Datameister

This one had a Williams temp track, and it seems Johnson wanted him to follow it pretty closely in some spots.

For me, Finale still gets the job done quicker and with more flexibility and advanced features than, say, Sibelius. (Haven't really tried Dorico yet, as intriguing as it looks.) Honestly, Finale feels like a PC mindset where Sibelius feels like a Mac. Either one can handle most things you could throw at it, but Finale feels a lot more natural to me (just like PCs do). Another person might be exactly the opposite way. But I wouldn't describe either as antiquated.

I get the impression Williams was just cutting out the middleman. That's not at all to diminish the swift and beautiful work of his orchestrators over the years; it's just that he had built up enough trust with Mark Graham and his team at JKMS to let them take on that piece, too. (Mark said in an interview for Finale's website that he'd been at all JW's sessions since 1998.) Before the switch, Williams had already been tending toward an even greater level of detail in his sketches than in previous decades, further reducing the amount of actual orchestration necessary.

Also, what about measures that simply direct the orchestrator or copyist to duplicate material from another measure/cue/score? Consider, too, that not everything he's written has been recorded. We're talking unrecorded early versions of cues, yes, but also music he wrote simply for the sake of writing. He's mentioned in interviews his practice of writing music even between projects. With all that in mind, my estimation is...a lot.

Man, I didn't realize there was that level of ghostwriting in some of Horner's projects. I'm guessing he still did a fair amount of his own writing over the years; the scores he's credited for certainly have a distinct sound. Regardless...yeah, it's always an interesting feeling when you find out that something was ghostwritten.

Thanks for posting your awesome work, @crumbs. Let's hope that anonymous user who did the mockups and music editing eventually finishes their TFA edit, with 5 kajillion versions of that film's first ten minutes!

That's maddening...I'd love to hear this!

My girlfriend is a lot more into the Muppets than I am, but I've been gaining some enjoyment through osmosis and I love the Haunted Mansion. We did watch and enjoy the special. Honestly, the lack of real sets was the biggest buzzkill for me; kinda felt like watching a Muppets Zoom call with great virtual backgrounds at times. But it was still a good time.

Damn, it's good to hear this isn't dead! This will be such an instant buy for me. I wonder if it'll include both of his Soarin' scores - there are a few scattered differences.

The trouble is, I love both versions just about equally!

I normally like to place the composer's latest revisions in the main program and leave earlier alternates for the end...but with the start of ESB, the multiple inserts make that decision more difficult for me. If you go with Williams' latest revisions, you end up cutting out some great material and chopping up a longer cue into separate parts. But if you go with the original, you miss out on the more mysterious opening to the film. In any case, I certainly agree with Jay (and many others here) that I want to hear what the composer wrote and recorded, not what the film editor included in the final cut. For something like ESB, the film benefits from the way the score was pared down and replaced in parts, but when I listen to it outside of the film, I want to hear the score that was recorded.

There's the soft passage for strings, piano, and percussion in ESB when the Rebel troops are looking out across the surface of Hoth, waiting for the Empire to show up.

The ghostly synth polychords for the invisibility cloak scenes in his Potter scores are pretty mysterious.

Interesting...news to me!

Pocahontas for both. Hunchback has some absolutely stunning material in it, but other parts inexplicably grate on my nerves. I don't have that issue with the songs or score for Pocahontas.