stole anything from Goldfinger.
I'm always suspicious of these kinds of claims because if it really was there, more than one person would have said something about it.
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Well said, KK. While I think Skyfall is an effective score with the film, listening to it on its own becomes a bit tedious because so much of it is given to rhythm loops that our beloved JW avoids like the plague. So, effective yes, but I would agree, not Oscar worthy.
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Excellent. By the way, the Death Star explodes at bar 201.
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Yes, horns an octave below the trombones. And yes, contrabassoon would be the second bassoon staff. Funny, it's marked in my score, and it's even written again over the first bar of that part just to make sure.
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Sibelius will do the transposing for you as long as you choose the correct instrument to start with and have "Transposing Score" switched on. You're right that the transpositions are not marked in this score, but looking at, I can tell you that the transposing instruments are:
Clarinets - all in Bb, down a major 2nd
Bass Clarinet - in Bb, down a major 9th
Contrabassoon - down an octave
Horns - all in F, down a 5th
Trumpets - all in Bb, down a major 2nd
Bass - down an octave
I understand now why you're copying it out.
That would be really cool to hear the parts individually.
So what I mean is that with the switch turned on in Sibelius and with the right instruments chosen, you just enter the notes as they are in the score, and Sibelius will play them as they sound, not as they are written.
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He doesn't use key signatures for this piece, so he writes accidentals instead. Horns 3 and 4, for example, double what trombone 3 and the tuba are doing at the start - exactly the same pitches.
So you copy bits of the music, then analyze them? Why do you copy the music to analyze it? Does it have to do with hearing certain sections of the piece without the mass of the whole orchestra? I suppose I've never analyzed that way, which is why I ask. Just curious.
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I'm curious as to why you want to enter it into Sibelius when you have a recording already. To hear each instrument individually maybe?
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Wait a minute. You said the score has horns 3 and 4 on F and A-flat. That's the same score I have, and it's not in concert pitch. All transposing instruments have the written pitch, not the sounding one. If you're using Sibelius, just make sure you have "transposing score" on so that when you enter the horns, for example, they transpose down a 5th for the sound.
Datameister, I think you're right that JW writes his sketches in concert pitch, but since this is a finished score, everything's transposing.
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Just the first four bars of the Imperial March repeating. Awesome for building up the confidence.
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Oh good. Let me know what you see/hear in the piece as you study it. I'd be curious to know.
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Great analysis on Lincoln Ludwig!
Thanks a bunch! I thought the score is full of subtlety. The more I looked, the more I found - the mark of a great artwork.
- Lincoln Ludwig
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Actually he updated gears only recently, according to 2011's Wall Street Journal profile.
His process starts with a "spotting" session with Mr. Spielberg, deciding which scenes should feature music or not. Then, unlike contemporary composers who use a computerized timer that clicks off the beats in a scene, Mr. Williams monitors an analog Minerva stopwatch to write to length. At his desk, he works off his memory of the on-screen action, whether it's a character striding across a room or, as in "War Horse," a horse stampeding through thickets of barbed wire. If he needs to analyze the sequence again, he strolls out of his office and across the hall to a room where music editor Ramiro Belgardt cues up the scene. As recently as the last "Indiana Jones" picture in 2008, this process involved Mr. Belgardt punching rewind and fast forward on a bulky videotape player. (He now calls up time-coded footage on a computer linked to a flat screen television.)Wow, that is not what I would have guessed - thanks for sharing. It makes me wonder what he does about mock-ups for previews of the films he scores. Does he have someone do this for him? Apparently it's an essential part of the film scoring process now.
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Yes, that's the one. It includes the long lead up to the Death Star exploding and the music just after it. Cool stuff.
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Hi all - I've just posted an analysis of the Lincoln score as it relates to scenes in the film. In case you're interested:
http://www.filmmusicnotes.com/oscar-nominees-2013-john-williams-score-for-lincoln/
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Not that there's anything wrong in it, its just JW is a bit behind the times so to speak.
If only there were more like him!
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Does JW still using a movieola?
I don't know for sure, but I really don't think so. He must either synch it up himself with a computer or have an assistant do it for him. Then again, he does still use paper and pencil for composing...
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To answer the question about the sketch, there are definitely trombones, bar 41, staff 3. He's got "Tbs" (= trombones). But there is also what looks like "Wind" at the same spot, so probably doubling in the bassoons. He uses "Wind" in other places, and at other times specifies precisely what instruments in the wind family, probably only when there could be confusion as to which ones. The low range of these notes are only playable in the bassoons, so I would think this is what he means.
As for the score, I have a hard copy of the Star Wars Symphonic Suite. This is not the same as the newer "Signature Series" that has music from both of the first two movies. The older suite has a cue called "The Battle" from the end of the first film, which on the newer CDs is renamed "The Death Star/The Stormtroopers". This is a fast action cue that is certainly worth studying. See if you can get your hands on it at a library somewhere, one that specializes in music. That would probably be your best bet since it's no longer in print. The newer suite still is in print, but that doesn't have the kind of fast action music you're looking for.
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Great . I'm glad it seems like a good idea. I did a mock up of a Michael Giacchino cue, but didn't have the score so had to do it by ear. Took a week but I learned a lot.
T
Oh lord this is hard...any idea what the clef is in stave 3 ? Bar 41. Is it bass ? The sound like trombones
T
I can answer this in a bit - again, not with my scores, though I will be shortly.
I'm sure it's not easy, but I am curious why you want to start with this cue in particular. Why not study something for which there is a full score first, like The Battle from the original Star Wars? You would probably find similar techniques, orchestrations, etc. that you could then apply to The Asteroid Field. It seems like you're reaching right for the very summit of action cues (which I admire, of course), but there is probably an easier way. Just trying to help.
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Yes, "imperiously" (which is funny - how else should the Imperial March be played?). I suppose the ordering how you say it is, though it's odd to me that the percussion appears at the top and the timpani on the bottom. In a full score, these are always between the brass and strings. I haven't done a comprehensive study of these sketches, but they seem to be pretty consistent in the ordering, it's just that the number of instruments from each family can change. So maybe a wind staff becomes a trumpet staff. But it does seem like he labels things pretty carefully.
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You've probably seen this documentary on the score for ESB before at some point, but a thread on JW's sketches reminded me of this bit from it. It's so rare to see this kind of footage of not just Williams, but any composer working with an orchestrator. I especially like how Williams explains exactly what his daily procedure is for writing for a big orchestra.
The bit with Spencer starts at the beginning and is short, but still pretty informative. (Right after this, we see Williams working with a movieola, a now obsolete item used to synch the music - cool.)
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Any particular place you're looking at in "The Asteroid Field"? The scoring seems to be marked at all times, but changing frequently, as Datameister points out.
For the start of that cue, where the quote of the Imperial March occurs (where there's a big "28" at the top of the sketch - p. 65 of the ESB sketches PDF), the instrumentation for the staves are marked ("1" starting from the top down):
1 - "Piano, glock, chimes"
2 - "Piat.", short for "piatti", the Italian for cymbals - funny, I don't hear any cymbals in the final cue; maybe they took it out?
3 - blank
4,5 - "Brass"
6,7 - unmarked, but clearly strings
8 - "Tymp" - timpani
On a related note, these sketches were of course elaborated into the final score by his long-time orchestrator, the late Herbert Spencer. There has been a lot of criticism in literature on film music that film composers don't do their own orchestrations because they say the orchestrators do it for them. The few who know the truth about Williams and other top composers have pointed to these sketches and noted that just about everything's there already and Spencer was more of a copyist than an orchestrator. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but just thought I'd mention it FWIW.
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Apologies again for the late reply to this - I always seem to be on the losing end of a battle against time.
Anyway, to answer your first question, the bass note in the Star Wars main theme where I mentioned the bitonal chords is Db with the first chord, A with the second, and E with the third, all of which support the bottom chord more than the top (except the third chord, where it is part of both the Ab augmented chord and C major chord, nicely blending the two into that "outer-space chord" we've talked about).
Unfortunately, I don't have the score for "The Asteroid Field", which is too bad because Williams said in an interview somewhere that he thought it was one of his best cues. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of chromatic third relations and tritone relations between chords, something you mentioned in your first post in this thread. I would like to go through this by ear and see what it going on exactly. I don't know that I would find octatonic scales per se. Williams doesn't seem to stick with one scale in a systematic way in action cues like this. He seems more interested in the construction of chords by taking triads and adding really dissonant notes to them, either singly or in groups.
For an example, have a listen to the opening of "The Battle" (in full recordings, called "The Death Star/Stormtroopers") cue from Star Wars. I do have the score to that. It starts off with just a minor 3rd between Bb and Db. From here, the upper parts move up in 3rds, but they keep going two steps forward and one step back, as though they are hesitant to move forward (much like the Rebel Alliance at this point in the film). That is, they go:
Bb-Db, C-E, then
Bb-Db, C-E, Eb-G, then
C-E, G-B
The bass goes down in contrary motion to these 3rds and form dissonant chords with all but the first 3rd, so:
Bb with Bb-Db (consonant)
Ab with C-E (dissonant, augmented triad)
E with Eb-G (dissonant)
Eb with G-B (dissonant)
After this, the upper parts sound out pretty dissonant chords that emphasize a tritone and a major 7th (ouch!):
Eb-Ab-D, then Db-Gb-C, both against an Eb in the bass.
The 3rds in the upper parts come back, but again with a dissonant bass. I could go on, but the point here is that this is a great example of how to create tension in a score without being obvious about it. What I mean is that, if you listen to this passage, it doesn't sound like a whole lot is happening onscreen (and of course there isn't), but it manages to keep the tension ratcheted up by using the dissonances of augmented triads, tritones, and semitones.
One of the wonderful things about this opening is that Williams manages to create this tension without exactly getting atonal. There are still plenty of 3rds and even whole triads to keep in in a similar style with the rest of the score (notice the dissonant version of the Rebel Fanfare in the first minute). The score is in that hard-to-classify style of "tonal" 20th-century composers that so many of the regular posters in this forum have mentioned, especially Russian composers: Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and the like.
I think this whole score will continue to reward those who study it time and again. It's an almost endless resource.
By the way, you can purchase some of JW's scores on sheetmusicplus.com. That's where I got most of mine. I have to say they are expensive for the amount of music you get, but such is the price of popularity!
Harmonic Progressions in Williams
in JOHN WILLIAMS
Posted
I would consider the chord in question to be a variant of the augmented sixth, written enharmonically with sharps instead of flats. In other words, it's almost a French sixth, which would be Eb-G-A-C#, but the third is lowered to create Eb-Gb-A-C#, then written enharmonically as D#-F#-A-C#. Of course, augmented sixth chords resolve to V, and in this case I would not ignore the chord on the final eighth note of the third bar. The bass is the dominant of G minor, and all we have above is Bb, which sounds to my ears like the outline of a V13 chord rather than an anticipation of the tonic. I think it's really important that the D appears in the bass since it suggests a V-I cadence, no matter how quickly it occurs.
If you want some theory literature to back this up, there's a good article in the Canadian journal Intersections. The author discusses the same type of chord in relation to Wagner's Tristan chord, which is a half-diminished seventh chord that resolves to a dominant, just like we have here. Here's a link to the article online (see especially pp. 18-21 for the relevant discussion):
http://www.erudit.org/revue/is/2008/v28/n2/029953ar.pdf
By the way, where is this excerpt from? It's pretty cool!