jamesluckard

It's an opera/water ballet. The audience are watching giant floating water balls, which gradually contort themselves. It's like a really futuristic lava lamp. There is no actual living performer. There is a brief establishing shot of the thing, which you see in the trailer. Palpatine is watching and Anakin joins him. Palpatine then tells Anakin a story, and that is the focus of the scene. The music of the water ballet plays underneath, and is, as I remember, the first half of Palpatine's Teachings, a low bass piece. Here's a capture of the establishing shot, which is in the music video on the DVD.

There's a very brief scene, under a minute, where Palpatine announces to the cheering senators that he has been proclaimed Emperor because of the threats the republic is facing, and Padme has one of the best lines in the film as an aside, "So this is how democracy dies, to thunderous applause." I have no recollection of what music was playing then, if any, so it's likely that it was not anything really memorable.

As somebody else pointed out somewhere, "I Am The Senate" is most likely just an alternate title for "Enter Lord Vader." They are the same scene. It ends with Vader being "knighted" by Palpatine, but it opens with Mace Windu and three or four other Jedi entering Palpatine's office to arrest him "in the name of the Galactic Senate." Palpatine's response to this is, "I Am The Senate."

Well, having seen the film last week, I can definitely say that "Anakin's Betrayal" does not play when Anakin makes the decision to turn. He does this in Palpatine's office, during a facedown with Mace Windu. I'm pretty sure that "Enter Lord Vader" is the music for this scene, because at the conclusion Palpatine dubs Anakin "Darth Vader" and says "Rise Lord Vader." As for where "Anakin's Betrayal," does go, it plays over the next sequence, which intercuts Anakin slaughtering the Jedi in their temple with the clone troopers annihilating the other Jedi, who have been dispatched to the four corners of the galaxy to fight Palpatine's phony war. Vader's actual creation is intercut with the birth of the twins, and is played as a very sad scene, not martial, so the music is not what you might expect.

Okay, the concensus seems to be that album track 12 must be split at the 1:50 mark. This sounds right to me, from what I remember of the film, so I'm amending my chronological listing above.

Boy am I glad I didn't post the spoiler I was going to. It's as I feared. When somebody quotes your text, the purple background means that the text which was once hidden by being white on white is no longer hidden. See four posts above this one.

"Enter Lord Vader" was the track I was least sure about. Where you say makes sense. That would put it between Padme's Ruminations and Anakin's Betrayal. As I said, the film was so exciting, it was tough to always notice the music in isloation and then simultaneously try to remember which album track it might be. I'll update my first post accordingly. Please keep the corrections coming.

Thanks. I'm actually deleting what I wrote. Even hidden like this, I just don't like the idea of spoilers. But I do hope people give me corrections for the chronological listing.

Mistake, sorry. Couldn't figure out how to write those hidden spoilers that you have to highlight to read.

I'm pretty sure it's all there, you certainly hear it open, and the big climax of the piece ends the duel. It's possible that the piece was edited in some way, it was hard to focus on the music when the film was so exciting.

Updated: 5/18, 5/19, 5/20 1) Star Wars and The Revenge of the Sith 2) Grievous and the Droids 3) Grievous Speaks to Lord Sidious (0:00-1:50) 4) Anakin’s Dream 5) Track 6 (2:27-end) Council Meeting 7) Track 6 (0:00-1:38) Palpatine's Big Pitch 8) Track 5 (0:00-1:25) Riding The Lizard 9) Track 6 (1:38-2:27) Palpatine's Seduction 10) General Grievous (1:25-end) 11) Padme’s Ruminations 12) Anakin’s Betrayal 13) Enter Lord Vader 14) Anakin’s Dark Deeds 15) Track 13 (1:50-end) A Moody Trip 16) Anakin vs. Obi-Wan 17) Duel of the Fates (Ep I album version) 18) Battle of the Heroes 19) The Immolation Scene 20) The Birth of the Twins and Padme’s Destiny 21) A New Hope and End Credits For a Williams CD this actually doesn't seem too difficult to rearrange. According to jimware, the album version of Duel of the Fates off the Ep I CD is the recording used in the film. It scores the duel between Yoda and Palpatine, and was too important to the flow of the film not to include. However, it is important to note that the chorus was re-recorded at the ROTS sessions in Feb, and only the orchestral track from this has been used, so it doesn't match exactly. Many thanks to elvisjones for the breakdowns of tracks 5 and 6. I would also add that tracks 5 and 6 are not easily disassembled, with the exception of Council Meeting, which can be sliced off with no problem. Since the pieces they include occur so close together, I have chosen to leave them together on my version with track 6 first, then track 5. It depends on how important exact chronology is to you.

Aside from everyone else's top picks, GoldenEye and Pirates of the Caribbean, I thought "A Very Long Engagement" last year had an atrocious score. The movie was decent, a bit too cutesy and quirky when a straight romance would have been more powerful, but everything was undercut by the droning, monotonous, synthesizer-sounding score. I was afraid when I saw Badalamenti's name months before the film came out. He does a certain sound well, and it suits certain films, like Mulholland Drive, which need a spooky, odd, lonely atmosphere, but Engagement needed big, sweeping thematic music, orchestral music, a John Barry sound to represent the tremendous passion and longing of the seperated lovers. Instead, it had a tedious main theme that sounded like it was being played on a home synthesizer. I never felt a thing for the characters because of the score. I can't remember the last time a score was so glaringly inappropriate. (No, wait, I can, Alexander a week later)

Wow, just watched the downloadable version. Everything I see makes me more excited about this. But then that's the same with every Spielberg film, the man knows cinematic storytelling like nobody else alive. In two hunderd years, when all the other current directors are long forgotten, I think people will look back on him the way we look back on Dickens or Shakespeare, as one of the few genius mainstream storytellers in the English language.

I had to watch LoRes as well, anything higher froze a few seconds in. The video was too awful to really know what I was looking at, except the footage I recognized from the Superbowl spot. Looking foward to seeing this in Quicktime or some other decent format.

Por Una Cabeza starts playing the moment the film cuts from Schindler in his apartment, getting dressed, to the nightclub. It is played by the violin, accordion and drummer with cymbal that you describe. It continues as he enters, bribes the maitre'd, sits down, surveys the club, and then brings the two Nazis and their Polish female companion over to his table. The film then cuts to chorus girls dancing to a period recording of some song called Die Holzauktion, according to the credits. Schindler never dances. Have you watched the film recently? Just curious. I hadn't myself, but popped the DVD in to be sure about all this?

I've already checked all the online trailer music sites I could find, with no luck. As for the Nyman thread, I took a look at it, but I'm a Nyman maniac, owning every CD he's ever put out and loving about half of them. It seems most people here either A) have only heard two or three of his scores, B) don't like him, or C) have no familiarity with him. I have no problem with that, everyone has their tastes, but it doesn't make me want to start writing long posts here about him. Williams, on the other hand, is a composer I love just as much. He has so many CDs that I'm still not near to owning them all, and I only collect his film scores, not every CD like Nyman. I'm always happy to write about Williams as well.

I apologize, I hadn't read the instructions on track 11 clearly enough. I think you've got everything there. I went back and listened to th CD and looked for your edits. The cut of track 9 into two tracks is what I most clearly remembered, with the guitar solo playing as the woman's parents are freed by Schindler. You've done good work to list what needs to be done for a chronological album and again, I'm sorry I didn't look closely enough.

A slightly odd question, the reverse of the usual "what movie is that trailer music from" line of questions. I was listening to "The Accidental Tourist" soundtrack tonight, and the first 5 seconds of track 11, a piano tune, sounded awfully familiar. I'm wracking my brain, but can't rememeber from where. I think it's a fairly recent trailer. It feels like it's the opening bit of a trailer, showing a family with an idyllic life, before it is torn to pieces by something horrible or something, but I have no idea what trailer this was used in. Any ideas?

It's actually a bit more complicated than that. A number of album tracks have to be split and pasted to make a chronolgical album. I did this years ago onto an audio tape, which is long gone by now. I've been planning on redoing it on CD since I got the film on DVD but haven't gotten around to it. The lists above are a good start if you just want to program your CD, but if you want every piece in the right place, they're far from complete.

It's a tango called "Por Una Cabeza." It's also played in True Lies at the beginning and end, and in Scent of a Woman. It's on the Scent soundtrack, in case you happen to have that. I would assume it is performed by the orchestra we see in the film, because there is no copyright information for the recording of the song in the end credits.

There could very well be more about Williams's music on the DVD. While the shortened television version of the documentary is 90 mins, the full version of it on the DVD set runs two and a half hours, according to reviews and articles I've read at thedigitalbits.com and dvdfile.com

Well, if people just don't want to agree, that's fine, free country and all. However, as I said, the differences were not tiny, they were often a full second or two. Literally. Sometimes even more. And the mismatches would be early and then late on the same piece sometimes. I can't believe any CD player would be able to play at such off speeds. And the differences were not just in the timing, but in instrumentation and the very playing of the instruments as well. These were noticable differences. I wouldn't consider anything but word from people who worked on the recordings themselves to be definitive, but these facts, coupled with the very clear answer given by John Williams at the concert I went to, are enough for me at least.

Okay, I should have made this clearer. The reason I say that the whole album is a re-recording is that, although the tracks that match up to the film cues are approximate, the timing is subtly different. I played the DVD, while listening to the soundtrack album on my Discman. Although most of the pieces of music are nearly identical, there are always differences. Specific instruments come in a second or two later or earlier, and instrumentation varies slightly from the film versions. The only two cues that are represented absolutely identically on the album are Deadheading and Frank Connors, M.D. As for re-recording for albums not being common anymore, when I saw John Williams at the Kennedy Center last year, someone asked him about this at the Q&A session, and he said that he likes to re-record his scores for the albums still. He wants to reimagine the listening experience, since there's no sound f/x or dialogue to compete with. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist of it. I think you'll find that portions of the A.I. and Minority Report albums are re-recordings as well. You're welcome to disagree with me, but I think if you do what I did and listen to the film score and the album versions simultaneously, you'll find that they simply don't match at all. (I should point out that I am watching the DVD on a Region 1 NTSC system, so there is not the 4% speed-up that afflicts PAL movie viewing. The film is running at just about exactly the speed it did in theaters.) When you say that only the middle of Learning The Ropes is different, I think you must have missed my descriptions of the differences between the film versions and the album track. The pacing of this track is also, like almost all the others, a bit different. Sorry if any of this sounds unpleasant. I'm sure you want only to help in pointing things out, it's just that I spent a great deal of time listening to this music, over and over, and the differences were very clear to me. As for the other questions you brought up, I'll take a look at those tiomorrow. I never considered "Reflections" when I was looking for film cues on the album, because Spielberg specifically calls it a concert piece in the liner notes, but it's entirely possible I missed some things there.

Jason, Thanks so much for all of your own work in making this file viewable by all. James

I've just emailed the Word file to Jason. Hopefully he'll be able to convert it so everyone else can use it. The album is entirely re-recordings, which often differ a great deal from the film cues, but it's pretty easy to make a CD of the album music in film order, it only involves cutting one track in half and switching the order of the rest.