Jump to content

Score

Members
  • Posts

    964
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Posts posted by Score

  1. 5 hours ago, Datameister said:

    Y'all, the odds that this isn't a troll job are, like … smaller than a cat turd's midi-chlorian count. :lol:

     

    Nah, I don't believe this is a troll job. No one (*) would go at such lengths, just for a troll job - just think at the amount of time that he must have spent to do his "researches" and reply here... it wouldn't be a reasonable investment of time. In Mattris's posts, I've seen a greater amount of logical fallacies than I would have been able to conceive if I had tried. So, either he's someone who is doing a sociological research on whether people on the internet are able to detect logical fallacies and/or for how long they are going to reply to these (so, he knows them and he's producing them on purpose to study people's responses), or such fallacies are just part of his way of approaching reality, and he truly believes in what he's saying. I think these are the most likely possible explanations. 

     

     

    (*)... admittedly, based on the people that I know in real life, which might not be a representative sample of the whole population of the internet!

  2. 7 hours ago, Trope said:

    Does anyone know who performed/arranged/conducted the version of "Manhattan Serenade" on disc 2? When I ripped the disc into iTunes, it listed the main artist as Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra, but I have a feeling this may be incorrect, as I looked that version up online and it is quite different. The booklet only lists the composer and lyricist. Could it be an original Carmine Coppola arrangement, done specifically for the film?

     

    The author of the arrangement is Peter King.

  3. 1 hour ago, Brundlefly said:

    Have you seen Lost Highway? In my opinion, this is his masterpiece and I'm mesmerized about the fact that it got so overlooked next to Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (which would have deserved a spot on this list as well).

     

     

    No, I haven't. I've discovered Lynch very recently with Mulholland Drive, and I'm currently going through Twin Peaks. Lost Highway will join my to-watch-soon list together with Blue Velvet, thanks for the suggestion. 

     

  4. I will never understand why the Godfather movies (both part 1 and part 2) are so much revered. They are surely good movies, but I don't see what makes them so exceptionally great that they always end up on everybody's short list of the best movies ever. Same for Citizen Kane. 

     

    Now, Mulholland Drive should definitely be on any list of best movies. Truly a masterpiece in every sector, and one of the most original movies I've ever seen. I haven't seen Blue Velvet, though -  a hole that I will try to fill as soon as possible.

  5. 26 minutes ago, TownerFan said:

    Should also be noted that the reviewer is the esteemed Christopher Palmer, i.e. a distinguished film music historian and also a fabulous composer, arranger and orchestrator--he collaborated with Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein among others.

     

    His book The Composer in Hollywood is an essential reading for any true film music aficionado. I also love the notes he wrote for the TESB re-recording by Charles Gerhardt as printed on the Varèse Sarabande release, it's a sort of mini-essay on JW:

     

     

    Notably, Christopher Palmer composed the memorable saxophone main theme for Taxi Driver ("So Close To Me Blues"), based on a theme by Herrmann. It's probably the most famous cue in that score.

     

     

     

  6. As far as I'm concerned, Nyman's film music masterworks are the scores for The Piano and Gattaca. I think The Piano is one of the great scores of the 1990s, and its OST features, among many beautiful pieces, one of the best album openers ever ("To the Edge of the Earth"). 

     

    His overall production is a mixed bag for me. Among the pieces that I love, I should surely mention The Piano Concerto and the 5-movement orchestral piece "Strong on Oaks, Strong on the Causes of Oaks". "Musique à Grande Vitesse", Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, and the Saxophone Concerto are also quite interesting.   

  7. I want to thank all those who have shared their experiences and videos of the concert. Although I could not attend, I feel a bit as if I was there as well. I truly hope that someone recorded the Schindler's List theme, since by all accounts (here and elsewhere) it was an incredibly moving performance. Also, I'm very pleased to notice that all the reviews that I've seen on Italian newspapers, so far, are overwhelmingly positive. It's impressive that John, at his age, has managed to complete the tour of the European theaters which best epitomize the remote roots of his art.    

  8. 2 hours ago, Biodome said:

    I decided to settle the argument with a conclusive proof that John Williams wrote the trailer music. I simply asked ChatGPT, the world's most knowledgeable AI chat bot:

    UPDATE: After voicing my doubts to the chat bot regarding its last reply, it suddenly decided that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a non-existent film, and, thus, no trailer, let alone trailer music, exists for it:

     

     

    That AI's behaviour would definitely pass the Turing test!

     

  9. 7 hours ago, Datameister said:

    It would be interesting to extrapolate forward. Given an infinite amount of time, eventually the human race would stumble upon a trailer format so irresistible that the entire population of the universe would show up. That would be peak trailer. (It would probably be unbearable, but it would work.)

     

    This sentence definitely gives me "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" vibes!

  10. 15 minutes ago, Holko said:

    The section that scores Bilbo's pain by starting with simple Hobbit material, souring it, then coming back to transition it to the full calm theme statement that follows? Filler to me would mean it's just there so there's something there but doesn't do anything, this definitely does things. It serves its purpose perfectly, I love it there in the cue. I will never understand why people want to remove everything 100% from context.

     

    The answer to this is in the rest of my post that you have partially quoted. I have already explained several times what I mean. If you object to the word "filler" (that I was borrowing from previous posts), replace it with one of your choice that is able to capture the difference between a well-thought and well-constructed piece of music such as the Prologue (for example) and a sequence of static elementary chords. Because, believe me, there is a difference, and I'm sure that Shore himself would agree.  

  11. 3 hours ago, JohnTheBaptist said:

    I have to disagree with this. I know we prefer more classical forms here, but even apart from the role of simple music as effective score, you're ruling out other valid forms of music as having no musical value. Ambient music comes to mind, as well as classical Indian music which revolves around drones.

     

    That's not what I meant. Maybe, instead of "musical value" (which is somehow subjective) I should have used the term "compositional value". Or "compositional originality", if you prefer. For example, the Prologue of LOTR (in both the film and the original version, though I prefer the latter) is compositionally interesting, as well as very fitting for the film context. An example of what I call "filler material" is the section from 1:43 to 2:40 of track 4 "Very Old Friends" from the LOTR complete recordings. I hope I have made clear enough, above, that I don't deny the possible role of simple music as effective score (I said it two or three times), I'm just talking about the compositional values of the piece of music taken in itself. The Prologue of LOTR requires a very good and skilled composer, that section from track 4 can be written by anyone with basic musical training. The LOTR scores display a singular alternation of both types of musical cues. 

     

  12. 1 hour ago, Chen G. said:

     

    I think that's wrong. Just because the material is harmonically unadventurous - one's mind wanders to the long monophonic passage at the beginning of act III/scene two of Siegfrieddoesn't mean it doesn't forward the storytelling through the leitmotif "language".

     

    I'm not talking only about harmony. I'm talking about all the aspects of the musical piece. Wagner has nothing to do with this, the Tetralogy is everywhere much more elaborated (including the passage that you have linked). It's not about the use of leitmotives, it's about the compositional techniques: what is the musical idea, and how it is realized, in all its aspects. In this respect, there is an ocean between the Tetralogy and the LOTR scores. I cannot think of a single moment in the Tetralogy where I thought "ok, here he had a couple of minutes to fill and he wrote some strings chords". 

     

    1 hour ago, Roll the Bones said:

    You are forgetting two important parts:

     

    Emotional value.

    Textural value.

     

    Those portions allow the room and the textures and colours of the instruments to speak.

     

     

    I'm not forgetting them. Emotionally speaking, a series of sustained elementary strings chords (taken alone) does not give me anything. Anyone can write those; the instruments can speak much more eloquently than that. Praising the textural aspects is like saying that a string ensemble sounds very nicely, whatever they play. Ok, I know strings and choir sound nicely, there is a reason if composers use them, but this has nothing to do with the value of a specific musical piece; it's a property of the instruments, not of the composition. 

     

    I stress again that I'm not talking about the LOTR scores in their entirety, just about the filler parts, which occur often enough to be noticed. And again, I'm not implying that those parts were "wrong" in the context they were written for. For those moments, the movies did not need anything more. But the parts of the LOTR scores that I admire are among the "non-filler" ones.  

     

    In the case of ROP, surely I was not overwhelmed by the show. However, in the scores I noticed no filler moments, and this is one of the many reasons why I like them. Almost everywhere the scores are interesting and evocative. I feel a bit like in the case of the SW prequels; at the end I found myself saying "ok, they are what they are, but at least we got some very good music". In the ROP case, IMO we also saw some good acting and other values (such as the visuals); I also think some of the storylines were intriguing, although not realized in the best possible way. 

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Guidelines.