Skelly

I often hear "Elliot Goldenthal" and "Polish avant-garde" in the same sentence. I know he takes a lot of inspiration from Kilar and Penderecki in particular (and of course his old mentor Corigliano also uses some of these ideas), but what are some other names/works or even just general techniques which you can hear as his influences?

Generally “demo” refers to mock-ups of cues, but if you mean musical ideas that come before the spotting, then Marco Beltrami did a few jazz ideas for “Logan” with four or five players. Some were adapted into cues and others didn’t make the cut.

it was, but with tracked music. I don't think that scene was even spotted, or if it was, it would have been a much longer 1M10.

For number 1, I don't think there was any original music written for those scenes. The closest Williams did to scoring a "deleted scene" was the original Time Transition, which I assume was written in response to Dumbledore's silly line that the Mirror of Erised shows him with brand-new socks. When this line was removed it probably made the cue seem really inappropriate for the sentiment the scene now ends on, which is about the danger of getting sucked into fantasies and ignoring reality. But Number 2 had music written for nearly all its incorporated deleted scenes. I don't know how much of it ended up being used in the extended editions though. And even the deleted scenes that weren't scored, you can see that some were at least spotted in that "On the Track" list of the cues (at least two Hermione recovering-from-being-a-cat scenes, and the Dursley household receiving a letter about Harry's alleged spell-casting).

There was definitely something in that scene that was added in late. I don't think anything was left intentionally unscored, least of all the dialogue; almost all the dialogue in the movie is underscored once we reach Hogwarts, and if it isn't, it's usually because the music was dialed out! My guess is that Williams scored a cut where Filch's cat didn't begin to follow Harry. Maybe Harry nearly bumped into Snape/Quirrel on his own (and note that the cat seems to suddenly disappear in the final cut). Here's a quick and dirty edit of what I think Williams was trying to underscore... https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZzCQJvEmp066iRyT8hnocEluinYzbomz The actual movie tries to have three big crescendo moments with the music: when the cat follows Harry; when Snape reaches out for Harry; and when all the faculty leave the corridor at the end. The cue as written only has one. When you line it up with the third instance, the little quote of Harry's theme plays about when Snape grabs empty air, which makes sense to me and is way more fun than what they did in the final cut.

Yeah, it was. It's so barely audible though that I doubt most people hear it in the first place... kind of a weird choice.

Oh, but it is! (Unless you meant as originally written.)

Everyone calls it the Pettigrew motif because that's what it was edited to be (it's even sloppily applied when he turns back into a rat near the end). I think Williams intended for it to be more representative of danger, or evil usage of magic. It's like a sinister version of the Nimbus 2000 theme.

Yeah, I'm using the sheets. I can't read music but the audio matches up to V1; in V2, the woodwinds bleed into the harpsichord, and the harpsichord doesn't have accompanying tremolos.

I'm pretty sure Version 1 is what was used in the movie.

It wasn't that complicated, it was just meant for the trailer. I get the impression that Williams really liked working on the Potter movies and was willing to go that extra mile; he probably would have written original music for a CoS trailer too if he hadn't been so busy that year. Fun fact, the pre-Double Trouble music in the trailer was actually written by Brand X Music (Tom Gire and John Sponsler) but was still recorded with DT and conducted by Williams.

You're thinking of John Williams. https://www.finalemusic.com/blog/may-the-fourth-spotlight-on-joann-kane-music/ Maybe there's some small adjustment here and there by the time his sketches are sent to the scoring stage, but I bet you that no one wants to be the guy who bungles up a John Williams cue, or surprises him when he gets up to the conductor's stand. Williams knows exactly what he wants in terms of sound and orchestration and no one is going to stand in his way. That "imitation sound" could be him trying to replicate a style from many years ago that he's sort of gotten past in his everyday writing.

Well I think the point is that the score is supposed to sound like a major blockbuster. Rogue Nation was envisioned as sort of a "spiritual successor" to the original television show and took more inspiration from that than the previous Cruise films. The music reflected that choice. I haven't seen Fallout but the trailers make it look like it's trying to be a blockbuster "of its time" and have the feel of what you would expect a 2018 action movie to be.

McQuarrie says plainly that he wanted a score of "simplicity and minimalism" for Rogue Nation in the liner notes of that soundtrack. Word on the street is that Tom Cruise wasn't very enthusiastic about the demo cues he was hearing in that vein, and kept asking for more assertion and presence from the underscore, so Kraemer of course followed those instructions. So now McQuarrie wasn't getting the sort of music he wanted. Not only that but the movie's release date was moved to six months earlier, which meant that there was virtually no time for McQuarrie to really check out what each cue was going to sound like. Kraemer tried to be accommodating by writing multiple versions/ideas for cues and give him some options but that's still not the most ideal thing in the world. In February when the Lorne Balfe rumors were starting to go around, Kraemer said on Twitter that he hadn't been contacted at all by McQuarrie about MI6 (and then a day later said, "okay, I got an email just now, it's a 'no'"). It seems like McQuarrie's decision wasn't necessarily about the quality of the finished score but more the very unsatisfying scoring process. I guess he wanted a fresh start without all the baggage of what happened on the last movie, or worse, a repeat. Kraemer also decided to "like" a tweet that was highly critical of McQuarrie for the whole situation, so you can probably surmise how well their relationship is doing. It's not as if Kraemer would refuse to do a Nolan-type score either - he's said pretty bluntly that if he were hired and asked to do that, if push came to shove, he'd do it if it's what he was being asked to do.