Loert

You are all mistaken.
 
Watch "Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)"...

Threw on 'Jason and the Argonauts' and heard this...which sounds like something Steven Spielberg would've laughed at, if it was suggested as a musical motif for a shark...
 
 

Mozart Dead At 35

fuck

https://filmconcertslive.com/movies/fiddler-on-the-roof-the-film-with-orchestra/

it's An American Tale

Whatever it is, it's very quiet!

Here's me playing my own arrangement of Helena's Theme for piano:
 
 
Note: if you have perfect pitch, or an excellent musical memory, then this arrangement may drive you crazy as I mix and match elements from the standard version and the violin version (including some key changes). Though hopefully the final result is coherent enough.

I don't know if it has been already mentioned in here yet or not, but it sounds really interesting!
I don't if there's an official announcement but since it has a full title and an ISBN I guess it's legit. And probably to be released around the same time as the Deluxe Edition of The Hidden World!

Yes.  At 90+ years old, he's an encyclopedia of these chords and scales he's obsessed over for 80+ years.  I very much doubt scales and chords are something he has to put much thought into these days.  Here is an analogy.  Playing side by side with a professional level musician, they played a fiendishly exposed and difficult passage without breaking a sweat.  I asked, didn't playing that even make you nervous a little bit?  They said absolutely - but the items they were nervous about were no longer about hitting the right notes or rhythms.  They worked that all out over decades.  They were nervous about bringing something fresh and musical into something they had played thousands of times.  So, a beginner might be fretting over the obvious items like hitting the right note.  A mid level musician might focus just as much about tempo, phrasing, and dynamics but less worried they'll hit the right notes.  A professional level player might play the same passage now worried about doing the passage artistic justice and giving it the dynamic flare it needs though they've played it a thousand times.  At each level, the musician is stressing over the same passage and are working through issues but those aren't the same issues at all.  As a beginner you might think, it's crazy to imagine the pro doesn't have to worry about hitting the right notes.  They've moved past those obvious issues and are now focused on more nuanced challenges we might not even notice yet.  That is the analogy I'm making with JW.  He's at that point compositionally.  I seriously doubt he scratches his head wondering what that chord was or how to spell it because he's been doing that already for decades and now knows if I need something for a scene with a specific feel, C#min7+#9+#11 would work great right there.  Some would see this as it comes easy for him but it doesn't.  He just spent many, many years already working through the basic issues.  There are very few people in any capacity who will reach this level of accomplishment.  

I think he has both in mind... I think JW is quite an instinctive composer, and he will basically do whatever is needed to write the music he wants.

Dudes, am I the only person who likes 1941? 

If I were labelling these harmonies, I would just label bar 65-68 as "D Ionian". I think this, and the preceding section, are great examples of modal harmony. If we take the D Ionian part, I think we can divide it into 3 semantic parts. The first 2 parts are:
- The underlying "bell" chord, containing the tones D E A B (in order of increasing pitch), i.e. all but the top stave in your reduction
- The melody, containing the tones: A G F# E (in order of first appearance), in the top stave
 
Now, if JW had left it like this, the melody would sound bare and lonely. So to make it sound more fanfare-ish, he "harmonizes" the melody by adding two more notes below each note in the main melody line. This is the 3rd part. But what tones does he use? He simply chooses tones from the mode he is in. Which mode should he pick? First, let's spell out the tones we already have:
 
D E F# G A B
 
Assuming this is a standard Western mode, we only have one degree missing: C. So we can have either C or C#. The first case would be Mixolydian, the 2nd would be Ionian, and JW decides to go with Ionian, as signified by the C# in bar 66.
 
In a similar way, you can deduce that the preceding section is in B Mixolydian.
 
That's all there is to it really. I think it is a fruitless task to try to account for every single note as part of some "chord", and to label it as such. Think of it this way: if you gave bar 64 to a guitarist, would you expect them to play F#7(sus4)/B followed by B6/9(sus4) followed by B(sus4) at that tempo? I think it is easier to understand, and closer to the spirit of the music, to tell them: "We are in B Mixolydian, and play around that".
 
Here is one of few examples I can think of where thinking in terms of quick chord changes makes sense in JW's music (0:04-0:06):
 
 

This is bar 44 in the HL full score. If you’re interested, the four horns play a (concert) Dm7 on the first beat of the bar before bouncing down to Cmaj7 for the middle minim. One horn per note of the chord, as others have pointed out. Clarinets, Vn & Vla are doubling them. Low strings are bom-bomming along on low Cs.
 
Another thing happening here that I think of as quite JW-y is the way the bass note pedals on a C for ages, despite the changing chords above, for five bars in this case.

Same thing happens in Yoda’s Theme - pedal C in the bass for the first ten bars.
And in Flying (ET) - pedal C from bar 9 (theme entry) for seven bars except one bar where it goes to B and one to D.
Raiders pedals on a C a lot too in the main theme, but I haven’t got the score to check.
 
So - pedal on a C to sound like JW (as if it were that simple)!
 
Mark

Yep, I noticed he loves doing it in the brass too! I think it sounds great in the mid-register horns especially. I do think it comes from a big-band way of scoring, where if you have 4 horns (as JW usually does), then each horn plays a different note to avoid doubling any one pitch and thus avoiding un-even volume across the pitches. But this gives the nice side-effect of producing a 4-note harmony.

Yep, I noticed he loves doing it in the brass too! I think it sounds great in the mid-register horns especially. I do think it comes from a big-band way of scoring, where if you have 4 horns (as JW usually does), then each horn plays a different note to avoid doubling any one pitch and thus avoiding un-even volume across the pitches. But this gives the nice side-effect of producing a 4-note harmony.

I’ve long loved these kinds of “jazzy” chords in Williams’ music. Would I be correct in thinking that the end of “The Seduction of Suki and the Ballroom Scene” is an example of this? I love the half-step crunchiness in the lower horns starting at 6:24, which I am assuming (I haven’t looked at the notes or put it into my computer by ear yet) could be a major 7th. Either way, this is one of my favorite spots that comes to mind when I think of this sort of thing:
 
 
Also, I performed the Superman March in concert earlier this year and one of my favorite things was noticing just how crunchy the horns are (he really seems to love doing this stuff in the horns in particular) in the section at 1:40:
 
 
Especially that chord at 1:43!
 
 
Yeah, I caught my mistake shortly after I made the post (you may have made your comment before I added my edit). Part of me was still thinking of the A major chord at the time, as far as the B goes as the 2nd. Thanks for your thorough response, and thanks for that link!

There's no hard and fast rules to describing this kind of thing, but I'd characterize the B as an added 2nd. Not as a 9th (there's no 7th implied), nor a sus-2 (there's no feeling that the B needs to resolve by step). So A major (add2).
 
I think you'll find these sorts of major-add2 chords are quite common in JW!

Ah! I see now. Yes, there is some similarity...