Bayesian

Wet blanket chiming in! I don’t really get the appeal of these types of questions, which are excessively moot. If they try hard enough, people are going to find ways to argue every step on the gradient between 100% yes and 100% no. Which is another way of me saying, why bother with this exercise? Maybe it’d help to give some parameters. Was Bach the JW of his time based on personality? Productivity? How much money he made? How lauded he was while alive? How many things he wrote? Technical competency? Give us a boundary!

I'm pretty curious about the first one. Only 1,000 units? I can't recall any releases that pressed less than 1,500. It must be super niche if they think they'll only be able to move that few units.

JW once again joins some pretty rarified company. It’s great that he continues to be recognized like this. (And it’s also wonderful to see, in his video recordings, that he continues to be in great health.)

I'm happy I came across your post; I didn't realize he recorded a complete set! I just added it to my Amazon list as a reminder to buy it soon. Have you listened to any of it? What are your thoughts??

@who cares gets it. I planned to drop out of this thread but we need to dial down the temperature and, to my chagrin, I appear to be have been a big part of the reason it blew up. So allow me to try, because I’d like to avoid being painted as a villain by users whose content I truly enjoy (e.g., @Arpy). I’m still not convinced klee251 is a real person—or at least is a retired white collar female who spent her career writing technical documents, as she professes to be. Too little adds up—the unnatural phrasing and spelling in klee’s posts from the get-go, the weirdly blunt request, the instant and repeated passive-aggressive, petulant reaction against the entire forum after her request met with suspicion from two people... it all sounded to me more likely to come from some weird AI programming than an actual human. To that, I’ll add that something really seems off about the things she responded to—my problem with Congress was not that I didn’t “like” it, but that too many races were up in the air, so why ask us to write to people who might no longer be seated in January? Or that she was being “facetious”—regarding what, exactly? Did she mean to use that word? A professional writer would know. Having said all that, the way I came at her was too forceful. I dove too deep into explaining my suspicions—if I’d just left it at “are we sure it’s not a bot?”, we might have had a different thread trajectory and learned the truth faster. Instead, the focus turned onto my harsh reaction. And for that, I apologize. Klee, don’t abandon this forum, you’ve already got a bunch of folks on your side, and you did it over the course of a single weekend. That’s pretty darn good in anyone’s book—and much faster than it took me 😅. And a CGM would be a lovely recognition for JW, no matter when or how he was to receive it. So thank you for putting the idea into our heads.

This is the most surreal thread I've ever seen. "Kathy," for someone who spent 45 years writing things, you missed the obvious fact I was not paying you a compliment (although I'll admit the quality of your writing noticeably improved over the course of 3 hours, so that you now sound like a real person). If you've spent as much time on these boards as you say you have, you'll have surely seen that we've been attacked by bots in recent days. That you would come at us with this request at this specific time is just weird... and that you'd automatically dismiss the entire board as unhelpful when it was clearly just me making the biggest fuss is weirder still, especially coming from someone who's read this board a lot and who's simply old enough to know better how to respond to situations like this. In any case, I'm dropping the whole thing. I wasn't looking to make trouble. Good luck tilting at this particular windmill.

Just like you advise us not to feed trolls here, we’d be well advised not to feed bots either.

So this is what bot-writing looks like. It almost reads like an actual human wrote the words, but you can still parse out areas with weird or unnatural phrasing where the AI is trying to fill in words based on what was said to it. It may be humorous now, but give it enough time and bot-speak will become indistinguishable from actual people talking. 😟

Still not buying it.

Here's a song I love, and one that for me at least rings so very very true after today. One short musical moment here that has always captured me starts at 0:59, when Debbie Reynolds sings "..and you and you and you and you." I'd love if someone could explain what that chord progression is and why it sounds so magical.

Are we sure it's not a bot? The post just reads real strange, is all. Think about it: some guy who professes to be a JW fan shows up on a JW forum out of the blue and his first message to us is a demand to write our Congresspeople for a CGM? Of all the possible times to bring this up, he picks the week of this particular presidential election? He's fucking kidding, right? Over two dozen House seats yet to be called, plus several more that flipped, and then there's the Senate races--two of which, in Georgia, are heading to runoffs... and that's not to mention that probably half or more of this forum's regular users live outside the U.S. and have no say. If you're going to get two-thirds of our present-era senate to agree on something, I can think of plenty of things more useful to the American public to ask for than this.

So... lock thread??

I’m partial to Paul Paray’s recording of the four Schumann symphonies on MLP.

I just like how much love TFA is getting here when pitted against ANH and TPM. It seems a genuinely rare thing when someone can restart something and be praised for doing as good a job (or nearly so) as the first time around. It’s rarer still that someone can restart something twice and still get the same reaction. It tells you all you need to know about how truly incredible JW is.

I believe it was a boaking accident. [beat] I have to go now.

Gia is one of the highest profile ambassadors of his craft. Hence why he gets the opportunity to be asked to make lists like this—people want a peek inside his head. And when we get that peek... we get this airheaded bs. Either this was his hot take on a really easy question he ought to have been ready to answer insightfully—which then speaks poorly about him as a composer or about his command of his mother tongue. Or he figures this is an adequate level of communication for Academy audiences in this day and age, which speaks poorly to... well, our whole society, I guess. Either way, if I’m a budding film composer and I read this from a shining light in the industry, I’d be pissed.

I gotta say, it was pretty dismaying to read how he described his top five scores. As an Oscar-winning film composer, I figured he was capable of articulating why he chose those scores as the top examples of his craft. I figured wrong: "blown away by how weird it was" "it was just incredible" "melody that was just incredible" "I love [that score] because I also loved the movie itself" "I thought it was so crazy and weird" "you hear it [and] you're like, 'Whoa, that's weird." "I remember the score just being so simple and emotional and beautiful" "Arrival is so cool. I find it very emotional, and I find it very creative and incredibly expansive." A 13-year-old kid could have come up with more insightful or perceptive comments than this insipid nonsense, ffs. >smh<

File under “Miscellany,” I’d say.

I suppose that’s marginally better than getting the “I thought he was dead” reply. Which has happened with me at least twice that I can recall.

JW does not plagiarize. Plagiarism is an act of intentional deceit, an effort to cut corners and lessen the workload—two things JW can never be accused of. As others have said, if certain Star Wars motifs or musical contours resemble material written by Holst, it’s because that’s what Lucas was going to use in the first place. As a composer, you’re not going to win the job away from another (dead) composer without being able to deliver the earlier composer’s sound (which happened to already win over the director).

@Chewy, I'm finally getting around to watching these, and this is phenomenal work. Thank you for these! I like to think they give a whole new perspective on JW's approach to scoring. Can't wait to see more!

The hardworking folks who bring us our beloved expansions would surely disagree! Apart from the SW demastered edition, there aren't any albums that got worse sound in the expansion that I can recall being talked about. (Maybe Rocketeer?)

In my iTunes (sorry, Music) library, I usually delete my rip of the OST once I have the expansion in my hot little hands, whether or not the expansion contains the remastered OST after the main program. If it's JW or Elfman, the OST cd stays in my collection because I'm striving to be a completist for those two (the only two for whom I'll bother attempting that feat). A few weeks ago, I wrote in some other thread my interest in one day becoming an audiophile. My cd collection is basically waiting for the day when I have a modest but decent sound system to play it on. Until then, I'll rely on my Music library for all my listening. In terms of editing playlists or rebuilding cues or tracks with software, I do none of that. I admire the folks here who have the know-how and the ear for it, but that's one area I'll never venture into. I see @Gruesome Son of a Bitch liked your post, but where's @Thor's enthusiastic approval??

All I meant by that was that a film score is pure program music and that seeing the film would give the detailed program that the composer was responding to when he wrote it (in terms of things like orchestral stabs or abrupt appearances of leitmotifs or whatever). If a score can stand apart from its film as a rewarding aural experience, that’s something to cherish. But it’s also technically extraneous, since the score serves the film exactly the same way something like costume design serves the film. The fact that relatively few composers seem to be able to reliably write scores that serve their purpose and also stand alone as quality listening experiences speaks to how hard it is to do.

I think you both make a great point—film music is written in response to a story or a scene provided by someone else. It’s the ultimate program music. And so much of what we enjoy in film scores comes from composers solving musical quandaries invoked by the story or scene ( the “program”). So in a certain sense, watching the film itself seems mandatory. But after awhile, you also realize that much of what’s being written is mood-setting rather than action-specific. Or even if it’s the latter, you realize you don’t always need to know exactly what the composer was responding to on screen. That’s where I am now regarding many scores I haven’t heard.