Bayesian

In my mind, the target audience for this box set, other than obsessive completists, are those individuals who know JW’s music enough to appreciate him as a composer and want to get a sense of what his long and varied career looks like. There’s an unparalleled story to be read (listened to) here; one that spans 7 decades and shows remarkable diversity and evolution unlike that of any other composer. All presented with the highest production values in one beautiful book-box. I have the Morricone version of this box and it’s all the physical-format Morricone I ever need or want to own, exactly for the reasons I laid out above.

I remember seeing, back in the mid-90s, a headline from the Weekly World News claiming there were elderly people close to death who refused to die until they could witness the OJ verdict. I kinda feel like we're at a pretty similar point now with this Disney CD/LP release.

Exactly. Well, the sitting-at-home part of it. I don't mind if the film itself nears 4 hours in the extended cut. Plus, we still have Spielberg's Napoleon series in development, AFAIK, for anyone looking for a miniseries treatment. (Woo hoo!)

Very interesting exercise, Thor! My participation will be woefully incompetent, sadly, because I’m unfamiliar with almost all the names you listed. At the very least, it’s a useful reminder that there’s a whole world of composing talent outside of the Hollywood system, or at least beyond the household names in that system (assuming the household in question is made up of film score nerds). Looks like I have a lot of listening and learning to do.

Thanksgiving can’t get here soon enough! It’s going to play on 70mm, meaning it’s the AMC Metreon for me.

Précommandé aussi!

The LLL release also contains the film version of the opening credits/title card, which remains one of the finest moments of music married to picture in a 90s movie, IMHO.

Yup. BB is an all-time great. Never stumbled as it neared the home stretch, which sometimes seems like a common fate for prestige shows. The Americans should have ranked a lot higher. That show was so good. This thread reminds me I need to watch Six Feet Under at some point.

This looks horrid.🤮

One thing I’ve never warmed to is the way Goldsmith would write action cues for brass. They always seemed written too thinly, if that makes sense, like as if every instrument was only playing in unison or in octaves. The piercing quality of that voicing starts to feel like the musical equivalent of a dentist’s drill after awhile. The worst offender I can think of is Air Force One — indeed, it’s the expanded soundtrack I most regret buying.

Watching that trailer got me to realize there’s something really shopworn about the way family friendly movies are made these days. It’s hard to explain, but things like the cute-looking collectible sidekick with an unexpected feature or skill, the hero’s slightly-less-attractive friend with the deadpan reactions, the one-at-time delivery of visual gags, the “I know what I have to do” song, things like that. More egregious, though, is the way computer animated characters move—too balletic, too light, too “flow”-y, too twee. It seems every Pixar and Disney Animation movie suffers from this. Wish looks and feels like something a gen AI could have made. Maybe I can sympathize with the studios after all if this is the best that actual writers and animators can do.

What’ll that be, like the 15th consecutive flop for them? They gotta turn this ship around. The animation looks 15 years out of date. Where did the $200M go on this picture??

Well, way to go, you guys. I write a brilliantly funny post that all you JW nerds should have pissed yourselves laughing over and I get one single solitary lol??? I mean, this thread was begging for a shawm cue reference and I freakin’ pulled it off exquisitely. Man, folks aren’t kidding when they say comedy is hard.

You know what I can’t stand? The shawm. What a ridiculous instrument! I mean, honestly, you’d have to be an incredibly bad composer without a shred of talent or imagination to write anything for that thing.

I don’t think any of us is looking to bring the hate, but if you’re open to a reasonable counterargument, I’ll give it a shot. Your depiction of us as too-easily-impressed JW fanboys misses the mark. It doesn’t help that you misrepresent the amount of self-plagiarism in JW’s music, specifically DoD. We don’t treat every score JW writes with unquestioned, overjoyed praise. Off the top of my head, there was plenty of commentary in these boards about how slight BFG, The Post, and The Fabelmans all were. Folks here wasted no time identifying the handful of moments that JW lifted from his previous work for DoD, which led to (in my opinion) an overwrought reaction about JW’s supposedly deteriorating creative faculties. I seem to recall TROS being treated as the least of the sequel trilogy scores—although that’s actually due to JJ Abrams and the Mouse House screwing the movie up every which way possible. Rather, what we appreciate and show genuine gratitude for is a man who continues to apply himself with the same level of commitment to the craft that he gave when he was half his age—composing music for characters and moments using ridiculous, outdated things like key changes, octatonic scales and woodwinds, rather than washes of interchangeable ‘moods’ written with drum loops; writing and shorthand-orchestrating every note with a pencil on paper; conducting every bar in the studio; and doing it week after week at an age when most of his birth cohort is already six feet under. It’s exactly this that prevents JW from ever being overrated. Being the consummate pro that he is, JW continues to be the same one-stop shop he’s always been, delivering each film exactly the music it needs (to the extent this era of “no such thing as picture lock” allows)—and if that music is ‘deficient’ in some way to some folks, it’s usually because JW either left out some choice cues in his OST program or because we all spent too long imagining what the music might be like to a movie we hadn’t seen in the months/years leading to that movie’s release and was ultimately disappointed in the material JW had to work with. JW isn’t overrated here—he’s rated exactly at the level he deserves to be.

My wife loves this movie! She quotes lines from it with her sister all the time. So random to see it pop up here—although it is a lovely score and Delerue’s name should be spoken of ‘round these parts far more often than it is.

Just in time for fall, Schumann’s “Spring” symphony in B-flat. I have a soft spot for this one. The last movement is one of the happiest sounding things out of the Romantic era I know of. You need a good conductor this one, though. Not some dour Furtwangler or Karajan or arch Gardiner. No, you wanna go with Mehta and the Wiener men circa 1976. It’s glorious.

I appreciate the Cassandra-approaching-chicken-little-level of dismay about generative AI in the creative sphere. When ChatGPT broke into the popular consciousness back in February, I was aghast at the implications and not a single development since then has changed my view on the perils of this technology. Ive said it before and I’ll say it again—there are some things humans can do that should simply not be done. We, for example, mutually agreed as a planetary society not to spend our time and energy developing chemical or biological warfare agents. Imagine if we hadn’t, though. The technology has been around for a century to do exactly such things and if we had chosen to race towards designing the “best” in biochemical agents, well, we wouldn’t have an Earth in 2023 with humans on it anymore. By the same token, and like others have said above, if we keep racing to make the best generative AI, we’re going to put millions of people out of work. And that is a huge risk in so many ways—economically, of course, but also spiritually and socially. How many of us derive our identities from our professions or the jobs we do? What happens to ambition or the quest to mastery in a subject that gen AI has dominated at a fraction of the cost and time? You think society is on a knife edge now? Wait until AI puts millions of people into forced furlough with nothing to do but stew in their resentment at the tech elites responsible for the situation. There’s no universal basic income high enough to compensate for that. Generative AI is an experiment that needs to die. It’s that simple.

Don't know where to start with this one, other than, um, not.

The scary part of the linked article was the mention of companies that make AI-generated music. These already exist?? Who are they selling to? I can’t believe there’s already a market for them.

@danbeck, you are my hero.

Said every Goldsmith fan ever, amirite?? Trenchant japes aside, this announcement is really exciting. I have all of the JNH/Shyamalan scores on CD, having collected them several years ago with the sense that there was something special about their collaboration (and that there wouldn't be any more of it forthcoming). There's something nostalgic too about their collaboration that, for me, represents one of the best things from the aughts decade. I don't really know how to put words to it, but I know I'm very much looking forward to this CD.

I was going to blame the composer and his hot mess of a score for that one, but I guess edmilson’s explanation makes more sense.

I sat in on your seminar today, @Ludwig, and it was really insightful. Thank you for letting us in on your research and interpretations of the methods of JW’s compositional genius! It was enlightening, too, to think about the two examples you chose, from 1980 and 1983. You’re discussing advanced harmonic methods he was employing four decades ago—that folks have only relatively recently started grappling with musicologically. Imagine what JW’s worked into his repertoire since then!

That would be wonderful if they ever get around to it; it'd further entrench JW's deserved position in the classical firmament. Goddamn branding. Why should a yellow label make a difference in people's minds about classical music legitimacy? It shouldn't, but it does.