Skelly

Yeah, I got it working again just as those last few minutes were playing. :/ Keep an eye on his label's YouTube channel I guess, they post random performances there. Maybe October Light will show up one day.

I think expecting Williams to do a tell-all at his age and with his consistent outlook about the idea ("My life isn't interesting enough") is wishful thinking. But he's donated his old scores and has given his blessing for expanded CD releases so that's something. On the other hand he was happy to speak at length about Conrad Salinger a few months ago, so if someone really wants to get him to talk then asking him about his experiences with other people is the way to do it. I think any personal legacy he wants to leave behind can be found at the end: If they're playing Superman today, maybe they'll be interested in playing Berlioz tomorrow. Being able to open someone else's musical world like that seems like a great thrill to him, maybe most evident with the Children's Suite from Harry Potter (which I understand he recorded only by hoarding bits of spare session time, and which J.K. Rowling's people were wary of to some degree -- he didn't have to do that).

.... Well I hope someone else was recording it since my internet crapped out right in the middle of it. Seriously. If not, sorry guys. Edit: Here's as much as I was able to get, including a short introduction by Goldenthal. Even though descriptions say the piece is 8 minutes I think it really was more like 12. No clue why my internet died when it did, but maybe one day he'll release it through his label or something. Also, here's a long discussion with Goldenthal and St. Clair about music and life and things.

Tomorrow night, for anyone who needs a reminder. I'll record it if I can.

wanna know subtle motif switcheroo... Peter Pettigrew's theme (or, what I guess was the standard "danger" motif before all the music editing made it his theme) is just the Nimbus 2000 Theme with the last two notes switched around. who knows if that's intentional or not.

Re: the choir in the Quidditch cue -- I agree with crumbs that dropping the choir makes the Grim's looming image more eerie. That little section was chopped in half in the final cut (there's no giant "Double Trouble" statement anymore) so maybe there was something in the editing or length which Williams was responding to that we can't see anymore. And with that in mind it kind of "breaks" the music if choir suddenly comes and goes without that Double Trouble there to tie it back to the rest of the track. Another reason they nixed it might be because choir is the trademark sound of the patronus and narratively it's out of place here.

On paper it is, but you can put in any random postcode and it lets you through. Or at least, it lets me listen live. I still get error messages when I try to listen to old programs. Not sure if that's just me or related to the geo-blocking.

Even if no one records it live (I'll try to), there's an option for all their other programs to "Listen again", so I guess that'll be the case for the Williams show as well. https://planetradio.co.uk/scala-radio/schedule/

It reminds me of an anecdote Conrad Pope told about some Oliver Stone film they worked on. The first thing they recorded was the main title and Stone loved it. Williams told Stone he thought take 3 was the best of the bunch, but Stone disagreed; take 1 was the best. Williams recognized what was really going on was that Stone still felt the buzz of excitement from hearing the music for the first time, and was attaching that feeling to the first take. So instead of arguing he just said, "Let's talk about it later"; and in the end they used take 3 because by that point Stone couldn't remember or tell the difference anyway.

Sure, if it wasn't stimulating he wouldn't be doing it. All the same, in interviews he describes the life of a pencil-and-paper guy like him as hermetical and lonely, usually in a soft-spoken, thoughtful tone of voice. That's how he wants to spin it for the public, even if in reality the pencil-and-paper process might be more fulfilling or invigorating than he admits. He describes the day-to-day schedule of his writing period as very challenging, very private, and through the decades he's more or less kept it that way for his listeners and fans -- even though some interesting morsels slip through the cracks every once in a while, like the Empire Strikes Back documentary where he and Herb Spencer discuss the orchestration for a cue. But whenever he starts talking about the parts of his job that are away from the desk, that's when his eyes will light up and he'll wax lyrical. His job has brought him into contact with some extraordinary people and that's what he seems to be more comfortable talking about. People here say it's the journalists' fault for not asking him more thoughtful, probing questions, but Williams is happy to go off on tangents and change the conversation towards things that he thinks are worth people's time to read -- about the brilliance of directors or actors or other musicians, how the world responds to music and vice versa. He kinda flippantly says that he doesn't watch movies and doesn't listen to music (obviously he does) but I feel like he only says that to abstain himself from talking just about movie music in these interviews. If he wanted to go off on a tangent about that stuff then he by all means would. He's done enough of these things to know that he controls the conversation, not the reporter. But if he doesn't want to get into great detail about his musical choices then he won't do it. In an interview a few weeks ago someone asked him the specific question of why he used timpani so much for the new Star Wars movies. His final word on that was "I don’t know", before switching to the old spiel about how lucky he is to be doing these movies for forty years. He's more interested in that phenomenon than what must to him feel like an an orchestration 101 question. That's just what he wants to talk about, and the nuts and bolts of his working life and musical intuition are a deeply personal part of himself that he's only going to share with his close buddies.

I don't think he likes talking about his work as much as people wish he did. Because that's what it is: work. There's no excitement in sitting on your ass 10 hours a day looking back and forth from a monitor to a slowly-filled sheet of paper, hoping for a eureka moment that will speed things up a little. The real satisfaction comes from when he can finally stand up and conduct some extraordinary musicians. In that Times interview posted yesterday, he doesn't say a word about how he dug deep into the music of Waxman, Korngold, Steiner, and whoever else to almost single-handedly create something which resuscitated the symphonic film score in a historic way. Who cares? Instead his favorite memory was going into the recording studio, being surprised at how this guy nailed a high C, and being surprised still more since it was his very first day with the LSO. Now there's talent worth talking about. That's why he likes telling that Schindler's List story so much: it was a powerful movie that Williams acknowledged would take the skill of a much better composer to do justice to. Spielberg agreed and likewise acknowledged, however jokingly, that his movie was so great that it demanded the very best of any composer working on it, Williams or anyone. Don't we all like it when our favorite artists display that real pride and confidence in their work? Those are the special moments that stay in his memory because they make all the long hours and hard work worth it on a spiritual level. Lately he has been loosening up and giving his blessing to expanded score releases, to do those sorts of things while he's still around. Maybe one day he'll decide to do a Hugo Friedhofer-type thing where he sits down with someone and goes over his entire career which results in a 400-page interview. But really I think he'd rather talk about someone else's career than his own.

Classical KUSC will be airing "October Light" again next month on August 16th, 7PM PST.

Probably for practical/logistical reasons. Flying and all that heavy travel gets harder on your body as you get older and Williams is in his eighties. Plus the schedule for those movies was a little weird; on "The Last Jedi" for instance, instead of recording the score all at once like you usually do, he would write maybe 45 minutes of music, record it, then spend a few more weeks writing another 45 minutes, record it, and did this for three or four months. With that schedule it was much easier to stay home instead of traveling for such a long time. In a perfect world I think JW would have liked to continue using the LSO since they're such an important part of Star Wars history, but in interviews he's spoken very highly of LA's musicians (they're seriously some of the best in the world), and by the time of "Rise of Skywalker" he and his music contractor had assembled an orchestra of the best players they could find -- the absolute cream of the crop -- so he was very happy with the results.

The shawm and tambourine tracks are interesting because they're examples of how Cuaron blurs the line between underscore and diegetic music (or even sound effects) in a way that hasn't been popular or standard pretty much since the 1930s. Like Hitchcock famously asked, "Where is the music coming from?" The shawm is ostensibly coming from somewhere in the pub, but then it slides into orchestral underscore and for a moment the two are laid on top each other. The Dufay track seems to be normal underscore at first as Buckbeak nuzzles Harry, but suddenly one cut later it's paranormal music that constantly follows the headless horsemen. Or the lute track, where it isn't until the shot's conclusion that we see the "underscore" is actually coming from someone randomly playing his own instrument. Or the Boggart scene where the difference between underscore and source music is the difference between fear and fun, but when the two intertwine during Harry's turn -- where's the music coming from then? There are other examples but those are the most obvious. I think the opposite of that might be part of why the Diagon Alley music in the first movie was dropped and replaced with the Great Hall cue. Harry steps out of the Leaky Cauldron (which had obvious source music) and into Diagon Alley, and even though Williams puts an orchestral delineation up as the brick wall disassembles, he goes back into wizardly music that tells us more what Harry is probably hearing as opposed to what he's feeling. I think the filmmakers wanted to keep the score firmly from Harry's perspective, and the only cue I can think of that deviates from that is "Filch's Fond Remembrance" (which was cut down a lot in the actual movie).

You can get a pretty clean copy if you play with it enough https://clyp.it/ii3urvna?token=a618b4472874f54494e3fe135eba2294

Thanks for sharing that! Is there another copy of that interview you posted up there in 2013? The video has since been removed.

One of Williams's go-to anecdotes for the press was that he doesn't like to read scripts before he works on a movie, but that in this case he read the book before he even knew a movie was in production.

It sort of sounds like an extension of this bit... ... but one where the evil climax is suppressed and the energy is sucked out of the room. Who knows how finished the VFX were on the cut Williams was working on, but it sounds like he was trying to capture the idea of Harry bearing a huge shield and using it to force the Dementor back into its trunk. Less like a victory and more like a tension has been relieved. In the end it looks less physically demanding than that, and I think Cuaron wanted the concept of a patronus to be more psychological anyway. That way it ties into Harry's self-confidence about his parenthood and identity, which would explain why he wanted Williams to do a version with the "Family Theme" on triumphant brass instead.

I was poking around archived copies of the Film Music Mag site and found the old store page which had a lot of interesting items for sale (audio seminars and all sorts of neat little guides). All of it seems to have totally vanished. As far as I can tell the current FMM site is kind of in a state of disrepair (lotsa dead links) and I can't even find an email address I could contact. Are any of these old store items still available anywhere, or have they fallen into internet oblivion?

I have a weird question. Do you know where this image came from? http://celluloidtunes.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/valhalla2.jpg I've always wondered whether the film had a widescreen version, but every release that I know of has it in fullscreen (even the digital).

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.